Why was Villeneuve so heavily defeated?
'The English fought us at every point with superior forces; 23 vessels only, of the 33 which formed the combined fleets, were in action. To whom are we to attribute the inaction of our van? Dumanoir did not consider Villeneuve's signal, ordering any ship which was not engaged to get into action, made at 12.15, to be addressed to his division. Not until 1.15, when it was too late, did Villeneuve signal his van to put about and get into action. By that time our centre was no longer offering any serious resistance.
It is the business of the Commander-in-Chief to direct the movements of his fleet so long as he can make signals. Villeneuve may therefore be reasonably held responsible for the inaction of the 10 ships ahead of the Santisima Trinidad. But what are we to make of the behaviour of a commander of the van who, when the fate of the action was in the balance, waited for orders? Ought he not to have recollected that Villeneuve, in his instructions dated 20 December 1804, said: ''Any captain who is not in action will not be in his station; and the signal that recalls him to his station will be a stain upon his character?'' Dumanoir committed a serious error in not, on his own responsibility, leading his division to the assistance of the Bucentaure. The calm, he declared, prevented the van putting about earlier than it did. But the 16 vessels which followed the Royal Sovereign, and the 9 in the wake of the Victory, found enough wind to bring them into action. Moreover, the Africa was able to pass to windward of the entire van and join the vessels engaging the Santisima Trinidad. How is it that, while the English found the thing possible, we did not find it so?
It would appear that fatality clung to the movements of our van. When it did turn towards the fighting it split up. As a compact force it might have done something; as a divided one it invited the enemy's blows. These ten vessels joining the battle might not have changed the issue, but would have inflicted serious losses on the enemy. Dumanoir's inaction was seriously condemned in Paris. Seeing himself in disgrace, he asked for an inquiry. When this was held in 1809, he was exonerated.
Of Gravina Decrès wrote: ''His squadron, instead of making its way where events called for its presence, placed itself in the rear and rendered none of the services for which it had been designed. It allowed itself to be attacked, and fled.'' The Dumanoir enquiry blamed Gravina's behaviour; his squadron ought to have kept its station to windward of the line where it would have covered the centre instead of prolonging the rear without being signalled to do so. Just blame may be given to Gravina for his behaviour on 21 October.'
Such is a French verdict. (E. Chevalier in Histoire de la Marine Francaise sous le Consulat et l'Empire, abridged.) And clearly, Villeneuve, Gravina and Dumanoir, of whom the last deserved more criticism than the inquiry bestowed on the Spanish Admiral, made serious mistakes which contributed to the British victory. But how few are the battles in which a beaten foe has not made mistakes? And for the vanquished to determine these mistakes and apportion blame is understandable, even inevitable. Britain has done both: the escape of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen up Channel in 1942 is a recent example; of earlier ones the best remembered is the action off Minorca in 1756, for which Admiral Byng suffered death 'pour encourager les autres'. But in how few, if any, battles is the result to be attributed only to the mistakes made by the vanquished, in which the victor deserves no credit?
That the Royal Navy deserves credit in abundance for Trafalgar is not to be disputed. That twenty-seven ships-of-the-line divided into two columns, the ships in each coming into action in succession against twenty-three, compelled all but five to strike, is clear evidence of superior seamanship and gunnery. The British ships were better sailed and manoeuvred in the light wind that prevailed throughout the day; and their guns crews were better trained, both to hold their fire until within point-blank range, and to discharge their broadsides, three to every one of the enemy's, with devastating accuracy. Moreover, all, from captain to powder monkey were imbued not only with dauntless courage, but a rock-like belief in the justice of their cause, the need to defeat an enemy, personified in Napoleon, who had for so long threatened to invade their homeland.
In sharp contrast, the French, whose bravery is not in question, were handicapped by an Emperor who had deprived them of the revolutionary cause they had once so fervently espoused, and who had imposed on them the concept of evading action with all but forces of marked inferiority, so that many of their admirals and captains lacked the will to win. Even more so did their Spanish allies, who were so little interested in the war that several of their ships had to be fired on by the French to keep them in the line, with the consequence that, when taken prisoner, their crews volunteered to help their British captors fight their guns!
Even so, there would have been no such victory for the Royal Navy if the British Mediterranean fleet had not been under Nelson's command. His was the strategy which allowed the combined fleets to come out and be brought to battle, not Collingwood's orthodox close blockade of Cadiz. His was the magnetic personality and the understanding of the whole art of leadership that inspired Collingwood and all the British captains and their crews to fight as they did. His was the tactical plan, based on the. vital principle of concentration of force, and in disregard of all dogma, that enabled the British fleet to engage and vanquish a numerically superior enemy. And to him goes the credit for carrying out that plan in a modified form to suit the situation which faced him on 21 October 1805, with a determination that crushed the enemy's centre and rear. Nor, from the number of enemy ships that struck their colours without the loss of a British vessel, is it difficult to believe that he would have achieved victory if Villeneuve had directed his fleet more ably, and Dumanoir and Gravina had possessed the qualities required of divisional commanders, such as Nelson had shown when in command of the Captain off Cape St Vincent nine years before.
For all the success of Nelson's strategy and tactics, coupled with his personality and leadership, there was, however, another reason why the Royal Navy won Trafalgar. Nelson himself expressed it again and again. As he had been obsessed with Emma, he was fervently determined to gain not just 'victory or Westminster Abbey' but to come near to annihilating an enemy whom he hated, on whom he had maintained such a long and arduous watch off Toulon, and after whom he had chased all the way to the Caribbean and back again. It is easy to say that Nelson was vain; but none can argue that, when Fate in the form of a ball from a French musket ended his life, he was more than justified in his dying words: 'Thank God I have done my duty.'
XII Legacy
The rest is soon told. . . . The crippled Victory anchored in Gibraltar Bay on 28 October 1805, where Hardy landed his dead for burial in the little Trafalgar cemetery which to this day remains hallowed ground. There, too, Hardy disembarked his wounded before effecting the repairs needed to make his ship seaworthy. One week later the Victory carried Nelson home. His body, 'after the hair had been cut off . . . [and] stripped of the clothes except the shirt' had been put into 'a cask . . . of the largest size on ship-board', by Dr Beattie, and 'then filled with brandy' (not the rum of legend, for all that this liquor has since been called Nelson's blood), which was replaced at Gibraltar by a better preservative, spirit of wine.
The voyage, at first in tow of Redmill's Polyphemus and later of Fremantle's Neptune, took more than a month: not until December did the Victory reach Spithead, then proceed to the Nore, where, on the 23rd Nelson's body was placed in a coffin, of which the inner shell was the one that Hallowell had caused to be made from the Orient's mainmast, to be carried up the Thames and lie in state in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital (now the Royal Naval College, Greenwich).
The news of Trafalgar had reached England long before this. Penzance heard it first (as a plaque in the Union Hotel, formerly the Assembly Rooms, commemorates) from a Mounts Bay lugger which chanced to fall in with the schooner Pickle off the Lizard, with her ensign at half-mast. From Falmouth her commander, Lieutenant Le Ponetiere, posted through the night to d
eliver Collingwood's despatches to the Admiralty. Old Lord Barham sped the news to the King at Windsor where it stunned that most loquacious of monarchs into silence for a full five minutes. Pitt, in residence at 10 Downing Street, was awakened at 3 am, to be so shocked by the news that he was unable to resume his sleep. To Francis Lady Nelson, the First Lord began a letter: 'It is with the utmost concern that in the midst of victory I have to inform Your Ladyship of the death of your illustrious partner. . . .' The task of writing to Merton was left to the Controller of the Navy Board. Emma was prostrate with grief: on 29 November she was still in 'my bed where I have been ever since the fatal sixth of this month. . . . I do not see anyone but the family of my dear Nelson. . . . His letters are in bed with me. . . . My heart is broken. Life to me now is not worth having. I lived but for him. . . . I am very, very ill.'
The Times published Collingwood's despatches on 7 November, 'the most afflicting intelligence which has ever elated or depressed the British nation'. (In sharp contrast, the French press made no allusion to their catastrophic defeat until after the New Year when the Moniteur published this classic understatement: 'A storm has caused us the loss of a few ships after an imprudently delivered battle.') Collingwood's grief was shared by the Fleet. Fremantle told his wife: 'The loss of Nelson is a death blow. . . . I shall never cease to lament his loss while I live.' A seaman in the Royal Sovereign wrote:
'Our dear Admiral Nelson is killed! . . . All the men in our ship . . . are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed. . . . Chaps that fought like the devil, sit down and cry like a wench.'
The Times gave this verdict:
'The triumph, great and glorious as it is, has been dearly bought. . . . There was not a man who did not think that the life of the Hero of the Nile was too great a price for the capture and destruction of twenty sail of French and Spanish men-of-war.... No demonstrations of public joy marked this great and important event. . . . The people . . . felt an inward satisfaction at the triumph of their favourite arms; they mourned with all the sincerity and poignancy of domestic grief their HERO slain. . . . If ever there was a man who deserved to be ''praised, wept and honoured'' by his Country, it is Lord Nelson. His three great naval achievements have eclipsed the brilliancy of the most dazzling victories in the annals of English daring. . . . [His] death has plunged a whole nation into the deepest grief.'
The leader writer did not exaggerate. On the previous evening the performance at Covent Garden Theatre ended with 'a superb naval scene . . . of columns . . . decorated with medallions of the naval heroes of Britain. In the distance a number of ships were seen. . . . The principal singers . . . with their eyes turned towards the clouds, from whence . . . a portrait of Lord Nelson descended . . . sang Rule Britannia with the following additional verse. . . .
Again the loud ton'd trump of fame
Proclaims Britannia rules the main
Whilst sorrow whispers Nelson's name,
And mourns the gallant Victor slain,
Rule, brave Britons, rule the main;
Revenge the God-like Hero slain.'
The reaction was the same throughout Britain: on 10 November, in distant Cumberland, the poet Wordsworth noted in his diary: 'At the breakfast table tidings reached us of the death of Lord Nelson and of the victory at Trafalgar. We were shocked to hear that the bells had been ringing joyously at Penrith', where they knew only of the triumph.
The first Trafalgar honours were announced on 9 November, other awards later; for Nelson a posthumous earldom, an estate and a hereditary pension of £5,000 ($12,000) per annum bestowed upon his elder brother; to each of his sisters £19,000 ($45,600); to Lady Nelson an annuity of £2,000 ($4,800); for Collingwood a barony; for Northesk a K.B.; for Hardy a baronetcy. Many officers were promoted. For every officer and man there was a medal. But there was nothing then, nor later, for Emma Hamilton: though Hardy fulfilled his task of delivering Nelson's last letter, and the codicil to his will leaving her 'a legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her ample provision to maintain her rank in life', it was not to be expected that the Government would show such generosity to any man's mistress: that was a Sovereign's prerogative - for his.
Nelson was carried up the Thames from Greenwich to Whitehall on 8 January 1806, to lie that night in the Captains' Room in the Admiralty. Next day he received a state funeral in St Paul's Cathedral. Thirty-one admirals, of whom the senior was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Parker, he who had promoted Nelson to post-captain in 1779, and 100 captains followed the body. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence were there. Lady Hamilton was not: she waited at home to hear from Dr Scott that 'the very beggars left their stands, neglected the passing crowd, and seemed to pay tribute to his memory by a look. Many did I see, tattered and on crutches, shaking their heads with plain signs of sorrow. This must be truly unbought affection of the heart.' Garter King of Arms, after formally reciting Nelson's many honours, was moved to add in breach of all precedent: 'The Hero who in the moment of Victory fell covered with Immortal glory.'
And in St Paul's Nelson was accorded the much rarer honour of burial in the Crypt, beneath a great marble sarcophagus inscribed only with his name and the dates of his birth and death, whilst beside him sleep three of his last Band of Brothers, the two captains who were killed at Trafalgar, Duff of the Mars and Cooke of the Bellerophon, and 'Old Coll' who later joined him there.
This story would be incomplete if it did not tell of what befell certain of the other players in the drama of Nelson's life after his funeral. Collingwood stayed on as Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean until, worn out by more than five years of continuous sea service, he died on 7 March 1810 at the age of sixty-one. Codrington of the Orion was destined to be Commander-in-Chief of the combined British, French and Russian fleets at the victory of Navarino on 2 October 1827.
Villeneuve was repatriated to France on 22 April 1806. According to Napoleon, 'upon his arrival I ordered him to remain at Rennes, and not to come to Paris. . . . Fearing to be convicted by a council of war of having disobeyed my orders, and of having lost the fleet in consequence . . . [he] determined to put an end to himself', after writing these last poignant words to his wife: 'Quel honheur que je n'ais aucun enfant pour recueillir mon horrible heritage et qui soit chargé du poids de mon nom.' Next morning (Napoleon speaks again), 'when they opened his room they found him dead, [a long] pin being in his breast [and through his heart]. He should not have acted in that way. He was a gallant man, although he had no talent.' He was buried without honours.
Lady Nelson, the bird-like Fanny whom Nelson treated so cruelly, lived in quiet retirement until her death on 6 May 1831. Her detestable son, Josiah, had already died of pleurisy at the age of fifty, 'successful proprietor of a yacht . . . a full nursery and a solid fortune, but perhaps never quite so proud a man as when he had commanded HMS Thalia, aged nineteen, according to Nelson, "a seaman every inch of him." ' (Carola Oman in her Nelson.)
With £800 ($1,920) a year from Hamilton and a like sum from Nelson, in addition to Merton Place, Emma was left well enough provided for had she lived a prudent life. But in her distress she was recklessly extravagant and gambled so heavily that in 1813 she was gaoled for debt. A year later, after a second term in prison, she fled to France, taking Horatia with her, to live at No. III, Rue Francaise, Calais. There she fell into 'the baneful habit . . . of taking wine and spirits to a fearful degree', and in the year of Waterloo contracted jaundice from which she died. But Horatia was not left to starve: adopted by the Matchams (Nelson's sister Catherine and her husband), she married the eminently respectable Rev. Philip Ward in 1822. Curiously, though she always acknowledged Nelson as her father (to the extent of adopting the married name of Nelson-Ward), right down to her death at the age of eighty-one she never agreed that Emma had been more than a guardian who 'with all [her faults] - and she had many - had many fine qualities, which, had [she] been placed in better hands, would have made her
a very superior woman. It is but justice . . . to say that through all her difficulties, she invariably till the last few months, expended on my education, etc. the whole of the interest of the sum left to me by Lord Nelson, [An annuity of £200 ($480)] and which was entirely at her control.'
Collingwood writing 'whose name will be immortal': the Past Overseers of St Margaret and St John, Westminster raising their glasses to 'the Immortal Memory': Garter King of Arms proclaiming 'the Hero who . . . fell covered with Immortal glory'. These were the spontaneous reactions of those to whom Nelson's death deprived Britain of a victorious hero amidst the stress of a great war, when the dark shadow of invasion across the Channel had only recently been lifted. But time has long since proved the immortality of Nelson's name, not only by the erection of so many memorials, the most noteworthy being the great column guarded by Landseer's lions in London's Trafalgar Square, but by this eloquent tribute paid by Captain Alfred T. Mahan of the United States Navy:
'The words, ''I have done my duty'', sealed the closed book of Nelson's story with a truth broader and deeper than he himself could suspect. . . . Other men have died in the hour of victory, but for no other has victory so singular and so signal graced the fulfilment and ending of a great life's work. . . . There were, indeed, consequences momentous and stupendous yet to flow from the decisive supremacy of Great Britain's sea power, the establishment of which, beyond all question or competition, was Nelson's great achievement; but his part was done when Trafalgar was fought. The coincidence of his death with the moment of completed success has impressed upon that superb battle a stamp of finality, an immortality of fame. . . . He needed and he left, no successor. To use again St Vincent's words, ''There is but one Nelson.'' ' (Mahan in his Life of Nelson)
Nelson the Commander Page 31
