Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  Battle as a result remained something of a quadrille. Lord Augustus Hervey, watching from the quarterdeck of a frigate in Admiral Byng’s fleet as they manoeuvred against the French outside Port Mahon in Minorca, considered the ‘evolutions’ of the enemy ‘pretty and regular’. Even the terrifying Admiral Boscawen, known to his sailors as ‘Old Dreadnought’, who when woken as a young captain by the officer of the watch and asked what to do with two large Frenchmen then seen to be bearing down on them, asked famously, standing in his night shirt on the quarterdeck, ‘Do? Do? Damn ‘em and fight ‘em,’—even this termagant could in 1759 (in written instructions they all carried on board) address his captains like a dancing master:

  If at any time while we are engaged with the enemy, the admiral shall judge it proper to come to a closer engagement than at the distance we then are, he will hoist a red and white flag on the flagstaff at the main topmast-head, and fire a gun. Then every ship is to engage the enemy at the same distance the admiral does.

  When I think the ship astern of me is at too great a distance, I will make it known to him by putting abroad a pennant at the cross-jack yard-arm, and keep it flying till he is in his station; and if he finds the ship astern of him is at a greater distance than he is from the [flagship] he shall make the same signal at the cross-jack yard-arm, and keep it flying till he thinks that the ship is at a proper distance, and so on to the rear of the line.

  This insistence on orderliness and on the stately meeting of equally matched forces began to break down in the last quarter of the 18th century. One after another, leading admirals and naval theorists, looking for battle advantage, started to abandon the old sense of regularity as the underlying principle of the well-conducted battle. Roughness, imbalance, asymmetry, concentration on one part of the enemy, the breaking open of accepted norms: this, increasingly, became the intellectual pattern of British naval battle in the last part of the 18th century. Classical forms had started to take on Romantic intonations.

  By 1780 a system of tactics had been developed in which the idea of crushing part of the enemy had replaced the earlier intention of coming alongside, fleet to fleet, and hoping for the best. A swift and vigorous attack had replaced the slow and watchful defensive. Above all, naval tacticians had come to realise that concentrating as much of the attacking force as possible on the rear of the enemy meant that a devastating victory could be achieved. The leading ships in the enemy’s van could do nothing to help their beleaguered rear, at least not quickly, and that period of advantage for the attacker would bring victory before any help arrived. Battle had moved over from something that had seemed essentially fair to an action which was founded on the idea of initial and shocking advantage. From a matter of regular beauty, it had become a question of the devastating sublime.

  Three leading British admirals, Hawke, Rodney and Howe, were largely responsible for the change. All, despite their age, Hawke born in 1705, Rodney in 1719, Howe in 1726, stood outside the acceptable mid-century courteous norm. Hawke’s victory at Quiberon Bay during the Seven Years War in 1759 off the Breton coast, in a thrashingly wild northwesterly November gale, had broken all the rules. Hawke’s blockading squadron heard that the French Brest fleet was at sea and it was spotted by one of his scouts when 40 miles west of Belle Isle. They were making for shelter, hoping to avoid an engagement. Hawke made the signal ‘for the seven ships nearest to them to chase, and draw into a line of battle ahead of the Royal George [his flagship], and endeavour to stop them until the rest of the squadron should come up, who were also to form as they chased.’ Forming as they chase, pursuing a reluctant enemy on to a wild lee shore: there are pre-echoes here of Trafalgar.

  Hawke had no reliable charts of the reef-strewn bay into which he pursued the French. He simply assumed the French themselves would avoid the rocks and shoals and followed them. He used the enemy as his pilot, chasing up behind them as the shore and the night both approached. Two French ships surrendered, two sank, two ran ashore and burnt, seven others ran ashore deliberately, of which four broke their backs. Another nine escaped either into the mouth of the Loire or southwards to Rochefort, where they spent the rest of the war, imprisoned behind the British blockade. It was a model of victory achieved through wild and unregulated pursuit.

  Hawke gleams as a Nelsonian hero avant la lettre, but he had his heirs. Rodney was intemperate, a gambler, falling so deeply in debt that in the 1770s he had to escape to Paris for four years, a man famed for a dashing attack against the Spanish, on a lee shore, at night and in a storm, always quick to seize an opportunity, and far from polished. He had the habit of ‘making himself the theme of his own discourse. He talked much and freely upon every subject, concealed nothing in the course of conversation, regardless who were present, and dealt his censure as well as his praises with imprudent liberality. Through his whole life two passions—the love of women and of play—carried him into many excesses.’

  For the first time, at the Battle of the Saints off St Lucia in 1782, this wild womanising gambler of an admiral took the shocking and unprecedented step of leading his fleet through the enemy to the other side, an action which won him the battle, ‘pulverising’ the French and turning the world of naval tactics upside down. To go through the enemy was to become British orthodoxy.

  Where Rodney was garrulous, Howe was silent, ‘a man universally acknowledged to be unfeeling in his nature, ungracious in his manner and, upon all occasions, discovers a wonderful attachment to the dictates of his own perverse impenetrable disposition.’ His courage was famous—Horace Walpole described him as ‘undaunted as a rock and as silent’—and his appearance forbidding, but ‘Black Dick’ was loved by both officers and the men of the lower deck. When the mutinies erupted in 1797, it was the aged Howe whom the supervising committee at Spithead chose as the one admiral they trusted and would deal with. These were the precursors, both of them heroes to the common man, on whom the daring, mould-breaking aspect of the Nelsonian method was based.

  In Lord Howe’s signal book issued in 1790, there is an entirely new signal, applicable when the British fleet was on the attack either from upwind of the enemy or to leeward of them:

  If, when having the weather-gage of the enemy, the admiral means to pass between the ships of their line for engaging them to leeward or, being to leeward, to pass between them for obtaining the weather-gage. N.B.—the different captains and commanders not being able to effect the specified intention in either case are at liberty to act as circumstances require.

  Lines broken through and captains at liberty to act as circumstances require: the world of the orderly dance was over. In the next edition of the signal book, the degree of individual freedom for ships was enhanced still further. Howe included a signal which told the ships of the fleet: ‘To break through the enemy’s line in all parts where practicable, and engage on the other side.’ A manuscript note is added in the Admiralty copy of the signal book: ‘If a blue pennant is hoisted at the fore topmast-head, to break through the centre; if at the mizzen topmast-head, to break through the rear.’ In either case, the van is to be left to sail away ignored. At the Battle of the Saints, Rodney had led his fleet in line ahead through the enemy line. At the Glorious First of June in 1794, Howe instructed his captains to approach the enemy in line abreast, break through wherever they could and ‘for each ship to steer for, independently of each other, and engage respectively the ship opposed in situation to them in the enemy’s line.’

  There is a deep historical and geographical pattern at work here. The essential disposition of British and French fleets over the whole of the 18th century was governed by geography and the prevailing winds. The strategic position of the British was to be out at sea, to windward, holding their blockading station to the west of the European mainland. Their leeward guns faced the French. The French, emerging from port, approached the British from downwind. Their windward guns faced the British. This essential historical structure had a shaping effect on the way in which each side
engaged in battle. The British guns, brought down towards the surface of the sea by the heeling of the ships, were habitually aimed at the hulls of the enemy. The French guns, lifted by the heeling of the ships, were usually aimed at the rigging of the ships.

  More significantly than that, the French had developed the habit during battle of slipping off to leeward, avoiding the decisive contact, dancing away in front of the British eyes, compelling the British ships to turn towards them and allowing the French to rake their enemy on the approach. The great innovation of the Howe method in particular was to slip through the gaps in the enemy to leeward and then to hold them between the mouths of the British guns and the wind, since a fleet to windward cannot slip away. It is seized in a murderous grasp, the coherence of the fleet broken into fragments over which the French admiral has no control. The Howe method, in other words, dared to recreate the mêlée which 150 years previously the invention of the line of battle had been designed to avoid. It is, like so much of what was happening in European consciousness at the time, a return to the primitive, to the essential brutal realities of battle in which deep and violent energies are released by dispensing with the carapace of courtliness which the 18th century had done so much to cultivate. It is, in a phrase, Romantic battle, in which, as tacticians describe it, there is ‘the utmost development of fire-surface’. It was the method by which a fleet could develop an overwhelming attack of the most violent kind. And it released the possibilities of heroism. This morning, off Trafalgar, Nelson made a signal to the fleet, expressing an intention which in all likelihood his captains had already assumed: he would break through the enemy line and engage them on their leeward side.

  The battle which made Nelson famous, fought off Cape St Vincent in 1797, is an example of this thinking. Commanding the British fleet was Sir John Jervis, who would be created Earl St Vincent as a result of the victory. He surprised a scattered Spanish fleet off Cape St Vincent on the northern edge of the Bay of Cadiz. The by now familiar signal went up; ‘The admiral intends to pass through the enemy’s line.’ But Jervis then made a mistake, asking his fleet to ‘tack in succession’ meaning that they should follow him in a single line ahead through the enemy, pursuing in other words the Rodney tactic. Only Nelson grasped the mistake, which would have allowed the Spanish the time to get away. On his own initiative, Nelson in the Captain converted the order into a version of Howe’s method of attack: all turn for the enemy together, in line abreast, not an orderly file but a flock of aggression descending on the Spanish fleet. Followed by Collingwood, Nelson broke through the middle of the Spanish fleet, created the havoc he required, destroyed the Spanish admirals’ system of control and captured two ships in the process.

  Fascinatingly, there is an account of this battle written by a Spanish observer, Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana, who identified the core of the new English fighting method:

  An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support.

  Accordingly, both he and all his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgement upon the spur of the moment, and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into action with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeuvres…

  Thus they can never make up their minds to seize any favourable opportunity that may present itself. They are fettered by the strict rule to keep station, which is enforced upon them in both navies, and the usual result is that in one place ten of their ships may be firing on four, while in another four of their comrades may be receiving the fire of ten of the enemy. Worst of all they are denied the confidence inspired by mutual support, which is as surely maintained by the English as it is neglected by us, who will not learn from them.

  In three acute paragraphs, de Grandallana, who by the time of Trafalgar had become head of the naval secretariat in Madrid, identified precisely the post-systematic nature of the British advantage. He understood it was a cultural and not a technical advantage; reliant on the notion of the ‘band of brothers’, of which he would not have heard; and intuitively grasping the power of the individual ‘emulation to excel’ with which the 18th century had coloured the English heart. This is not a description of Trafalgar; it explains, nevertheless, why Trafalgar was won.

  Up to the eve of Trafalgar, and beyond, there were officers in the Royal Navy who had not grasped the essence of the new idea. The fleet engagement that had occurred most recently before Trafalgar was a text-book case of what the new thirst for uncompromising victory no longer thought adequate. Sir Robert Calder, the admiral commanding a British squadron off Cape Finisterre, the northwestern tip of Spain, had enjoyed by any account a glitteringly successful career, winning prizes, making his fortune, acting as Sir John Jervis’s flag captain at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, promoted to vice-admiral in 1804, both a knight and a baronet.

  In the summer of 1805, Calder’s responsibility was one of the most essential nodes in the British defence network, cruising off the deep-water port of Ferrol, both to blockade the Spanish ships arming and victualling in there and to catch Villeneuve’s fleet as it returned from the Caribbean. The British force, reinforced by Barham in early July, consisted of fifteen ships-of-the-line, stretched out in a curtain to the west of Cape Finisterre. On 22 July, in a thick fog, they fell in with Villeneuve’s superior fleet, twenty to his fifteen. Calder found himself downwind of the French, but he managed to engage them and capture two Spaniards before night intervened. The poor man was honourable, personable and charming but not cast in the Nelsonian mode. He thought he had achieved a victory and sent a modestly heroic dispatch to London. The following day, he was anxious to secure his prizes, to attend to the battered condition of one or two of his own fleet and to avoid being caught by the huge fleet, consisting of Villeneuve’s 18 plus the 15 that would come out of Ferrol to join him, which now threatened him. Imagining that discretion was still the better part of valour, he did not seek to re-engage.

  The newspapers in England were full of contempt for Calder’s lack of fighting spirit, for his ridiculous interest in preserving his little Spanish prizes and his failure to destroy the enemy. Lord Howe’s explanatory notes to the Fighting Instructions issued in 1799 had been unequivocal:

  If there should be found a captain so lost to all sense of honour and the great duty he owes his country, as not to exert himself to the utmost to get into action with the enemy, or to take or destroy them when engaged, the commander of the squadron…is to suspend him from his command, and is to appoint some other officer to command the ship.

  If the admiral himself behaved in such a pusillanimous way, public ignominy was the only possible outcome. The tradition of Hawke, Rodney, Howe and now Nelson had created an environment in which Calders could not survive.

  When the news of the state of public opinion reached the fleet, Calder requested a court martial at which he might defend himself, feeling, as officers usually did in this predicament, that without a hearing his silence would be interpreted as accepting the calumnies against him. At the same time, an acutely political Admiralty required him to return home to England, realising equally powerfully that the London populace would never accept as good enough such an inconclusive form of fighting the French. The delays in communication between the fleet at sea and the Admiralty meant that Calder’s personal crisis persisted for the rest of the year. By the time the decision was made to send Calder home, it was mid-September. Nelson had by then returned to the
fleet off Cadiz, where Calder was flying his flag in the 98-gun Prince of Wales. Such a ship would be an immensely important asset in any coming battle with the Combined Fleet. On instructions from the Admiralty, Nelson decided, at first, to remove the admiral from his flagship and send him home in the Dreadnought, still a ship-of-the-line, but the fleet’s worst and slowest sailer.

  He wrote to Calder to say so and Calder, in a highly emotional state, replied:

  Prince of Wales, at Sea

  I am this instant honoured with your Lordship’s letter: I own I was not prepared for its contents. Believe me, they have cut me to the soul, and, if I am to be turned out of my Ship, after all that has passed, I have only to request I may be allowed to take my Captain, and such Officers as I find necessary for their justification of my conduct as an Officer, and to be put into such ship with them…as your Lordship shall deem proper for my passage to England, and that I may be permitted to go without a moment’s further loss of time. My heart is broken! and I can only say I have the honour to be, my Lord, with all due respect, your Lordship’s obliged and faithful humble servant, ROB. CALDER

  Nelson relented, allowed Calder to remain in the Prince of Wales and on 30 September wrote to Barham:

  I may be thought wrong, as an Officer, to disobey the orders of the Admiralty, by not insisting on Sir Robert Calder’s quitting the Prince of Wales for the Dreadnought, and for parting with a 90-gun Ship before the force arrives which their Lordships have judged necessary; but I trust I shall be considered to have done right as a man, and to a Brother Officer in affliction—my heart could not stand it, and so the thing must rest.