Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.

  In the hands of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, war came to be seen not as a shrine to innocence, but as its destroyer. The shadow, or perhaps the light of Trafalgar, with its halo of courage, beauty and honour, its powerful and Elysian idea of the Happy Warrior, lasted only until the killing fields of industrial war.

  The 19th century had chosen to remember only the Happy Warrior; the 20th century only ‘the blood come gargling.’ Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar: the uncompromising violence; the dedicated grip on the need for ‘annihilation’; the seeking of victory through exsanguination; combined with a hunger for honour; a belief in the reality of noble ideas; self-possession as a mark of nobility; and behind all that a tender and active humanity. However reluctant people have become to describe battle in this way, these are the ambivalent ingredients of sublime and noble war, of a kind which Homer and Virgil would have recognised, and all of which were undeniably there on 21 October 1805. It was a brutal amalgam and remains an inheritance with a troubling moral ambiguity at its heart.

  Bibliography

  MANUSCRIPTS

  NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW

  ADMiralty In Letter Book, Mediterranean Station, May-December 1805 ADM/1/411

  Captain’s Logs: September-October 1805 Master’s Logs: September-October 1805

  Achille ADM 51/1535 Achille ADM 52/3561

  Agamemnon ADM 51/1576 Agamemnon ADM 52/3563

  Belleisle ADM 51/1515 Belleisle ADM 52/3734

  Bellerophon ADM 51/1522 Britannia ADM 52/3572

  Britannia ADM 51/1552 Conqueror ADM 52/3742

  Conqueror ADM 51/1529 Leviathan ADM 52/3640

  Entreprenante ADM 51/4443 Mars ADM 52/3654

  Leviathan ADM 51/1526 Neptune ADM 52/3657

  Mars ADM 51/1493 & 4472 Orion ADM 52/3662

  Neptune ADM 51/1545 Pickle ADM 52/3669

  Orion ADM 51/1635 Revenge ADM 52/4273

  Revenge ADM 51/1535 Royal Sovereign ADM 52/3678

  Royal Sovereign ADM 51/1533 Spartiate ADM 52/4323 & 3691

  Swiftsure ADM 51/1550 Swiftsure ADM 52/3693

  Téméraire ADM 51/1530 Téméraire ADM 52/3706

  Tonnant ADM 51/1547 Tonnant ADM 52/3707

  Victory ADM 51/4514 Victory ADM 52/3711

  BUCKINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY RECORD OFFICE

  Fremantle Papers

  Swanbourne inventory d/fr/41/6

  Rice contretemps d/fr/31/5

  Post-Trafalgar strategic situation 1807 d/fr/32/2/1

  BEDFORDSHIRE COUNTY RECORD OFFICE

  Bayntun papers

  Out Letter book 1799-1800 x170/4/1

  Leviathan’s Rough Log Book for 1805 x 170/1/2

  Leviathan’s Muster Book for 1805 x 170/2/2

  1804 Letter to Bayntun on Leviathan warning of gale in Gulf of Cadiz x 170/7/2

  NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS

  Bonner Smith, David, (ed.), Letters of Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of St Vincent, Navy Records Society, 1921, 1927

  Corbett, Julian S., (ed.), Fighting Instructions 1530-1816, Navy Records Society, 1905

  Firth, C.H., (ed.), Naval Songs and Ballads, Navy Records Society, 1907

  Hughes, Edward, (ed.), The Private Correspondence of Admiral Lord Collingwood, Navy Records Society, 1907

  Laughton, John Knox, (ed.), Letters and Papers of Charles, Lord Barham 1758-1813, Navy Records Society, 1911

  Lavery, Brian, (ed.), Shipboard Life and Organisation 1731-1815, Navy Records Society, 1998

  Thursfield, H.G., (ed) Five Naval Journals 1789-1817, Navy Records Society, 1951

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  Cobb, Richard, The People’s Armies (New Haven and London, 1987)

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  Colley, Linda, Britons, Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (London, 1992)

  Committee on Trauma, American College of Surgeons, Advanced Trauma Life Support Course (Chicago, 1989)

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  Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence, The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford, 2003)

  Erskine, David, (ed.), Augustus Hervey’s Journal (1953) (London, 2002)

  Fraser, Edward, The Enemy at Trafalgar (1906) (London, 2004)

  Fraser, Flora, Beloved Emma (London, 1986)

  Fremantle, Anne, The Wynne Diaries (London, 1933-1940)

  Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 2000)

  Gardiner, Robert, The Line of Battle, The Sailing Warship 1650-1840 (London, 1992)

  Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot, Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London, 1981)

  Girouard, Mark, The English Town (New Haven and London, 1990)

  Goodwin, Peter, Nelson’s Ships 1771-1805 (London, 2002)

  Goodwin, Peter, Men o’War, the Illustrated Story of Life in Nelson’s Navy (London, 2003)

  Harbron, John, Trafalgar and the Spanish Navy (London, 1988)

  Harland, John, Seamanship in the Age of Sail (London, 1985)

  Hayward, Joel, For God and Glory, Lord Nelson and his Way of War (Annapolis,2003)

  Hoffman, Capt. Frederick, A Sailor of King George, The Journals 1793-1814 (1901) (London, 1999)

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  Holmes, Richard, Coleridge, Early Visions (London, 1989)

  Holmes, Richard, Coleridge, Darker Reflections (London, 1998)

  Holmes, Richard, (ed.), Southey on Nelson (1813) (London, 2004)

  Holmes, Richard, (ed.), Defoe on Sheppard & Wild (1724-5) (London, 2004)

  Horne, Alistair, The Age of Napoleon (London, 2004)

  Howard, Michael, War in European History (Oxford, 1976)

  Howard, Michael, The Causes of Wars (London, 1983)

  Howarth, David, Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch (1969) (Adlestrop, 2003)

  Humphrey, A.R., The
Augustan World (London, 1954)

  Jaeger, Muriel, Before Victoria, Changing Standards & Behaviour 1787-1837 (London, 1956)

  Jennings, Humphrey, Pandaemonium, The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (London, 1985)

  Keegan, John, The Face of Battle (London, 1976)

  Keegan, John, The Price of Admiralty (London, 1988)

  Kennedy, Ludovic, Nelson and his Captains (London, 1975)

  Konstam, Angus, British Napoleonic Ship-of-the-Line (Oxford, 2001)

  Lambert, Andrew, Nelson, Britannia’s God of War (London, 2004)

  Laurie, Robert and Whittle, James, Mediterranean Pilot (London, 1803)

  Lavery, Brian, Nelson’s Navy, The Ships, Men and Organisation 1793-1815 (London, 1990)

  Lavery, Brian, Nelson’s Fleet at Trafalgar (London, 2004)

  Leech, Samuel, A Voice from the Main Deck (1857) (London, 1999)

  Le Fevre, Peter & Harding, Richard, (eds.), Precursors of Nelson, British Admirals of the Eighteenth Century (London, 2000)

  Levey, Michael, Sir Thomas Lawrence (London, 1979)

  Lewis, Michael, A Social History of the Navy 1793-1815 (London, 1960)

  Lynch, Jack, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (Delray Beach, 2004)

  Mackay, Ruddock F., Admiral Hawke (Oxford, 1965)

  Mahan, Capt. A.T., The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890) (London, 1987)

  Mahan, Capt. A.T., The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812 (London, 1892)

  McCalman, Iain, (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, British Culture 1776-1832 (Oxford, 1999)

  McEvedy, Colin and Jones, Richard, Atlas of World Population History (Harmondsworth, 1978)

  McMaster, Graham, (ed.), William Wordsworth, A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth, 1972)

  Nichelson, William, A Treatise on Practical Navigation and Seamanship (1765) (Portsmouth, 1792)

  Nicolas, Sir Nicholas Harris, The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, Volumes I-VII, (1846) (London, 1998)

  Padfield, Peter, Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind (London, 1999)

  Padfield, Peter, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom 1788-1851 (London, 2003)

  Paley, Morton D., Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999)

  Perry, Seamus, Coleridge’s Notebooks, A Selection (Oxford, 2002)

  Piper, David, The English Face (London, 1992)

  Pocock, Tom, Horatio Nelson (London, 1994)

  Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1990)

  Quirk, Ronald J., Literature as Introspection, Spain Confronts Trafalgar (New York, 1998)

  Reynolds, Graham, Turner (London, 1969)

  Ribeiro, Aileen, The Gallery of Fashion (London, 2000)

  Rodger, N.A.M., The Wooden World, An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986)

  Rodger, N.A.M., The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (London, 1997)

  Rodger, N.A.M., The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London, 2004)

  Rule, John, The Vital Century, England’s Developing Economy 1714-1815 (London and New York, 1992)

  Rule, John, Albion’s People, English Society 1714-1815 (London and New York, 1992)

  Schama, Simon, Citizens, A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989)

  Southam, Brian, Jane Austen and the Navy (London and New York, 2000)

  Terraine, John, Trafalgar (London, 1976)

  Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980)

  Tracy, Nicholas (ed.), The Naval Chronicle, Consolidated Edition, Volumes I-V (London, 1999)

  Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (London, 1972)

  Tunstall, Brian, Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca (London, 1928)

  Uglow, Jenny, The Lunar Men, The Friends Who Made the Future (London, 2002)

  Villiers, Alan, The Way of a Ship, (London, 1954)

  Vincent, Edgar, Nelson, Love & Fame (New Haven and London, 2003)

  Warner, Oliver, Nelson’s Battles (London, 1965)

  Warner, Oliver, (ed.), Nelson’s Last Diary and the Prayer before Trafalgar (London, 1971)

  Watson, J.R., Romanticism and War, A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (Basingstoke, 2003)

  Wheeler, Dennis, ‘The Weather of the European Atlantic Seaboard during October 1805’, Climatic Change 48, (2-3), Feb 2001: 361-385

  Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995)

  Wordsworth, Jonathan, Abrams, M.H. and Gill, Stephen, (eds.) William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York and London 1979)

  Index

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

  Achille 10, 88, 229, 288-90, 309

  Achilles 6, 7, 206

  Acton, Sir John 232

  Addington, Henry 115

  Africa 4, 269, 270, 280, 298, 299

  Africaine 152-3

  Agamemnon 280

  Aigle 19, 229

  Albarracin, Pedro 293

  Albion Steam Mill 67

  Aldred, Ebenezer xiv

  Alexander the Great 237

  Algésiras 229, 257, 258

  Amazon 55, 290

  American War of Independence 20, 23

  Amphion 120

  Argonauta 293, 310

  Argonaute 305

  Atkinson, Master Thomas 138-9

  Atlas Maritimo de España 86-7

  Aurora 232

  Austen, Francis 119-20, 150

  Austen, Jane 5, 140, 172

  Austerlitz, Battle of, 84

  Authentic Narrative (Beatty) 271

  Badcock, William 25, 201

  Bahama 304, 306-7, 310, 311

  Ball, Sir Alexander 84, 151, 152, 155, 234-5

  Barbados 80-1

  Barbaro, Sánchez 12

  Barham, Lord 24, 59, 68-9, 70, 72-, 79, 89, 185, 187, 188

  Battle of the Saints 180, 181

  Bayntun, Captain Henry 51, 86, 87, 131, 132, 133-7, 147, 155, 228, 279, 280, 309

  Beatty, John 88

  Beatty, William 254, 255, 256, 264, 265, 267-8, 271, 274, 282

  Beaufort, Captain Francis 70

  Beaver 121

  Beckford, William 252

  Beechey, Sir William 171

  Belleisle 10, 51, 90, 160, 162-3, 204, 215, 225, 226, 228-9, 230, 257, 262, 289, 292, 293, 305, 306

  Bellerophon 87, 89, 93, 282

  Berry, Captain Sir Edward 95, 96, 280

  Berwick 10, 311

  Bickerton, Sir Richard 88

  Blackwood, Henry 50-1, 91, 92, 128, 149, 155-6, 233, 294, 297, 304, 312

  Blake, William xix-xxi

  ‘Blind Sailor, The’ 39-40

  boldness:

  British officer’s individual encouragement to excel promotes 184-9

  definition of 157

  18th Century idea of hero clashes with 164-71

  line of battle and 175-84

  Nelson’s 190-201, 203-4

  19th Century idea of hero promotes 169-75

  Trafalgar, presence at 157, 161-4, 190-201, 203-6

  Bonaparte, Napoleon 73, 190, 285

  aggression 33

  Army, gives priority to 84

  Dumanoir, opinion of 282

  forbids Villeneuve to inform his captains of French Grand Strategy 45

  Grand Strategy 45, 75, 76, 77, 81, 85

  Louvre, gathers masterpieces inside 19

  ‘manoeuvre sur la derrière’, adopts 75

  on France making war in the name of principles 30

  rise to power 23

  systematises military 34

  Villeneuve, relationship with 45, 47, 85, 86

  Waterloo 314

  Boreas 233

  Boscawen, Ad
miral 177

  Boswell, James 68

  Boulton, Matthew 67

  Britannia 198, 275, 280, 281, 298, 304

  British Admiralty 20-1, 23, 54, 59, 79, 84, 88, 89, 112, 131, 137, 147, 181, 186, 202, 232, 256

  British Treasury 21-2, 42

  Brothers, Richard xiii

  Brown, John 50

  Bucentaure 4, 19, 46, 85-6, 93, 94, 241, 242, 244-5, 268, 269, 277-8, 304

  Bulkeley, Richard xvi, 266

  Bullen, Captain Charles 275

  Burke, Edmund 39, 45-6, 108, 123, 174-5, 239, 251, 265-6, 266, 270, 314

  Byng, Admiral John 168, 169, 170, 177

  Byron, Lord 236

  Ça Ira 101, 105

  Calder, Sir Robert 85, 86, 92, 185-6, 187, 188-9

  Canopus 90, 119, 120

  Cape Finisterre 79, 85, 185

  Cape St Vincent, Battle of 72, 79, 104, 183, 185, 190, 236

  Captain 183

  Carter, Rear Admiral Richard 57-8

  Caunant, Jeannette 289

  Centaur 138

  Chevalier, Henry 274

  chivalry, British officers sense of 122-7

  Christian Knights 28

  Churruca, Don Cosme 93-4, 95, 277

  Cicero 285

  Cisneros, Bernardo Hidalgo 17, 270

  Claret, Charles 34

  Cobbett, William 70-1

  Codrington, Captain Edward 51, 188, 280, 281, 304, 306-7

  Coleridge, Bernard 99

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 51-2, 61-2, 84, 115-16, 130, 150-1, 194, 234, 236, 238, 243

  Colley, Linda 174

  Collingwood, Edward 262

  Collingwood, Lord, 89, 240, 288

  burial in St Paul’s 276

  Cadiz blockade 86, 87

  complains Nelson is signalling too much 129

  Duff, relationship with 148

  on naval intelligence 90

  TRAFALGAR

  breaks through middle of Spanish fleet 183

  calculates pre-battle will not signify 162

  courage 160, 215

  first battle between division and rear of Combined Fleet 217, 219, 228-9, 244, 279-80

  flagship alone amongst enemy 160