Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  And ever faithfull

  humble servant

  W. SHARPE.

  This was not a culture from which the heroic would emerge. Apartments described as Frenchified (the adjective would also become slang for ‘suffering from the clap’) and floored in light deal, lit by modern open glazed windows, were furnished not with the big old comfortable chairs of the late 17th and early 18th centuries but little light French chairs, fitted with little swivel wheels on their feet and decorated with French linen festoonings instead of the thick welty damasks which England had once loved. Tables were no longer solid and immovable. They had been replaced by delicate gilded ‘scuttling’ tables in front of what, as Horace Walpole described it, ‘they now call a fireplace, a little low dug hole surrounded by a slip of marble and what does that do for a man? It toasts his shins.’ No longer did England have the giant roaring holes in the side of the room in which half trees were burned for hours at a time.

  Mrs Caroline Lybbe Powys, a distant relation of the Austens, visited the by-then ancient and untouched latesixteenth interiors of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire in 1757:

  Of course it is antique and rendered extremely curious to the present age, as all the furniture is co-eval with the edifice. Our ancestors’ taste for substantialness in every piece makes us now smile; they too would, could they see our delicateness in the same articles, smile at us, and I am certain, if anyone was to compare three or four hundred years hence a chair from the dining room of Queen Elizabeth’s days and of the light French ones of George II, it would never be possible to suppose them to belong to the same race of people, as the one is altogether gigantic, the other quite Liliputian.

  Acceptable behaviour had become toy-like and it was not long before the anti-heroic fashion for a delicate sensibility ran out of control. Manliness, or even the ability to survive, had in fact almost entirely deserted those who were suffering from the cult of sensibility. In the Abbey of St Peter and St Paul in Dorchester, there is this poignant epitaph to poor Sarah Fletcher who died in 1799 aged 29:

  Reader!

  If thou has a heart fam’d for

  Tenderness and Pity, Contemplate this Spot.

  In which are deposited the Remains

  Of a Young Lady, whose artless Beauty,

  Innocence of Mind, and gentle Manners,

  Once obtained her the Love and

  Esteem of all who knew her, But when

  Nerves were too delicately spun to

  Bear the rude Shakes and Jostlings

  Which we meet in this transitory

  World, Nature gave way; She sunk

  And died a Martyr to Excessive

  Sensibility.

  Of course, the Cult of Courtesy and Feeling was, at least in part, thought ridiculous even as it was happening—Dr Johnson defined ‘Finesse’ in his 1755 Dictionary as ‘an unnecessary word which is creeping into the language’—and never more than when subject to the unforgiving verdict of the Grub Street journalists. No figure loomed more symbolically over the naval mythology of the 18th century than Admiral John Byng. Among navy men, he stood as an example of the honourable naval officer who had been betrayed by a combination of deceitful politicians and a crude, vengeful mob. He had been sent to the Mediterranean with a fleet that was inadequate in size, inadequately manned and inadequately equipped. His task was to relieve the siege which the French were laying to the British garrison in Minorca. On May 20 1755, he engaged their fleet under Admiral de la Galissonière, with the sort of inconclusive results which 18th-century naval battle often produced. His own leading ships were severely mauled by the French; de La Galissonière had adroitly withdrawn to leeward when it looked as if Byng was about to attack him with the centre and rear of the British fleet and Byng soon decided to withdraw himself to the safety of Gibraltar.

  Every aspect of what he did, given his inadequate force, had been perfectly reasonable, without being in any way heroic, but as a result the Mediterranean base of Minorca had been lost by the British. The government ministers did their best to blame Byng and the English broadsheet writers rubbed their hands with pleasure. Byng was a gent, not a fighter, and as a result of the popular clamour against him, abetted by the astonishingly corrupt desire among ministers for self-preservation, he was famously shot for cowardice,

  And, in Voltaire’s famous words, to encourage the others. His death was intended to satisfy a widespread demand for aggressive leadership, not among the cultured and political élite, but among the non-enfranchised populace. At that level, throughout the 18th century, another vision of admirable behaviour persisted. The mob did not want the smooth, conformable man, the slick hypocrite who could so politely manoeuvre his way into the rewards of high politics and high society. They wanted his very opposite, the clever thief, the man who thrived not by using the well oiled wheels of society, but by opposing them and cheating them, by attending only to the wellbeing of his own heroic self. The notion of the hero—alive in England in the 17th century and again in the 19th—had gone underground in the 18th century and flourished there as the criminal king, full of daring, guile, violence when needed, and a flamboyant theatricality, which emerged nowhere more entrancingly than when on the way to the gallows. For conservative supporters of the status quo, such as Henry Fielding, the novelist and magistrate, nothing was more subversive of that order than the behaviour of the show-off thief as he was taken to his judicial execution at Tyburn. The crowd views him as a ‘hero’ dressed in ‘imaginary glory’. He is puffed up with ‘Pride’ and ‘passion’.

  The day appointed by law for the thief’s shame is the day of glory in his own opinion. His procession to Tyburn and his last moments there, are all triumphant; attended with the compassion of the meek and the tender-hearted, and with the applause and the admiration and envy of all the bold and hardened. His behaviour in his recent condition, not the crimes, how atrocious soever, which brought him to it, are the subject of contemplation. And if he hath sense enough to temper his boldness with any degree of decency, his death is spoken of by many with honour, by most with pity, and by all with approbation.

  This extraordinary passage, written by Fielding in 1751, part of his Inquiry into the Cause of the Late Increase in Robbers, might be the template on which the heroic figure of Nelson himself was based. Every single keyword and key phrase of the Nelsonian amalgam is there: hero, pride, passion, ‘the day of glory’, ‘his last moments’, ‘triumphant’, ‘the compassion of the meek and the tender-hearted’, ‘applause’, ‘admiration’, ‘envy of all the bold and hardened,’ ‘his death spoken of by many with honour, by most with pity, and by all with approbation.’ It is as if, half a century before, the appetite was there among the mob in the streets en route to Tyburn for the kind of figure which Nelson would provide them in the late 1790s and early 1800s. The public figure of Nelson is modelled not on the Newcastle-Byng template, the big, solid, respectable, prudent and lying establishment, but on the bold, brave, tricky, clever, daring, nimble-minded and nimble-fingered, counter-culture hero of the thief.

  The appetite for such a hero was certainly there, but the 18th-century cult of gentlemanly courtesy could not satisfy it. It was fed by a stream of twopenny broadsheets and sixpenny pamphlets, filled with journalistic accounts of criminals in Newgate prison in London. For sale singly or bound in collections for a shilling, by 1760 almost 1,300 of these Newgate prison lives had been published. Men of charm, wit, honour, violence and great professional skill, with a protean ability to appear and disappear, with no social standing, money or education, alert for captures, prizes and victories, ready to risk all for the glory of their triumphs: more connects the image of the naval hero and the thief than divides them. There is, in other words, something in the national hero of 1805 which looks like an adopted and legitimised criminality. Nelson and his band of brothers might be seen as a set of sanctioned villains, living lives that oscillated between intense risk and predatory gain, a role in which a deeply prepared public consciousness welco
med and adored them. And in that role, distinguishing them from the stiff establishment figures with whom the populace in general felt little sympathy, two qualities were central: daring and sincerity.

  By 1805, the femininity of the mid-18th century was being left behind. Exaggerated sensibility had started to look absurd. Clothes, for both men and women, had become sober and simple. Their colours were plain; embroidery had shrunk to a minimum. The wig and hair powder had both been dispensed with and men wore their own hair unpowdered, either short in the Roman style or longer and romantically wayward. There is at least some evidence that portrait painters, including Sir William Beechey, when painting Nelson, fluffed up his rather flat reddish-grey hair into much more of a heroic creation than it was. The hero needed big hair. The same treatment was given by Sir Thomas Lawrence to Wellington, whose real hair, as painted by Goya, was insignificant and mousy. In Lawrence’s version, Wellington looks as if he has just emerged from the salon into a fresh breeze, the correct setting for a hero. The admirable had moved outside.

  A fashion for manliness had begun to take over the culture. You can see it happening before your eyes in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen had completed the original draft of the novel before 1800 and in it one can see dramatised the shift in values between the 18th and 19th centuries, arranged around the two potential heroes of the book: Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy. Mr Bingley is 18th-century man: handsome, young, agreeable, delightful, fond of dancing, gentlemanlike, pleasant, easy, unaffected and not entirely in control of his destiny. Darcy is fine, tall, handsome, noble, proud, forbidding, disagreeable and subject to no control but his own. It is a strikingly schematic division. Darcy is like a craggy black mountainside—Mrs Bennett calls him ‘horrid’, the word used to describe the pleasure to be derived from a harsh and sublime landscape; Mr Bingley is a verdant park with bubbling rills. Darcy is 19th-century man, manliness itself, uncompromising, dark and sexy. And it is Darcy, of course, whom the novel ends up loving. Darcy is the coming man, Bingley the old way of doing things. In some ways, Darcy is the template on which the severe and unbending model of Victorian manliness is founded.

  The implication of the novel is that there is something better than politeness and that the merely civil is inadequate. Pride and self-possession, even to the extent of rudeness, taciturnity—‘He does not rattle away’—sudden unpredictable behaviour and abrupt judgements had become not a symptom of barbarism but of authenticity, of a truth to a more fiercely defined self which cannot tolerate the hypocrisy on which the previous century was founded. Darcy is ‘silent, grave, and indifferent’, words in this new moral universe which signal pure approval.

  It is not difficult to see in this powerful and spreading ethic and aesthetic a version of the new economic reality. A society based on the fixed and ancient ranks, while dressing its aesthetic sense in patterns derived from the ancients, will like the idea of fixed perfectability, of a static order as the definition of beauty. But British society in 1805, in which the motor and generator of national life was increasingly commercial, a commercial empire and armed forces in which enormous prizes and high prestige could be won, was increasingly impatient with and contemptuous of the stupidities of rank. What mattered was authentic, selfgenerated worth. The first years of the 19th century were a surprisingly rude and frank moment. St Vincent, when First Lord of the Admiralty, could write to the Marquises of Salisbury and of Douglas in a way no one could have dreamed of doing even 20 years before. Both grandees had written to St Vincent, outraged that employees of theirs should have been taken by the press gang, and asking them to be released:

  23rd June 1803

  To the Marquis of Salisbury

  If the Board was to give way to the numerous applications for the discharge of Seamen, the Fleet could never be manned. Let me entreat Your Lordship therefore not to listen to the representations which are made to you on this head.

  23rd June 1803

  To the Marquis of Douglas

  The Peerage is become so numerous that if Noblemen grant their Badge and Livery for the sole purpose of protecting Men whose occupation is upon the water from the Impress, it will be impossible to man the Fleet.

  With the increasing erosion of the élite by bourgeois culture, something of the street understanding of the herothief in the 1750s had become 1805 middle-class mainstream thinking. By the time of Trafalgar, England had not only been long subject to an expensive and threatening war. She was deep into the social transformations which a commercial revolution had worked, and had, as a result, become a more serious place: tense, anxious, interested in material facts. War and commerce had rubbed away the frivolities which a previous age had come to see as normal and natural. A new roughness and harshness was in the air. As Linda Colley has written, there was ‘a distinctively sturm-und-drang quality about British patrician life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.’ William Pitt died at the age of forty-seven, a victim of incessant work and compensatory drinking. One minister after another committed suicide, most by cutting their throats. Nineteen members of parliament killed themselves between 1790 and 1820. More than twenty went mad. Both Russian and real roulette became the diversion of the moment. Duelling and gambling enjoyed a resurgence they had not known since the 17th century.

  Delight in easy gradients had been replaced by a passion for suddenness. The sudden was integral to the sublime. As the young Burke had described it,

  Whatever, either in sights or sounds, makes the transition from one extreme to the other easy, causes no terror, and consequently can be no cause of greatness. In everything sudden and unexpected, we are apt to start; that is, we have a perception of danger, and our nature rouses us to guard against it.

  That rousing of the inner nature was the source of sublime pleasure, and the new delight in the ‘great’ feelings which suddenness produces had penetrated very deeply into English society. Throughout the summers of the 1790s, the British royal family spent their time at Weymouth on the Dorset coast. At night there was dancing and in the daytime expeditions into the Dorset countryside. Far more exciting, though, was sailing in the bay. A 74-gun ship-of-the-line, the Magnificent and, faster and more fun, a frigate, the Southampton, stood by every day, one for royal protection, the other for royal pleasure. The favourite game was for the Magnificent and the Southampton to approach each other under full sail on opposite tacks, with a combined speed of twenty knots or even more and to rush past one another, almost brushing sides. At the moment of climax, when the gunports of the two ships were inches apart, the entire crew of the Magnificent would cheer the rapidly passing royals. The experience was said to have ‘had a charming effect on the whole party’ and at the end of the summer Captain Douglas of the Southampton was knighted.

  There is a cluster of new ideas here: the beauty in sudden change; the admirableness of the man whose character is authentically his and stands out from his surroundings; the flaccid nature of the courteous quadrille; the possibility of the heroic in the sublime; the delight in roughness rather than high finish. Perhaps the most intriguing question about Trafalgar is how this deep transformation in sensibility and in the sense of what was valuable played itself out in the conduct of naval war.

  Eighteenth-century naval war had been based on the line of battle and the line of battle was founded on two unavoidable facts: a ship is longer than it is broad; and it cannot always manoeuvre where required. Its most defended and its most aggressive aspects are along its length; the most vulnerable its bow and stern where there are no or few guns and the structure is weakest. The essential idea of the line of battle, first used by the English in 1653 against the Dutch, is that the fleet lines up bow to stern, and presents those long armed broadsides to the enemy. This arrangement protects individual ships from both the raking fire of an enemy firing from ahead or astern and the possibility of being outnumbered and ‘doubled’—with an enemy on both sides. It also avoids the danger of friendly fire. Ships in line ahead cannot by mistake fire into ea
ch other, something which had often happened in the chaotic mêlées of the 16th and 17th centuries. The line of battle, in theory, combines the force of many ships into a single fighting instrument.

  But it had its problems. It was most effective as a defensive posture: it minimised one’s own risk but it also minimised the potential of damage to the enemy. It was a flock or a shoal of fish, bristling with violence, but concerned to look after itself, hugging itself for protection. In attack, in ships which anyway could not sail closer than 67° to the wind, and only sailed happily with the wind on the quarter, it was cumbersome and stiff. The line had to sail at the speed of the slowest ship and to turn a line without ships losing position, creating dangerous gaps, could only be done slowly and steadily. The ballet of naval warfare was a stately business.

  Until the 1780s, when new gun-training tackles were introduced to the British fleet, allowing guns to be trained 45° both ahead and abaft of the beam, the broadside could only be fired at 90° to the direction in which the ship was sailing. To bring the guns of a fleet to bear on a mobile enemy in shifting conditions of wind and sea, with the possibilities of gear failing, ships running into each other or falling off to leeward, was an extraordinarily demanding task, only rarely achieved with anything like conclusive effect. What is called ‘decisive action’—in other words one ship battering another for long enough for its crew to be killed or its rig destroyed—usually required broadsides to be fired into the enemy for at least half an hour at a distance of no more than 200 yards, closer if possible. ‘Hailing distance’ was Nelson’s favoured range for the ideal moment at which to open fire.

  Inevitably, by the mid-18th century, there was an element of stalemate to line-of-battle fighting. Admirals became concerned above all to preserve their forces to fight another day and not to allow their captains to expose themselves to danger. Exactness was all. Admiral Edward Vernon, in 1740, for example, ordered that ‘During the time of engagement every ship is to appoint a proper person to keep an eye upon the admiral and to observe signals.’ No free spirits there. Captains needed to obey. In some ways, the ethic and aesthetic of order, propriety and communality which shaped so much of mid-18th-century life, also dictated the behaviour of fleets, the mentality of admirals and the fighting instructions they issued.