Men of Honour (6 page)

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 douted
¹

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.