Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  St Vincent had said that ‘predatory war’ was Nelson’s métier and he was certainly capable of the kind of uncomplicated, direct, unelaborated violence in which predators specialise. When commander of the Boreas, he had flogged in 18 months 54 of his 122 seamen and 12 of his 20 marines, eight of them for mutinous language. He famously said he would be happy to hang a mutineer on Christmas Day and St Vincent’s final verdict on the greatest naval commander Britain has ever known was coldly evaluative: ‘the sole merit of Lord Nelson,’ the ancient earl wrote in a letter written deep into the 19th century, was ‘animal courage’.

  This was undoubtedly one of the grounds on which the characters of Nelson and Troubridge met. It was, as so often with Nelson, a friendship charged with high passion. In January 1800 Troubridge had written to him warning him of the immorality of the Sicilian court—‘We have characters, my lord, to lose; these people have none.’—and of the dangers of being seen with Emma Hamilton gambling deep into the night. Nelson loved Emma and revered the Bourbon queen, at whom Troubridge had openly sneered, and wrote back to his junior captain a letter which has not survived but which was clearly smoking with rage and destruction. Troubridge replied:

  It really has so unhinged me, that I am quite unmanned and crying. I would sooner forfeit my life, my everything, than be deemed ungrateful to an officer and friend I feel I owe so much to.

  Only a few weeks later, in March that year, Troubridge wrote a letter to Nelson which takes the relish in death and violence to new heights. The British were besieging the French garrison in the port of Valetta on Malta. In attempting to escape, the Guillaume Tell had been taken by Henry Blackwood and others and four English deserters had been found on her, savagely wounded. Troubridge wrote to Nelson:

  Two died of their wounds the other two are here one with both legs off & the other has lost his arm, a court martial is ordered, if they will but live Monday, they will be tried and meet their deserts immediately, we shot & hung a Maltese for carrying in two fowls & tomorrow I hope will be gala day, for the old lady who I have long been wishing to hang, that carried in the intelligence. She swore she was with child, and possibly she will try some stout fellow: even then it will be good policy to destroy the breed.

  What to make of such a series of statements? They are—almost technically in the last phrases—fascistic. They describe the scenes which Goya would paint in the Peninsular War a year or two later. They might be excused as coming from a man too long exposed to the facts of war, but they are words written in the expectation of approval from their recipient, bitter, dehumanising words which still shock at the distance of two centuries.

  Perhaps the way to explain this is to see in Nelson the particular form of genius which is able to absorb contradictory qualities and to see no contradiction between them. He was an amalgamator, a bringer-together, a collector of qualities, an animator of spirits, an intuitionist, with a mind in which the rational and spontaneous, the instinctive and the systematic, and perhaps the violent and the loving were not strictly separable or distinct. As Coleridge said, no doubt repeating what he had heard from Sir Alexander Ball,

  [Nelson] with easy hand collected, as it passed by him, whatever could add to his own stores, appropriated what he could assimilate, and levied subsidies of knowledge from all the accidents of social life and familiar intercourse. When the taper of his genius seemed extinguished, it was still surrounded by an inflammable atmosphere of its own, and rekindled at the first approach of light, and not seldom at a distance which made it seem to flame up self-revived.

  That flickering and beautiful description of the workings of Nelson’s mind, as if it were partly a butterfly net, partly a chemical or electrical experiment, partly of the Enlightenment, partly of the Romantic world, has never been equalled. Nelson required, in his lieutenants, something of the violence of Troubridge. But he also valued its opposite. Few men in the navy could match the systematic and Olympian calm of Alexander Ball, a ‘tideless man’ as he was described at the time. ‘Courage,’ Ball once told Coleridge, ‘is the natural product of familiarity with danger.’ No sturm-und-drang there, just the Virgilian emergence of virtuous behaviour from the virtuous man. In 1797 he had saved Nelson’s ship, the Vanguard in a storm on a lee shore off the coast of Corsica, without even raising his voice. Ball had taken the Vanguard in tow but Nelson had, again according to Coleridge,

  considered the case of his own ship as desperate, and that unless she was immediately left to her own fate, both vessels would inevitably be lost. He, therefore, with the generosity natural to him, repeatedly requested Captain Ball to let him loose; and on Captain Ball’s refusal, he became impetuous, and enforced his demand with passionate threats. Captain Ball then himself took the speaking-trumpet, which the fury of the wind and waves rendered necessary, and with great solemnity and without the least disturbance of temper, called out in reply, ‘I feel confident that I can bring you in safe.’

  But that neoclassical firmness of purpose in Ball (who also enjoyed a fearsome reputation as a disciplinarian) was not enough. It needed the addition of Troubridge’s troubled, violent and intemperate spirit. ‘Whenever I see a fellow look as if he was thinking,’ Troubridge said when asked how to impose discipline on a ship’s company, ‘I say that’s mutiny.’ Each man and each quality contradicts the other. They cannot tolerate each other. One looks like liberal civilisation; the other unprincipled barbarity; one is patrician (Ball’s father was a large landowner), the other of the street (Troubridge’s childhood had been poor); one is controlled, the other anarchic; but in battle neither is adequate without the other. Victory depends on their fusion, a melding of contradictory qualities. It is the contradiction between that grim controlled silence in the long approach to battle and the ruthless killing minute of the double-shotted broadsides pouring into the stern of the Santa Ana, tearing apart the flesh and bones of those within. They are twinned, the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of war. Troubridge and Ball were Nelson’s closest fighting allies. Once, according to Coleridge,

  when they were both present, on some allusion made to the loss of his arm, he replied, ‘Who shall dare tell me that I want an arm, when I have three right arms—this (putting forward his own) and Ball and Troubridge?’

  If Nelson was, as Byron described him, ‘Britannia’s God of War’, it was due to his intuitive understanding of the intimacy of violence, love, courage, honour, classlessness and victory. That was the amalgam which undoubtedly drew the mass of the ships’ companies at Trafalgar into their deep love and admiration of him. He was the conjuror of violence. As commander of the inshore squadron off Cadiz in the summer of 1797, already a vice-admiral, promoted after the battle of Cape St Vincent in February that year, Nelson and the great Thomas Fremantle had plunged off in his ten-oared barge, accompanied by Nelson’s boatswain John Sykes, to take part in the most dreadful, bloody slashing mêlée of his entire career. The British boats fought gunwale to gunwale with three Spanish gunboats which had come out from Cadiz. Boatswain Sykes twice saved Nelson’s life, at the cost of some terrible deep cutting wounds to his head, pushing himself between his admiral and his admiral’s death. Eighteen Spaniards had been killed out of about 26 and the rest wounded before they surrendered to this whirlwind of violence and aggression. In his dispatch Nelson, without affectation, put the name of Sykes the boatswain alongside those of Captains Miller and Fremantle, two of the gilded élite of the Navy. In Nelson’s own words, it was a moment at which ‘perhaps my personal courage was more conspicuous than at any other part of my life.’ Needless to say, the navy as a result, especially the seamen of the navy on whose level he had put himself, in precisely the way Alexander the Great used to put himself again and again into the bloody crux of battle, came to regard him with still greater awe, admiration and love. That is another way of expressing the amalgam: shared violence is the stimulus for the love on which the violence depends for its success.

  This is the world of violence in which, as Wordsworth was
writing in The Prelude during the summer of 1805, there was ‘A grandeur in the beatings of the heart,’ where ‘danger or desire’ made

  The surface of the universal earth With triumph, and delight, and hope, and fear, Work like a sea…

  Danger and desire, hope and fear, triumph and delight, violent exposure, removal from the ordinary, on the brink of destruction and self-destruction—this is the heartland of Romanticism, in which the immediate, the spontaneous, the intense and the primitive take over from anything more adult or known. As Coleridge wrote again and again in his notebooks ‘Extremes meet—Nothing & intensest absolutest Being’. Crisis is revelatory. In that, intensely contemporary with Trafalgar, are the seeds of the idea that battle is the place of ultimate reality, and the reason that Trafalgar came to occupy such an iconic place in the British imagination.

  7

  Humanity

  October 21st 1805

  2.15 pm to 4.30 pm

  Humanity: great tenderness of heart

  EDMUND BURKE, An Appeal from the new to the old Whigs, 1791

  As the Victory approached the allied line, she had already suffered 20 dead and 30 wounded. The dead had gone over the side, if only to prevent their blood making the workspace of battle unusable. The wounded were already clogging the surgeons’ tables in the cockpit. According to Nelson’s specific instructions, their knives were warmed. The coldness of the steel at the amputation of his arm in the Canaries was something he wanted no one else to suffer. The silence was over; the shrieking came up from below.

  Even though, as usual, the crew had duplicated many of the lines in the running rigging, replacing some with chain rather than hempen rope, Victory’s top hamper was now in tatters. The studding sail booms on her foremast had all been shot away close to the yard-arms. The mizzen topmast had been toppled and hung over the poop deck. The foresail itself was hanging in strips. A shot had destroyed the wheel and the ship was now being steered by commands shouted down (perhaps through a speaking tube) to 40 men manning tiller ropes in the gun room below.

  This wounding of ship and crew, before a single shot had been fired in response, was an entirely conscious part of Nelson’s plan. He knew that the spearpoints of the two British columns would take the most terrible battering from the enemy fleet. He had decided that the strongest ships in the squadron, the three-deckers, should lead those columns and that they should be captained by men he knew and trusted from the long campaigns in the Mediterranean over the previous five years. And he knew, equally well, that both he and Collingwood should be in the lead. That was the essence of the tactics at Trafalgar: a front-loading of firepower, inspiration, exposure and damage. Thus equipped, the leading ships of the British attacking columns could apply overwhelming force to the centre and rear of the allied line. It was the equivalent of a heavily armoured thrust, strong enough to resist the cannonade with which it would be greeted on the way in, devastating when it arrived.

  The battle would be won in its beginnings, which is why Nelson had to be at the front. He conceived Trafalgar, at its heart, not as a corporate action, of the fleet acting as a single disciplined body; but as an action in his image. That was its primitivism. Where he and Collingwood led, others must follow, not by attending to the orders which he would issue—for he would issue none—but by doing what he had shown them to do. It was the most elemental form of command: leadership by example; a throwback to the days of heroism, when warrior kings did not direct, but demonstrated by their own prowess how war was to be conducted. There was honour in exposure, but the honour was not futile. Honour—like zeal, order, daring, love and violence—was an instrument of battle. The heroism, of which those were the constituent elements, was in the service of one thing only: victory.

  Sailing warships were in many ways delicate things. If topgallant masts and even topmasts and yards were not ‘struck’ or lowered in severe weather, they and their rigging would break. A line-of-battle ship was not made and manufactured in the shipyard as a finished object. It was in constant transformation, a continuous process of repair, attended to, battered by the sea and wind, endlessly nurtured by officers and crew. In a storm, fleets could not be held stiffly in position; they had to give before it, running with the wind, before returning to resume their stations after the stress was over. A ship was, in many ways, its habit of care. For Nelson, outstandingly among contemporary naval officers, that habit extended to the wellbeing of the men he commanded. The mountains of lemons ordered for the fleet, the onions at every meal, the standing as godfather to the children of the wounded, the recommending of positions for men he knew and trusted, the courtesy to the slightest, the punctilious delivery of notes and letters: humanity to one’s own crew, just like the nurturing of the ships themselves, was what in the end would annihilate the enemy.

  That is the context in which to understand the approach of Victory to the Combined line. That ship, like those that followed, was one of the most carefully maintained objects in the world. Everything, for month after month, would have told the officers and crew of a ship to attend to its orderliness, to nurture its systems, to be careful.

  Now, at this moment, all of that had become an irrelevance. As they approached the line, first aiming astern of the Santísima Trinidad, then aiming for a gap just astern of the French flagship, the Bucentaure, the French ship behind it, the Redoutable, began to close the gap. Hardy looked anxiously ahead and realised that the Victory could not pass through the allied line without ‘running on board’ or colliding with one of their ships. He asked Nelson what he should do:

  His Lordship quickly replied, ‘I cannot help it: it does not signify which we run on board of. Go on board which you please: take your choice.’

  Hardy is to decide. Damage and devastation were now the currency of victory, just as, a moment before, care and system had been the necessity. Prudence, so essential to the wellbeing of a fleet, was now to be abandoned. Choice did not signify. This was neither bravado nor bloodlust, but the application of a highly attuned mind to the essence of battle. It is a form of negative capability, a trans-rational sense of when interference and attentiveness, the giving and structuring of orders, becomes secondary. It is the point at which the preparedness of a system is so all-encompassing that the system no longer needs to be looked after. If a system is good enough, it must be abandoned to something far more wildly energetic, the thing that creates victory out of the destruction it wreaks.

  ‘Everything seemed,’ Collingwood wrote lovingly and loyally after the battle, ‘as if by enchantment, to prosper under his direction. But it was the effect of system, and nice combination, not of chance.’ That was true, and at least hinted at the whole truth. Collingwood could not stomach the common and received idea, which was everywhere in England, that Nelson was a magician, the conjuror of victory, that he achieved it by a kind of ‘spell’. But in the sense that in this battle Nelson relinquished pattern and rationality, there is an element of truth in the word ‘enchantment’. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar would not have occurred unless he had allowed and encouraged free rein to the less conscious forces of devastating aggression, the desire to excel, the desire for prizes, the desire to kill and the desire to win. His potency as a commander rests in this very moment as Victory comes within a few yards of the stern of the Bucentaure. Here his method—you might say his art —flicks over from careful to careless, from control to anarchy, from commander to conjuror. His method bridged those contradictory qualities, embodying and practising a negative capability which did not need to choose between them.

  Almost exactly two years before, in late October 1803, Coleridge in his notebook had asked himself the point of all his thought and work, and answered:

  To support all old & venerable Truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the Reason spread Light over our Feelings, to make our Feelings diffuse vital warmth thro’ our Reason—these are my Objects—& these my Subjects.

  That radical crossing of categories, and the deeply huma
ne nature of the enterprise, pursued through extreme, difficult, self-destructive and often lonely conditions, is the quality that unites Nelson and Coleridge. For both, the method is radical, the purpose deeply conservative, concerned for ‘all old & venerable Truths’ in a world threatened with change and destruction. It is the zeitgeist speaking through them, joined in this most ardent moment in English consciousness.

  As Collingwood wrote of Nelson after Trafalgar:

  There is nothing like him left for gallantry and conduct in battle. It was not a foolish passion for fighting for he was the most gentle of all human creatures and often lamented the cruel necessity of it, but it was a principle of duty which all men owed their country in defence of her laws and liberty.