That twin inheritance, the Virgilian and the Homeric, are both in play at Trafalgar and both are fused there with the contemporary passion for a burning apocalyptic fire. It is not usually done, either by naval or literary scholars, to put William Blake and Nelson in the same bracket—Blake openly despised Nelson, virtually as a war criminal—but to do so, and to understand their shared relationship to the visions and desires of contemporary England, is to understand both why Nelson was the object of so much love and hope in England—one of the first examples of a media-driven frenzy for a star—and why the men of the fleet he commanded fought and killed with such unbridled intensity and passion.
Scarcely anyone in England in 1805 could be more distant from Nelson than William Blake: the one, radical, poor, impractical and ‘hid’, as he described himself, buried in an artisan subculture of radicals and mystics outside any conceivable Establishment; the other deeply conservative, courted by the government, the most public figure in England. And yet, at this deeper level, at the level of the vision of the radiant orb, there is an astonishing and intimate connection between the imageries on which they both drew.
Neither trusted the old ways. ‘The Enquiry in England,’ Blake said, ‘is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen’s opinions in arts and science.’ Nelson could have said that. But it is in Blake’s concentrated encapsulation of the apocalyptic vision that he seems to be speaking most directly for the heart of the Nelsonian idea. Far more than the ranting prophets, whose language seems either mad or second-hand, Blake says conceptually what Nelsonian battle put into action. Nowhere is this more intense than in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, acid-etched by him into his copperplates in the decade before Trafalgar. They are a summary of Nelson’s method of battle:
Energy is eternal delight.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Without contraries is no progression.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Exuberance is Beauty.
In these revolutionary stabs at truth, which strip away the graceful hypocrisy of the Enlightenment, something of the Nelsonian soul is laid bare. As statements, they are deliberately primitive, beneath and beyond the elegances of civilisation, just as Nelson’s method of battle subverted the conventions of 18th-century warfare. Nelson lived and died for the ‘portions of eternity’ represented by love, violence and the destructive sword. He saw friendship as man’s most nurturing condition and devoted years of his life to cultivating intimacy with his fellow officers. Capable of intense sensuality, he loved the nakedness of a woman as an almost holy thing. The road of excess was not in itself the palace of wisdom, but certainly led there. He believed in action, not dwelling on action. His method was exuberance and the tigers of his wrath were undaunted by the horses of instruction.
Buried deep in the assumptions of England, was a spirit of daring and ferocity. Within the ferocity was a sense of cosmic beauty. That is the spirit of Blake’s greatest lyric, written ten or eleven years before Trafalgar, virtually unknown at the time, but full of a sublimity, a beauty in terror, which Blake’s publicly acknowledged contemporaries, most of them still engaged with the courtesies of the 18th century, could never have encompassed.
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
Those are precisely the questions to which Nelson and his Trafalgar fleet could give answers in the affirmative. This fleet was, if anything, a model of ‘fearful symmetry’. Here burned the ardour of destruction. Here were men who might aspire, who both confronted and delivered apocalyptic violence, who looked on battle not as a necessary evil but as a moment of revelation and truth. For James Martin, a 26-year-old able seaman on the Neptune, ‘Now the moment was fast advancing which was to Decide wether the Boasted Herosum of France and Spain or the Ginene Valour of free Born Britains was to Rule the Main…Death or Victory was the Gineral Resolution of our Ships Crew.’
In that light, the story of the British victory at Trafalgar is of a fleet of ships and men who, in a heroic mould, part Greek, part Roman, part Hebrew—the three-pronged roots of European violence—both dared to seize the fire and to use their apocalyptic inheritance as the fuel for lives of honour.
October 21st 1805 5.50 am to 12.30 pm
October 21st 18055.50 am to 8.30 am
Distance between fleets: 10 miles-6.5 miles
Victory’s heading and speed: 067°-078° at 3 knots
Zeal: passionate ardour for any cause
SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
At 5.50 on the morning of 21 October 1805, just as dawn was coming up, the look-outs high on the mainmasts of the British fleet spied the enemy, about twelve miles away downwind. They had been tracking them for a day and a night, the body of their force kept carefully over the horizon, not only to prevent the French and Spanish taking fright and running from battle, but to remain upwind, ‘keeping the weather gage’, holding the trump card with which they would control and direct the battle to come. All night long, British frigates, stationed between the two fleets, had been burning pairs of blue lights, every hour on the hour, as pre-arranged. It was the agreed signal that the enemy was standing to the south, just as was wanted, straight into the jaws of the British guns.
Twenty minutes after the first sighting in the light of dawn, Nelson signalled to the fleet: ‘Form order of sailing in two columns.’ This was the attack formation in which he had instructed his captains over the preceding weeks. His next signal, at 06.22, confirmed what they all knew was inevitable: ‘Prepare for battle’. Twenty minutes after that, the French frigate Hermione, standing out to the west of her own battle fleet, peering into the dark of the retreating night, signalled to her flagship, the Bucentaure: ‘The enemy in sight to windward.’ For all 47,000 men afloat that morning, it felt like a day of destiny and decision. Most ships in both fleets were already cleared for action.
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