Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  Calder was popular among the other captains, capable of giving life-enhancing dinner parties for twenty of his captains at a time on board the Prince of Wales, the object of far more affection, for example, than stiff, solitary, wooden Collingwood, ‘another stay-on-board Admiral, who never communicates with anybody but upon service,’ as Captain Codrington of the Orion described him. It is possible, in this light, to see Nelson’s leniency as an act of war: its respect for an officer’s honour would have bound the captains of the fleet to him with a gesture only they would have understood. Such trust would win a battle in a way that the mere presence of the Prince of Wales might not.

  Nevertheless, Nelson was worried about Calder, anxious about the outcome of the court martial, not sure that Calder quite understood the severity of his predicament, and was acting ‘too wise’, as Nelson wrote to Collingwood. The court martial was held on 25 December 1805, but even by then Calder had not understood. Defending himself against the charge that he did not renew the action the following day, he said:

  I deprecate the idea that an engagement must be continued by a commanding officer as long as he can continue it, even though he should put at a hazard the advantage he has before gained. I maintain, that to encourage such an idea, would one day prove fatal to the officer, and dangerous to the country. The necessity of continuing an engagement must always depend on its own circumstances, and the discretion of the officer who commands, subject to that responsibility which attaches to the situation in which he is placed.

  Not to have done what he did, he said, would have been ‘rash and imprudent’. He congratulated himself on having exercised ‘a sound discretion’. He did not like the idea, as he wrote to Barham, of the ‘danger I must have exposed my squadron to, as also the country, if I had madly and rashly done what John Bull seems to have wished me to have done.’ Pompous, wordy and non-Nelsonian, everything Calder disparaged was precisely what, in the light of Trafalgar, he should have done: rashness, imprudence, exposure to danger, madness, what John Bull wished for—all this was central to Nelson’s grasp of the heroic.

  At his trial, Trafalgar had come and gone and Calder had missed it:

  By being placed under the necessity of demanding this inquiry, I have been prevented from sharing in the glories of that day; and, believe me, that has been no small part of my sufferings (the gallant admiral turned round, and wiped a tear from his eye). The judgment of this Court will, I hope, reinstate me in society, and restore to me unsullied that fair fame and reputation which have been so cruelly attacked.

  He had no such luck; he made the appallingly thick-skinned error of claiming that, although he had been absent from Trafalgar, he was nevertheless due his share of the £300,000 prize money voted by parliament after the battle; and the judgement of the court must have driven a stake into the poor man’s tender, 18th-century heart.

  The Court is of the opinion, that the charge of not having done his utmost to renew the said engagement, and to take or destroy every ship of the enemy, has been proved against the said Vice-Admiral Calder; that it appears that his conduct has not been actuated either by cowardice or disaffection, but has arisen solely from error in judgment, and is highly censurable, and doth adjudge him to be severely reprimanded, and the said Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Calder is hereby severely reprimanded accordingly.

  The world had moved on past him and Calder was never asked to serve at sea again.

  Nelson had an instinct for devastation and the people of England detected it in him. He knew in his bones that the public demand was for convincing and destructive violence, not a harmless strategic victory. It was what he had gone for at Cape St Vincent and delivered at the Nile and again in Copenhagen. He had tried and failed to deliver the same in the Canaries and in a catastrophic raid on Napoleon’s invasion fleet in Boulogne. In the media-rich environment of early 19th-century London, this was, if nothing else, a canny stance. He was, consciously or not, the hero-thief. In August 1805, for the fortnight he was back in London, he was mobbed in the streets like a star. His old friend, Lord Minto, chanced on him one morning:

  I met Nelson in a mob in Piccadilly, and got hold of his arm, so that I was mobbed too. It is really quite affecting to see the wonder and admiration, and love and respect of the whole world; and the genuine expression of all these sentiments at once, from gentle and simple, the moment he is seen. It is beyond anything represented in a play or in a poem of fame.

  Those last words are acute: the Nelson story was rising up into the realms of fiction and theatre. Later he was seen in the Strand:

  The crowd which waited outside of Somerset House till the noble Viscount came out, was very great. He was then very ill, and neither in look nor dress betokened the naval hero, having on a pair of drabgreen breeches, and high black gaiters, a yellow waistcoat, and a plain blue coat, with a cocked hat, quite square, a large green shade over the eye, and a gold headed stick in his hand, yet the crowd ran before him and said, as he looked down, that he was then thinking of burning a fleet, &c.

  His appearance was irrelevant. These were inner qualities, only apparent to the adoring crowd, seeing in his slightest gesture, as they see in all heroes, the workings of a wild and catastrophic heroism. He was summoned for interviews by ministers and officials. The country looked to him for its prodigies of conflict and its miracles of victory. On 24 August he wrote to Captain Keats, one of his Mediterranean band of brothers, from the house at Merton, to the west of London, which he shared with Emma Hamilton: ‘I am now set up for a Conjuror, and God knows they will very soon find out I am far from being one.’ The country expected magic; Nelson, who had been careful throughout his career to promote this mould-breaking, magicdelivering idea of himself, now found the wave he had set in motion taking on a life of its own.

  The fantasy of sudden and violent victory at sea was something deeply shared in England. It reached what, at this distance, seems like the most unlikely of corners and was far more widely spread than merely among the jingoistic, navy-admiring French-haters. William Wordsworth, for example, who in the 1790s had been agonisingly alert to the savagery and psychic destruction of war, nevertheless nurtured a half-guilty, voyeuristic vision of himself as a fighting sailor.

  I cannot at this moment read a tale Of two brave Vessels matched in deadly fight And fighting to the death, but I am pleased More than a wise man ought to be; I wish, I burn, I struggle, and in soul am there.

  It is, for Wordsworth, a moment of visionary apocalyptics, a shuddering, vicarious delight at the tales of battle and the need for courage, resolution and skill which they impose. The received ideals of courteous politeness no longer satisfy. Those, perhaps are what a wise man should delight in, but they are not enough. Deadly fighting and fighting to the death reaches deeper into the modern heart than politesse and the observance of rank and order. Wordsworth’s guilty confession acknowledges a new world bubbling up under the skin of the old. And to the general populace Nelson, more than any other man in the country, looked as if he had the secret of that new world in his hand. For Wordsworth, Nelson’s genius consisted, more than anything else, in ‘turbulence’.

  Fascinatingly, in the terms they use to describe what they do, Nelson’s approach to battle mimics Wordsworth’s idea of what poetry needed to be. This is not to claim that battle is guided by aesthetic concerns, merely that Nelson’s form of battle, so clearly drawing on the Hawke-Rodney-Howe inheritance, but given heightened intensity in the psychically dynamic and inventive years around Trafalgar, takes as its essential merits precisely those qualities which Wordsworth requires for the new poetry: immediacy; a dignity given to the common man; dispensing with the fripperies; a sense that the moment of crisis is engaged with the ultimate metaphysical realities; interested more in the essence of what is to be done than the niceties of form; quite unaffected in manner, ‘scrambling into action’; inspiring in a way those around both Wordsworth and Nelson cannot quite explain; richly, deeply and humanly sympathetic; ruthless in its pur
suit of the ideal; prepared to engage with the broken, the anarchic and the chaotic in pursuit of the goal either of victory, which is a form of revelation, or revelation, which is also a form of victory.

  In both of them there is a deep distrust of the affected world of 18th-century society. From the beginning, Wordsworth proudly declared his crudeness, his lack of courtesy, his plain truth.

  ‘Those who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,’ he declared in the 1802 manifesto-preface to the Lyrical Ballads, ‘if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look around for poetry and be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.’

  This is battle without decorum, without the pretty and elegant evolutions on which poetry had previously relied. Like Nelson, never loath to repeat his essential point, Wordsworth’s language, he says again and again, is ‘the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’, ‘the very language of men’ addressing ‘the essential passions of the heart’ in ‘a plainer and more emphatic language.’ ‘What is a Poet?’ he asked, as Nelson might have asked what a fighting man might be. ‘He is a man speaking to men. He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love.’ In this light, it becomes clear that Wordsworth’s basic conception of the human condition is battle.

  This is no more than core Rousseauism, a rejection of ‘social vanity’, but given a new fighting ferocity. It is as if Wordsworth, in his programme for a new kind of poetry and a new kind of society, is drawing up a plan of attack, whose forms and emphases mimic Nelson’s in the months and years before Trafalgar. ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,’ Wordsworth famously wrote, just as Nelson insisted, again and again, that the purpose of battle was to annihilate the enemy by a release of essential fighting energies. A fusion of slow understanding, the application of the will and an unbending enmity towards the hypocritical, the weak, the affected and the wrong drives them both. ‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject,’ Wordsworth wrote. ‘The style is manly,’ and whatever beauty, he wrote modestly, may be found in his poetry, it resides ‘in the sense of difficulty overcome.’ Poetry is victory. In such a martial conception of art and life, beauty and victory become the same thing. Poetry is no longer bound up in books and metrical forms. Poetry, as Hazlitt would describe it, was to be found ‘wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power or harmony.’

  Direct, fierce, daringly bereft of ornament or complexity, focusing on the central task, impatient with frippery, allowing the plain and open approach its vigour and clarity, Wordsworth, at precisely the same historical and cultural moment, had become to poetry what Nelson was to battle. Both were driven by a desire for the primitive and the passionate, that dreamed-of, unequivocally manly moment in the history of the world when daring coloured the acts of men:

  The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring and figurative.

  Action would erase the effeminate hypocrisies to which both poet and admiral considered themselves opposed. ‘The ready way to make a mind grow awry is to lace it too tight,’ Coleridge had written in his notebook in November 1801. Here were his passionate contemporaries, both of them his heroes, looking for resolution in violence.

  Nelson had been dwelling on how to bring the French and Spanish fleet to a conclusive and final victory at least since October 1803. The long and grinding months on blockade off Toulon, the chase across the Atlantic and back again, the couple of weeks and the hectic discussions in England in August 1805 had all provided him with the opportunity to develop a plan. He was clear from the start. There was to be no shilly-shallying. ‘The business of an English Commander-in-Chief,’ he wrote in a memorandum probably written off Toulon in 1803, was to lay ‘his ships close on board the Enemy, as expeditiously as possible; and secondly to continue them there, without separating, until the business is decided.’ There was to be none of this long-distance elegance. It was to be close, bloody, attritional, naked and decisive. At this stage, he was thinking only of a relatively small fleet action, involving perhaps eight or nine ships on each side. Nelson’s initial plan was quite conventional: to bring his full force to bear on a part of the enemy fleet, push through them to leeward, à la Howe, accept that some damage would be done to the British ships during the attack, but confident that straight dealing would overwhelm the enemy in detail.

  Two years of dwelling on the question developed it. Nelson, predicting he would have more ships with him than turned out on the day, initially decided to attack in three divisions. One, made up of the fastest ships, would be held in reserve, to windward, to descend on any part of the battle where it looked as if they were needed. With the other two, as he told Sir Richard Keats, strolling on one of those August mornings in the garden at Merton,

  ‘I shall go at them at once if I can, about one third of their line from the leading ship.’ He then said, ‘What do you think of it?’ Such a question I felt required consideration. I paused. Seeing it he said, ‘But I will tell you what I think of it. I think it will surprise and confound the Enemy. They won’t know what I am about. It will bring forward a pell-mell Battle, and that is what I want.’

  This, as the great naval historian Sir Julian Corbett described it, was ‘a return to primitive methods: the three squadrons, the headlong charge and the mêlée. He seems to insist not so much upon defeating the enemy by concentration as by throwing him into confusion, upsetting his mental equilibrium in accordance with the primitive idea.’ A scribbled note, recently discovered among a file of letters from Nelson to his elder brother, seems to have, on its reverse side, a rough sketch by Nelson of exactly such a plan in action, clearly describing his method of attack when in London in August 1805.

  After Nelson joined the fleet, he described the plan to his captains on 29 September in the great cabin of the Victory:

  When I came to explain to them the ‘Nelson touch’ it was like an electric shock. Some shed tears, all approved—‘It was new—it was singular—it was simple!’ and from Admirals downwards it was repeated—‘It must succeed, if ever they will allow us to get at them!’

  The ‘Nelson touch’ was a phrase Nelson had often used in letters to Emma. Between them, it carried slight erotic overtones: ‘Touch and take’ was another variant he often used, implying closeness, that electricity, an intimate violence. Its meaning is nowhere spelled out, but it certainly cannot mean overwhelming the rear of the enemy fleet, nor of driving through them to the leeward side, as both of those tactics had been well known in the navy for 20 years. What it is much more likely to mean is the style of the attack: giving Collingwood complete command of the lee division; trusting his captains to their own initiative once the battle had begun; creating an atmosphere among them in which it felt impossible not to win; and as Collingwood wrote to Admiral Sir Thomas Pasley after the battle, ‘to substitute for exact order an impetuous attack in two distinct bodies.’ Those are the electrifying atmospherics which lie behind the victory at Trafalgar, the introduction of chaos as a tool of battle.

  The written memorandum Nelson issued to his captains on 9 October is highly detailed: three divisions, two to attack, one as reinforcement; Collingwood’s line to attack 12 from the rear of the enemy fleet; Nelson attacking in the centre; the enemy van to be left to its own devices. The plan, as described in the memorandum, does not describe a hell-for-leather chase all morning across the ocean to get to the enemy. The British fleet are to arrange themselves in their divisions just out of gunshot of the French, in close order, sailing parallel to them. Only then would the signal be given to attack, Collingwood’s division first, in line abreast, followed by Nelson’s, also in line abreast, t
he third division hanging off, waiting to see where its force could be brought with greatest effect.

  This is so unlike what happened at Trafalgar that it left most of the captains confused. There was no reserve squadron and the ships designated for the reserve squadron were mostly attached in a slightly muddled way to Collingwood’s line. The two columns did not gather themselves into coherent aggressive bodies just out of gunshot but each ship of each column plunged into battle one by one. The distance between the head and tail of each of the British columns was about 7 miles. As they approached, Collingwood gave the signal for each ship to make for the enemy ship nearest to him in the rear of the Combined Fleet, each pushing through, according to one of Howe’s signals. Nelson apparently feinted towards the enemy van, keeping Villeneuve in a state of uncertainty, and then pulled back towards the centre and drove into the enemy in line ahead, pretty much on the Rodney model.

  To a critical mind the whole approach was not only chaotic but intensely dangerous. There is one document in particular, anonymous but almost certainly written by an officer on board the Conqueror, Lieutenant Humphrey Senhouse, and almost certainly written soon after the event, which, a little tentatively, dared to criticise the haste and confusion with which Nelson jumped his fleet into the attack. ‘Of the advantages and disadvantages of the mode of attack adopted by the British fleet,’ Senhouse ventures, ‘it may be considered presumptuous to speak, as the event was so completely successful.’ The pall of perfection was already beginning to fall on Nelson’s great battle. Senhouse then described what should have happened: