HORATIO NELSON was a most unlikely pin-up. At the peak of his fame, he had exactly half the regulation number of eyes and arms. He was always diminutive, at 5ft 5in tall, but the mutilations of battle (and the pain from a rather less glorious hernia) made him seem even smaller. After dining with the admiral in 1797, one aristocratic lady diarist reflected that she hoped to see more of him, before adding: “Tho’ when I consider how little there is left of him, I cannot be sanguine in such expectations.”

To the public, however, this frail, pale, prematurely aged and abbreviated little man was monumental. More than that, he was a pop idol, adored in a way that superseded reality and went far beyond rational thought: Admiral Nelson was the first self-made super-celebrity of modern times.

Long before Trafalgar and a poignant death elevated him to national martyrdom, Nelson had already become the most beloved Englishman alive, a symbol of patriotic machismo, romance and style: a David Beckham of the high seas. After victory on the Nile, swooning society hostesses embroidered his name on their sashes; he was cheered to the echo whenever he took his seat at the theatre; if he walked anywhere, he was mobbed; if he travelled by carriage he was surrounded by cheering groupies who would unharness his horses and pull him through the streets themselves. Pubs up and down the country were renamed The Hero; there was no need to identify which hero. His scandalous affair with Emma Hamilton only added to his risqué appeal.

But it was his death, at the very moment of victory, that turned Nelson from hero into cult. Some of the demonstrations of grief were frankly weird. The slain hero’s corpse was pickled in a cask of brandy for the long voyage back to London; after the body had been removed, the brandy was distributed to Nelson sailors, who drank to his memory in what must have been a disgusting funeral libation: brandy with tincture of dead admiral.

Relics of Nelson were seized on like fragments of the true Cross: locks of his hair, the 48 pieces of his flag, even the musket ball removed from his spine, which was presented to the King and remains in Windsor. The funeral procession was a mile and a half long, along a route lined by 10,000 soldiers. A congregation of 7,000 crammed into St Paul’s Cathedral, for a funeral service lasting four hours. The admiral was was painted ascending to Heaven, borne aloft by cherubs. Nelson was not merely honoured, he was sanctified. Britain would have to wait for the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, for a similarly hysterical outpouring of national grief.

The parallel does not end there. Like Diana, Nelson provided an alternative focus to an increasingly unpopular monarchy, while his very public cuckolding of Sir William Hamilton and the resulting ménage à trois was oddly reminiscent of the later royal imbroglio: there were three people in that marriage, too. Above all, in both cases, a celebrated public life ending in dramatic and premature death has made it hard to see either figure clearly through the mists of celebrity mythology. Like Diana, Nelson was very far from being a saint.

The son of a country parson, he set out to become famous with beady-eyed determination; a diary written at the age of 19 proclaims his ambition to become a hero. Managing his image with consummate skill, he was as conscious of his own headlines as any rock star, and just as conceited. At the Battle of the Nile he told his officers: “Before this time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.” The lives and careers of his men were apparently secondary. Having achieved greater celebrity that any martial figure before or since, the effects went straight to his already large head. As victory followed victory, the hubris mounted: “Almighty God has made me his happy instrument,” he declared.

Nelson was a naval commander of genius and an inspired leader, possessed of extraordinary flair and almost lunatic courage. He asserted British naval power across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, thwarted Napoleon’s advance and gave Britain a much-needed patriotic champion.

His naval reputation rested on an uncanny ability to take radical and inspired battle decisions, but he also had an innate sense of style that seems peculiarly modern. Nelson was roundly mocked by some for displaying the elaborate decorations heaped on him by foreign powers, but these were a crucial part of the brand: the medals, the blinded eye, the empty sleeve.

But just as his body was damaged, so his character was full of holes. The future Duke of Wellington recalled his first and last conversation with Nelson, shortly before the Battle of Trafalgar: “. . . If I can call it a conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself and in, really, a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me.” Nelson’s treatment of his wife Fanny — abandoning her by letter and never speaking to her again — was appalling. The hanging of 99 rebels in Naples in 1799, after they had been assured of safe passage under an armistice, has left a permanent blot on his reputation. His vanity was accompanied, as arrogance usually is, by a craving for approval. Lord Minto was pithy: “He is in many points a really great man, in others a baby.”

To recall Nelson’s flaws is not to discredit his achievements, but rather to counterbalance the tendency to hagiography that persists in some quarters. Nelson transformed naval tactics, preserved British sea power, saved Europe from French domination; but he also represented a style of blind- hero worship that has reached its ludicrous apogee in our own age.

The planned re-enactment of Trafalgar in the Solent next Tuesday has already entered choppy waters after the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Alan West, defended a decision to remove all references to the French defeat, and to make the simulated battle between a “red fleet” and a “blue fleet”. “I didn‘t want to go in for some great triumphalist gesture,” said the admiral. Trying to airbrush the triumph out of victory by pretending that Trafalgar was a friendly fixture is just as unhistorical as insisting that Nelson was a one- dimensional, one-armed saint.

Trafalgar was a military triumph worth celebrating, the singular achievement of a great but complex man. We should all toast Nelson next week, but we should do so in ordinary naval rum, not brandy flavoured with fallen martyr.

Join the Debate
Send your e-mails via debate@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden