October 21st 1805
9.30 am to 11.30 am
Distance between the fleets: 5.9 miles – 2 miles
Victory’s heading and speed: 067? – 101? at 3 knots
Honour: nobleness of mind; scorn of meanness; magnanimity
SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
As the sun rose, and with all preparations made on all ships, there was little to do but think of home. The fleets were still more than five miles apart and the maximum range for even the heaviest guns was 2,000 yards. There would be no battle, no death and no resolution before midday. In the Bellerophon, the men chalked ‘Victory or Death’ on the barrels of their guns. In the Bucentaure, the French flagship, the eagle which Napoleon had granted to the ship was paraded from deck to deck accompanied by the admiral. Vive l’Empereur! Vive l’Amiral! the sailors cheered as it passed. In the Spanish ships, the crews assembled for prayers and absolution. On the San Juan Nepocumeno, the captain, Don Cosme Churruca – a 45-year-old, highly educated disciplinarian and scholar, a hidalgo of the highest class, El Gran Churruca – spoke to the men. ‘In the name of the God of Battles, I promise eternal happiness to all those who die today doing their duty.’ Anyone who did not, he went on, would either be ‘shot immediately or, if he escapes my eyes or those of the valiant officers I have the honour to command, bitter remorse will follow the wretch for the rest of his days, in misery and disgrace.’ He did not tell them what he had written to a friend before leaving Cadiz: ‘If you hear that my ship has been taken, you can say that I am dead.’ Nor the advice he had given to his nephew, then a volunteer on the San Juan: ‘Write to your friends that you are going into a battle that will be desperate and bloody. Tell them also that they may be certain of this – that I, for my part, will meet my death there. Let them know that rather than surrender my ship I shall sink her. It is the last duty that an officer owes to his king and country.’ Honour for the Spaniard was a matter more of death than of victory.
On board this morning, Churruca told his second-in-command, ‘The fleet is doomed. The French admiral does not understand his business. He has compromised us all.’ They could look out to the west and see their fate approaching. The captain stood on his quarterdeck with his telescope fixed to his eye, trained on the masts of the Bucentaure, waiting for Villeneuve to respond to the threat which the two approaching columns of the British fleet posed. The British plan was becoming clear. Nelson would throw the weight of his attack on the centre and rear of the Combined Fleet. In the light winds, once the attack had begun, the French and Spanish van would not be able to turn in time to bring their force to bear. Arriving in force, the British would outnumber the centre and rear of the Franco-Spanish fleet. As Churruca understood, there was a perfectly clear tactical move Villeneuve could have decided on as the two British columns approached which would have made the British position much more vulnerable. All Villeneuve had to do was order his van to wear round and double on the rear squadron. That way they could envelop the British as they attacked. But no signal came and Churruca finally lowered his telescope and walked across the quarterdeck, saying to himself, ‘Perdidos, perdidos, perdidos.’ Why Villeneuve did not make this signal until far too late and why the Combined van did not take it upon themselves to turn back towards the battle are the two great conundrums of Trafalgar. It may, as Churruca thought, have been mere indecisiveness on the part of Villeneuve. It may have been a reluctance on the part of Dumanoir, the admiral commanding the van, to make an independent decision, without orders from his Commander-in-Chief. This fatal mistake may, in other words, have been a failure of morale on one side and a failure of initiative on the other. In that double weakness lay the roots of the British victory.
Nemesis was on the western horizon. What was it like on the British commander’s quarterdeck? No word-by-word record survives of Nelson’s behaviour on the morning of Trafalgar, as it does of his tragic end during the afternoon, but an extraordinarily illuminating account of Nelson’s behaviour in pursuit of the enemy, also when hard on the chase of the French, survives from five years earlier. Scarcely any document describes more exactly the man he was.
Nelson was in command of a small squadron in the central Mediterranean, on board his flagship the Foudroyant, with his friend Captain Sir Edward Berry on the quarterdeck beside him. They found themselves in the same stretch of sea as a French squadron, under Rear-Admiral Perrée, whose flagship Le Généreux had been one of the very few French ships-of-the-line to have escaped from the Battle of the Nile. The account was published by one of his lieutenants, George Parsons.
‘Ah! An enemy, Mr Stains. I pray God it may be Le Genereux. The signal for a general chase, Sir Ed’ard, (the Nelsonian pronunciation of Edward) make the Foudroyant fly!’
Thus spoke the heroic Nelson; and every exertion that emulation could inspire was used to crowd the squadron with canvas, the Northumberland taking the lead, with the flagship close on her quarter.
‘This will not do Sir Ed’ard; it is certainly Le Genereux, and to my flagship she can alone surrender. Sir Ed’ard we must and shall beat the Northumberland.’
‘I will do the utmost, my lord; get the engines to work on the sails – hang butts of water to the stays – pipe the hammocks down, and each man place shot in them – slack the stays, knock up the wedges and give the masts play – start off the water, Mr James, and pump the ship.’
Nelson is competitive, goading, and extraordinarily hungry for conflict. Berry’s orders are all designed to get extra speed out of the ship and prepare her for battle. ‘Engines’ are pumps with which to wet the sails, since damp sails set fairer and will not catch fire in a fight; water butts on the deck are further fire precautions; shot placed in the windward hammock netting on deck helps balance the ship and a level ship sails faster; the slackened stays and masts given play both allow more sail to be set; pumping the ship and draining the water butts lightens the load.
The Foudroyant is drawing a-head, and at last takes the lead in the chase. ‘The Admiral is working his fin (the stump of his right arm), do not cross his hawse I advise you.’
The advice was good, for at that moment Nelson opened furiously on the quartermaster at the conn [wheel]. ‘I’ll knock you off your perch, you rascal, if you are so inattentive. Sir Ed’ard, send your best quartermaster to the weather wheel.’
‘A strange sail a-head of the chase!’ called the look-out man.
‘Youngster, to the mast-head. What! Going without your glass, and be d–d to you? Let me know what she is immediately.’
‘A sloop of war or frigate, my lord,’ shouted the young signal-midshipman.
‘Demand her number.’
‘The Success, my lord.’
‘Captain Peard; signal to cut off the flying enemy – great odds, though – thirty two small guns to eighty large ones.’
An order which in itself is the mark of a ruthless commander: to set a 32-gun frigate against a ship of the line rated at 74 guns, with extra upper deck armament, was to set a poodle on a bear.
‘The Success has hove-to athwart-hawse of the Genereux, and is firing her larboard broadside. The Frenchman has hoisted his tricolour, with a rear-admiral’s flag.’
‘Bravo – Success, at her again!’
‘She has wore round my lord, and firing her starboard broadside. It has winged her my lord – her flying kites [her lightest sails] are flying away all together. The enemy is close on the Success, who must receive her tremendous broadside.’ The Genereux opens her fire on her little enemy, and every person stands aghast, afraid of the consequences. The smoke clears away, and there is the Success, crippled it is true, but bull-dog like, bearing up after the enemy.
‘The signal for the Success to discontinue the action, and come under my stern,’ said Lord Nelson; ‘she has done well for her size. Try a shot from the lower deck at her, Sir Ed’ard.’
‘It goes over her.’
‘Beat to quarters and fire coolly at her masts and yards.’
It might often have been the case that the French aimed for the rigging and the British for the hull, but that was never a universal rule. Where a chasing ship wanted to halt or slow the progress of the enemy, destroying the masts and yards, the source of any motive power, was the obvious option.
Le Genereux at this moment opened her fire on us; and as a shot passed through the mizzen stay sail [i.e. immediately above the quarterdeck], Lord Nelson, patting one of the youngsters on the head, asked him jocularly how he relished the music; and observing something like alarm depicted on his countenance, consoled him with the information that Charles XII [the great 18th-century Swedish warrior king] ran away from the first shot he heard, though afterwards he was called ‘The Great’, and deservedly, from his bravery. ‘I, therefore,’ said Lord Nelson, ‘hope much from you in future.’
Here the Northumberland opened her fire, and down came the tri-coloured ensign, amid the thunder of our united cannon.
Even in this tiny fragment, his method of command can be seen to run across all the strings: intemperate, charming, theatrical, anxious, impetuous, educative, curt, considerate, indifferent to death and danger, inspirational to those around him and above all fixed on attack and victory.
Rising and falling in the wake of the British flagship in the weather column, behind the Téméraire, was the Neptune, 98 guns, one of the big and heavy three-deckers which, with the other two, formed the battering ram at the head of Nelson’s windward line. The Neptune was not a good sailer but capable of dominating and destroying any craft she fell in with, firing plunging shots down through the decks of her victims. She was force, not elegance. The Neptune had been part of the British Channel Fleet and for many months had suffered the long, wearing tedium of holding the French locked into their ports. One of the boys on that station, the eleven-year-old Bernard Coleridge, had written to his father and mother:
Indeed we live on beef which has been ten or eleven years in corn and on biscuit which makes your throat cold in eating it owing to the maggots which are very cold when you eat them, like calves-foot jelly or blomonge being very fat indeed. Indeed, I do like this life very much, but I cannot help laughing heartily when I think of sculling about the old cyder-tub in the pond, and Mary Anne Cosserat capsizing into the pond just by the mulberry bush. I hope I shall learn not to swear, and by God’s assistance I hope I shall not.
Every ship at Trafalgar, in all ranks, quarters and stations, carried its freight of homesickness. The Neptune’s captain was Thomas Fremantle, who had his copy of Pope’s Iliad in his library on board. There was no doubt that he too was longing for home, quite as much as any powder-monkey. A battle is not only the aggression at the point of contact; it is a meeting of hinterlands. Fremantle’s anger, violence, anxiety, tenderness, professionalism and sheer ambition – all constituents of his honour – were also some of the vital factors in battle.
He was not quite 40 years old, and one of Nelson’s favourites. As Nelson had been blockading Toulon, he had written to his old friend in the Channel. ‘I Trust, my dear Fremantle, in God and English valour. We are enough in England if true to ourselves.’ It was the sort of encouragement at which Nelson had no equal. His words, which carry subtly heroic undertones, echoing the famous speech of Henry V in front of Harfleur, transform the king’s exhortations into a kind of complicit togetherness: ‘We are enough in England if true to ourselves’. That is the Nelson charm in action, a form of combined balm and stimulus for any officer suffering the sapping and demoralising conditions of a blockading fleet.
Off Brest, Fremantle had been forced to stay in his quarters for four days, his head swathed in bandages, his eyes burning from an acute inflammation. To hold the tedium at bay, he took to brewing spruce beer, smoking ‘segars’ in his cabin and reading Family Secrets, a book of wonderfully consoling pornographic stories given him by the ship’s purser. His wife rapidly sent out a set of Shakespeare to fill the gap and some of Cobbett’s diatribes against the wickedness of the French. In thanking her, Fremantle described how his goat had fallen down a hatchway and died, depriving him of his daily glass of milk. He asked her to send him out some toothpaste with the next set of letters. The air of his private correspondence is more exhausted than heroic. Nelson’s undoubted role was as a goad to honour, to lift these men to a higher conception of themselves and of their duty.
Like most officers, Fremantle had been at sea since he was twelve and he was in some ways fed up with the life he had led for almost 30 years. The strain and the tedium, the impositions of duty, were of a kind unknown to those who stayed ashore. In the summer of 1803, the last time he had been at home, he had not wanted to leave England again. ‘He really goes to sea quite à contre coeur,’ his wife had written in her diary, ‘as he was now so comfortably settled here.’ He had wept at dinner on the evening before he left and had to leave the room to conceal his tears.
Despite this intense emotionality – and Englishmen in 1805 had more immediate access to their emotions than at any time before or since – Fremantle was no Nelson. He was, at least on the surface, and unlike the admiral, a strong, tough, stocky man, with an intimidating rather than a persuasive presence, but was certainly capable, when required, of a kind of charm. In the summer of 1796, as a 30-year-old captain in Nelson’s Mediterranean squadron, he had been ordered to take on board his frigate, the Inconstant, then at anchor off Leghorn, an English family, the Wynnes, who were threatened by the French armies then sweeping down into Italy. Fremantle was already the hero of a famous action against a French 84-gun ship, the Ça Ira, when quite alone in the Inconstant, with 38 guns; he had tacked to and fro behind her, bringing first one broadside to bear, then the other, on the French man-ofwar’s stern, like a boxer with his jabs, all the time staying out of reach of the French ship’s massive broadsides, any one of which would have sunk the Inconstant in a few minutes. Nelson loved him, one of the few captains he referred to as ‘one of my darling children’, as much for Fremantle’s capacity to apply unbridled violence as for any softer human qualities. He was a member of the Band of Brothers.
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 sweet-smelling, 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 son-in-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:
the people at the capstern [up in the bows] were hallowing and making a very great noise, an open breach of all order and discipline, which Captain Francis [of the Marines] was endeavouring to suppress by ordering them as loud as he could speak through a speaking trumpet, to stand fast heaving in order that he might discover the ringleaders of such unusual tumult.
Lieutenant Rice told them to continue, at which Captain Fremantle, a hundred feet further aft on his quarterdeck, lost his temper. ‘He sent for Lieutenant Rice on the quarter deck, asked him with some warmth how he could suffer the men to make such a noise at their duty…To which Lt Rice, in a careless and disrespectful manner, with his hands in his pockets, answered in these words “I did not tell them to do so.”’ It was probably a misunderstanding, a mishearing along the length of the ship, among all the hubbub. But Rice’s hands in pockets was a crime against the all-important symbolic hierarchy on which the ship’s working depended. He behaved, Fremantle said, ‘in a manner wholly unbecoming an inferior to a superior officer.’
The relationship rapidly began to plummet. The men had been paid; there was money, drink and sex between the decks, with a carefully counted 112 Portsmouth women on board. But now the women were to be sent ashore in the ship’s boats and Rice was in charge of the transfer. Here, though, poor man, he made another mistake and somehow allowed the midshipman who was in charge of the boat that took the women ashore (not a boy, but a mature seaman who had come up from the ranks) to stay ashore himself all night with three of the boat crew, all of whom were qualified as able seamen. A ship could scarcely afford to lose four such valuable men and Fremantle used ‘gross language’ to Lieutenant Rice about this. Two days later, once the ship had weighed anchor and moved down the Channel, Rice wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty to complain.
1 Nov 1800
To Lord St Vincent from HMS Ganges Torbay
My Lord
It gives me inexpressible concern to inform Your Lordship that I have recently been most undeservedly abused by my Captain for a mistake in giving orders he damned my blood said I deserved to be hanged and if I did so again he would hang me.
The row deepened and tensed. Fremantle sent Rice a note via the purser, Mr Alcott:
Tell Mr Rice I have no wish to hurt him that I am as anxious to have the Business made up as he possibly can be & if he will write to Earl St Vincent and say his Letter were premature I will meet him in as handsome and honorable manner as ever I met any officer.
Fremantle was clearly as anxious as Rice about his own standing in the eyes of his superiors. Naval careers could collapse on the basis of a single bad report, a single false decision, and Fremantle urgently needed the impression of his first lieutenant’s letter to be cancelled. Rice then made the condition of his doing so an apology from his captain. Mr Alcott trundled back and forth between them. Fremantle sent a message to say he wouldn’t apologize first, but invited Lieutenant Rice to dinner with him ashore. Rice accepted and they met for dinner at an inn in Torquay. But at dinner Fremantle made no apology. Instead he said to his first lieutenant, ‘You could not suppose what I sayd in my passion was meant. I may say the same thing before a month to any other officer. And unless my tongue is cut out I cannot help it.’
As Rice told his lawyer, ‘This sort of apology was so repugnant to his feelings as an Officer and a Gentleman that he refused to dine with the said Thomas Francis Freemantle [sic].’ There was no reconciliation possible, Lieutenant Rice declared, ‘while Captain Fremantle entertains such sentiments with respect to propriety of Language.’
Over the weeks that followed, as the Ganges took up her role as part of the blockading fleet off Brest, Fremantle inexorably took his revenge on Rice. He made him keep the same watches as the junior lieutenants, another status humiliation for the first lieutenant. He told Rice in front of the other officers ‘not to chatter to him but to give his orders like a seaman and an officer.’ He told him not to be ‘impertinent’. At different times, he said to Rice, in front of others on the quarterdeck, ‘You always talk nonsense;’ ‘You might as well be in your hammock;’ ‘You are no use to me.’ Each one of these remarks was stored up and nurtured in the brine of the poor man’s heart, his standing being eaten away by the rage of an intemperate captain. Rice was then suspended and told by Fremantle that he was to consider himself ‘a prisoner’. Rice queried the judgement and was told ‘if he did not understand the meaning of the word he might look into the Dictionary for it.’
After they had returned to England, Rice, still in a frenzy of hurt, piled up the affidavits from the senior officers who had known him. He had ‘always conducted himself as a Gentleman’; ‘the said Henry Rice was always invariably ready to do his utmost’; he was ‘an Officer blessed with a well tempered courage equally incapable of either giving or receiving an Insult’; ‘a Gentleman particularly beloved and esteemed by all’; Rice ‘at all times manifested that zeal which is so indispensable in the character of a British officer.’ He was ‘most mild and amiable’; ‘I thought him a young man of aimiable manners, zealous and desirous of what he could to please me.’
Fremantle, on his side, attempted the same, but with rather less clear-cut results. He preserved in his papers a letter from Luke J Nagle, late surgeon of the Ganges, an old friend who was with him again on the Neptune at Trafalgar:
Your temper to those who know you is at times warm but as to Malice or Ill Will to any officer who saild with you in the Ganges, I am positive it never entered into your Breast. As your study always was to make it comfortable to Officers and Men.
Even Luke Nagle couldn’t quite give Fremantle a full-blooded endorsement. The captain was clearly a bully, running an exceptionally tight ship, ferocious to those around him and capable of being more than short with any rather gentle young man who did not do quite as required. But he was the captain and had his contacts. The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty were soon instructing their solicitors to prosecute Rice for having issued a challenge, which was a technical breach of the peace.
Rice, in a rage, then wrote to Fremantle from Fitcham Grove, Leatherhead:
Sir,
Your claiming the protection of the Admiralty reminds me of a little, dirty, sniveling boy at School, running to the Master, when threatened to be chastised, for low, mean, conduct –
You know my opinion & as you have not the feelings of a Gentleman, it is unnecessary saying more on this subject.
With crushing inevitability, Fremantle won and Rice was forced to make a public climb-down, writing an open letter in April 1803, finally confronting the sin of addressing his commanding officer with his hands in his pockets:
I did not sufficiently consider that naval subordination so essential to the public Service, might suffer by such an example.
It never was my wish, or intention to bring into question Captain Freemantle’s [sic] general merits as an officer. I acted from my own feelings as a gentleman.
Although he was still unable to spell his captain’s name, Rice was guilty of little more than speaking to him as any man might speak to another. His career, though, as they would have said at the time, was ‘broke’. He was not here at Trafalgar; Fremantle was. Fremantle went on to become a Vice-Admiral of the Blue, a Knight Grand Cross of both the Order of the Bath and of the Order of St Michael and St George, a baron of the Austrian States, a Knight of Maria Theresa and of St Ferdinand and Merit, the founder of a naval dynasty, one of the acknowledged heroes from the age of heroes, dripping with what they called ‘honours’. Rice, though, nurturing his wounded gentlemanliness and his damaged amiability, sinks from view. He is too sweet to be a hero. The iron, on which honour in the end relies, is not in his soul. On the south wall of the chancel of Exeter Cathedral in Devon, there is a plaque:
Sacred to the memory of
Lieutenant Henry Rice RN
late of Tooting in the county of Surrey.
He died
October 17th 1808
aged 31
That’s all: no more elevated rank, no honours, no glory. The cause of his death is unknown.
Rice’s degree of tenderness and vulnerability is not an aberration. His interest in preserving his honour unharmed is one of the central motors of the fleet at Trafalgar. A body of officers coming from an uncertain and ill-defined social position needs to rely on the idea of their honour to establish their place in the social hierarchy. Anyone either above or below that tender middle ground can be more relaxed about it. The securely placed aristocrat can behave as he will, in the knowledge that his status is unlosable. The wage-earning or labouring poor can be equally certain that the position of gentleman is almost unavailable to them. But when, if you defined yourself as a gentleman, you had nothing else, as so many of them did not, honour was what you had. It was membership of a moral community, which is why the use of language was so critical. Your membership was defined by the respect with which other people treated you. Fremantle, in his ugly spitting ‘warmth’, expelled Rice from the community to which he needed to belong. In those circumstances, risking one’s life in a duel was a perfectly rational choice, because the treatment to which Rice had already been subjected had effectively destroyed him as a man of honour.
Honour had mutated through the 18th century. Its Latin etymology is clear: honor means ‘esteem’, the standing in which you are held by others. It is a public virtue, virtually inseparable from ‘reputation’. Inevitably, in a hierarchical society, ‘reputation’ acquired a social dimension. A man of honour was a man with the sort of reputation which men of the upper classes should have. Or as Lord Stanhope put it in 1705:
What is Honour, but a greatness of mind which scorns to descend to an ill and base thing?
George, Lord Lyttelton, a friend of Alexander Pope and slightly ramshackle politician, a famously scruffy man of unimpeachable integrity, expressed it even more unequivocally in 1764. Honour, Lyttelton said, was
something distinct from mere probity, and…supposes in gentlemen a stronger abhorrence of perfidy, falsehood, and cowardice and a more elevated and delicate sense of the dignity of virtue, than are usually found in vulgar minds.
The idea of an honourable member of the working class is a 19th-century invention. It would have been a contradiction in terms to the 18th century. Seamen called senior officers ‘Your Honour’ as a matter of habit, and St Vincent, writing as First Lord of the Admiralty, to Henry Addington, the Prime Minister, would address him as ‘Your Honour’, as a friendly joke, treating him in a chummy and self-deprecating way, as a senior shipmate.
Among younger minds, though, by the time of Trafalgar, there had been a subtle shift. Honour had gone inward and had begun to lose its social quality. Honour, around 1800, came to define a man simply as a man among men, without reference to his standing in society. It became very nearly equivalent to sincerity or integrity. So Wordsworth in 1809 could ask ‘Say, What is Honour?’ and answer his own question:
’Tis the finest sense
Of justice which the human mind can frame.
In the same year, Coleridge, writing in his periodical The Friend, with the massive and half-penetrable grandiloquence to which he had become prone, put it still higher:
Honor implies a reverence for the invisible and super-sensual in our nature.
Honour, by the first decade of the 19th century, had become otherworldly and immaterial, set apart from material concerns. It was now very nearly an aspect of saintliness, no longer social but both psychological and metaphysical. Heroism was unthinkable without it and in the light of this new concept of honour, the stage was set for the event which, more than any other, came to identify Trafalgar in British national consciousness: the beatification of the hero in the ultimately honourable act of self-sacrifice.
Fremantle may not have understood what the great men of the navy consistently understood, that ‘The Honour of an officer may be compared to the chastity of a woman, and when once wounded may never be recovered.’ Those are the words of Earl St Vincent. Honour, in this context, is not a choice but a compulsion, the sine qua non of an effectively aggressive fighting navy. Nothing could raise the level of anxiety in Nelson, as among all these officers, more steeply or more quickly than the idea that his honour was in question. In 1795, a rumour had begun to circulate in the western Mediterranean, and then back in Britain, that the squadron under Nelson’s command had made a formal arrangement to connive with, and profit from, merchant ships running the blockade of the Italian coast, which he was meant to be enforcing. The rumour reached the ears of Lord Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, who wrote to Francis Drake, the British Minister in Genoa wondering what truth there was in it. Nelson responded like a she-wolf in front of her threatened pups:
Having received from Mr Drake a copy of your Lordship’s letter to him of October, enclosing a paper highly reflecting on the honour of myself and others of His Majesty’s Officers employed on this coast under my orders, it well becomes me, as far as in my power lies, to wipe away this ignominious stain on our characters.
I do therefore in behalf of my self and much-injured brethren demand that the person, whoever he may be, that wrote or gave that paper to your Lordship do fully and expressly bring home his charge; which as he states that this agreement is made by numbers of people on both sides, there can be no difficulty in doing. We dare him, My Lord, to the proof…
Perhaps I ought to stop my letter here; but I feel too much to rest easy for a moment when the honour of Navy and our country is struck at through us…
On and on Nelson goes, raging with indignation at the slur, defending his captains as men who were ‘more alert and more anxious for the good and honour of their King and Country [than] can scarcely ever fall to the lot of any Commanding Officer…’ Nothing of course can endear a leader to the men he leads more than that kind of impassioned defence. And Nelson put his own case equally forcefully and with equally passionate indignation. He had fought ‘in more than one hundred and forty skirmishes and battles, at sea and on shore; have lost an eye and otherwise blood, in fighting the Enemies of my King and Country; and God knows, instead of riches, my little fortune has been diminished in the Service…and when instead of all my fancied approbation, to receive an accusation of a most traitorous nature – it has been almost too much for me to bear.’
The critical difference from Fremantle, of course, is that Nelson includes his ‘brethren’ within the community of honour. ‘My darling children’ are the honourable men with whom he identifies. Often, and not only from the pen of Nelson, it seems as if the real enemy is not the French or Spanish but the self-indulgent, effeminate and affected people at home in England, who take up an interest in the doings of the navy from time to time, but who know nothing of it, and who all too easily condemn behaviour they have no means of judging.
The people Nelson loved, apart of course from Emma Hamilton, were his captains. In some ways he treated Emma as though she were one. ‘If there were more Emmas,’ he once told her, in a remark deeply coloured by the combination of love and self-love which drew people towards Nelson as if to the centre of a whirlpool, ‘there would be more Nelsons.’ And as for the captains, he told one immensely grand Spanish diplomat, ‘I can assure you, Sir, that the word of every captain of a British man-of-war is equal, not only to mine, but to that of any person in Europe, however elevated his rank.’ That too is a diagnostic thought: rank is dissolved in the community of honour. The radically entrepreneurial world of which this honour class is a part, cares nothing for rank and everything for duty, which meant the radical and uncompromising imposition of violent will on the enemy, with the view to killing his people and either destroying or capturing his ships. There is a straightforward chain of connection and implication. The naval officer is a gentleman and acts with honour because he does his duty in bringing about the annihilation of the enemy. Someone like Henry Rice cannot comply with this model, cannot mobilise and activate its various constituent parts. With more of an instinctive grasp of the anatomy of honour than anyone else in the world in 1805, Nelson could and did.
Battle was the place where honour was validated. That alone can explain something about the fleet at Trafalgar which seems strange to the modern world: the hunger for the fight. Battle was the moment in which a man could be for ever identified as honourable, where the fragility of the status was expunged and the possibility of ‘hero’ pinned to his breast, not to speak of the accompanying prize money being pushed into his pocket. Leaving aside for a moment its obvious terrors and suffering, battle was not the place of agony but the moment at which the agony was over. To be denied it was to be denied the great resolution of the naval officer’s life.
In some, the hunger for battle was to be disappointed. When Nelson had rejoined the fleet off Trafalgar on 27 September, he had found it in ‘very fair condition and good humour’ but ‘getting short in their water and provisions’. He had brought reinforcements with him from England and so could afford to send ships into Gibraltar for stores and to Tetuan in Morocco for water. The first detachment to leave was made up of six ships-of-the-line, commanded by Rear-Admiral Thomas Louis in the Canopus, one of the 98-gun ships captured from the French at the Battle of the Nile. Louis had been at the Nile with Nelson and the captain of his flagship was 31-year-old Francis Austen, Jane Austen’s brother.
The story of Captain Austen’s life is also strikingly emblematic of the age. He had been a wild and ‘saucy’ boy, whose sister described him as ‘fearless of danger, braving pain’ with ‘warmth, nay insolence of spirit.’ He too, like Nelson, was a vicar’s son, and well down the family hierarchy, the fifth of six sons. These were the men whose need for honour, not as an option in life but a guarantee of who they were, drove the British fleet.
He had grown into a hectic, impatient man and when, sitting in the great cabin on Victory, Nelson proposed to Captain Austen and Admiral Louis that they should go into Gibraltar, both reacted with despair. ‘You are sending us away, my Lord,’ Louis said, ‘– the Enemy will come out, and we shall have no share in the battle.’ Nelson replied – this is Austen’s account, the memory still passionately alive 40 years later –
The Enemy will come out, and we shall fight them; but there will be time for you to get back first. I look upon Canopus as my right hand (she was his second astern in the Line of Battle); and I send you first to insure your being here to help beat them.
This was off-the-peg Nelson charm. The position of being Nelson’s right hand was both a poignant compliment (he’d had no right hand of his own since the whole of the lower arm was amputated in the Canaries) and an often-repeated one. Nelson must have guessed that the news of six ships-of-the-line being absent from the British fleet would have encouraged Villeneuve to make his move.
That is exactly what happened and Admiral Louis and Captain Austen missed the battle which would have secured them a place on the roll of honour. They were not the only ones. William Hoste, captain of the Amphion, had been sent by Nelson on a diplomatic mission to the Dey of Algiers. He missed the battle and afterwards, in despair, wrote to his father: ‘Not to have been in it, is enough to make one mad…I am low indeed, and nothing but a good Action with a French or Spanish frigate will set me up again.’
These conceptions of honour are part classical, part bourgeois, part Romantic. The modern, entrepreneurial man saw himself standing in the long tradition that stemmed from the armed citizens of ancient Rome, and beyond that to the Homeric heroes. What he did was honourable because he served both the state and his higher self. That was the repeated test, seen quite explicitly in these terms, to which the honour-seeking officers of the Royal Navy submitted again and again.
Early in 1804, Lieutenant George Hardinge, for example, then aged 22, was in command of HMS Scorpion, a sloop, in the North Sea. His class background could stand for all the great officers of the navy. He was the son of a Durham vicar, but the adopted son of his uncle, who was Attorney General to the Queen, and who sent George to Eton. As a very young man, he had been in the Foudroyant, part of Nelson’s Mediterranean squadron, at their dramatic capture of the Guillaume Tell off Malta in March 1800. Now he had his own command, cruising off the port of Vlie on the Dutch coast. Having spotted ‘a couple of the enemy’s Brigs at anchor in the Roads’, he ‘determined upon a dash at the outermost one in the boats.’ Another British sloop, the Beaver, came up and the two captains decided to join forces for the night attack. What happened is a model in miniature of Nelsonian war. ‘At half past nine in the evening’, he wrote to his uncle, addressing him as ‘My dearest friend,’
we began the enterprise, in three boats from the Scorpion and in two from the Beaver. We had near 60 men, including Officers, headed by your humble Servant in the foremost boat. As we rowed with tide and flood, we arrived along-side the enemy at half past eleven. I had the good fortune or (as by some it has been considered) the Honour, to be the first man who boarded her. She was prepared for us, with Board Nettings up, and with all the other customary implements of defence. But the noise, the alarm, &c so intimidated her crew, that many of them ran below in a panic, leaving to us the painful duty of combating those whom we respected most.
The decks were slippery in consequence of rain; so that in grappling with my first opponent, a mate of the watch, I fell, but recovered my position & fought him upon equal terms, and killed him. I then engaged the Captain, as brave a man as any service ever boasted; he had almost killed one of my Seamen. To my shame be it spoken, he disarmed me! And was on the point of killing me – when a seaman of mine came up, rescued me at the peril of his own life, and enabled me to recover my sword. – At this time all the men had come from the boats, and were in possession of the deck: two were going to fall upon the Captain at once – I ran up – held them back – and then adjured him to accept Quarter. With inflexible heroism he disdained the gift, kept us at bay, and compelled us to kill him; he fell covered with honourable wounds.
To the end of my existence I shall regret the Captain. He was a perfect Hero; and if his crew had been like him, critical indeed would have been our peril…In two days after the Captain’s death, he was buried with all the Naval Honours in my power to bestow upon him: during the ceremony of his interment, the English colours disappeared, and the Dutch were hoisted in their place. All the Dutch Officers were liberated [not the men] – one of them pronounced an éloge on the Hero they had lost – and we fired three volleys over him as he descended into the deep.
For this action, Hardinge was promoted Captain, received post rank and was given a sword by Lloyd’s to the value of 300 guineas. A Nelson in the making? Perhaps: the necessary combination is there of aggression, sweetness, courage and an almost painful conception of honour. But he too is forgotten by history, killed in action off Sri Lanka in 1808 and buried in Colombo.
The word to describe such a man is ‘chivalrous’ and by 1805 it is perfectly clear that honour had acquired another layer. The officers of the British navy saw themselves as heirs, strange as this might sound, to the knights of the Middle Ages. Their sense of honour was stoked by the rich, antiquarian fuel of chivalry. It is that medievalism which lies behind the most famous moment on the morning of Trafalgar.
The medieval inheritance was present, of course, in the officers of all three nations at the battle, but it takes on a peculiarly potent and mythic quality among the British. Chivalry, and the utterly unhistorical idea that the English were above all nations its champions, was in the air. It was to chivalry that Edmund Burke most famously appealed after the French Revolution in response to the ‘fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes.’ The arrival in France of sterile, nude, anti-traditionalist principles of mechanistic, rational government meant, for Burke, that
the age of chivalry is gone. –That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the chief defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
These marvellous, Romantic words implied, of course, that in Britain these dignities survived. England was not the rapacious usurper of the global seas; it was a medieval jewel, Arthurian in its purity. Burke’s fantasy of the nature of Englishness had found a fertile seed-bed in a country already turning towards the reassurance of the medieval. This was the first age of the antique and the aesthetics of 1805 were dominated by the moral value of the old. George III had commissioned the architect James Wyatt to re-medievalise 17th-century parts of Windsor Castle. At Kew, on the Thames, an enormous, new brick castle was begun for him, also by Wyatt. It remained unfinished until it was blown up in the 1820s as yet another unwarrantable royal extravagance. In 1788, the American painter Benjamin West created sequences of heroic medieval scenes for the King. George appointed Richard Hurd, the author of the antiquarian Moral and Political Discourses, as tutor to his son, the Prince of Wales. ‘Affability, courtesy, generosity, veracity,’ Hurd had written, ‘these were the qualifications most pretended to by men of arms, in the days of pure and uncorrupted chivalry.’ Perhaps in response, the Prince Regent, in 1811, would have himself painted by PE Stroehling as the Black Prince, his reproduction-armour ballooning out over acres of princely stomach and royal thigh. It may have looked too ridiculous; the portrait has vanished.
The 18th century had considered the Middle Ages stupid rather than noble. In 1761, David Hume had called the crusades ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.’ But by 1805, that scepticism had almost entirely disappeared. On St George’s Day in 1805, 25 Knights of the Garter, the most distinguished knightly order of medieval England, founded by Edward III, were installed at Windsor Castle in the most elaborate ceremony seen there since a previous phase of revivalism in the early 17th century. Banquets for the knights and for the assembled lords and ladies were held in different parts of the Castle. A baron of beef was roasted and served on a dish specially made for the occasion. ‘It was His Majesty’s particular wish,’ it was said, ‘that as many of the old customs should be kept up as possible.’
There was more to this than fancy dress and slabs of beef. To an astonishing degree, chivalric medievalism penetrated the Royal Navy. Earl St Vincent, writing to Emma Hamilton in 1798, explaining to her why Nelson and not he was commanding the British squadron charged with the ‘succour of their Sicilian majesties’, informs her that even though he is ‘bound by my oath of chivalry to protect all who are persecuted and distressed’ he is sadly ‘forbid to quit my post before Cadiz’. He is ‘happy however to have a knight of superior prowess in my train who is charged with this enterprize, and will soon make his appearance, at the head of as gallant a band as ever drew sword or trailed pike.’ St Vincent signed himself off as Emma’s ‘true knight and devoted servant’.
This may well be the old admiral flirting outrageously with the most beautiful woman in Europe, but it is clear that this medievalist talk did not seem absurd at the time. The Middle Ages, above all else, embodied both honour and a conception of England which went beyond the compromises and tricksy dealing of its modern commercial culture. The all-powerful presence of that new, rampant bourgeois culture of course created the appetite for something which stood outside it. The fantasy of an honourable medieval purity lay conveniently to hand, almost as a form of pastoral, a place where morality was still clear and duty obvious. It seems at times that the navy itself, for all its rapaciousness, tedium and dangers, represented to its officers a place apart from the modern world of getting and spending, a place of innocence, where honour still lived.
Nelson was entranced with the medieval. Again and again he quoted from the battle speeches of Henry V, the great 15th-century warrior and self-dramatising man of honour. The very phrase the ‘Band of Brothers’, which he used to describe the captains who fought with him in the Mediterranean, was drawn from it. And he misquotes Henry V in a way that measures the role of honour in his own mind. Writing to St Vincent in September 1801, Nelson, already a peer and the holder of three battle medals, says, in the unequivocal way which was his habit and one of the foundations of his charm:
I feel myself, my dear Lord, as anxious to get a medal, or a step in the Peerage as if I had never got either, – for ‘if it be a sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive’.
That, Nelson thinks, is a quotation from the words Shakespeare gave to King Harry. But it is not. As part of the great St Crispin’s Day speech to his cousin Westmoreland, Shakespeare in fact wrote:
But if it be a sin to covert honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
Honour and glory have become inseparable and interchangeable in Nelson’s mind. Glory is inaccessible without honour; honour is the foundation of the glorious. The speech as a whole, which portrays itself as the thinking of a medieval king, is in fact founded on a new, post-medieval conception of honour. For Shakespeare’s Henry, as for Nelson and the other officers in his fleet, honour is not a question of social rank but an amalgam of daring, fame, and manliness. As King Henry says, the man who fought at Agincourt, (no class or social status attached) will
strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day’…
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speak
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
That is a speech Nelson undoubtedly knew by heart and it would serve as a guidebook to the place of honour in the British fleet at Trafalgar. It thrives on manliness and companionship. It substitutes valour, or perhaps honour, for rank. As a speech, it is physical, engorged and primitive. There is a latent sexuality in it, circling around the ideas of manliness and manhood, of men who can ‘stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood’, disparaging those now lying flaccid in bed in England, but celebrating their own potency, imposing themselves and their honour on the world abroad.
One word glows out of it: ‘England’, the name not of the increasingly efficient, ruthless modern state which paid for the fleet at Trafalgar, which is Britain; but of the pre-existent, half-fantasy kingdom of medieval honour which embodied not the grubby commercial ambitions of the modern country, but the higher ideals to which this fleet aspired. Henry V is full of this imagined ‘England’: ‘Now all the youth of England are on fire,’ ‘And you good yeomen,/Whose limbs were made in England, show us here/The mettle of your pasture.’ This England, in a play about the ruthless and at times deeply disturbing pursuit of fiercely destructive and yet honourable ends by war, is what motivates the single most famous moment on the morning of Trafalgar.
Nelson had been below in his cabin. When he returned to the quarter-deck the enemy were little more than two miles away to the east-southeast. Nelson spoke to Lieutenant John Pasco, the flag lieutenant on Victory, returned to duty after his bout of sickness. As an old man in the 1840s, Pasco described the scene to Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas:
His Lordship came up to me on the poop, and after ordering certain signals to be made, about a quarter to noon, he said, ‘Mr Pasco, I wish to say to the fleet, “England confides that every man will do his duty”;’ and he added, ‘you must be quick for I have one more to make, which is for Close Action.’ I replied, ‘If your Lordship will permit me to substitute the expects for confides the signal will soon be completed, because the word expects is in the vocabulary, and confides must be spelt’. His Lordship replied in haste, and with seeming satisfaction, ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly.’
Nelson’s instinct for ‘confides’ rather than ‘expects’ was right. To ‘expect’ is to command but to ‘confide’ is to trust. It is the binding word, it represents the community of honour, and the mythical ‘England’ to which it appeals is a place where duty is a matter of trust, not of instruction or obedience. But the heart of the idea survived the translation into flags. ‘England’, not ‘Britain’; ‘duty’, not ‘obedience’; and ‘every man’, not ‘every officer and man’ as Henry Blackwood remembered it: a summation of Nelson’s method of command, founded on inspiration, rigour, and inclusiveness, the three elements of the modern notion of honour.
The working admiral, conscious that time is short, accepted the compromise and the famous signal was made with the flag signalling system developed by Sir Home Popham. ‘England’, ‘expects’, ‘every’, ‘man’, ‘will’, ‘do’ and ‘his’ all had a designated flag. ‘Duty’ was spelled out with flags 4, 21, 19 and 24, and, ship by ship, the British fleet – not English: at least a third of the officers and a higher proportion of the men came from Scotland, Wales, Ireland and abroad – gave three cheers as the message was conveyed. Collingwood at first complained that Nelson was signalling too much. They all knew what to do. But when he was read the meaning of the signal, he too welcomed it. In the violence to come, the necklace of ideas represented by ‘England’, ‘expectation’, ‘manhood’ and ‘duty’ would sustain a fleet in the horror and grief that would surround them.