This was largely a reflection of social structure. In England, the officers of the navy came from a broad spread of English society, stretching from the lower reaches of the aristocracy through the landed gentry and professional classes to (occasionally) the genuinely poor. Of Nelson’s great predecessors in the 18th century, for example, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who ran his fleet up on rocks off Scilly, was the son of a Norwich merchant; Byng, who was shot for cowardice off Minorca, was the son of a Kentish gentleman; Vernon was the son of a London merchant; Anson from Staffordshire gentry; Hawke the son of a barrister; Rodney from a family of army officers, and with his mother’s father a judge; Howe was the second son of an Irish peer; Lord Hood was the son of a vicar, like Nelson himself; Lord Barham’s father was a customs officer; St Vincent’s a lawyer; and Lord Cornwallis was the fourth son of a peer, who like his brothers had been educated at Eton.
Those are the great men of the 18th-century navy. There is a drift towards high social status among them, but it is a far from exclusive set. Their mixed social origins are evidence of a kind of responsive elasticity in the hiring and promoting strategies of the Royal Navy. Nothing could have been more different in the Marine Royale of Bourbon France. There, any access to the officer corps was, as in Spain, rigidly restricted to members of the aristocracy. Access to the Grand Corps was through the élite trainee cadres of the Gardes de la Marine and the Gardes du Pavillon.
In the British navy, the test to become a junior officer, a lieutenant, depended on having spent at least six years at sea as a midshipman and an ability to answer a series of disturbingly sea-based questions. As the standard form of words approving a promotion to lieutenant expressed it, the candidate had to prove that he could
Splice, Knot, Reef a sail, work a Ship Sailing, Shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ships way by Plain Sailing and Mercator, Observe by the Sun or Star, find the variation of the Compass and is qualified to do his Duty as an Able Seaman and a Midshipman.
In May 1805, one young man, William Badcock, was sent forward by his captain Thomas Fremantle of the Neptune to sit his exam. He was in a state of extreme nerves and the three captains on the examining board allowed him to sit quietly for a few moments so that he would do himself justice. Then they began.
I was desired to stand up, and consider myself on the quarterdeck of a man-of-war at Spithead—‘unmoor’—‘get underway’—‘stand out to sea’—‘make and shorten sail’—‘reef’—‘return into port’—‘unrig the foremast and bowsprit, and rig them again’. I got into a scrape after reefing for not overhauling the reef tackles when reefing the sails [because unless those tackles were overhauled, the sails would not set fair]. However they passed me, and desired me to come again the next day to receive my passing certificate. I made the captains the best bow I could and, without staying, to look behind me, bolted out of the room…
For the young French aristocrat officers of the gardes, there was no equivalent. They were given an education in the great ports of Brest, Rochefort and Toulon and the curriculum they followed was essentially mathematical. They studied hydrography and the customs of the shipbuilding trade in both England and Spain, but no history, nothing about fighting or sailing tactics. There were daily sessions set aside for both dancing and fencing. Any suggestion that a French officer would know how to steer a ship, reef a sail, splice a warp or make a Single Diamond Knot, a Sprit-Sail Sheet Knot, a Carrick Bend, a Midshipman’s Hitch, a throat seizing, a mouse for a stay or puddings for yards, would have drawn as quizzical a look from him as it does from us. All those tasks, and tens more, described in detail and with diagrams in the midshipman’s vade mecum, ‘The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor’, first published in Leeds in 1808, but drawing on centuries-long expectation, were required to be known by an officer in the British Royal Navy. There was a naval academy in England established at Dartmouth, but it was not the usual or favoured route to a successful naval career. The British training ground was at sea.
In this was the core difference between the middleclass British and upper-class French and Spanish officer corps. For an aristocrat, failure in battle does not erode his standing or his honour. He remains, as long as he has behaved with courage, the man he was born to be. For the younger son of the English gentry, or of a lawyer or merchant, as most British naval officers were, there is no such destined luxury. If he fails at sea, his standing is diminished; he has not won the prize money which will set him up at home; his name is not gilded with honour; he has failed in the same way that a failing entrepreneur has failed. To preserve his honour and his name, he needs to win. Victory is neither a luxury nor an ornament. It is a compulsion and a necessity.
The young French gardes, convinced of their genetic and social superiority, often behaved with a kind of violent arrogance which more senior naval officers could scarcely control. In 1774, a senior naval administrator, Vice—Admiral Laurent Jean-François Truguet condemned it.
The spirit of independence, of contrariness, of egotism which has long distinguished the different classes of naval officers, and which is so opposed to the good of the King’s service, certainly is borne in the companies of the gardes de la marine and du pavillon; they perpetuate it in carrying it with them to all ranks.
No one should suggest that the officer corps of the ancien regime in France was made up of exclusively self-indulgent young blue bloods. There were a few officers of nonaristocratic lineage—les bleus, as they were called, contrasted with les rouges of the gardes—even if they were looked down on and excluded from the most valuable commands. In the 1780s there had been half-hearted attempts to recruit and promote men with a regard more to their skills than their names. There were officers among the aristocrats of great resource, ingenuity, courage and dedication to their profession. And the pre-revolutionary aristocracy was more open to recruitment from the bourgeoisie and the professional classes than is sometimes realised. Fully two-thirds of French titles dated back no further than the 1620s.
Nevertheless, the higher ranks in the French navy were strikingly incompetent. Fleet commands were more often than not given to old and decrepit admirals. Only three of the 22 vice-admirals promoted between 1715 and 1789 had ever commanded fleets at sea and the rank of lieutenantgeneral, a pivotal fleet position, was equally carelessly filled with the clueless: only eighteen of the sixty-eight lieutenants-généraux appointed between 1720 and 1784 had held seagoing commands. The man in charge of the navy as a whole, the Admiral of France, was the Duc de Penthièvre, a relative of the king, who had never been on board a ship and treated the navy merely as a useful source of income.
It would be a mistake, though, to think of the French naval officers as doing little more than living out a selfdeluded, aristocratic fantasia. It is true that they were deeply attached to and proud of their aristocratic traditions. It is equally true that there was fierce regional conflict between the Breton aristocrats and the Provençal aristocrats with which the Brest and Toulon fleets were officered. And it is true that to many of them their membership of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, or the Knights of Malta, the order of military Christian Knights founded in the 12th century as one of the vehicles of an ardent Christianity fighting Islam in the Mediterranean, was of equal importance to them as their duties with the French navy.
But these educated and professional men were inevitably alert to the forces of the Enlightenment unfolding around them. Their élitism had adopted modern dress and many of the Grand Corps thought of themselves as modern scientific men. In the 1780s, the French naval officer began to take up serious modern studies in navigation, the fixing of longitude, the rationalist understanding of the essence of sea-battle