I have already drawn attention to Nelson’s blind prejudice to and hatred of the French.  Collingwood was tainted with the same one-sided views, but tempered them with more conventional language.  In his letters to Lady Collingwood he expresses delight at receiving a letter written to him in French by his daughter, and exhorts the mother to see that she converses when she can in that language, and to remember that she is never to admire anything French but the language.  On another occasion he enjoins his daughter Sarah to write every day a translation of English into French, so that the language may soon become familiar to her; and then, as though he regarded these instructions as unpatriotic, he qualifies them by reminding her “that it is the only thing French that she needs to acquire, because there is little else in connection with that country which he would wish her to love or imitate.”  A kinsman of his, after the battle of Trafalgar, wrote to inform him that his family were descended from, and allied to, many great families, Talebois amongst the rest.  He brushed the intended compliment aside, and in his quaint manner remarked that “he had never troubled to search out his genealogy but all he could say was, that if he got hold of the French fleet, he would either be a Viscount or nothing.”  This is one of the very rare symptoms of vaunting that he ever gave way to; and though his dislike of the French was as inherent as Nelson’s, he never allowed his chivalrous nature to be overruled by passion.  In a letter to Lord Radstock in 1806 he closes it by paying a high tribute to the unfortunate French Admiral Villeneuve by stating “that he was a well-bred man, and a good officer, who had nothing of the offensive vapourings and boastings in his manner which were, perhaps, too commonly attributed to the Frenchmen.”

Collingwood was a man of high ideals with a deeply religious fervour, never sinning and then repenting as Nelson was habitually doing.  Physical punishment of his men was abhorrent to him, and although he enforced stern discipline on his crew, they worshipped him.  “I cannot understand,” he said, “the religion of an officer who can pray all one day and flog his men all the next.”  His method was to create a feeling of honour amongst his men, and he did this with unfailing success, without adopting the harsh law of the land made by English aristocrats.

In a letter to his wife, dated September, 1806, Collingwood informs her that the Queen of Naples expected to be put on the throne of Naples again and had intimated the desire of showing her gratitude to himself by creating him a Sicilian Duke and giving him an estate.  “If a Dukedom is offered to me,” he tells her, “I shall return my thanks for the honour they wish to confer upon me, and show my estimate of it by telling them that I am the servant of my sovereign alone, and can receive no rewards from a foreign prince.”  Napoleon denounced Marie Caroline, Queen of Naples,