Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero. Adam Nicolson

The battle was lost and won before a moment of it was fought. This was a meeting the British had desired for at least two years, a chance to establish their command of the world ocean. But it was a meeting which their enemies, as they quite explicitly repeated in dispatch after dispatch to Madrid, Paris and on to Napoleon’s mobile headquarters, then in Germany, did not desire at all. The French and Spanish commanders knew, as if it were their destiny, that a catastrophe awaited them.

      In the light of this, what happened at Trafalgar is, on one level, not complicated: a highly ambitious, confident and aggressive English battle fleet found and attacked a larger combined French and Spanish fleet whose morale was broken, and whose command was divided and without conviction, and heavily defeated it, by killing and disabling very large numbers of its officers and crew. In some ways, that was all: a pack of dogs battened on to a flock of sheep.

      It is an easy description and in some ways inaccurate. The sheep were armed, brave, obstinate and frightening and did dreadful damage to the British attackers. Nevertheless there is a kernel of truth in it and the description raises questions. Why were the English so ambitious, so confident and so aggressive? Why were these crews, about half of them there against their own will, prepared to accept the level of risk which their commanders offered them? Why, in their different ways, were the French and Spanish so broken, so pusillanimous, so defeatist? Why did the British manage to kill ten times more of their enemy than they did of the British? How by 1805 had the Royal Navy become the most effective maritime killing machine in the world? And how had the French and Spanish, each with their long, dignified and noble naval traditions, become their quivering and broken victims?

      There are technological answers to these questions, to do with ships and guns, but they are not enough. Two British ships, the Berwick and the Swiftsure, both in fact fought on the French side during the battle. They had been captured from the British during the war. The British Belleisle had begun life as the French Formidable, captured off the Breton coast in 1795. Many of the British ships had anyway been built as copies of French men-of-war. The British Achille for example was a precise copy of the French 74-gun ship Pompée, which had been captured by the British in 1793. The Spanish fleet had in large part been built by renegade Catholic Irishmen, using British ship-building techniques, even in the Spanish yards in Cuba, and including the greatest ship of all, the four-decker Santísima Trinidad, entirely constructed of sweet-smelling Cuban cedar.

      Technology does not distinguish the fleets—or at least not sufficiently. What makes them different are the people on board. Trafalgar is a meeting of men. It is in the men that the difference lies between aggression and the need to defend; between the desire to attack and destroy and the desperate fear for one’s life; between the ability to persist in battle when surrounded by gore, grief and destruction and the need to submit to the natural instincts to surrender; and between a reliance on an old-fashioned tactical method of defence—the well-closed-up line—and a hungry, searching and disconcerting inventiveness which blew that defence into atoms. The day of Trafalgar was one in which three complex variations of the early 19th-century European frame of mind was put to the test.

      Both French and Spanish regarded the British with fear and contempt. When the Spanish declared war on Great Britain in 1797, the Madrid government had explained its decision to go to war by describing how

      that ambitious and greedy nation has once more proclaimed to the world that she recognizes no law but that of aggrandizement of her own trade, achieved by her global despotism on the high seas; our patience is spent, our forbearance is exhausted: we must now turn our gaze to the dignity of our throne…We must now declare war on the King of England and the English nation.

      The values that were in conflict here are obvious enough, and reminiscent of 20th-century European attitudes to America: British amoral commercial ruthlessness set against the dignified, aristocratic patience and honour of old Spain. It is the repeated note in the contemporary Spanish view of Britain, confirmed after an incident in October 1804, when Spain was reluctantly in alliance with France but not yet formally at war with Britain, and which established the British fleet in Spanish eyes as little more than statesponsored pirates.

      A powerful group of four British frigates under the command of Captain Graham Moore, as commodore of the squadron, was cruising off Cadiz, with orders to detain any Spanish ships they should fall in with. Early on the morning of 5 October, they spotted four large Spanish frigates coming in from the west and making for Cadiz harbour. After an initial parley, in which the Spanish refused to surrender, the British rapidly savaged their opponents. They had come from Montevideo, with four million South American gold dollars on board as well as hides and furs. Two of the Spanish frigates were captured, described as ‘torn to pieces’ when later brought into Spithead, and one of them, the Mercedes, blew up, killing everyone on board.

      What scandalised Spanish opinion more than anything else, though, were the civilian casualties. The wife of a colonel of artillery was wounded in the battle and died of her wounds when a prisoner in England. On the Mercedes were a large number of ‘Spanish gentlemen and 19 ladies,’ as it was reported in the Naval Chronicle, ‘with their families, from Lima, returning to Old Spain, who, with the Spanish Captain, his wife, and seven children, all unfortunately perished in the explosion which took place.’ The presence of these people was known to the British commodore, but he had no hesitation, once the Spaniards had refused his invitation to accompany him to an English port, in making, as he described it in his dispatch, ‘the signal for close battle, which was instantly commenced with all the alacrity and vigour of English sailors.’ Moore was acting entirely in accord with British government policy. As Lord Harrowby, the British Foreign Secretary informed the Madrid Court, ‘it was an act done in express orders from his Majesty, to detain all ships laden with treasure for Spain.’ Spain was paying reluctant subsidies to France and so her bullion was seen by the British as war material. Heartlessness at sea, and never more than when in pursuit of gold, was British policy. Nelson himself was described by the deeply conservative and nationalistic Spanish poet Francisco Sánchez Barbaro as ‘el tirano del mar’ and ‘el héroe más bárbaro y tirano’. In the daily Diario de Madrid, the British in general were seen as ‘los arrogantes usurpadores de la libertad de los mares’. It seems, in retrospect, a perfectly legitimate description.

      The language and perception was shared by the French. ‘The sea must become free like the land,’ the revolutionary zealot André Jeanbon Saint-André had told the French fleet in Brest in January 1794.

      Deploy therefore all the force and power which the People, whom you have the honour to represent, can give to exterminate the most miserable of its enemies, the speculators of London, the oppressors of Bengal, the disturbers of public peace in Europe. Ships, cannon, sailors: such must be your rallying cry.

      Far more than any war of the 18th century, this was a triangular, ideological conflict. A post-revolutionary, authoritarian regime in France, profoundly subversive of all the accepted nostrums of pre-modern European society, was allied in Spain with the most conservative and backward of all the European powers, the trailing partner in the alliance, against a Britain which already embodied a distinctly modern Atlanticist set of values—commercial, libertarian, amoral and aggressive—but which remained, nevertheless, dressed in some very old-fashioned ‘King and Country’, monarchist 18th-century Establishment clothes.

      Spain was the poorest, weakest, most inefficient and most antique of the three. It remained in 1805 a profoundly conservative country. The radical changes that had already occurred further north in Europe scarcely impinged, except in the most superficial of ways, on the style, thinking and government of the country. Spain was without a middle class. Enormous armies of desperately poor landless peasants languished at the bottom of society. A hereditary aristocracy remained, at least in theory, the dominant class, motivated by little except a kind of piety towards the crown, its institutions and the Roman church. The Spanish navy was officered by those aristocrats and manned by those peasants—a plebeian/patrician polarity on which the working of modern, high technology men-of-war, with highly complex systems of both sailing and fighting the vessels, could not easily rely.

      On top of that, the Spanish aristocracy had learned to exist in a kind of dependency culture. Spain