Men of Honour (22 page)

The battle which made Nelson famous, fought off Cape St Vincent in 1797, is an example of this thinking. Commanding the British fleet was Sir John Jervis, who would be created Earl St Vincent as a result of the victory. He surprised a scattered Spanish fleet off Cape St Vincent on the northern edge of the Bay of Cadiz. The by now familiar signal went up; ‘The admiral intends to pass through the enemy's line.' But Jervis then made a mistake, asking his fleet to ‘tack in succession' meaning that they should follow him in a single line ahead through the enemy, pursuing in other words the Rodney tactic. Only Nelson grasped the mistake, which would have allowed the Spanish the time to get away. On his own initiative, Nelson in the
Captain
converted the order into a version of Howe's method of attack: all turn for the enemy together, in line abreast, not an orderly file but a flock of aggression descending on the Spanish fleet. Followed by Collingwood, Nelson broke through the middle of the Spanish fleet, created the havoc he required, destroyed the Spanish admirals' system of control and captured two ships in the process.

Fascinatingly, there is an account of this battle written by a Spanish observer, Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana, who identified the core of the new English fighting method:

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades,
actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support.

Accordingly, both he and all his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgement upon the spur of the moment, and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into action with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief's signals for such and such manoeuvres…

Thus they can never make up their minds to seize any favourable opportunity that may present itself. They are fettered by the strict rule to keep station, which is enforced upon them in both navies, and the usual result is that in one place ten of their ships may be firing on four, while in another four of their comrades may be receiving the fire of ten of the enemy. Worst of all they are denied the confidence inspired by mutual support, which is as surely maintained by the English as it is neglected by us, who will not learn from them.

In three acute paragraphs, de Grandallana, who by the time of Trafalgar had become head of the naval secretariat in Madrid, identified precisely the post-systematic nature of the British advantage. He understood it was a cultural and not a technical advantage; reliant on the notion of the ‘band of brothers', of which he would not have heard; and intuitively grasping the power of the individual ‘emulation to excel' with which the 18th century had coloured the English heart. This is not a description of Trafalgar; it explains, nevertheless, why Trafalgar was won.

Up to the eve of Trafalgar, and beyond, there were officers in the Royal Navy who had not grasped the essence of the new idea. The fleet engagement that had occurred most recently before Trafalgar was a text-book case of what the new thirst for uncompromising victory no longer thought adequate. Sir Robert Calder, the admiral commanding a British squadron off Cape Finisterre, the northwestern tip of Spain, had enjoyed by any account a glitteringly successful career, winning prizes, making his fortune, acting as Sir John Jervis's flag captain at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, promoted to vice-admiral in 1804, both a knight and a baronet.

In the summer of 1805, Calder's responsibility was one of the most essential nodes in the British defence network, cruising off the deep-water port of Ferrol, both to blockade the Spanish ships arming and victualling in there and to catch Villeneuve's fleet as it returned from the Caribbean. The British force, reinforced by Barham in early July, consisted of fifteen ships-of-the-line, stretched out in a curtain to the west of Cape Finisterre. On 22 July, in a thick fog, they fell in with Villeneuve's superior fleet, twenty to his fifteen. Calder found himself downwind of the French, but he managed to engage them and capture two Spaniards before night intervened. The poor man was honourable, personable and charming but not cast in the Nelsonian mode. He thought he had achieved a victory and sent a modestly heroic dispatch to London. The following day, he was anxious to secure his prizes, to attend to the battered condition of one or two of his own fleet and to avoid being caught by the huge fleet, consisting of Villeneuve's 18 plus the 15 that would come out of Ferrol to join him, which now threatened him. Imagining that discretion was still the better part of valour, he did not seek to re-engage.

The newspapers in England were full of contempt for Calder's lack of fighting spirit, for his ridiculous interest in
preserving his little Spanish prizes and his failure to destroy the enemy. Lord Howe's explanatory notes to the Fighting Instructions issued in 1799 had been unequivocal:

If there should be found a captain so lost to all sense of honour and the great duty he owes his country, as not to exert himself to the utmost to get into action with the enemy, or to take or destroy them when engaged, the commander of the squadron…is to suspend him from his command, and is to appoint some other officer to command the ship.

If the admiral himself behaved in such a pusillanimous way, public ignominy was the only possible outcome. The tradition of Hawke, Rodney, Howe and now Nelson had created an environment in which Calders could not survive.

When the news of the state of public opinion reached the fleet, Calder requested a court martial at which he might defend himself, feeling, as officers usually did in this predicament, that without a hearing his silence would be interpreted as accepting the calumnies against him. At the same time, an acutely political Admiralty required him to return home to England, realising equally powerfully that the London populace would never accept as good enough such an inconclusive form of fighting the French. The delays in communication between the fleet at sea and the Admiralty meant that Calder's personal crisis persisted for the rest of the year. By the time the decision was made to send Calder home, it was mid-September. Nelson had by then returned to the fleet off Cadiz, where Calder was flying his flag in the 98-gun
Prince of Wales
. Such a ship would be an immensely important asset in any coming battle with the Combined Fleet. On instructions from the Admiralty, Nelson decided, at first, to remove the admiral from his flagship and send him home in the
Dreadnought
, still a ship-of-the-line, but the fleet's worst and slowest sailer.

He wrote to Calder to say so and Calder, in a highly emotional state, replied:

Prince of Wales, at Sea

I am this instant honoured with your Lordship's letter: I own I was not prepared for its contents. Believe me, they have cut me to the soul, and, if I am to be turned out of my Ship, after all that has passed, I have only to request I may be allowed to take my Captain, and such Officers as I find necessary for their justification of my conduct as an Officer, and to be put into such ship with them…as your Lordship shall deem proper for my passage to England, and that I may be permitted to go without a moment's further loss of time. My heart is broken! and I can only say I have the honour to be, my Lord, with all due respect, your Lordship's obliged and faithful humble servant, R
OB
. C
ALDER

Nelson relented, allowed Calder to remain in the
Prince of Wales
and on 30 September wrote to Barham:

I may be thought wrong, as an Officer, to disobey the orders of the Admiralty, by not insisting on Sir Robert Calder's quitting the Prince of Wales for the Dreadnought, and for parting with a 90-gun Ship before the force arrives which their Lordships have judged necessary; but I trust I shall be considered to have done right as a man, and to a Brother Officer in affliction—my heart could not stand it, and so the thing must rest.

Calder was popular among the other captains, capable of giving life-enhancing dinner parties for twenty of his captains at a time on board the
Prince of Wales
, the object of far more affection, for example, than stiff, solitary, wooden Collingwood, ‘another stay-on-board Admiral, who never
communicates with anybody but upon service,' as Captain Codrington of the
Orion
described him. It is possible, in this light, to see Nelson's leniency as an act of war: its respect for an officer's honour would have bound the captains of the fleet to him with a gesture only they would have understood. Such trust would win a battle in a way that the mere presence of the
Prince of Wales
might not.

Nevertheless, Nelson was worried about Calder, anxious about the outcome of the court martial, not sure that Calder quite understood the severity of his predicament, and was acting ‘too wise', as Nelson wrote to Collingwood. The court martial was held on 25 December 1805, but even by then Calder had not understood. Defending himself against the charge that he did not renew the action the following day, he said:

I deprecate the idea that an engagement must be continued by a commanding officer as long as he can continue it, even though he should put at a hazard the advantage he has before gained. I maintain, that to encourage such an idea, would one day prove fatal to the officer, and dangerous to the country. The necessity of continuing an engagement must always depend on its own circumstances, and the discretion of the officer who commands, subject to that responsibility which attaches to the situation in which he is placed.

Not to have done what he did, he said, would have been ‘rash and imprudent'. He congratulated himself on having exercised ‘a sound discretion'. He did not like the idea, as he wrote to Barham, of the ‘danger I must have exposed my squadron to, as also the country, if I had madly and rashly done what John Bull seems to have wished me to have done.' Pompous, wordy and non-Nelsonian, everything Calder disparaged was precisely what, in the
light of Trafalgar, he should have done: rashness, imprudence, exposure to danger, madness, what John Bull wished for—all this was central to Nelson's grasp of the heroic.

At his trial, Trafalgar had come and gone and Calder had missed it:

By being placed under the necessity of demanding this inquiry, I have been prevented from sharing in the glories of that day; and, believe me, that has been no small part of my sufferings (
the gallant admiral turned round, and wiped a tear from his eye
). The judgment of this Court will, I hope, reinstate me in society, and restore to me unsullied that fair fame and reputation which have been so cruelly attacked.

He had no such luck; he made the appallingly thick-skinned error of claiming that, although he had been absent from Trafalgar, he was nevertheless due his share of the £300,000 prize money voted by parliament after the battle; and the judgement of the court must have driven a stake into the poor man's tender, 18th-century heart.

The Court is of the opinion, that the charge of not having done his utmost to renew the said engagement, and to take or destroy every ship of the enemy, has been proved against the said Vice-Admiral Calder; that it appears that his conduct has not been actuated either by cowardice or disaffection, but has arisen solely from error in judgment, and is highly censurable, and doth adjudge him to be severely reprimanded, and the said Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Calder is hereby severely reprimanded accordingly.

The world had moved on past him and Calder was never asked to serve at sea again.

Nelson had an instinct for devastation and the people of England detected it in him. He knew in his bones that the public demand was for convincing and destructive violence, not a harmless strategic victory. It was what he had gone for at Cape St Vincent and delivered at the Nile and again in Copenhagen. He had tried and failed to deliver the same in the Canaries and in a catastrophic raid on Napoleon's invasion fleet in Boulogne. In the media-rich environment of early 19th-century London, this was, if nothing else, a canny stance. He was, consciously or not, the hero-thief. In August 1805, for the fortnight he was back in London, he was mobbed in the streets like a star. His old friend, Lord Minto, chanced on him one morning:

I met Nelson in a mob in Piccadilly, and got hold of his arm, so that I was mobbed too. It is really quite affecting to see the wonder and admiration, and love and respect of the whole world; and the genuine expression of all these sentiments at once, from gentle and simple, the moment he is seen. It is beyond anything represented in a play or in a poem of fame.

Those last words are acute: the Nelson story was rising up into the realms of fiction and theatre. Later he was seen in the Strand:

The crowd which waited outside of Somerset House till the noble Viscount came out, was very great. He was then very ill, and neither in look nor dress betokened the naval hero, having on a pair of drabgreen breeches, and high black gaiters, a yellow waistcoat, and a plain blue coat, with a cocked hat, quite square, a large green shade over the eye, and a gold headed stick in his hand, yet the crowd ran before him and said, as he looked down, that he was then thinking of burning a fleet, &c.

His appearance was irrelevant. These were inner qualities, only apparent to the adoring crowd, seeing in his slightest gesture, as they see in all heroes, the workings of a wild and catastrophic heroism. He was summoned for interviews by ministers and officials. The country looked to him for its prodigies of conflict and its miracles of victory. On 24 August he wrote to Captain Keats, one of his Mediterranean band of brothers, from the house at Merton, to the west of London, which he shared with Emma Hamilton: ‘I am now set up for a Conjuror, and God knows they will very soon find out I am far from being one.' The country expected magic; Nelson, who had been careful throughout his career to promote this mould-breaking, magicdelivering idea of himself, now found the wave he had set in motion taking on a life of its own.