Men of Honour (15 page)

On and on Nelson goes, raging with indignation at the slur, defending his captains as men who were ‘more alert and more anxious for the good and honour of their King and Country [than] can scarcely ever fall to the lot of any Commanding Officer…' Nothing of course can endear a leader to the men he leads more than that kind of impassioned defence. And Nelson put his own case equally forcefully and with equally passionate indignation. He had fought ‘in more than one hundred and forty skirmishes and battles, at sea and on shore; have lost an eye and otherwise blood, in fighting the Enemies of my King and Country; and God knows, instead of riches, my little fortune has been diminished in the Service…and when instead of all my fancied approbation, to receive an accusation of a most traitorous nature—it has been almost too much for me to bear.'

The critical difference from Fremantle, of course, is that Nelson includes his ‘brethren' within the community of honour. ‘My darling children' are the honourable men with whom he identifies. Often, and not only from the pen of Nelson, it seems as if the real enemy is not the French or Spanish but the self-indulgent, effeminate and affected people at home in England, who take up an interest in the doings of the navy from time to time, but who know
nothing of it, and who all too easily condemn behaviour they have no means of judging.

The people Nelson loved, apart of course from Emma Hamilton, were his captains. In some ways he treated Emma as though she were one. ‘If there were more Emmas,' he once told her, in a remark deeply coloured by the combination of love and self-love which drew people towards Nelson as if to the centre of a whirlpool, ‘there would be more Nelsons.' And as for the captains, he told one immensely grand Spanish diplomat, ‘I can assure you, Sir, that the word of every captain of a British man-of-war is equal, not only to mine, but to that of any person in Europe, however elevated his rank.' That too is a diagnostic thought: rank is dissolved in the community of honour. The radically entrepreneurial world of which this honour class is a part, cares nothing for rank and everything for duty, which meant the radical and uncompromising imposition of violent will on the enemy, with the view to killing his people and either destroying or capturing his ships. There is a straightforward chain of connection and implication. The naval officer is a gentleman and acts with honour because he does his duty in bringing about the annihilation of the enemy. Someone like Henry Rice cannot comply with this model, cannot mobilise and activate its various constituent parts. With more of an instinctive grasp of the anatomy of honour than anyone else in the world in 1805, Nelson could and did.

Battle was the place where honour was validated. That alone can explain something about the fleet at Trafalgar which seems strange to the modern world: the hunger for the fight. Battle was the moment in which a man could be for ever identified as honourable, where the fragility of the status was expunged and the possibility of ‘hero' pinned to his breast, not to speak of the accompanying prize money being pushed into his pocket. Leaving aside for a moment its obvious terrors and suffering, battle was not
the place of agony but the moment at which the agony was over. To be denied it was to be denied the great resolution of the naval officer's life.

In some, the hunger for battle was to be disappointed. When Nelson had rejoined the fleet off Trafalgar on 27 September, he had found it in ‘very fair condition and good humour' but ‘getting short in their water and provisions'. He had brought reinforcements with him from England and so could afford to send ships into Gibraltar for stores and to Tetuan in Morocco for water. The first detachment to leave was made up of six ships-of-the-line, commanded by Rear-Admiral Thomas Louis in the
Canopus
, one of the 98-gun ships captured from the French at the Battle of the Nile. Louis had been at the Nile with Nelson and the captain of his flagship was 31-year-old Francis Austen, Jane Austen's brother.

The story of Captain Austen's life is also strikingly emblematic of the age. He had been a wild and ‘saucy' boy, whose sister described him as ‘fearless of danger, braving pain' with ‘warmth, nay insolence of spirit.' He too, like Nelson, was a vicar's son, and well down the family hierarchy, the fifth of six sons. These were the men whose need for honour, not as an option in life but a guarantee of who they were, drove the British fleet.

He had grown into a hectic, impatient man and when, sitting in the great cabin on
Victory
, Nelson proposed to Captain Austen and Admiral Louis that they should go into Gibraltar, both reacted with despair. ‘You are sending us away, my Lord,' Louis said, ‘—the Enemy will come out, and we shall have no share in the battle.' Nelson replied—this is Austen's account, the memory still passionately alive 40 years later—

The Enemy
will
come out, and we shall fight them; but there will be time for you to get back first. I look
upon
Canopus
as my right hand (she was his second astern in the Line of Battle); and I send you first to insure your being here to help beat them.

This was off-the-peg Nelson charm. The position of being Nelson's right hand was both a poignant compliment (he'd had no right hand of his own since the whole of the lower arm was amputated in the Canaries) and an often-repeated one. Nelson must have guessed that the news of six ships-of-the-line being absent from the British fleet would have encouraged Villeneuve to make his move.

That is exactly what happened and Admiral Louis and Captain Austen missed the battle which would have secured them a place on the roll of honour. They were not the only ones. William Hoste, captain of the
Amphion
, had been sent by Nelson on a diplomatic mission to the Dey of Algiers. He missed the battle and afterwards, in despair, wrote to his father: ‘Not to have been in it, is enough to make one mad…I am low indeed, and nothing but a good Action with a French or Spanish frigate will set me up again.'

These conceptions of honour are part classical, part bourgeois, part Romantic. The modern, entrepreneurial man saw himself standing in the long tradition that stemmed from the armed citizens of ancient Rome, and beyond that to the Homeric heroes. What he did was honourable because he served both the state and his higher self. That was the repeated test, seen quite explicitly in these terms, to which the honour-seeking officers of the Royal Navy submitted again and again.

Early in 1804, Lieutenant George Hardinge, for example, then aged 22, was in command of HMS
Scorpion
, a sloop, in the North Sea. His class background could stand
for all the great officers of the navy. He was the son of a Durham vicar, but the adopted son of his uncle, who was Attorney General to the Queen, and who sent George to Eton. As a very young man, he had been in the
Foudroyant
, part of Nelson's Mediterranean squadron, at their dramatic capture of the
Guillaume Tell
off Malta in March 1800. Now he had his own command, cruising off the port of Vlie on the Dutch coast. Having spotted ‘a couple of the enemy's Brigs at anchor in the Roads', he ‘determined upon a dash at the outermost one in the boats.' Another British sloop, the
Beaver
, came up and the two captains decided to join forces for the night attack. What happened is a model in miniature of Nelsonian war. ‘At half past nine in the evening', he wrote to his uncle, addressing him as ‘My dearest friend,'

we began the enterprise, in three boats from the
Scorpion
and in two from the
Beaver.
We had near 60 men, including Officers, headed by your humble Servant in the foremost boat. As we rowed with tide and flood, we arrived along-side the enemy at half past eleven. I had the good fortune or (as by some it has been considered) the Honour, to be the first man who boarded her. She was prepared for us, with Board Nettings up, and with all the other customary implements of defence. But the noise, the alarm, &c so intimidated her crew, that many of them ran below in a panic, leaving to us the painful duty of combating those whom we respected most.

The decks were slippery in consequence of rain; so that in grappling with my first opponent, a mate of the watch, I fell, but recovered my position & fought him upon equal terms, and killed him. I then engaged the Captain, as brave a man as any service ever boasted; he had almost killed one of my Seamen. To my shame be it spoken, he disarmed me! And was
on the point of killing me—when a seaman of mine came up, rescued me at the peril of his own life, and enabled me to recover my sword.—At this time all the men had come from the boats, and were in possession of the deck: two were going to fall upon the Captain at once—I ran up—held them back—and then adjured him to accept Quarter. With inflexible heroism he disdained the gift, kept us at bay, and compelled us to kill him; he fell covered with honourable wounds.

To the end of my existence I shall regret the Captain. He was a perfect Hero; and if his crew had been like him, critical indeed would have been our peril…In two days after the Captain's death, he was buried with all the Naval Honours in my power to bestow upon him: during the ceremony of his interment, the English colours disappeared, and the Dutch were hoisted in their place. All the Dutch Officers were liberated [not the men]—one of them pronounced an éloge on the Hero they had lost—and we fired three volleys over him as he descended into the deep.

For this action, Hardinge was promoted Captain, received post rank and was given a sword by Lloyd's to the value of 300 guineas. A Nelson in the making? Perhaps: the necessary combination is there of aggression, sweetness, courage and an almost painful conception of honour. But he too is forgotten by history, killed in action off Sri Lanka in 1808 and buried in Colombo.

The word to describe such a man is ‘chivalrous' and by 1805 it is perfectly clear that honour had acquired another layer. The officers of the British navy saw themselves as heirs, strange as this might sound, to the knights of the Middle Ages. Their sense of honour was stoked by the rich, antiquarian fuel of chivalry. It is that medievalism which
lies behind the most famous moment on the morning of Trafalgar.

The medieval inheritance was present, of course, in the officers of all three nations at the battle, but it takes on a peculiarly potent and mythic quality among the British. Chivalry, and the utterly unhistorical idea that the English were above all nations its champions, was in the air. It was to chivalry that Edmund Burke most famously appealed after the French Revolution in response to the ‘fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes.' The arrival in France of sterile, nude, antitraditionalist principles of mechanistic, rational government meant, for Burke, that

the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the chief defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

These marvellous, Romantic words implied, of course, that in Britain these dignities survived. England was not the rapacious usurper of the global seas; it was a medieval jewel, Arthurian in its purity. Burke's fantasy of the nature of Englishness had found a fertile seed-bed in a country already turning towards the reassurance of the medieval. This was
the first age of the antique and the aesthetics of 1805 were dominated by the moral value of the old. George III had commissioned the architect James Wyatt to re-medievalise 17th-century parts of Windsor Castle. At Kew, on the Thames, an enormous, new brick castle was begun for him, also by Wyatt. It remained unfinished until it was blown up in the 1820s as yet another unwarrantable royal extravagance. In 1788, the American painter Benjamin West created sequences of heroic medieval scenes for the King. George appointed Richard Hurd, the author of the antiquarian
Moral and Political Discourses
, as tutor to his son, the Prince of Wales. ‘Affability, courtesy, generosity, veracity,' Hurd had written, ‘these were the qualifications most pretended to by men of arms, in the days of pure and uncorrupted chivalry.' Perhaps in response, the Prince Regent, in 1811, would have himself painted by PE Stroehling as the Black Prince, his reproduction-armour ballooning out over acres of princely stomach and royal thigh. It may have looked too ridiculous; the portrait has vanished.

The 18th century had considered the Middle Ages stupid rather than noble. In 1761, David Hume had called the crusades ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.' But by 1805, that scepticism had almost entirely disappeared. On St George's Day in 1805, 25 Knights of the Garter, the most distinguished knightly order of medieval England, founded by Edward III, were installed at Windsor Castle in the most elaborate ceremony seen there since a previous phase of revivalism in the early 17th century. Banquets for the knights and for the assembled lords and ladies were held in different parts of the Castle. A baron of beef was roasted and served on a dish specially made for the occasion. ‘It was His Majesty's particular wish,' it was said, ‘that as many of the old customs should be kept up as possible.'

There was more to this than fancy dress and slabs of beef. To an astonishing degree, chivalric medievalism penetrated the Royal Navy. Earl St Vincent, writing to Emma Hamilton in 1798, explaining to her why Nelson and not he was commanding the British squadron charged with the ‘succour of their Sicilian majesties', informs her that even though he is ‘bound by my oath of chivalry to protect all who are persecuted and distressed' he is sadly ‘forbid to quit my post before Cadiz'. He is ‘happy however to have a knight of superior prowess in my train who is charged with this enterprize, and will soon make his appearance, at the head of as gallant a band as ever drew sword or trailed pike.' St Vincent signed himself off as Emma's ‘true knight and devoted servant'.