Men of Honour (13 page)

Among the Wynnes was 18-year-old Betsey. The
Inconstant
's captain was ‘not handsome', she decided,

but there is something pleasing in his countenance and his fiery black eyes are quite captivating. He is good-natured, gay and lively, in short he seems to possess all the amiable qualities that are required to win everybody's heart the moment one sees him.

That is a picture of enlightened civility, of a man whose frigate struck even the young Betsey as clean and sweetsmelling, who made a practice of having the guns cleared
away and holding candlelit dances on his quarterdeck, even within range of the French batteries on the Italian shore. During one of these dances, a round from one of the French cannon passed clean over the quarterdeck and on into the sea beyond the ship. No one but the naval officers even noticed. Fremantle's dark eyes sparkled, and he embodied a word and a moral quality which recurs again and again in this late-Enlightenment world: he was ‘amiable'—a man to be liked and loved, in whom the bonds of society seemed happily alive. But this was his party-face, his charm. Profound and ferocious anxieties lay behind Fremantle's smiles.

He was the product of precisely the middling class and indeterminate situation which yielded the great majority of successful British naval officers. He was the third son of a Buckinghamshire gentleman, with a bit of land from a family with a sense of its own standing. That standing might be seamlessly transmitted to the eldest son, but in 18th-century England, a third son needed to shift for himself. Fremantle, self-motivating and aggressive, did precisely that.

He was not easy. He could often, as Betsey Wynne described in her diary, be in ‘quite a fever'. He was angry from time to time and he was far from emotionally or financially secure. Within a few days of the Wynnes arriving on board the
Inconstant
, Betsey fell in love with him and he with her. But Fremantle had rapidly to confess something to Mr Wynne: ‘his fortune at present was not sufficient for him to maintain a family.' Only the money he would get from his share of enemy prizes could propel him into the category of a gentleman who could sustain the state of marriage.

Social and financial insecurity, which are deeply connected to the question of honour, had a shaping effect on the officer corps of the British fleet at Trafalgar. They were men on edge, not certain of the place they held in the hierarchy
for which they were fighting, with enormous rewards in money and status dangling before their eyes, but the equal and opposite possibility of failure, ignominy and poverty if chance did not favour them or their connections did not steer them into the path of the great rewards. The quartet of honour, money, aggression and success formed a tight little knot at the centre of their lives, the source at times of an almost overwhelming anxiety.

Fremantle's skill and aggression, and the patronage of Earl St Vincent, had guaranteed that he soon got the prizes that made him rich enough to marry Betsey Wynne. (Her father, at the earliest opportunity, had a plain conversation with St Vincent, asking him to send his prospective sonin-law on a profitable cruise. St Vincent had complied, sending him to prey for weeks at a time on the juiciest Mediterranean shipping lanes.) But the character traits of an uncertain and ambitious man do not disappear even with success. After they were married, and in private, Betsey's diary continues to find her husband difficult, and edgy: ‘Fremantle attacked me for some nonsense or other. I am too inanimate. I see that very little is required to make him uneasy.' With fellow officers, he could be violently assertive. When the general in command of the army detachment in Porto Ferrajo in Corsica said he would fit out his own privateers, Fremantle told him that he would order the navy to attack and retake any prizes which the general's craft managed to capture. No negotiations or mutual accommodation: pure aggression would provide the solution. It was one of the qualities in an officer which Nelson treasured.

Fremantle was severely and painfully wounded in the right arm during the same catastrophic attack on Tenerife in the Canaries where Nelson lost his right arm in 1797, and the wound kept Fremantle at home. While Nelson led the Mediterranean Fleet to its triumphs at the Nile, Fremantle festered ashore. Betsey bought a ‘piano forte' in Portsmouth
to comfort her husband as his arm healed. They had a Miss Fortnum to tea ‘whose father keeps a grocer's shop in London.' They went to see the French prisoners in Porchester Castle and bought ‘a Guillotine neatly done in bone'. They moved to London but it was rarely the favourite place of naval officers, and the Fremantles soon left their small house off Curzon Street for the balm of rural, lowland, cow-filled, welcoming Buckinghamshire.

They found a place, as Betsey described it, ‘about two miles from the turnpike road in the village of Swanburn, very agreeably situated on a hill. There is three little fields with the house and a good kitchen garden.' The price was 1,000 guineas, Fremantle offered 900 guineas from the prize money St Vincent had enabled him to win and, on the day after the Battle of the Nile, the offer was accepted. It was an emblematic moment: a navy that was funded by taxes on consumer goods had allowed an impoverished younger son of the minor English gentry to capture from merchants of other, competing nations the prize money which allowed him to set up as a country gentleman in the county of his birth. It is a central aspect of Trafalgar that the officers who fought so hard and uncompromisingly to win it were fighting, in the end, to establish themselves as members of a comfortable, pastorally-minded rural gentry. The road of battle led unerringly to the country house.

It is possible, fascinatingly, to reconstruct exactly the world the Fremantles now arranged for themselves. An inventory of the Trafalgar captain's house and library at Swanbourne survives, describing everything in precise detail. It is, on its surface, and in its accoutrements, a graceful and elegant existence. The striking orderliness of the
Inconstant
, of the ship-of-the-line the
Ganges
to which he was appointed in 1800, and of the
Neptune
which he commanded at Trafalgar, extends to the elegance of his house. Any hint of the gripping anxieties at sea lies buried in
his other documents. At home, Captain and Mrs Fremantle have everything that civilisation can provide. There are tall looking-glasses over the marble chimneypieces in the dining room and drawing room. Elegant cane chairs stand around the walls, and other softer furniture is covered in chintz which matches the curtains. There is the ‘piano forte', a music stool and stand, a card table, and in the hall a billiard table. There is enough silver for 24 to come to dinner, and a particularly treasured, and specifically mentioned, butter trowel. Turkey carpets are on the floors and green Moroccan curtains hang before the windows. The kitchen has a cheese toaster, a chocolate pot and a coffee pot as well as ‘1 Large Beef salting pan & 2 Tongue salting pans'. Striped pink chintz furniture decorates the bedrooms and a large yellow and black covered sofa with ‘five hair cushions and 2 feather ditto' fills the ‘Sopha Room'. In the nursery there is a ‘Mahogany Horse' for Thomas, Emma and the baby Charles, who, Betsey thinks ‘a pretty child but Fremantle calls him an ugly dog.' In the attic are four gingham-decorated garrets for the servants.

The Fremantles are not philistines. Among the pictures, there are of course portraits of Sir Thomas himself, of his wife, father and grandfather, of Nelson, of the Eddystone Lighthouse, Windsor Castle and a painting of the
Inconstant
humbling the
Ça Ira.
But there is another finer strain, a head called simply
L'Amabilité
, three moonlit and snowy Romantic landscapes by Biagio Rebecca, a copy of
Socrates in search of a Wise Man
by Rembrandt, a Gainsborough landscape and, confronting Sir Thomas himself in the dining room, a large picture of ‘Buona Parte'.

His books describe his mind. There are the volumes of the working navy man: Meare's
Voyage
and Guthrie's
Geography
,
Extracts from Treaties
and
Admiralty Statutes
, the invaluable
Ship Master's Assistant
,
Ready Observer
and
Elements of Navigation
. Unsurprisingly, he has poked a
little into the affairs of his enemies.
Gréement des Vaisseaux
[the Rigging of Ships] sits in the Buckinghamshire shelves alongside
Le Petit Neptune François
, a
French Marine Vocabulary
, a
Tactique de Signaux
, a Spanish grammar and a Spanish Naval List.

These are the working parts of the library, but it is far from all. For those long and dreary weeks on blockade, he has eleven volumes of the
Novelist Magazine
as well as Philidon
On Chess,
five volumes of Rabelais, the nine of Shakespeare, the complete, unnumbered
Oeuvres de Molière
, eighteen volumes of Swift, six of Voltaire, five of Rousseau, six of Sterne and the volumes of Pope which included the
Iliad
. He might have turned with some relief to the sexy and scandalous story of the
Life of the Duchess of Kingston
, the most famous bigamist of the century, or to the excitements of Horace Walpole's gothic thriller
The Castle of Otranto
.

But also preserved in his papers, alongside this carefully cultivated, chintz-lined image of order and propriety, of the gentleman at home, is the record of another incident, which throws a different light on the nature of the man and of the role of anxiety and honour in the shaping of Trafalgar. At Swanbourne, in July 1802, during the peace of Amiens, when Fremantle along with the majority of naval officers was ashore in England—like many naval officers, he was standing for parliament—he had received the following letter in the post from London:

July 16 1802 Adelphi

Sir,

I have mentioned to all my Friends, that your conduct to me, when First Lieutt of H:M:S: Ganges, was unlike a Gentleman, unmanly, Base and dishonorable.

You pledged your word and honor, never to
take an advantage of me, and then went and told yr Gallant Adml, who commanded the Fleet, an infamous falsity, & succeeded in your Views in attaining my removal.

Ask any of my friends what balsam will heal the wounds you have inflicted, & they or myself will say, you ought to meet me in the Field, like a Man of Honor.

My mind has long been purpos'd to make every sacrifice; and if I do not receive some satisfaction; I will publish a statement of faith, & have the World to judge, who has acted dishonorable. I shall conclude by saying, I would rather expire on a Scaffold than have my Liberty and feelings trampled on, by a dirty Tyrant.

I remain Sir, with marked Contempt; for your having persecuted

&c &c. &c

Henry Rice

That must have come as some shock to the Fremantle household, but it would be difficult to find a more concentrated capsule of what it meant to be a British naval officer in the early 19th century: manliness, honour, gentlemanliness, Liberty, opposition to tyranny, the Field as the place of honourable action, and all of these set in a frame of intense emotionality. Fremantle must have replied, in a letter now lost, that to engage in any kind of duel would be an inconvenient use of his time. Rice responded on 30 July ‘that it will not be inconvenient to me, to go two thirds of the way, to any part of England, or France.'

Rice was not to be brushed off and the case was soon in the hands of the lawyers. The story that emerged hinged on the acute status anxiety among British naval officers, and on the twin concepts of ‘Honour' and the ‘Gentleman' to which that status was pinned. ‘Knob' had been the naval
slang for an officer since at least the mid-16th century, but that term—part vulgar, part ridiculing, in part merely an abbreviation for ‘noble'—was by 1805 a source of worry for those to whom it was applied. No longer were the officers knobs by birth, as they had been in the 16th century. If they were knobs at all, they were knobs because of inner qualities which needed to be outwardly recognized and repeatedly confirmed. They were both the servants and products of a mobile, commercial society and their position in what can be called ‘the status market' was constantly under threat. As Burke had written in a letter to a friend in 1795, ‘Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.' A gentleman could not be appointed to that position; he had to live as a gentleman himself.

The Rules of Discipline and Good Government to be Observed on Board His Majesty's Ships of War
, made it clear in Article I that captains were ‘to show in themselves a good example of honour and virtue to their officers and men.' Underlying that instruction is the sense that both those labels, of such overriding importance, were both terrifyingly vulnerable to ‘unmanly, base and dishonorable' behaviour. Because honour was both defined and besieged by the possibilities of dishonour which surrounded and threatened it, the moral category which ‘honour' enshrined was fragility itself. Honour always teetered on the lip of its own failure; you could never be sure that you belonged within its dignifying embrace. The doing of one's duty is what gave you access to the realms of honour. It was what England expected of you. And honour was the goddess Nelson would address some six hours later, at the end of his life and his battle, as his last breaths left him on the
Victory
's blood-soaked orlop deck. ‘Thank God I have done my duty,' he muttered again and again, and in those seven words spoke for his age and class. He had not fallen
out of the gilded net. Honour and duty would remain identified with him for the rest of time.

That is the context which can explain Lieutenant Rice's agony. The central incident had happened on 30 October 1800. The
Ganges
had been mooring at the great naval anchorage of Spithead outside Portsmouth, but it was not going well: