Men of Honour (7 page)

Trafalgar, a battle fought by trade, for trade and in some ways
as
trade, might be seen as the first great bourgeois victory of European history, and its heroes as the first great heroes of the British middle class.

There is an important qualification to be made here. The idea of a fleet commanded by members of the British middle class has an implication of settled propriety. But that is an anachronism and something much rawer has to be put in its place. The rampant energy of 18th-century England is founded on the idea of dynamic change. By 1805, the bourgeoisie were only on the cusp of acquiring the strait-laced solidity and evangelical worthiness by which they would come to define themselves in the century that followed. The Georgian bourgeoisie was wilder than that. Tumultuousness, extravagance and flightiness were given full rein alongside tight-fistedness and cold ambition. Add to that background the knowledge that the 1790s had been a desperate time in Britain. A series of bad harvests
had meant that the cost of poor relief had gone up to over £4 million a year, almost three times what it had been in the 1770s. The revolutionary events in France had issued a violent challenge to the status quo in England, and 1790s Britain felt like a system in crisis, as the armies of revolutionary France had brushed aside the old order in Europe. It was a time of immense strain. From a brief moment of peace in November 1801 Pitt looked back on it, as if on a traumatic crossing of a wild sea:

We have the satisfaction of knowing that we have survived the violence of the revolutionary fever, and we have seen the extent of its principles abated. We have seen Jacobinism deprived of its fascination; we have seen it stripped of the name and pretext of liberty; it has shown itself to be capable only of destroying, not of building, and that it must necessarily end in military despotism.

These are the initial elements of Trafalgar: antique Spanish stiffness; French post-revolutionary uncertainty; and British commercial, bourgeois dynamism, portraying itself to itself as defending the ancient honour of England against the flashy, subversive allure of pretended revolutionary freedom. Or to put it another way: a Spanish navy acting to a pre-modern code of chivalric honour; a French navy surviving as a dysfunctional amalgam of aristocratic hauteur, Enlightenment expertise and revolutionary ideological fervour; and a British navy actively creating a global commercial network but thinking of itself as the guardian of ancient freedoms.

In the Royal Navy, a man's seniors, at least at the level of the officer class, never used ‘obedience' as a term of approval. Enterprise was what was required and a man was invariably recommended for his ‘zeal'. Zeal was the
amalgam of energy, commitment, what we would call ‘hunger', an enterprising spirit that wants to land the deal, or in these circumstances, to put the competitor out of business. It was a mechanism that worked within the navy as a whole, within fleets and within ships. Zeal is what Nelson was commended for, above all qualities, by his Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Earl St Vincent. ‘Your Lordship has given so many proofs of transcendent Zeal in the service of your King and country,' the old flatterer wrote, ‘that we have only to pray for the preservation of your invaluable life to insure everything that can be achieved by mortal man.'

Emerging from a society in which neither revolutionary equality nor ossified rank was the guiding principle, but a sort of bourgeois capitalist middle ground between those two, something the 18th century would have called the acquisition and retention of
Place
became the motor behind the zeal. They all wanted and needed to win. ‘
Place
,' Adam Smith wrote in the
Theory of Moral Sentiments,
‘that great object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world.' Of course, in
The Wealth of Nations
published in 1777, Smith identified this individual ‘emulation to excel' as the mechanism by which social good was achieved. That idea became the British and American orthodoxy. ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,' Smith wrote, ‘but from the regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but their self-love.'

This legitimising and release of a surging hunger to excel, to achieve and to satisfy the self, was a critical part of the British frame of mind in 1805. Nelson had made his instructions to his captains quite clear. He would bring the
fleets to battle, but once there, they were to rely on their own zeal. He would create the market, but once it was created he would depend on their enterprise. His captains were to see themselves as the entrepreneurs of battle. In Nelson's secret memorandum, written on board
Victory
on 9 October 1805, a fortnight before the battle and circulated to his captains, he makes this explicit. He describes how they are to attack in the columns in which they have been sailing, but

Something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a Sea Fight beyond all others. Shot will carry away the masts and yards of friends as well as foes…Captains are to look to their particular Line as their rallying point. But, in case Signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an Enemy.

That is the essence of Trafalgar: the liberation of individual energies to ensure victory. The battle is founded on a clear commercial analogy. Trafalgar worked according to the basic principle enunciated by Adam Smith that the individual's uncompromising pursuit of the end that will satisfy him will also serve the general good. What is good for one is good for all and a fleet which promotes and relies on individual zeal will be more likely to achieve a productive end than one controlled by a single deciding government or admiral.

While the French fleet was acting to an authoritarian pattern (Napoleon had forbidden Villeneuve to tell his captains at any stage what the grand strategy might be) and the Spanish to an aristocratic one, the British mentality and tactics were bourgeois and market-liberal to the core. Edmund Burke, the great anti-revolutionary orator, and defender of English gradualism, had put into a single
sentence the factors underlying this drive. ‘The laws of commerce,' Burke had told the House of Commons, ‘are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.' There was no arguing with them.

As these 47,000 men are moving inexorably towards battle, with the wind on their cheeks wafting them towards the fight, it seems clear that the new, commercial, selfmotivating and wage-based conception of the self which the changes in Britain had created over the previous century was the key factor lying behind the extraordinary winning power of the British Royal Navy. Compared with the fixed peasant/aristocratic mentalities of the Spanish crews and the uncomfortable mix of ancient and modern in the French, it was the commercial form of English life that made them into better fighters and killers. Nelson's fleet carried a capitalist charge.

Soon after eight o'clock that morning, with the two columns of the British fleet slowly growing on the western horizon, Villeneuve was faced with a decision. The Combined Fleet, still making efforts to get into line of battle, with many ships still out of place and out of order, were heading southeast for the Strait of Gibraltar. The French frigate
Hermione
, on station to the west, made another signal to Villeneuve: ‘The enemy number twenty-seven sail of the line'. From his own quarter-deck on the
Bucentaure
, he still could not see them but this was more than he had reckoned. He knew, from interrogating the neutral merchantmen that had made their way into Cadiz, that the British fleet contained several three-deckers, all of them heavyweight punchers, and despite his own numerical superiority, 33 to 27, he now calculated that in the weight of firepower, not to speak in seamanly skills, the British were superior. His leading ships had already cleared Cape Trafalgar, and
would now have been able to turn downwind for the Strait, but his fleet as a whole, stretched over some eight miles of sea, would not in the light airs reach that point before the British caught them. Without the van of the fleet to support them, they would be pinned against the shoals off Cape Trafalgar and either killed in battle or drowned in the huge Atlantic surf they could see breaking on the rocks and sands to leeward. A battle was inevitable. A storm was in the offing. It would be better to have the port of Cadiz to run to than those murderous shoals. Should he head on for the Strait, as his orders from the Emperor himself required? Or should he turn and keep Cadiz under his lee bow, in case disaster struck? He was already crushingly aware that Napoleon no longer trusted him as a commander in battle. Admiral Rosily was en route from Paris, only delayed in Madrid because a broken carriage spring had interrupted his journey, with orders to relieve Villeneuve of his command and replace him. Villeneuve had already written to his friend Denis Decrès, the Minister of Marine in Paris, that he knew himself and his fleet to be the ‘laughing-stock of Europe'. He was in ‘the abyss of unhappiness'.

It is a mark of his seamanship, and of his moral courage in standing up to the Emperor, that soon after eight o'clock Villeneuve gave the order for the entire fleet to reverse direction, by taking their sterns through the wind (wearing ship) and then to head on a port tack northwards for Cadiz. But this was no run for cover. The British fleet in headlong chase had every sail set but the Combined Fleet was under topsails, staysails and topgallants only, trying slowly and clumsily to form up in good order, but nevertheless waiting for the attack to reach them. The main topsails were hauled tight to the wind, so that their luffs were shivering and not driving the ships as hard as they might. British officers watching through telescopes were aware of this and appreciated it. As he watched them, Nelson ‘frequently remarked
that they put a good face upon it; but always quickly added, “I'll give them such a dressing as they never had before,” regretting at the same time the vicinity of the land.' There was honour in the way they were standing up for battle. No English officer ever suggested that their enemy was not courageous.

But the manoeuvre involved the first Franco-Spanish failure of the day. Villeneuve's plan had been to hold a squadron of twelve powerful ships, under the command of Admiral Gravina, in reserve. His intention was for this squadron to remain to windward of the main fleet as battle was joined and, when it became clear on which part the bulk of Nelson's divisions were descending, for Gravina to commit his force to that part of the battle. At the crucial point, the
Schwerpunkt
, the hard place, as Clausewitz would call it, the defending force would then be able at least to equalise the numbers of ships engaged. This never happened. Early in the morning, as the fleet reversed direction and turned northwards, Gravina's squadron had become mixed in with the rear of the Combined Fleet. Their identity as a separate squadron was muddled away and Gravina's ships would enter the battle, one by one, as they came up to the series of mêlées which developed in the centre of the fleet.

At the very beginning, Villeneuve lost his ability to reshape the battle. His fleet waited in a state of victimhood. By about ten o'clock, they ended up in a shallow crescent, about eight miles long, partly bunched together, partly overlapping, and with vulnerable gaps opening in places through which an enemy could drive. Every eyeglass on every British ship watched those gaps. That was where battle would be joined.

October 21st 1805
8.30 am to 9.30 am

Distance between fleets: 6.5 miles-5.9 miles
Victory
's heading and speed: 034°-067° at 2.5 knots

Order is Heav'n's first Law
A
LEXANDER
P
OPE
,
Essay on Man,
1734

As the British ships made their slow progress to the eastward, the crews were struck by the beauty of the spectacle they were creating. In the log of the
Mars,
Thomas Cook, her master, described what the men were about this morning: ‘making Ship perfectly clear for Action'. The clarity before battle was a form of perfection. It was the beauty of order and arrangement, each part of each ship designed for its task, each related to and dependent on all others, a network of interaction. Forget for a minute that these are killing machines. Years later, Midshipman Hercules Robinson of the
Euryalus
reminisced:

There is now before me the beautiful misty sun-shiny morning of the 21st October. The delight of us all at the idea of a wearisome blockade, about to terminate with a fair stand-up fight, of which we knew the
result. The noble fleet, with royals and studding sails on both sides, bands playing, officers in full dress, and the ships covered with ensigns, hanging in various places where they could never be struck.

According to John Brown, a seaman on
Victory
, ‘the French and Spanish Fleets was like a great wood on our lee bow which cheered the hearts of every British tar in the
Victory
like lions anxious to be at it.' Nelson, again and again, commented to the frigate captains he had summoned on board
Victory
how much the enemy were standing up for a fight, not running and scattering to all corners. The scene looked as these moments were intended to look: a clash of organisations in which men, ships, fleets, naval systems and countries were to be put to the test.

The
Euryalus
had been in close to the mouth of Cadiz harbour on the preceding days, looking for the slightest sign of enemy preparation. Midshipman Robinson remembered how

The morning of the 19th of October saw us so close to Cadiz as to see the ripple of the beach and catch the morning fragrance which came out of the land, and then as the sun rose over the Trocadero with what joy we saw the fleet inside let fall and hoist their topsails and one after another slowly emerge from the harbour mouth.

His captain, Henry Blackwood, had written on the 20th to his wife in England:

What do you think, my own dearest love? At this moment the Enemy are coming out, and as if determined to have a fair fight. You see also, my Harriet, I have time to write to you, and to assure you that to the last moment of my breath I shall be as much attached to you as man can be, which I am sure you will credit. It is very odd how I have been dreaming
all night of my carrying home dispatches. God send so much good luck! The day is fine; the sight of course, beautiful.…God bless you. No more at present.

Captain Edward Codrington on the
Orion
wrote smilingly to his wife:

We have now a nice air, which fills our flying kites and drives us along at four knots an hour…How would your heart beat for me, dearest Jane, did you but know that we are under every stitch of sail we can set, steering for the enemy.

Codrington missed Jane with a passion, writing to her that he was ‘full of hope that Lord Nelson's declaration would be verified; viz. that we should have a good battle and go home to eat our Christmas dinner.' On the
Belleisle,
Lieutenant Paul Nicolas described how

I was awakened by the cheers of the crew and by their rushing up the hatchways to get a glimpse of the hostile fleet. The delight manifested exceeded anything I ever witnessed, surpassing even those gratulations when our native cliffs are descried after a long period of distant service.

They were seeing battle as home, as the moment of perfection, with the sweet-smelling scents of Iberia wafting across the stretch of sea at which they had arrived, and the Atlantic breakers beyond it creaming on to the sand.

Over this very stretch of sea, 18 months before, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had sailed to Malta in convoy, shepherded by Captain Henry Bayntun in HMS
Leviathan.
For the poet it was a passage of troubled but at times ecstatic happiness, running from opium and hopelessness in England to the warmth of the Mediterranean. His journal of the voyage speaks, in a way no naval officer could, of the
beauties which were so clearly felt on the morning of Trafalgar. ‘Oh with what envy I have gazed at our commodore,' Coleridge wrote, half in love with ships,

the Leviathan of 74 guns, the majestic and beautiful creation, sailing right before us, upright, motionless, as a church with its steeple—as though moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual.

This morning, Tuesday April 10th, 1804, a fine sharp morning—the Sea rolls rough & high / but the Ships are before us & behind us. I count 35, & the lonely Gulls fish in among the Ships / & what a beautiful object even a single wave is!

Delightful weather, motion, relation of the convoy to each other, all exquisite/—and I particularly watched the beautiful Surface of the Sea in this gentle Breeze!—every form so transitory, so for the instant, & and yet for that instant so substantial in all its sharp lines, steep surfaces, & hair-deep indentures, just as if it were cut glass, glass cut into ten thousand varieties / & then the network of the wavelets, & the rude circle hole network of the Foam /

And on the gliding Vessel Heaven & Ocean smil'd!

That is a line from one of Wordsworth's poems in
Lyrical Ballads
, in which the female vagrant who speaks is in a wretched condition herself but can nevertheless grasp the beauty in the gliding Vessel before her. That is Coleridge's predicament too, broken himself, but in love with the orderliness of the
Leviathan
's convoy around him.

On the morning of the 21 October 1805, with the huge bluff ships surging beneath them and the sails slatting in the swells, there was little to do but contemplate the excellence of their own fleet and the prospect of violence to come. In the steady breeze and on the constant course,
there was little need to adjust the trim of the sails. The only movement was at the wheel, where the helmsman steered to port as the swell lifted beneath him, to starboard as it dropped the bow in the trough that followed. Men had breakfast. Captains showed their lieutenants Nelson's memorandum, in case they were ‘bowled out' in the action and the lieutenants needed to take command. On the poops, their bands played ‘Rule Britannia', ‘Britons strike home' and ‘Hearts of Oak', first written after the triumphant victories of 1759, the Annus Mirabilis of the Seven Years War:

Come, cheer up my lads,

It's to glory we steer,

To add something more

To this wonderful year.

To honour we call you,

As free men, not slaves,

For who are so free

As the sons of the waves?

Half the people who sang that were either pressed men or miscreants sent on board as part of a quota from each county, and a sixth of the entire fleet would desert or attempt to desert in the coming year (an average kept up throughout the Napoleonic war). Their average age was under 22. But the power of the British self-image as free men was such that in all probability these men believed what they sang: theirs was an honourable condition of freedom and order.

This profound shipboard orderliness was no chance effect. The ship itself was to be a model of order. Sailmakers were to see that sails were dry when they went into store, to make sure they were aired and to secure them from ‘drips, damps and vermin as much as possible.' Proper sentinels were to be posted ‘to prevent people's easing
themselves in the hold or throwing anything there that may occasion nastiness.' Rather than order, the prevention of disorder was the essence of naval life. Written Admiralty instructions required the boatswain and his mates on each ship ‘to be diligent…and see…that the working of the ship be performed with as little noise and confusion as possible.' The ship, in fact, is to be worked in silence or near-silence. The repeating of orders was thought to be a symptom of slightly inadequate management.

In a world where the orderliness of things seems so close to disorder and disintegration, an almost dance-like form of behaviour, in which the set moves are made with some grace and precision, was a kind of bulwark against chaos, a guarantee of who you were. On these ships, theatricality of language and dress was more than mere display: it was a mark of civility and order, of a distance from the anarchic mob, of precisely the values for which the war against revolutionary-cum-imperial France was being fought. ‘Even a momentary dereliction of forms,' one ship's chaplain wrote, ‘might prove fatal to the general interest.' St Vincent had insisted that his captains should remain aloof from their men and even from their brother officers. The idea of a captain eating dinner with his lieutenants appalled him. Distance was a method of command. It is the same instinct for order which lies, for example, behind an instruction issued by Lord St Vincent to the Mediterranean fleet in July 1796. The admiral wasn't going to have any hint of casual drawing-room manners, nor the wit of elegant society, about his fleet or flagship:

The admiral having observed a flippancy in the behaviour of officers when coming upon the Victory's quarterdeck and sometimes in receiving orders from a superior officer and that they do not pull off their hats and some not even touching them, it is his
positive directions that any officer who shall in future so far forget this essential duty of respect and subordination be admonished publically; and he expects the officers of the Victory will set the example by taking their hats off on such occasions and not touching them with an air of negligence.

St Vincent was insistent that midshipmen should have a uniform ‘which distinguish their class to be in the rank of gentleman, and give them better credit and figure in executing the commands of their superior officers.' Decks were to be swept at least twice a day, the dirt thrown overboard, men to change their linen twice a week, to wash frequently, to make sure the heads were clean every morning and evening. The ship was to appear ‘clean and neat from without board.' These orders, written in order books, were to be kept on the quarterdeck and open to inspection ‘of every person belonging to the ship', sometimes in a canvas case.

Filthy language, the solid staple of life between decks, was nevertheless not to be used within the hearing of officers. ‘There is a word which only comes from the mouths of hardened blackguards,' wrote the extremely cleanminded Captain Riou on the
Amazon
in 1799, ‘that will not be permitted to pass with impunity.' What that word was can only be guessed at but certainly Captain Griffiths on the
London
in 1795 thought “‘Bugger” a horrid expression disgraceful to a British seaman, a scandalous and infamous word.' Not as scandalous as the act itself, which seems to have been committed rarely, and only then down in the unlit spaces in the depths of the ship, on the cable tier, where love, lust or dominance could have its way with least chance of disturbance.

The essence of the order was of course vigilance, and the roots of vigilance reached far down into the souls of the
officers themselves. Officers and men lived, critically, on either side of a moral watershed: an officer's self-control was the source of the discipline which he then imposed on the men. The state of a ship and its company was a test of the officer's inner, moral qualities and each ship needed to be, in effect, a diagram of that highly regulated state. It was a difference which meant that the violence done by officers to men was seen as almost unequivocally good; and violence done by men to officers just as unequivocally bad. A man's duty was to obey, an officer's to be right and so, as an aspect of nothing but logic, a man's failure was a cause for punishment and an officer's a cause for dishonour.

Every aspect of the ship was to conform to this image of order. The stores were to be stored ‘with economical exactness.' No excuse would be admitted for stores ‘not being neatly arranged and ready to hand.' The officer of the watch was

to be careful that the sails are at all times well hoisted, reefs repaired if required, sheets home, yards braced, trusses, weather braces and bowlines attended to, and the sails in every respect as properly set as if the ship was in a chase.

'Minute attention', ‘her exact place', ‘a uniform system of discipline': every phrase reinforced the sense that not only was the ship a fighting machine but a microcosm of rational civilisation, surviving in and threatened by a chaotic and hostile world, a zone of chaos to which the ship's company naturally belonged. The terror with which mutiny was viewed, and with which the mildest whisper of mutinous thought was received, was a measure of the tightness with which the line of order was drawn. For the first lieutenant, in effect on test for promotion to captain, the demands of the system could not be more absolute:

It is impossible he can be too minute in these particulars of his duty. He ought to know everything, see everything and have to do with everything that is to be known, seen or done in the ship.

He was, in other words, to be Enlightenment, Virgilian man, the representative of civilisation, entirely aware, entirely informed, entirely in control and as a result entirely admirable. From the cleanness and regularity of his heart and mind would ‘follow credit and comfort to a well disposed ship's company.' There were some deeply traditional aspects to this. Buried deep within the 1805 conception of the naval officer was a Roman and stoical image of distilled order, of an applied and balanced rationality which both constituted and oiled the fleet system itself. A fleet was an act of English civility. Its orderliness was its virtue, rationality its fuel, clarity its purpose, and in those qualities, the English had long congratulated themselves that they were different from foreigners. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, a thrilling discovery was reported in London: