Men of Honour (19 page)

It was a gesture which embodied a profoundly Nelsonian combination of naivety, deep trust and high egotism. In retrospect it is inconceivable that an increasingly strait-laced British Establishment would look after either a scandalous mistress or her illegitimate child, however noble and glorious the lover and father might be.

That is the view of history and was certainly the view from London in 1805. From within the fleet, though, from the world of interconnected lives which the Royal Navy fostered, such a legacy was neither odd nor wrong. The trust by which it worked was founded on their sense of honour and on the habit of mutuality on which a ship relies. The social connections and practice of care within the navy, by
which captains took on their young relations and the sons of their friends as midshipmen, might just as well be extended to the two people most loved and adored by their own adored admiral. In the heightened emotional atmosphere before the battle, the request that Britain should look after Horatia Nelson might have seemed little different from Captain Duff sending 13-year-old Norwich Duff away from the quarterdeck, Alexander Ball holding the midshipman's hand, Henry Bayntun asking for the prisoners to be better treated in the Caribbean, from George Duff's hurried and desperate long-distance love for his Sophia in Edinburgh or even from John Vincent's letter to Mr Hancock in Nottinghamshire. Each of those instances was a symptom of sociability and of a naval civilisation which, if anything, went further in its mutual attachments than those Englishmen who stayed on shore and relied on the navy for their security.

From a distance of a good mile away, the first shot from the French and Spanish fleet, aimed high, flew over the flagship. Henry Blackwood recorded his last minutes with Nelson:

When Lord Nelson found the shot pass over the Victory, he desired Captain Prowse of the Sirius and myself, to go on board our Ships, and in our way to tell all the Captains of Line-of-Battle Ships, that he depended on their exertions; and that if, by the mode of attack prescribed, they found it impracticable to get into Action immediately, they might adopt whatever they thought best, provided it led them quickly and closely alongside an Enemy. He then again desired me to go away; and as we were standing on the front of the poop, I took his hand, and said, ‘I trust, my Lord, that on my return to
the Victory, which will be as soon as possible, I shall find your Lordship well, and in possession of twenty prizes.' On which he made this reply, ‘God bless you, Blackwood, I shall never speak to you again.'

October 21st 1805
12 midday to 12.30 pm

Distance between fleets: 1 mile—Contact
Victory
's heading and speed: 104° at 3 knots

Boldness: the Power to speak or do what we intend, before others, without fear or disorder
J
OHN
L
OCKE
,
Essay on Human Understanding,
1695

The more southerly of the two British columns, led by Collingwood in the
Royal Sovereign
, was nearer the enemy line and came within range first. The wind was still light, now more westerly and dropping fast, the sea smooth, the sun shining on the newly painted sides of the French and Spanish ships. As soon as the first shots of the French were fired, from the
Fougueux
, the flags on the British fleet were let fly. Jacks and ensigns were lashed to the fore topgallant stay, the main topmast stay and the mizzen shrouds, a multiplicity of signals so that in the battle, when in the still airs smoke would hang in thick clouds around them, friends would have a chance of recognising friends. The multiple flags were a sign both of comradeship and isolation. This was a battle in which all of them, jointly, would be alone.

At the
Victory
's main topgallant masthead was ‘fastbelayed'

—not to be taken down unless a man was sent up there to untie it—Nelson's signal No. 16: ‘Engage the enemy more closely.' It remained there throughout, until shot away, less an instruction than a philosophy of battle: Touch and Take, the intimacy of violence. In the Spanish fleet, a large wooden cross was hung from the end of each spanker-boom, the wooden spar to which the foot of the sail behind the mizzenmast was bent. The large, highly visible crucifixes were, in that way, the mirror image of signal No. 16, an expression not of aggression but of hope and faith looming over every Spanish stern.

The
Royal Sovereign
was about two miles southeast of the
Victory
. Because of the speed given her by the smoothness of her newly coppered hull, she had stretched well ahead of the second ship in her own line, the
Belleisle
. She was strolling into hell: for perhaps twenty minutes she would be exposed to the fire of the enemy line; for perhaps another twenty minutes beyond that, before the
Belleisle
herself could come up, Collingwood's flagship would be alone in the midst of the enemy. But he did not pause, nor in any way reduce sail. The fear was not of battle, nor of the French and Spanish gunners even then gauging the distance, but of the wind dropping, of the engagement going off at half cock and of the enemy fleet finding its way back into Cadiz before they were made to fight.

Besides, the sea-state was on the attackers' side. Each long heavy swell coming in from the west was urging them on to battle. For the Combined Fleet, sailing north, the effect was very different: although their big, many-sailed rigs would in some ways have acted as a stabilising vane, each swell that came through rolled the ships heavily, through as much as ten or fifteen degrees each side, lifting first the port and then the starboard broadsides, so that only for a few seconds in every minute would the ship itself be level. The huge potential of the broadside armaments

confronting the two columns of the approaching British fleet were, in these conditions, and at any distance, very nearly unaimable. The first shots fired at the British columns either fell short into the Atlantic or flew high over the top of their targets. Nor was aiming helped by a technical deficiency on the French and Spanish guns. British naval guns were by 1805 fitted with instant firing mechanisms: the moment the gun captain wanted the gun fired, he pulled a lanyard, a flintlock fell, the spark was communicated to the powder in the breech and the gun fired. In the French and Spanish ships, those flintlocks had not been fitted, and the gunners depended on a relatively slow-burning fuse, a slow-match, whose burning time could not be accurately predicted. In a rolling ship, that made target-selection a matter of almost pure chance. It can only have been in Nelson's and Collingwood's calculation that the pre-battle, the twenty-minute approach within range, would not signify. The battle that would count was the close-fought battle that was to follow.

The British took no unnecessary chances. On the
Neptune
, as one of her midshipmen remembered, ‘during the time we were going into action, and being raked by the enemy, the whole of the crew, with the exception of the officers, were made to lie flat on the deck, to secure them from the raking shots, some of which came in at the bows and went out at the stern.' But the officers, however young, as an act of honour, as a sign of their status as gentlemen, were required to stand.

Paul Nicolas was a 16-year-old Lieutenant of Marines on the
Belleisle
:

The determined and resolute countenance of the weather-beaten sailors, here and there brightened by a smile of exultation, was well suited to the terrific appearance which they exhibited. Some were
stripped to the waist; some had bared their necks and arms; others had tied a handkerchief round their heads; and all seemed eagerly to await the order to engage. My two brother officers and myself were stationed, with about thirty men at small arms, on the poop, on the front of which I was now standing. An awful silence prevailed in the ship, only interrupted by the commanding voice of Captain Hargood, ‘Steady! Starboard a little! Steady so!' echoed by the Master directing the quartermasters at the wheel.

Whatever the perceived inadequacies of the enemy gunners, the sheer density of gunfire would ensure that the British columns were sailing into air filled with death and destruction. It was a moment of revelation at which the young Lieutenant Nicolas came to recognise what was expected of him:

Seeing that almost every one was lying down, I was half disposed to follow the example and several times stooped for the purpose, but—and I remember the impression well—a certain monitor seemed to whisper ‘Stand up and do not shrink from your duty.' Turning round, my much esteemed and gallant senior fixed my attention; the serenity of his countenance and the composure with which he paced the deck, drove more than half my terrors away; and joining him I became somewhat infused with his spirit, which cheered me on to act the part it became me.

The instinct is to flee, or the next best thing, to hide behind the hammocks piled up in the netting on the bulwarks of the ship. But ‘a certain monitor'—a Latinate, Enlightenment phrase for what an earlier more religious age would have called ‘conscience' and a later, more psycho-analytical one the ‘super-ego'—deflects him into the path of duty,
which is revealed as a mixture of cool self-possession and in Nicolas's extraordinary, half-theatrical, half-psychological language of ‘to act the part it became me.' The echoes of
Henry V
are so deeply embedded they have become entirely unconscious: to act is now to act; fully to exist is to become the received role. Here, in these phrases, on the lip of extreme violence, can be seen the English hero in the making, a process whose roots go far back into English history.

The early 18th century had not liked the idea of a hero. A hero was unconformable; would not know about delicacy or even courtesy; and threatened rudeness. A hero would break the rules which it was the function of a civilised man to observe and sustain. Heroes were crude, whereas what was required was the polished and the developed. Sir Richard Steele, Gentleman Waiter to Prince George of Denmark, editor of the
Spectator
and one of the great arbiters of early 18th-century taste and understanding, discussed for his readers the most suitable paintings with which to decorate their apartments. ‘It is the great use of pictures,' he instructed them,

to raise in our minds either agreeable ideas of our absent friends; or high images of ancient personages. But the latter design is, methinks, carried on in a very improper way; for to fill a room full of battle pieces, pompous histories of sieges, and a tall hero alone in a crowd of insignificant figures about him, is of no consequence to private men. But to place before our eyes great and illustrious men in those parts and circumstances of life wherein their behaviour may have an effect upon our minds; as being such as we partake with them merely as they were men; such as these I say, may be just and useful ornaments of an elegant apartment.

Heroism in the 18th century, in other words, was vulgar. It was not part of a system, as the third Earl of Shaftesbury described it, in which ‘We polish one another and rub off our corners and sides by a kind of amicable collision.' Earlier society had been both stiff and violent. Modern civilisation was both supple and peaceful. Arrogant lords, illiterate squires, fanatical puritans and swashbuckling heroes were all in their own way angular rather than polished, and so were not to be embraced. People had to be taught how to be civilised and they could learn from a flood of books such as F. Nivelon's,
The Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour
, published in 1737 to ‘distinguish the polite Gentleman from the rude Rustick'. ‘If at any times we must deal in extremes,' John Toland had written in 1711, ‘then we prefer the quiet, good-natured hypocrite to the implacable, turbulent zealot of any kind. In plain terms, we are not so fond of any set of notions, as to think them more important than the peace of society.' It was better to lie than to be rude.

Anyone in the swim in mid-18th-century England accepted lying and hypocrisy as both a necessity and the norm. When, for example, in 1746 as a young naval lieutenant so far disappointed in his hopes for command, Lord Augustus Hervey made his way into the higher reaches of London society, looking for promotion, his own cynical
savoir faire
allowed him to understand its manners and mannerisms for what they were:

I went after dinner to the Duke of Grafton's, where I found the Duke of Newcastle [Chancellor of the Exchequer] dined at a wedding dinner for Lady Caroline Fitzroy, married to Lord Petersham, Lord Harrington's eldest son. [She would soon become famous as the Countess of Harrington, the most promiscuous flirt in London.] The Duke received me with all that civility ministers can put on, and with
all that falseness natural to his Grace, and seemed astonished that I was not a Captain, when he was the very person in the year 1744 who prevented Lord Winchelsea giving me the
Grampus
sloop…I received the Duke's carresses and flatteries as if I believed them good current coin

In response to this need for courtesy and delicacy, wide swathes of English 18th-century life became fragile and dainty, in a way that no age in England, before or since, has managed. It became possible, for the first and only time, for a perfectly serious man to attend ceremonies at court in ‘a lavender suit, the waistcoat embroidered with a little silver or of white silk work worked in the tambour, partridge silk stockings, gold buckles, ruffles and lace frill.'

Politeness became a kind of affliction. The Duke of Newcastle who had been so smooth with Hervey acquired the nickname ‘
Permis
', as he prefaced every remark with the bogus-sycophantic phrase ‘
Est-il permis?
' This was the man to whom half of England had themselves been crawling, hoping for preferment in church, court, government, army or navy. In some ways, natural human dignity had been sacrificed on the altar of a kind of rococo politeness. A letter addressed to Newcastle in January 1756 concluded: