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both highly injurious to his repose, women and play [gambling] carried him into many excesses,” Wraxall writes of his friend. According to Horace Walpole, the emperor of gossip, Rodney won the favor of the Princess Amelia, daughter of George III, and left of their liaison a “token.” The token grew to be a pretty young lady of small stature known in her circle as “little Miss Ashe.” Indefatigable investigators who edit 18th century letters and journals maintain, based on calculation of relative ages, that Rodney was too young to have been responsible for this royal fragment. Though Rodney was loquacious, Wraxall says, and particularly given to “making himself frequently the theme of his own discourse” and talking “much and freely upon every subject concealing nothing regardless of who was present,” he himself left no mention, as far as is recorded, of the Princess Amelia or the “token.” About his gambling, however, there is no question. He was never long absent from the gaming table at White’s, where the addiction ruled, and if his debts were not as spectacular as those of the rising political star Charles James Fox, it was only because Rodney did not have a rich father to pay them. The debts remained, and as many were owed to men in office or with political influence, they were to become stumbling blocks in his professional career, besides keeping him, combined with a spendthrift character, under tight pecuniary pressure all his life. “His person was more elegant,” Wraxall adds, “than seemed to become his rough profession. There was even something that approached to delicacy and effeminacy in his figure: but no man manifested a more temperate and steady courage in action.” Equally “fearless” in talk, “he dealt his censures as well as his praises … which necessarily procured him many enemies particularly in his own profession.”

The year of the Reynolds portrait was 1761, when Reynolds had burst, like Byron later, into glittering overnight celebrity. Everyone of fame and fashion, equipped with 25 guineas in hand, formed a line to his door. All of London, social, political and important, met on Reynolds’ canvases, from Admiral Anson, circumnavigator of the globe who had captured the richest Spanish treasure galleon and was afterward First Lord of the Admiralty, to sleepy Lord North, soon to endure his long confinement as reluctant Prime Minister, to exquisite duchesses in the gauzy gowns that exercised the brushes of Reynolds’ drapery painters, to the uncouth figure and sparkling talker Dr. Samuel Johnson. The full-length portrait of a hero of naval and political battle, Admiral Keppel, attracted the most attention. Standing upright in a statuary pose before a background of storm-filled sky and heaving waves, he dominated the group, but of the male portraits there was no close-up to equal the stunning head of George Rodney.

The possessor of these handsome features has been described by one historian as “the most enterprising and irascible, able and bombastic, intolerant, intolerable and successful naval officer between Drake and Nelson.” This is an exciting introduction but it is, one is obliged to say, a case of historian’s hype. Irascible yes, but so was every naval commander of the time, owing no doubt to the continual test of trying to navigate as a fighting instrument a cumbersome vehicle whose motor power was the inconstant wind not subject to human control, and whose action depended on instant and expert response by a rough crew to orders governing the delicate adjustment of sails through an infinity of ropes hardly identifiable one from another. That a commander who had to bring home success in battle under these conditions should be irascible is not to be wondered at. Or it may be that there is something about commanding a ship, sail or steam—a mysterious fungus on shipboard, as it were—that brings out ill-temper. Of a great wartime admiral of another age it has been said, “He was vindictive, irascible, over-bearing, hated and feared.” Not a man of the 18th century, this was Ernest J. King, Commander-in-Chief of