‘A love of order and control': how Lord Nelson's handwriting revealed his secret character

Telegraph

24-03-2025

How is your handwriting? Do you write long letters with flourishes and ornamentation worthy of an 18 th century calligraphist? Or are your notes more of the 'doctor' variety: individual letters which bear little resemblance to the recognised alphabet, and words which require a palaeographer to decipher? Maybe the question is rather redundant – like many of us now, perhaps you write everything in a digital format, only using pen and ink for the occasional signature.
It hasn't always been that way. Beginning in the 1830s, and reaching its height in the fin de siècle period of the 1880s and 90s, there was a craze for collecting letters: signatures of the rich and famous, or even just the writing of a beloved family-member. This obsession with script led many wits to deem it some kind of illness: 'autographomania', or 'autograph fever'. In the 1830s and 1840s, the American writer Edgar Allen Poe satirised the sickness with cod-serious interpretations of handwriting. Of one particularly jerky script, he ventured 'What mental idiosyncrasy lies… beneath all this, is more than we can say.'
One such 'autographomaniac' of the type Poe was poking fun at was the Baron Edmond de Rothschild – a member of the prominent French banking family, and a collector of thousands of engravings, drawings, and books which now reside in Paris's Louvre museum. Alongside his artworks, he collected signatures: an interest which began young when, as a child, his parents hosted the diplomats negotiating the end of the Crimean War, and he asked each of them to sign his 'little album'.
Some decades later, his collection had grown into a repository of over two hundred missives from history's important figures, from a score by Mozart to letters by the French writer Voltaire, notes penned by Elizabeth I and James II, and political scrawls signed by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and the Duke of Buckingham.
Last year, the archivists at Waddesdon Manor – one of the former Rothschild residences, and the home of Edmund's son, James, before he bequeathed it to the National Trust – found the collection by surprise as part of a routine cataloguing exercise. Opening this month, the 229 letters are on display as a collection for the first time and, for most of them, it is the first time they have been seen by the public at all. Seeing the treasure trove of letters in one place made the team at Waddesdon 'realise the potential' of displaying the extraordinary collection, Waddesdon archivist Laura Noble tells me.
Rothschild's letters were bought in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, and now, unfortunately, there is no way of telling how he sourced them or what he paid for them. His interests are decidedly Francophile – many of the letters are to French recipients, suggesting he bought them in the country – but wide-ranging: from the 17 th century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, to the wit and rogue Lord Byron, and naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson.
The names may be impressive, but there's a secret to the collection. Some of the letters tell of battles, high-stakes gossip, and intrigue, but many are often rather more prosaic. In one letter signed by Voltaire, he uses his secretary to write that he was in too much pain from gout to write himself. Another, by King James II, is little more than a cookie-cutter template letter of thanks to Louis XIV of France. These letters were not prised for their originality or insight, but rather for the tangible nature of the handwriting – the presence of a signature. When Rothschild was collecting at the turn of the 19 th century, the world was growing more mechanical. The telegram and the telephone had both recently been invented. Letters were still used, but they were beginning to be valued as a slower, more intimate form of communication. As archivist Noble says, these letters show a 'really human side' to their authors: a way of connecting to the hands behind the pen.
Just because the contents of the letters may not be the most scintillating, that needn't mean there are no insights they can provide. Graphology is the 'study of personality through handwriting', as leading graphologist Emma Bache tells me. 'Like a snapshot in time', it can tell us 'how the author was and their mood and inclination[s]'.
Emma – who has written a book, Reading Between the Lines, about handwriting analysis – turned her analytical eye to some of the Waddesdon letters to uncover what might be hidden within the neat, competent scripts. Of Elizabeth I's 1583 letter written to thank the recipient for his gifts of horses, Bache notes the fluidity of the 'relatively casual' script; its strong right-hand slant revealing that she was 'ardent in her passions'. At points, 'she has been unable to avoid tangling of the lines', which Bache suggests might reveal Elizabeth's conflicted feelings: the tensions 'between her regal demeanour and her repressed emotions.'
Elizabeth, unlike non-aristocratic or non-royal Tudor women, had been taught to write. Yet she still, unlike highly educated men, favoured an italic script which was thought to be easier for women to master. The reliability of graphology is highly debated – with some claiming it is a pseudoscience – but the chance that it might provide access to the Virgin Queen's hidden feelings is tantalising.
A draft of Mozart's aria Misera, Dove son! is one of the highlights of Rothschild's collection. Composed in 1781, the cramped space between the score lines is adorned with marginal notations of the libretto and the soprano who was to sing the music. Mozart's 'heavy pressured script' and the 'very tall upper zone loops' show he was not concerned with the lack of space available to him, perhaps revealing a 'tendency towards a boastful nature or at least an exaggerated need to make an impression'.
But perhaps the greatest jewel of the Waddesdon collection is a 1802 letter by Admiral Horatio Nelson. Written five years after the Battle of Santa Cruz in which the Admiral lost his right arm, it is written and signed with his left hand after he had had to re-learn how to write. Compared to any of the many letters he wrote prior to the amputation, the difference in his scripts is striking: from their fluid 18 th century copy-book style, the script in Waddesdon Manor's collection one is looser and less elaborate. But Bache notes how competent it is for a non-dominant hand: 'the baseline is extremely straight and horizontal', perhaps revealing the military man's 'love of order and control'.
But when comparing letters before and after the amputation, Bache notes a change to a 'more relaxed' script – and character. Angles are replaced with curves, as the commander relied less on 'brute intellect'. His injury may have been traumatic, but, judging from his handwriting, Bache posits it might have made him 'more charismatic and possibly much easier to live with'.
With all that insight possible from handwriting, perhaps it is no wonder Rothschild and others were obsessed with what letters they could capture; what personalities they could own in ink. So the next time you write your shopping list: beware. You never know what secrets you might leave on the page.