MEN OF HONOUR
Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero
ADAM NICOLSON
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Table of Contents
There is a long tradition of English violence. More Catholics were burned at the stake in 16th-century England than in any other country in Europe. A higher percentage of the population died in the English Civil War than in the French Revolution. The suppression and brutalisation of the Scottish Highlanders after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion in 1745-6 was the scandal of enlightened Europe. All this was part of the nation from which Nelson came. He was able at Trafalgar, as he had been at the Nile and Copenhagen, to summon a scale of aggression from his fleets that seems to have drawn on the deepest levels of common consciousness among his men. This is a difficult area to address, but essential: how does one read into the behaviour of a fighting fleet the deep half-conscious preoccupations of the people who man its ships? How do the semi-understood but widely inherited ideas about purpose, violence and victory, which are present in any evolved society, shape the way men behave in battle? Battle is not simply a question of ideology, military expertise or technology. Deeper and more personal forces are in play and intimate battle, of the kind Nelson invited and created, inevitably engages men at their innermost levels.
By 1805, the sequence of violent and revolutionary events in Europe over the previous fifteen years had established in England—or, to be strict, re-summoned—a form of millenarian fever which had not been seen since the 17th century. The template for this fever came from the prophets of the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy, Daniel, Ezekiel and Isaiah in particular, and from the Book of Revelation which draws on them. Deep in the Jewish tradition, and radiantly powerful in those books, is the idea that a moment of fearful justice will come, when the wrath of the divine descends on earth. It will know no compromise. Its very violence is a measure of its goodness.
If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy. Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries.
That is the tradition drawn on by the blood-drenched visions of the end of time in Revelation. In this shared vision of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic world, the moment of utter violence gives way to the moment of utter peace, the tranquillity of the Kingdom of God, the future dream time of the millennium, when all striving is over and all wickedness banished. There will be no peace until the violence is done. Peace is inaccessible without the violence, because violence is righteousness in action. Apocalypse is the route to millennium.
These movements have always emerged in English history at periods of flux and crisis: during the Peasants’ Revolt, early in the 16th century during the first years of the Reformation, in the lead-up to the Civil War in the mid-17th century, in the 1790s and again in the 1820s and 30s at a time of widespread uncertainty over the reform and democratisation of British political institutions. Never were they more powerful than in the years before Trafalgar. The twinning of apocalypse and millennium, of violence leading to peace, is everywhere you look. For English radicals, the French Revolution was itself a sign that the time had come when blood would be shed and peace would descend on all men. The Pitt government, bearing down heavily on any hint of revolutionary thought, was, in this cosmic drama, the agency of evil. House-to-house searches were made; registers of lodgers compiled; citizens denounced for ‘incivism’ if they did not sign a declaration of loyalty to the constitution. Semi-compulsory collections, for all the sailors and the troops, were set up as a means of testing loyalty to the government: if you were loyal you gave in your flannel waistcoats, mitts, drawers, caps, shirts, stockings, shoes, trousers, boots, sheets and greatcoats. If you did not, your loyalty fell under suspicion.
By the mid-1790s, as the pressure of the law came down, and as radicalism was driven underground, there was an eruption of millenarian fantasy. Richard Brothers, a retired naval lieutenant on half pay, spoke to the people. His books and pamphlets went through edition after edition on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘All nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of Babylon’s fornications,’ he told his giddy listeners, ‘and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.’ His words were, in a subterranean way, pregnant with extreme violence. One evening he saw ‘a large River run through London coloured with human blood.’
These were the ‘signs of mercy’—the violence was beautiful—and after them there was to be an era of universal brotherhood. ‘All shall be as one