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, antitraditionalist 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 Englishn
ess 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 i
s 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.
4
Love
October 21st 1805
11.30 am to 12 midday
Distance between fleets: 2 miles—1 mile
Victory’s heading and speed: 101° at 3 knots
Love: to regard with passionate affection; to regard with the affection of a friend.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
Three ships behind the Victory, just astern of Fremantle in the Neptune, was the Leviathan, the ship-of-the-line which had shepherded Coleridge’s convoy to Malta the year before. The ship was ready for battle. Hammocks had been stowed in the netting alongside the upper decks, soft bulwarks to absorb musket balls. Other nets had been spread above the deck and poop to catch falling debris. Further anti-boarding nets had been rigged up. Cabins had been dismantled to give a clear run from stem to stern on the gundecks. Furniture had been stowed far below in the hold, thrown overboard or hauled up into the rigging. Animals were usually slaughtered, sent down to the hold, or in a crisis also thrown into the sea. Nelson had at times on a chase in the Mediterranean pushed bullocks overboard to lighten the ship and to clear them out of the way. This morning off Cape Trafalgar, Leviathan’s goat was explicitly saved from any such fate by her captain, 39-year-old Henry Bayntun.
Men of Honour Page 13