Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  July 16 1802 Adelphi

  Sir,

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

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

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

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

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

  &c &c. &c

  Henry Rice

  That must have come as some shock to the Fremantle household, but it would be difficult to fin
d 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.