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 fullblooded 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 muchinjured 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.
Men of Honour Page 12