Читать книгу Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero - Adam Nicolson - Страница 7

October 21st 18055.50 am to 8.30 am

Distance between fleets: 10 miles-6.5 miles

Victory’s heading and speed: 067°-078° at 3 knots

Zeal: passionate ardour for any cause

SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

At 5.50 on the morning of 21 October 1805, just as dawn was coming up, the look-outs high on the mainmasts of the British fleet spied the enemy, about twelve miles away downwind. They had been tracking them for a day and a night, the body of their force kept carefully over the horizon, not only to prevent the French and Spanish taking fright and running from battle, but to remain upwind, ‘keeping the weather gage’, holding the trump card with which they would control and direct the battle to come. All night long, British frigates, stationed between the two fleets, had been burning pairs of blue lights, every hour on the hour, as pre-arranged. It was the agreed signal that the enemy was standing to the south, just as was wanted, straight into the jaws of the British guns.

Twenty minutes after the first sighting in the light of dawn, Nelson signalled to the fleet: ‘Form order of sailing in two columns.’ This was the attack formation in which he had instructed his captains over the preceding weeks. His next signal, at 06.22, confirmed what they all knew was inevitable: ‘Prepare for battle’. Twenty minutes after that, the French frigate Hermione, standing out to the west of her own battle fleet, peering into the dark of the retreating night, signalled to her flagship, the Bucentaure: ‘The enemy in sight to windward.’ For all 47,000 men afloat that morning, it felt like a day of destiny and decision. Most ships in both fleets were already cleared for action.

The French and Spanish were about twelve miles and the British about twenty-two miles off the coast of southwest Spain. The nearest point was Cape Trafalgar, an Arabic name, meaning the Point of the Cave, Taraf-al-Ghar. From the very top, the truck, of the highest masts in the British fleet, two hundred feet above the sea, you could just make out the blue smoky hills standing inland towards Seville. The wind was a light northwesterly, perhaps no more than Force 2 or 3, blowing at about 10 knots, but that was enough. A man-of-war would sail with a breeze so slight it could just be felt on the windward side of a licked finger. On the day of the battle, only the very largest ship, the vast Spanish four-decker, the Santísima Trinidad, did not respond to her helm. Most had just enough steerage way to manoeuvre. The sky was a pale, Neapolitan blue, with a few high clouds, and it was warm for the autumn. By midday, the Spanish meteorologists, recording the temperature in the Royal Observatory just outside Cadiz, would log 21° Celsius, about 70° Fahrenheit. In all ships in both fleets, men would strip to the waist. There was only one ominous element to the weather: a long, stirring swell was pushing in from the southwest, ‘the dog before its master’, the sign of a big Atlantic storm to come.

Twenty-six British ships-of-the-line were bearing down from to-windward. One more, the Africa, captained by Henry Digby, the richest man in the English fleet, who had won for himself £60,000 of prize money by the time he was thirty, perhaps £3-4 million in modern terms, had missed Nelson’s signal in the night, had got out of position and was now coming down from the north. The main body of the fleet was arranged a little raggedly, in two rough columns, ‘scrambling into action’ as one of the British captains described it afterwards, ‘in coveys’ as a Spaniard remembered it, as though the British fleet were a flock of partridges drifting in from the western horizon.

Nelson was already on the quarterdeck of Victory, a slight, grey-haired 47-year-old man, alert, wiry, anxious and intense, five feet four inches tall and irresistibly captivating in manner. Before battle, the remains of the arm he had lost in a catastrophic fight against the Spanish in the Canaries eight years before tended to quiver with the tension. ‘My fin’ he called it, and on his chairs he had a small patch particularly upholstered on the right arm, where he could rest this anxious stump. Like most naval officers, he was both tanned—the word used by unfriendly landlubbers to describe captains and admirals in Jane Austen’s Persuasion is ‘orange’—and prematurely aged, worn out by the worry and fretfulness of his life. At regular intervals, he would be struck, quite unexpectedly, by a terrifying and debilitating nervous spasm, his body releasing, in a surge of uncontrolled energy, the anxiety it had accumulated day by day. Only three weeks before Trafalgar, one such attack, suddenly coming on at four in the morning, had left him feeling enervated and confused. ‘I was hardly ever better than yesterday,’ he wrote to his lover Emma Hamilton,

and I slept uncommonly well; but was awoke with this disorder. The good people of England will not believe that rest of body and mind is necessary for me! But perhaps this spasm may not come again these six months. I had been writing seven hours yesterday; perhaps that had some hand in bringing it upon me.

The burden of work was unremitting. Drawings of the cabins of naval commanders of this period show pile on pile of papers, logbooks, files, notebooks, charts, musterbooks, and orderbooks. It was a navy that ran on paper.

No one who met Nelson thought he looked like a hero should. Lady Spencer, sophisticated wife of a distinguished First Lord of the Admiralty called Nelson ‘a most uncouth creature.’ His general appearance, she thought—and this was a woman who loved and admired him—‘was that of an idiot.’ He was the most feared naval commander in the world. In the previous seven years he had entirely destroyed, in brutally close action, both a French and a Danish fleet, with scarcely a thought for his own or his crews’ safety. ‘I consider the destruction of the Enemy’s Fleet of so much consequence,’ he had written within the last few months, ‘that I would willingly have half of mine burnt to effect their destruction. I am in a fever. God send I may find them.’ Naval warfare had not known such application since the wild mêlées of almost two centuries before. Nelson’s declared purpose, in letter after letter, was simple and total: ‘annihilation’. The spirit of Achilles was in him.

He was dressed this morning, as ever, in the coat on which the four stars of his orders of knighthood were embroidered in sequins. There was a drama to his presence. This was not Horatio Nelson, the smallish son of a Norfolk parson, the desperately anxious, self-justifying, sometimes jealous, sometimes squabblingly argumentative man he could so often appear from his letters; nor the extraordinarily unbuttoned lover; nor the friend of his brother officers and subordinates to whom, in an endless and ubiquitous cascade of ease and intimacy, he could bind himself with a single letter or even a look. This, as his orders still preserved in the Admiralty files in London repeatedly describe him, was:

The Right Honorable Lord Viscount Nelson k.b. Duke of Bronte in Sicily, Knight of the Great Cross of St Ferdinand & of Merit, Knight of the Order of the Crescent & of the Illustrious Orders of St Joachim, Vice-Admiral of the White and Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels employed and to be employed on the Mediterranean Station.

Here was the Trafalgar amalgam, Achilles as the servant of the state, an intense and passionate man, in whom one of the forms which passion took was the precise and unending attention to the details of order and organisation on which successful war depended.

The slowness of it would surprise us today, a murderous punch delivered at just about walking pace. The British ships, with all sails set, were moving at no more than two or three miles an hour. Ships’ boats rowed the frigate captains over to the flagship. In most ships, breakfast and then lunch were served to the men. According to Nelson’s particular instructions, all the men were given wine not the mixture of rum and water known in the navy as grog. As each swell came through, picking up the starboard quarter, travelling the length of the hull and then dropping the bow in the trough that followed, the huge rectangular bodies of the ships-of-the-line, built more for strength than speed, wooden blockhouses with oak walls three feet thick, their length no more than three or four times their beam, surged forward for a moment, only to fall back into a low, lazy wallow. Swell in light airs slats and bangs at sails and yards. From the slow scraping to and fro of an unoiled block, the creak of the main-top irons, the ‘frequent crack, crack of the tiller’ as the helmsman adjusted to each swell, the snatch and tug of a gust at the canvas, the pulling of the hard-eyes at the shackles on deck, everyone on every ship would have known that a storm would be on them before a day or two was out.

For over six steady hours, the two fleets watched each other growing larger, filling ever more of the eyepieces of their telescopes. A few miles out from the Spanish coast, and keeping warily away from the line of reefs and shoals which rim that shore between Cadiz and Cape Trafalgar, the combined Spanish and French fleet of 33 ships-of-the-line had been, according to orders received from Napoleon himself, attempting to make their way down into the Strait of Gibraltar and then on into the Mediterranean, heading for southern Italy where they were to land the 4,000 French soldiers they had on board. This force was to secure Naples and guard the Emperor’s southern flank as he invaded central Europe.

The Combined Fleet was not in good order. They had inched out of Cadiz over the previous 36 hours, intently watched by Nelson’s guard-dogs, every move, every hoisting of a yard, every bending of a sail transmitted by flag signal to the admiral waiting over the horizon. But the wind conditions had been difficult, their manoeuvres had been poorly executed and by this morning several ships had slipped far to leeward of the line. Mutual contempt prevailed between French and Spanish officers. The French considered the Spanish incompetent, the Spanish thought the French treacherous. Much of this fleet had fought an action together against a British squadron in July, in which two Spanish ships had been captured by the British, the result, the Spanish thought, of French failure to defend them. The French of course saw it only as evidence of Spanish hopelessness at sea. An atmosphere of anxiety and gloom had settled on them all. As the Spaniards had left the final angry Council of War in Cadiz, two days earlier, they had bowed to Villeneuve, the French Commander-in-Chief ‘with a resigned demeanour, like gladiators of old Rome, making their salute in the arena: “Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!” Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.’

The asymmetry between British confidence and Franco—Spanish despair, at the very beginning of the battle, is the governing condition of Trafalgar. The battle was lost and won before a moment of it was fought. This was a meeting the British had desired for at least two years, a chance to establish their command of the world ocean. But it was a meeting which their enemies, as they quite explicitly repeated in dispatch after dispatch to Madrid, Paris and on to Napoleon’s mobile headquarters, then in Germany, did not desire at all. The French and Spanish commanders knew, as if it were their destiny, that a catastrophe awaited them.

In the light of this, what happened at Trafalgar is, on one level, not complicated: a highly ambitious, confident and aggressive English battle fleet found and attacked a larger combined French and Spanish fleet whose morale was broken, and whose command was divided and without conviction, and heavily defeated it, by killing and disabling very large numbers of its officers and crew. In some ways, that was all: a pack of dogs battened on to a flock of sheep.

It is an easy description and in some ways inaccurate. The sheep were armed, brave, obstinate and frightening and did dreadful damage to the British attackers. Nevertheless there is a kernel of truth in it and the description raises questions. Why were the English so ambitious, so confident and so aggressive? Why were these crews, about half of them there against their own will, prepared to accept the level of risk which their commanders offered them? Why, in their different ways, were the French and Spanish so broken, so pusillanimous, so defeatist? Why did the British manage to kill ten times more of their enemy than they did of the British? How by 1805 had the Royal Navy become the most effective maritime killing machine in the world? And how had the French and Spanish, each with their long, dignified and noble naval traditions, become their quivering and broken victims?

There are technological answers to these questions, to do with ships and guns, but they are not enough. Two British ships, the Berwick and the Swiftsure, both in fact fought on the French side during the battle. They had been captured from the British during the war. The British Belleisle had begun life as the French Formidable, captured off the Breton coast in 1795. Many of the British ships had anyway been built as copies of French men-of-war. The British Achille for example was a precise copy of the French 74-gun ship Pompée, which had been captured by the British in 1793. The Spanish fleet had in large part been built by renegade Catholic Irishmen, using British ship-building techniques, even in the Spanish yards in Cuba, and including the greatest ship of all, the four-decker Santísima Trinidad, entirely constructed of sweet-smelling Cuban cedar.

Technology does not distinguish the fleets—or at least not sufficiently. What makes them different are the people on board. Trafalgar is a meeting of men. It is in the men that the difference lies between aggression and the need to defend; between the desire to attack and destroy and the desperate fear for one’s life; between the ability to persist in battle when surrounded by gore, grief and destruction and the need to submit to the natural instincts to surrender; and between a reliance on an old-fashioned tactical method of defence—the well-closed-up line—and a hungry, searching and disconcerting inventiveness which blew that defence into atoms. The day of Trafalgar was one in which three complex variations of the early 19th-century European frame of mind was put to the test.

Both French and Spanish regarded the British with fear and contempt. When the Spanish declared war on Great Britain in 1797, the Madrid government had explained its decision to go to war by describing how

that ambitious and greedy nation has once more proclaimed to the world that she recognizes no law but that of aggrandizement of her own trade, achieved by her global despotism on the high seas; our patience is spent, our forbearance is exhausted: we must now turn our gaze to the dignity of our throne…We must now declare war on the King of England and the English nation.

The values that were in conflict here are obvious enough, and reminiscent of 20th-century European attitudes to America: British amoral commercial ruthlessness set against the dignified, aristocratic patience and honour of old Spain. It is the repeated note in the contemporary Spanish view of Britain, confirmed after an incident in October 1804, when Spain was reluctantly in alliance with France but not yet formally at war with Britain, and which established the British fleet in Spanish eyes as little more than statesponsored pirates.

A powerful group of four British frigates under the command of Captain Graham Moore, as commodore of the squadron, was cruising off Cadiz, with orders to detain any Spanish ships they should fall in with. Early on the morning of 5 October, they spotted four large Spanish frigates coming in from the west and making for Cadiz harbour. After an initial parley, in which the Spanish refused to surrender, the British rapidly savaged their opponents. They had come from Montevideo, with four million South American gold dollars on board as well as hides and furs. Two of the Spanish frigates were captured, described as ‘torn to pieces’ when later brought into Spithead, and one of them, the Mercedes, blew up, killing everyone on board.

What scandalised Spanish opinion more than anything else, though, were the civilian casualties. The wife of a colonel of artillery was wounded in the battle and died of her wounds when a prisoner in England. On the Mercedes were a large number of ‘Spanish gentlemen and 19 ladies,’ as it was reported in the Naval Chronicle, ‘with their families, from Lima, returning to Old Spain, who, with the Spanish Captain, his wife, and seven children, all unfortunately perished in the explosion which took place.’ The presence of these people was known to the British commodore, but he had no hesitation, once the Spaniards had refused his invitation to accompany him to an English port, in making, as he described it in his dispatch, ‘the signal for close battle, which was instantly commenced with all the alacrity and vigour of English sailors.’ Moore was acting entirely in accord with British government policy. As Lord Harrowby, the British Foreign Secretary informed the Madrid Court, ‘it was an act done in express orders from his Majesty, to detain all ships laden with treasure for Spain.’ Spain was paying reluctant subsidies to France and so her bullion was seen by the British as war material. Heartlessness at sea, and never more than when in pursuit of gold, was British policy. Nelson himself was described by the deeply conservative and nationalistic Spanish poet Francisco Sánchez Barbaro as ‘el tirano del mar’ and ‘el héroe más bárbaro y tirano’. In the daily Diario de Madrid, the British in general were seen as ‘los arrogantes usurpadores de la libertad de los mares’. It seems, in retrospect, a perfectly legitimate description.

The language and perception was shared by the French. ‘The sea must become free like the land,’ the revolutionary zealot André Jeanbon Saint-André had told the French fleet in Brest in January 1794.

Deploy therefore all the force and power which the People, whom you have the honour to represent, can give to exterminate the most miserable of its enemies, the speculators of London, the oppressors of Bengal, the disturbers of public peace in Europe. Ships, cannon, sailors: such must be your rallying cry.

Far more than any war of the 18th century, this was a triangular, ideological conflict. A post-revolutionary, authoritarian regime in France, profoundly subversive of all the accepted nostrums of pre-modern European society, was allied in Spain with the most conservative and backward of all the European powers, the trailing partner in the alliance, against a Britain which already embodied a distinctly modern Atlanticist set of values—commercial, libertarian, amoral and aggressive—but which remained, nevertheless, dressed in some very old-fashioned ‘King and Country’, monarchist 18th-century Establishment clothes.

Spain was the poorest, weakest, most inefficient and most antique of the three. It remained in 1805 a profoundly conservative country. The radical changes that had already occurred further north in Europe scarcely impinged, except in the most superficial of ways, on the style, thinking and government of the country. Spain was without a middle class. Enormous armies of desperately poor landless peasants languished at the bottom of society. A hereditary aristocracy remained, at least in theory, the dominant class, motivated by little except a kind of piety towards the crown, its institutions and the Roman church. The Spanish navy was officered by those aristocrats and manned by those peasants—a plebeian/patrician polarity on which the working of modern, high technology men-of-war, with highly complex systems of both sailing and fighting the vessels, could not easily rely.

On top of that, the Spanish aristocracy had learned to exist in a kind of dependency culture. Spain itself, scarcely developed from its own medieval poverty, had relied for two and a half centuries on the wealth it had extracted from the New World. Six or eight generations of its leading families had come to understand that no effort was required in order to enjoy the fruits of life. They had become indolent. Work was anathema to them. The hereditary offices which they still held were performed for them by low-grade administrative clerks. Unlike in England, the aristocracy was still difficult to penetrate. Soldiers, bankers and lawyers had yet to enter its ranks. It had become, in a word, effete.

Spain had lagged behind. Professional people were still miserably paid and of low standing, treated as minor functionaries. The productive cycle which had been developing in Britain for a century or more between higher growth, better standards of living, rising expectations, a hunger for world markets and a burgeoning economy had scarcely begun in Spain. Disease still reigned: although plague had finally disappeared in the 1720s, ‘flu, smallpox, typhoid, dysentery and malaria continued to sweep through the country. Deeply symptomatic of a country going nowhere, of opportunities scarcely presenting themselves to Spanish youth, almost a quarter of Spaniards simply never married. There was no future for them to look forward to. As a result of high death rates and a low birth rate, the population of Spain had increased by little more than half during the century. In the same period, the number of English had doubled. The two countries were not even in the same arena. In the light of this, Nelson’s famous insult to the Spanish has often been misinterpreted as pure racism. ‘The Dons may make fine ships,’ he wrote in 1793, ‘—they cannot however make men.’ But this is not, as it might sound, a reflection on Spanish virility. It is a description of a demographic fact. The supply of good, strong, well-fed men, with a high level of ambition and enterprise, was simply absent. ‘They have four first-rates in commission at Cadiz,’ Nelson went on, ‘and very fine ships, but shockingly manned. I am certain if our six barges’ crews, who are picked men, had got on board one of them, they would have taken her.’ He was probably right.

Navies reflect the societies from which they come and at Cadiz in October 1805, Villeneuve, the French commander, was in despair about his Spanish allies. Their ships were in such poor condition, he reported to his friend Denis Decrès, Minister of Marine in Paris, that they should never have been sent to sea. Scurvy and dysentery were rife. One of the disadvantages from which Spain suffered, compared with its northern rivals, was the ability of tropical and Caribbean diseases to survive in the homeland. Yellow fever, which would habitually kill up to twenty per cent a year of the naval manpower of all nations when stationed in the Caribbean, could not survive the cold of southern England. In Spain it felt at home and Cadiz itself had been subject to a yellow fever epidemic that had been raging across the whole of southern Spain since the spring. More than a quarter of the thirty-six thousand people in Malaga, for example, had died of the sickness. With social systems collapsing across the whole of southern Spain, there was no food in Cadiz and few stores for refitting the ships. There was little money with which to pay crews, or any bounty for those who might be persuaded to volunteer. The people on board the Spanish ships, Villeneuve told Decrès, were ridiculous. Barely ten per cent were sailors. ‘It is truly painful to see such strong and beautiful ships manned with shepherds and beggars, and to have such a tiny number of real seamen. The fleet is not in a state to perform the services appointed to it. The Spanish are quite incapable of meeting the enemy.’ Intriguingly, the percentage of qualified seamen on British ships, when first leaving port, might not on occasions have been a great deal higher. The Spanish rarely put large fleets to sea but the British blue seas policy, pursued since the early 18th century, by which fleets were kept for years at a time blockading the ports of continental Europe, transformed those incompetent landmen into effective and coherent crews. On both sides, policy reinforced demography.

In common with other European navies, the Spanish had more ships than they could man. Unavailability of skilled labour, rather than the lack of funds, limited the effectiveness and power of their navy. Like the French, the government had for fifty years organised a register of all acknowledged seamen, on whom the state could call in time of war. But, inevitably, in Spain as in France, the state did not have the mechanisms to enforce the scheme. The demands made by the register could be all too easily cheated. Poorly paid officials depended on bribes as an essential part of their income, and repeatedly the men did not appear. The savage discipline habitual in all navies—fifty strokes while lashed to a cannon for the first attempt to desert; consignment to the galleys for the second—did little to encourage subscription.

Vice-Admiral Jose de Mazarredo wrote to the King in May 1801, describing his predicament when finding himself at sea with no more than sixty sailors with any experience out of a crew of five hundred, the rest being fishermen and off coasting vessels ‘without training or any understanding whatsoever of a ship’s rigging or routine on board, such as securing a topgallant sail to the yardarm or taking in a reef.’ It was a stumbling, untrained mass of ill-assorted peasantry with which the aristocrats of the Spanish officer class put to sea in October 1805. Spanish gun crews were able to fire one round every five minutes from each of their 32lb cannon. Most British crews could manage a round every ninety seconds. The best could reduce that time by a third.

The Spanish commander, Vice-Admiral Federico Carlos Gravina, was a Sicilian, and spoke a strongly accented Italian as his mother tongue—a trait he had in common with Napoleon—but his father, the Duke of San Miguel, was a Spanish grandee of the first class, as was his mother’s father. Gravina inherited the right on both his mother’s and his father’s side, to wear his hat in the presence of the King. He was, in many ways, an antique himself, laden with a sense of honour, duty and a particularly Spanish form of fatalism. ‘There are disasters that may be honoured as victory,’ the 19th-century Spanish nationalist Manuel Marliani later wrote of Trafalgar. It was a catastrophically self-fulfilling frame of mind.

Threads and fragments of the European Enlightenment had found their way into Spain. The Spanish navy had conducted long exploratory scientific voyages through the Pacific, which bear comparison with those of James Cook on behalf of the British Admiralty; and there was, for example, a modern and efficiently run meteorological observatory outside Cadiz. But these were superficial changes. The traditional structures remained in place. Of the two hundred and twenty-seven ships built for the Spanish Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, a third of them had been named after saints, others after the Mother of Christ, several after key elements of church doctrine: the Spanish Royal Navy was proud of nothing more than the Salvador del Mundo, and the Purísima Concepción. Here at Trafalgar, the Santísima Trinidad, the largest ship in the world, was the flagship of Rear-Admiral don Bernardo Hidalgo Cisneros, the Santa Ana carried the flag of Vice-Admiral don Ignacio Maria de Alava. In the Spanish fleet, Catholicism and aristocracy clasped each other in an embrace of pure retrospection.

The Spanish hierarchy had been exposed to, and clearly knew about, more modern approaches to war—and life—but didn’t take them up. After the execution of Louis XVI, Spain had been briefly allied with Britain against France. Gravina had visited Portsmouth in 1793 and had been introduced there to the extraordinarily beneficial effects that citrus juice could have on the health of sailors. The British sailors were known as ‘limeys’ for the very reason that they drank citrus juice drinks. Nelson would sip lemonade as he died. But Gravina ignored the advice. It was not what the Spaniards did. Lime and lemon juice was never introduced to the Spanish fleet and scurvy continued its wild career among their sad, impoverished crews.

There was one final element in Spanish naval tradition that would on the day secure their defeat. The navy itself, despite playing the essential role in the creation and maintenance of the Spanish overseas empire, on whose income the Spanish state itself relied, was not regarded, as it was in England, as ‘the first service’. The theatre in which true nobility in Spanish arms could be enacted was on land. Seamanship, the handling and running of a ship, was considered secondary to the fighting that could be done once the sailors had manoeuvred the warriors into position. The captain of a Spanish ship did not concern himself with sailing matters. That was the business of a junior officer, the pilot, to whom all aspects of seamanship were delegated. The captain was in charge of the soldiers on board, of whom there were inordinate numbers. As a result, the Spanish men-of-war at Trafalgar were not ships but floating fortresses, castles in transit, commanded by a clique of officers for whom victory might have been preferable but who considered nothing more honourable than an exceptionally bloody defeat. On 20 October, Gravina listed the men on board his flagship, the Principe de Asturias: Infantry troops 382; marine artillerymen 172; officers and men 609. Even nominally, without taking into account the goatherds and the sweepings of Cadiz, almost half the men on board the Spanish flagship at Trafalgar were not seamen.

Set against the Spanish pieties, the names of the French ships proclaimed a different culture: the great inheritance of Greek and Roman heroes, the beauties of France herself, the burning ardour of revolutionary zeal, the glories of empires which France had conquered and, like the masterpieces Napoleon was gathering in the Louvre, could adopt as her own. There was not a Christian idea or reference among them.

In October 1805, though, there was some mismatch between the trumpeting of these glories and the actual condition of the fleet. The flagship, the Bucentaure, was named after the great gilded barge of the Doge of Venice, the ancient republic finally humiliated by Napoleon in 1797. But the Bucentaure had been struck by lightning and all her masts were in a fragile condition. Nor were there any timbers in Cadiz with which to replace them. She wasn’t alone in her fragility. Most of the ships of the French fleet had been sent to sea, as Villeneuve wrote to the Ministry, with ‘bad masts, bad sails and bad rigging’, and, overall, his account of the force under his command was full of unintended irony:

The Formidable, the Mont Blanc, the Fougueux, [meaning the Ardent], and the Swiftsure [a ship captured from the British, and left with its earlier name as a taunt to the enemy] all need docking. The Scipion [the name of the two greatest and most aggressive of Roman generals] and the Aigle [the symbol of imperial dominance] want rerigging. The Pluton [the King of Hell] and the Héros can scarcely sail. The Indomptable, the Achille and the Berwick [another British capture] all have weak and incompetent crews.

It was a depressing audit, the rhetoric floating free of the vessels it adorned. ‘There is not a ship,’ the admiral wrote, ‘with less than sixty sick on board.’

These were not temporary aberrations. There were deep and systematic failures in French naval administration of which all this was the outward sign. There had been French successes in the past: they had been defeated by the British Royal Navy during the Seven Years War between 1757 and 1763, but after radical reorganisation and major investment had out-fought and out-manoeuvred the British during the American War of Independence. In the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which had begun in 1793, they, like the other Europeans, had been consistently defeated by the Royal Navy, and at an extraordinary cost in human lives. It has been calculated that in the six major battles between British fleets and their French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish enemies (First of June 1794, Cape St Vincent 1797, Camperdown 1797, The Nile 1798, Copenhagen 1801 and Trafalgar 1805) the British lost a total of 5,749 men killed and wounded, of whom 1,483 were killed in battle. In the same engagements, their enemies lost 38,970 killed, wounded and taken prisoner, of whom 9,068 were killed in battle itself, a figure over six times greater than the number of British dead.

At Trafalgar that disproportion rose to an unprecedentedly high ratio of very nearly ten times the number of French and Spanish dead to English, but that Everest of slaughter was only the culmination of a consistent pattern. Over more than twelve years, in a wide variety of conditions and theatres of naval war, the British had savagely outkilled their opponents.

Much of what follows will attempt to explain that imbalance, but there can be no doubt that the travails and evolutions of France herself were at least partly to blame. Before the Revolution, the French navy had been in far from perfect condition, without an effective central board of control—nothing to match the British Admiralty—and consistently struggling to source the large number of complex materials needed to equip a fleet. French shipbuilders had, throughout the 18th century, designed light, fast and efficient ships, the envy of their British enemies and widely copied by them. But the sourcing of the necessary materials had consistently imposed strains which were not met. The 74-gun ship had by the end of the century become the workhorse of all navies—heavy enough to confront anything, fast enough to pursue any other ship-of-the-line. But to create a 74-gun ship required 100,000 cubic feet of timber for the hull, 168,000 pounds of hemp for the rigging, 33,750 pounds of copper to sheathe that hull, keeping it clean and fast, and 4,800 pounds of nails to fix the entire elaborate assemblage together. About 3,400 trees, from about 75 acres of woodland, were needed for each ship. Ninety per cent of that was oak, half of it straight, for the keel, stempost and the heavy planking; half of it curved, for the knees and breasthooks on which the integral strength of a ship-of-the-line relied.

The supply system was the foundation of any navy and throughout the 1790s the British had applied the screw. Ship timber was being imported into Britain from the Adriatic, masts and hemp from North America, and large quantities of materials were carried from the Baltic. Decks were made of ‘good Prussia deals’ and the British Admiralty always specified that ‘all the Iron-work shall be wrought of the best Swedish iron’. By the end of the century, the number of British merchantmen sailing south from the Baltic to British ports had reached the astonishing total of 4,500 every year, the majority of them laden with naval stores: corn, tallow, hides, hemp and iron. Commerce was not only the purpose and prize of the long war against France; it was its method.

The cost of the fleet to the British Treasury was enormous: in 1805 alone, £2.9 million was spent on the pay of the 107,000 seamen and marines in the Royal Navy; another £2.96 million on their food; but fully £4.68 million was spent on repairing the wear and tear of vessels which were maintaining the blockades around the European shores. By comparison, only £400,000 was spent on ordnance, on the guns and their shot which would do the damage at Trafalgar. It was the very bodies of the ships themselves, and the materials of which the ships were made, which imposed the financial strain, demanding from the British government more than a third of its total annual expenditure.

The French struggled and failed to keep up. Even by the measure of looking after their own men, they failed. In 1801, Admiral Ganteaume in command of the premier fleet in France, the Brest squadron, wrote imploringly to the minister:

I once more call your attention to the terrible state in which the sea men are left, unpaid for fifteen months, naked or covered with rags, badly fed, down in the mouth; in a word sunk under the weight of the deepest and most humiliating wretchedness.

Since the late 17th century, the French state had reserved large slices of their native oak forest for those hulls, but it was not enough and they ransacked Italian oakwoods and Corsican pinewoods for their needs. The catastrophes of the 1790s had exacerbated the problem. When the British Admiral Lord Hood burnt nine French ships of the line and removed three more from Toulon in December 1793 (he had already taken one 74, an earlier Scipion, which soon sank) he also burned untold quantities of slowly maturing French oak from those government forests, stacked in the Toulon yards, and even larger quantities of mast—and spar-timber from the Baltic. The total destruction in 1798 of the French Mediterranean fleet at the Battle of the Nile, and in a series of individual ship actions after it, were both key elements in a form of attritional warfare which left the French naval establishment bruised, bleeding and diminished. The figures make it clear enough. In 1793, Britain had 135 ships-of-the-line and 133 frigates, the French well behind with 80 ships-of-the-line and 66 frigates. By 1801, at the peace of Amiens, the number of British warships had risen to 202 ships-of-the-line and 277 frigates. France at the same moment had 39 ships of the line and 35 frigates. Attrition had exacted its price.

In many ways, Trafalgar had been won at Toulon and the Nile. More, though, than technological and material failure, the long unrolling political crisis in France during the last years of the 18th century meant that the navy did not have the necessary depth and consistency of support it needed. The failing monarchy, the Revolution, the Terror, the string of half-competent administrations in the late 1790s and the coming to power of Napoleon—the ‘land animal’ as he was called—all, in their different ways, failed the French navy.

In the 19th century, it was often said by French conservative historians that the triumphant French navy of the American War of Independence was destroyed by the Revolution and the chaos that followed. That is not true. The endemic weaknesses stretched back into the management and structures of the pre-revolutionary navy itself. The French officer corps was traditionally formed into two divisions: l’épée and la plume, the fighting and the administrative arms. Each regarded the other with contempt: the pen thinking the sword incompetent, the sword regarding the pen as common. The British Board of Admiralty had a hint of the same division between politically appointed civilians and experienced, fighting ‘sea lords’, but further down the ranks of the Royal Navy, fighting tasks, sailing tasks and administrative tasks were all performed, at different stages, by the same individuals. The three core demands of a navy—to supply and fit itself; to survive the sea; and to kill the enemy—were understood in Britain to be part of a single integrated whole. In both Spain and France, that single organism was institutionally divided into conflicting and competing parts.

This was largely a reflection of social structure. In England, the officers of the navy came from a broad spread of English society, stretching from the lower reaches of the aristocracy through the landed gentry and professional classes to (occasionally) the genuinely poor. Of Nelson’s great predecessors in the 18th century, for example, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who ran his fleet up on rocks off Scilly, was the son of a Norwich merchant; Byng, who was shot for cowardice off Minorca, was the son of a Kentish gentleman; Vernon was the son of a London merchant; Anson from Staffordshire gentry; Hawke the son of a barrister; Rodney from a family of army officers, and with his mother’s father a judge; Howe was the second son of an Irish peer; Lord Hood was the son of a vicar, like Nelson himself; Lord Barham’s father was a customs officer; St Vincent’s a lawyer; and Lord Cornwallis was the fourth son of a peer, who like his brothers had been educated at Eton.

Those are the great men of the 18th-century navy. There is a drift towards high social status among them, but it is a far from exclusive set. Their mixed social origins are evidence of a kind of responsive elasticity in the hiring and promoting strategies of the Royal Navy. Nothing could have been more different in the Marine Royale of Bourbon France. There, any access to the officer corps was, as in Spain, rigidly restricted to members of the aristocracy. Access to the Grand Corps was through the élite trainee cadres of the Gardes de la Marine and the Gardes du Pavillon.

In the British navy, the test to become a junior officer, a lieutenant, depended on having spent at least six years at sea as a midshipman and an ability to answer a series of disturbingly sea-based questions. As the standard form of words approving a promotion to lieutenant expressed it, the candidate had to prove that he could

Splice, Knot, Reef a sail, work a Ship Sailing, Shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ships way by Plain Sailing and Mercator, Observe by the Sun or Star, find the variation of the Compass and is qualified to do his Duty as an Able Seaman and a Midshipman.

In May 1805, one young man, William Badcock, was sent forward by his captain Thomas Fremantle of the Neptune to sit his exam. He was in a state of extreme nerves and the three captains on the examining board allowed him to sit quietly for a few moments so that he would do himself justice. Then they began.

I was desired to stand up, and consider myself on the quarterdeck of a man-of-war at Spithead—‘unmoor’—‘get underway’—‘stand out to sea’—‘make and shorten sail’—‘reef’—‘return into port’—‘unrig the foremast and bowsprit, and rig them again’. I got into a scrape after reefing for not overhauling the reef tackles when reefing the sails [because unless those tackles were overhauled, the sails would not set fair]. However they passed me, and desired me to come again the next day to receive my passing certificate. I made the captains the best bow I could and, without staying, to look behind me, bolted out of the room…

For the young French aristocrat officers of the gardes, there was no equivalent. They were given an education in the great ports of Brest, Rochefort and Toulon and the curriculum they followed was essentially mathematical. They studied hydrography and the customs of the shipbuilding trade in both England and Spain, but no history, nothing about fighting or sailing tactics. There were daily sessions set aside for both dancing and fencing. Any suggestion that a French officer would know how to steer a ship, reef a sail, splice a warp or make a Single Diamond Knot, a Sprit-Sail Sheet Knot, a Carrick Bend, a Midshipman’s Hitch, a throat seizing, a mouse for a stay or puddings for yards, would have drawn as quizzical a look from him as it does from us. All those tasks, and tens more, described in detail and with diagrams in the midshipman’s vade mecum, ‘The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor’, first published in Leeds in 1808, but drawing on centuries-long expectation, were required to be known by an officer in the British Royal Navy. There was a naval academy in England established at Dartmouth, but it was not the usual or favoured route to a successful naval career. The British training ground was at sea.

In this was the core difference between the middleclass British and upper-class French and Spanish officer corps. For an aristocrat, failure in battle does not erode his standing or his honour. He remains, as long as he has behaved with courage, the man he was born to be. For the younger son of the English gentry, or of a lawyer or merchant, as most British naval officers were, there is no such destined luxury. If he fails at sea, his standing is diminished; he has not won the prize money which will set him up at home; his name is not gilded with honour; he has failed in the same way that a failing entrepreneur has failed. To preserve his honour and his name, he needs to win. Victory is neither a luxury nor an ornament. It is a compulsion and a necessity.

The young French gardes, convinced of their genetic and social superiority, often behaved with a kind of violent arrogance which more senior naval officers could scarcely control. In 1774, a senior naval administrator, Vice—Admiral Laurent Jean-François Truguet condemned it.

The spirit of independence, of contrariness, of egotism which has long distinguished the different classes of naval officers, and which is so opposed to the good of the King’s service, certainly is borne in the companies of the gardes de la marine and du pavillon; they perpetuate it in carrying it with them to all ranks.

No one should suggest that the officer corps of the ancien regime in France was made up of exclusively self-indulgent young blue bloods. There were a few officers of nonaristocratic lineage—les bleus, as they were called, contrasted with les rouges of the gardes—even if they were looked down on and excluded from the most valuable commands. In the 1780s there had been half-hearted attempts to recruit and promote men with a regard more to their skills than their names. There were officers among the aristocrats of great resource, ingenuity, courage and dedication to their profession. And the pre-revolutionary aristocracy was more open to recruitment from the bourgeoisie and the professional classes than is sometimes realised. Fully two-thirds of French titles dated back no further than the 1620s.

Nevertheless, the higher ranks in the French navy were strikingly incompetent. Fleet commands were more often than not given to old and decrepit admirals. Only three of the 22 vice-admirals promoted between 1715 and 1789 had ever commanded fleets at sea and the rank of lieutenantgeneral, a pivotal fleet position, was equally carelessly filled with the clueless: only eighteen of the sixty-eight lieutenants-généraux appointed between 1720 and 1784 had held seagoing commands. The man in charge of the navy as a whole, the Admiral of France, was the Duc de Penthièvre, a relative of the king, who had never been on board a ship and treated the navy merely as a useful source of income.

It would be a mistake, though, to think of the French naval officers as doing little more than living out a selfdeluded, aristocratic fantasia. It is true that they were deeply attached to and proud of their aristocratic traditions. It is equally true that there was fierce regional conflict between the Breton aristocrats and the Provençal aristocrats with which the Brest and Toulon fleets were officered. And it is true that to many of them their membership of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, or the Knights of Malta, the order of military Christian Knights founded in the 12th century as one of the vehicles of an ardent Christianity fighting Islam in the Mediterranean, was of equal importance to them as their duties with the French navy.

But these educated and professional men were inevitably alert to the forces of the Enlightenment unfolding around them. Their élitism had adopted modern dress and many of the Grand Corps thought of themselves as modern scientific men. In the 1780s, the French naval officer began to take up serious modern studies in navigation, the fixing of longitude, the rationalist understanding of the essence of sea-battle and other aspects of the sea, cartography and ship-building, as well learning and exercising in gunnery and fleet tactics. But, whatever its dress, the attitudes remained élitist, a step away from the antique Spanish grandeur, but at least as far removed from the British practice, which, from the very beginning, engaged the young midshipmen with the workings of the ship and its men.

The overall commander of the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar came from precisely such a tradition, as did his two deputy admirals. All three were aristocrats. Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre Villeneuve was, until 1793, de Villeneuve, when he quietly dropped the incriminating preposition. He became what all selfpreservative aristocrats in revolutionary France became, a ‘ci-devant’, a Heretofore. But there was little he could do to disguise his patrician origins. He was a grandee from Provence, in all probability a pious Catholic, perceptibly well bred, reserved in manner, exquisite in dress and refined in demeanour. One ancestor had fought alongside Roland in the pass at Roncesvalles; others had been on the crusades. He was the 91st Villeneuve to be a Knight of Malta. He was an educated man, who would quote lines from the great French tragedians, with an alert and supple sense of irony at the predicament in which the revolutionary era had placed him, and with a devastating sense of honour and duty which would, in the end, be his downfall. Napoleon, comparing these qualities with his requirement for all-consuming ardour, called Villeneuve a poltron de tête, an intellectual coward, a man perhaps too refined for the brutalities which the moment required of him.

The navy of which Villeneuve was now a part was scarcely recognisable from the one he had joined as a boy. After 1789, it became an obvious target of revolutionary rage. It was a symbol of royal power in the French provinces, easily attacked by the populace when in harbour, and it was an organisation boiling over with the discontent and argumentativeness on which revolutionary movements feed. The Bourbon navy had never been able to pay the notoriously corrupt and self-confident dockyard workers and government authority soon broke down in the yards at Toulon and Brest. Throughout the 1790s, the British Admiralty had exactly the same problems with the skilled, articulate workforce in the British dockyards, the same economic and social energies bubbling up on both sides of the English Channel. In Britain, such stirrings were controlled by a careful imposition of state authority. Trouble-makers were excluded; many of them were imprisoned on charges framed according to new anti-collectivist legislation rapidly passed by a Pitt government in political panic. It was called, at the time, the ‘White Terror’: Habeas Corpus was suspended in 1794 and again in 1798; a Treason and Sedition Act was passed in 1795, an Unlawful Oaths Act in 1797, a Corresponding Societies Act in 1799. Public meetings were banned and spies recruited. In the Royal Navy itself, uncompromising punishments were dealt out to the 47 ringleaders of the naval mutinies in 1797. Those men were mostly hanged, according to explicit Admiralty orders, by men from their own ships: men forced, by the authority of the state, to hang their own friends. By such methods, dissent was effectively suppressed in Britain until after Waterloo.

In France, though, the revolutionary state itself could not, at least initially, impose such repressive order on the popular will. Instead it faced an ideological conundrum: how could it discipline the popular will on which its own legitimacy was said to be founded? In the revolutionary navy, all citizens were to be eligible for all ranks. The habits of deference were to be banished by the ideals of equality. Discipline based on authority was to be replaced by discipline based on voluntary compliance. As Napoleon later reflected from St Helena, ‘It was part of the political religion of the France of that day to make war in the name of principles.’ For the old officer class, it was a catastrophe and their response was to abscond. By November 1791, 403 of Brest’s 600 officers were absent, most without leave. The following February, one captain of a ship-of-the-line in Brest wrote anonymously to the Minister of Marine in Paris:

A terrible fate awaits those who will command ships in the future, because they will be disobeyed and scorned with impunity. What has happened aboard various ships proves that juries can excuse faults of any kind: the most complete revolt becomes a crime that is scarcely punishable. These offences are recent, and no order of things permits the hope of a happier future.

In 1792, only 2 out of 9 vice-admirals, 2 out of 18 rear-admirals, 42 out of 170 captains and 390 out of 750 lieutenants remained at their posts. Those who did found themselves with nowhere to turn. ‘The tone of the seamen is wholly ruined,’ Admiral Morard de Galles wrote on 2 March 1793. He had been at sea in his flagship when her headsails were carried away in a storm, and it became imperative to wear ship, taking her stern through the wind on to the other tack. ‘If I had a crew such as we formerly had,’ Morard wrote to the Minister,

I would have used means which would have succeeded; but despite exhortations and threats, I could not get thirty seamen on deck. The army gunners and greater part of the marine troops behaved better. They did what they were told; but the seamen, even the petty officers, did not show themselves.

Naval affairs reached their deepest crisis when in September 1793 a Jacobin mob murdered a naval officer in Toulon and washed their hands in his blood.

The sequence of revolution and mutiny, the punishment and emigration of officers, followed by the rolling waves of political chaos, gave fruit to the Reign of Terror, instituted by decree on September 5 1793. ‘It is no longer, as under the Old Regime, the man that you obey,’ the National Convention’s Committee of Public Safety told the people, ‘it is the law; it is la Patrie.’

The Convention appointed a ferocious revolutionary zealot, André Jeanbon Saint-André, as its representative responsible for rebuilding the Republic’s navy after the chaos of the early revolutionary years. ‘Because all here was gangrenous,’ he told the fleet in Brest in October 1793, ‘all needed the scalpel of patriotism, the billhook of Republicanism.’ Guillotines were set up on pontoons among the fleet so that the crews could see the punishments dealt out to the mutinous. A form of naval terror was instituted, during which the language of French naval administration reached new depths of Orwellian doublespeak: ‘Do not think that we usurp your rights,’ Jeanbon told the men who were to be executed

when we defend them; to assist you is not to oppress you; to break your chains like this is not to attack your liberty! They say we exercise arbitrary power; they accuse us of being despots: Despots! Us! Hah! Doubtless, if it is despotism which is necessary for the triumph of liberty, this despotism is political regeneration.

Politically-vetted instructors attached to each ship taught republican virtues to the fleet. French sailors in the 1790s had to learn a new Rousseauesque and totalitarian catechism:

Work, the principal good of the free man; virtue, the torch of revolution and the foundation of republican government; nature, the source of the virtuous man’s sweetest pleasures; la Patrie, to which our duty directs everything: force, talent, virtue, luck.

The French fleet was governed by an ideology of terror and virtue. Political commissars sailed with the admirals. All movements of the fleet were to be uniform, simultaneous, and executed with as much precision as speed. Captains who surrendered their ships would be guillotined, as would those who failed to execute an order signalled by the admiral or even those who failed to repeat signals made to them. Special signals were developed so that any French captain could be instantly dismissed and replaced at sea. And captains must attack without pause and without thought of the cost in lives:

The captain and officers of ships-of-the-line of the Republic who have struck the flag of the nation [surrendered] to enemy vessels, whatever their number, unless their ship has been damaged to the point where it runs the risk of sinking and there is no time left to save the crew, will be declared traitors to their country and punished with death.

With its traditional culture erased; with any hint of individualism suspect; with a poorly found, meanly fed, scantily provisioned and inadequately equipped force; and with a sense of failure somehow implicit in the strictness of such controls, the French fleet fell apart. Fleets do not work unless fed, clothed, equipped and encouraged. They require, in other words, both a sense of their own dignity and a conviction that they are the agents of freedom. The anarchic and impassioned qualities which fuelled the rampaging French armies sweeping all before them in Europe, living off the land, bringing spontaneity and shock to the level of high military art: none of these things can sustain a navy which depends, in its deeper levels, on the far more rationalist, organisational virtues of steadiness of supply and practice, on orderly coherence and a sense of unquestioned mutual reliance. Only when that foundation is set can the famous spontaneities of Nelsonian battle find a role. Nelson could act with Napoleonic aggression and violence in battle only because the Royal Navy had preserved systems which were completely immune to those modern subversive methods.

The direction of French naval affairs under the Directoire and the Consulate made no improvement: chaotic inflation, a lack of consistency and intermittent supply crippled the French navy. Bonaparte systematised much of the chaos, creating maritime prefectures and appointing at the head of the Department of the Marine an energetic and dynamic engineer, M. Forfait, and to his Council of State, Charles Claret, Comte de Fleurieu, France’s foremost geographer, who had been tutor to the Dauphin and a powerful voice in the naval administration before the Revolution. At his imperial coronation in 1804, he had awarded to each ship of the navy an eagle and a flag on which the ship’s name was inscribed in gold. Three officers, three petty officers and four sailors had been invited to the coronation to receive their honours.

For all that, so much long-term damage had been done to the body of the French navy and its morale that it would take as long to repair the damage as it had taken to wreak it. When Britain declared war again on France in May 1803, Bonaparte recognised it as a deathblow for the French navy. ‘Peace,’ he said, ‘is necessary to restore a navy,—peace to fill our arsenals empty of materials, and peace because only then is the one exercise-ground for the fleets—the sea itself—open to them.’ The French fleet at Trafalgar was limping on to the battlefield.

On this light and gentle morning off the southwest coast of Spain, the three fleets were moving slowly towards their meeting, each a barometer of the almost diagrammatically opposed societies which had created them. Pre-revolutionary Spain was still stuck in the immobilities of the pre-modern world, its population having risen from 8 million in 1700 to no more than 11.5 million a century later, an increase of forty-four per cent; revolutionary France, deeply unsettled by the radical transformations and retransformations of the previous 15 years, was still the central power block of Europe, with a population of 29 million. But that figure concealed a lack of drive and vigour at the most basic biological and social level. France was growing even more slowly than Spain. Over the previous century, the number of French had risen by only 7 million, a growth rate of just over thirty per cent. The failure of the ancien regime in 1789 was the result not of any great demographic pressure coming up from the expanding classes below it, but of the stiffness and incompetence of the ruling class itself. The French Revolution was a failure of government, and the state of Villeneuve’s fleet was a reflection of that.

England was different. It had just emerged from a century of unprecedentedly dynamic acceleration and change. Between 1680 and 1820, the growth rate of the English population had been twice the rate of Europe as a whole. England had boomed. Men and women earning wages from businesses did not have to wait, as the poor peasants in Spain and France did, for the old man to die and leave the farm. People could marry younger, have more children, and then continue to live as long as they ever had. Disease was coming under control. Plague never entered 18th-century England (as it did both France and Spain) and by the 1760s smallpox in England had been virtually eradicated by inoculation.

As the population doubled, the value of the work done in England tripled. After 1780, it accelerated again, to an annual growth rate of two per cent, the underlying trend rate ever since. In the century after 1700, there was a sixty per cent increase in agricultural output, more than double the increase over the previous two centuries. It was the burgeoning time. People had plenty of food, children survived the first killing years of life and old men lived on.

England, by 1805, was in this way post-revolutionary. By almost any social or economic measure you might want to choose, England was leaving Europe behind: in the growth of its middle class; in the number of people living in towns and cities; in the size of its government and the level and amount of tax raised; in the ability of both government and individuals to borrow. England in 1805 looked far more like the modern than the pre-modern world. By 1800, well over a third of all people were working in commerce or industry, equalling the number working on the land. Barely one in ten Europeans lived in towns; in 1800, a quarter of the English did. By 1815, that proportion would have risen to a third. There were a million Londoners by 1811, an unprecedentedly vast agglomeration of human beings, a mass of humanity which amazed and appalled its inhabitants, as though it were some sublime effusion of the earth itself; towns in northern England were already black from the smoke of their ‘manufactories’. There were no internal trade barriers and Britain was the largest free-trade area in Europe.

The 18th-century English were acknowledged throughout Europe for their violence, shooting highwaymen and seducing 17-year-olds, swearing and farting in public, congratulating themselves on their lack of the effeminate refinements which the French affected. One young English nobleman returned from Paris wearing a wig made of very finely spun iron wire. He became famous for it, a measure of what the English were not. Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, ate apples in the chamber of the House of Commons to demonstrate his ordinariness. It was not unknown to be shot at in London. Horace Walpole, the Prime Minister’s nephew, had to dodge pistol shots in Hyde Park. ‘Anything that looks like a fight,’ one French traveller, Henri Misson, wrote home, a little scandalised, ‘an Englishman considers delicious.’

They liked to bet on anything. The craze for cricket, which swept the country, was largely fuelled by gambling on the outcome of matches, or even on the turn of a single ball. Twenty thousand people came to see Kent play Hampshire in 1772. Lord Sackville batted for a Kent side captained by Rumney, his head gardener. The delights of risk and chance were high on the list of English pleasures. Between its medieval and its 19th-century proprieties, the English spirit of the 18th century had become astonishingly mobile. They were no longer bound to the land. They had made the great escape from the essentially static patterns of a rural agrarian world and moved into the accelerated, modern rhythms of the commercial, the urban, the industrial and the sudden. ‘Nobody is provincial in this country,’ Louis Simond, a Swiss-American visitor in the first years of the 19th century wrote.

You meet nowhere with those persons who never were out of their native place, and whose habits are wholly local—nobody above poverty who has not visited London once in his life; and most of those who can do so, visit it once a year. To go up to town from 100 or 200 miles distance, is a thing done on a sudden, and without any previous deliberation. In France the people of the provinces used to make their will before they undertook such an expedition.

They were, by European standards, strikingly literate. By 1790 there were 14 London morning papers and another in the evening. The first Sunday paper began production in 1799. Papers were read at breakfast and as a result an English tradition had already begun: conversation at breakfast was never ‘of a lively nature’. They were clean and well fed. The Duc de Rochefoucauld considered the English the cleanest people in Europe. They were also immensely sociable, milling through the streets in crowds. ‘I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly thinking there was a mob,’ Horace Walpole wrote, ‘and it was only nymphs and swains, sauntering and trudging.’ It was a harddrinking country. There were 16,000 drink shops in London; William Pitt, who had been administered daily glasses of port as a sickly child, was by the 1790s a fourbottles—a-day man (although the port was not so alcoholic and the bottles smaller than ours.) People horded into taverns, where, according to Dr Johnson, ‘the true felicity of human life’ was to be found. They loved a show. The theatre in Drury Lane held over 3,600 people. George III would read little but King Lear as his own madness came on. Boxers were media stars: Jim Belcher, Dutch Sam, Bill Stevens ‘The Nailer’, Tom Crib and Daniel Mendoza all wrote their boxing memoirs and were feted in the streets. One London show featured Bruising Peg, a woman gladiator, accompanied by Macomo the Nubian lion tamer. In Charlotte Street in London there was a brothel staffed by flagellants. It was the first great age of the hunt, the aristocracy of England pursuing hounds across hedgerows in precisely the way, 150 years later, they would take up skiing.

This is the other side of the French and Spanish view of the English as rapacious, amoral go-getters. It was, needless to say, only obliquely related to the English view of themselves. They saw themselves as the apostles and champions of freedom, set against the various benighted tyrannies, whether revolutionary or Catholic, which had Europe in their grip. The poet laureate, Henry James Pye, who was only given that title because he was a supporter of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, celebrated the English vision of modern Englishness in his 1798 poem Naucratia: or Naval Dominion. As a good Tory, gazing out over his acres from the beautiful Palladian villa which he built at Faringdon in Oxfordshire, as loyal MP for Berkshire and a vengeful police magistrate for Westminster, said to be ‘destitute alike of poetic feeling or power of expression’, he had embraced the civilising beauties of Britain’s business mission:

By love of opulence and science led,

Now commerce wide her peaceful empire spread,

And seas, obedient to the pilot’s art,

But join’d the regions which they seem’d to part,

Free intercourse disarm’d the barbarous mind

Tam’d hate, and humaniz’d mankind.

The British warships were not usurping the freedom of the seas; they were establishing it, a maritime, commerceextending force of Roman good. ‘Opulence’ had yet to acquire its derogatory modern note. Wealth was still unequivocally marvellous. Edmund Burke loved to describe the British House of Commons as ‘filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and political distinction, that the country can afford.’ How delicious life was! By the end of the century, a profoundly satisfying complacency had come to settle on British consciousness and the eminently respectable Pye effortlessly embodied it. Not unlike the King he adulated, Henry Pye was the sort of person for whom the Battle of Trafalgar was fought.

If smugness was widespread, even the self-congratulation of Naucratia does not quite match the breath-taking complacency of some other contemporary propaganda. An anonymous song, published in about 1801, was to be sung in the voice of ‘The Blind Sailor’:

A splinter knocked my nose off,

’My bowsprit’s gone!’ I cries

’Yet well it kept their blows off,

Thank God ‘twas not my eyes.’

Scarce with these words I outed,

Glad for my eyes and limbs,

A splinter burst and douted¹

Both my two precious glims.²

I’m blind and I’m a cripple,

Yet cheerful would I sing

Were my disasters triple,

’Cause why? ‘twas for my King.’

However grotesque that kind of statist propaganda might now seem now—and did seem then, to those radicals in England opposed to the war and its savage carelessness with poor men’s lives—there is nevertheless an important point about the degree to which England was prepared, throughout the period from 1689 until 1815, to subscribe to war. Over that period, the country had been at war for more than half the time. The only long gap was the 16 years of Robert Walpole’s consciously peace-seeking administration from 1713 until 1729. Throughout the long 18th century, Britain was either at war, preparing for war or paying off the enormous costs of war. At least three-quarters of all government expenditure during the century had gone on fighting or on paying off the debts which fighting had incurred. In 1793, at a time when the annual tax revenue rarely exceeded £20 million, the national debt stood at £242.9 million. Pitt and his successors taxed and borrowed without hesitation to fight the French. By 1802, when the navy was costing £7 million a year, three times as much was being spent each year on subsidies to Britain’s allies on the European continent. Between 1793 and the end of the war in 1815, the British government raised in taxes, and borrowed from the English people, a total of £1.5 billion, a figure which can safely be multiplied by 60 for its modern equivalent. By the end of the war, the national debt had risen to £745 million, or somewhere near thirty years’ government revenue. Pitt and his successors, in other words, put the country in hock, the most radical national gamble of all, pouring money into ships and allies as though their life depended on it, which it did.

This is the second critical difference between Britain and her enemies in the Napoleonic wars: not only were the English riding a big, bucking commercial boom; they were happy to be taxed on their profits. What they didn’t give the government in tax, they lent it in return for government bonds. The two were connected. Uniquely in Europe, the British government was able to borrow so much from its own people because it was efficient enough at collecting tax to make sure that the annual interest was paid on the loan. It was a particularly English form of consensual government finance, without which the fleet at Trafalgar would have been as poorly equipped as its enemies’. On this consensual basis the British were able to raise far more in tax throughout the 18th century than the French, while still persuading themselves that they were the freest people on the planet.

British government finance was not without its crises but an extraordinary mutuality in the financial relationship of people and government lay behind the British naval victories in their 18th-century wars. And there is a further element to it, which makes the relationship between the British navy and the commercial classes in Britain particularly intimate and mutually sustaining. The navy was largely paid for by indirect taxes on a huge variety of goods and luxuries, from windows to servants, hair powder, nonworking horses, carriages and playing cards, as well as by excise duties levied on imports. The bulk of the tax burden, in other words, fell on the new middle classes as consumers. But the existence of the navy, very much as the great Henry James Pye described it in Naucratia, guaranteed and promoted the creation of a world commercial empire. A navy funded by the middle class and largely officered by the middle class created an empire in which the middle classes thrived. Between 1792 and 1800, the commerce of Great Britain on the seas which its navy controlled increased by an astonishing seven per cent year on year, rising from £44.5 million in 1792 to £73.7 million in 1800. Excise revenues rolled into the British Treasury. ‘If we compare this year of war with former years of peace,’ Pitt told the House of Commons in February 1801,

we shall in the produce of our revenue and in the extent of our commerce behold a spectacle at once paradoxical, inexplicable and astonishing. We have increased our external and internal commerce to a greater pitch than ever it was before; and we may look to the present as the proudest year that has ever occurred for this country.

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.

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