The War of Wars (65 page)

Perhaps the most desperate fight by a British ship was that of the
Bellerophon
, which, after breaking the enemy line, found herself under fire from a ship on either side, and three from behind. The ship was entirely dismasted and as her sails fell they caught fire. The captain and some 115 men were killed. But the wreck still fought on, and forced the
Monarca
to surrender. The
Bellerophon
then pounded the
Aigle
into submission; but as all her launches were out of action, an officer dived overboard, swam to the
Aigle
and climbed up her rudder chains to claim the prize. The
Bellerophon –
dubbed the ‘Billy Ruffian’ by her unclassically minded men – was later to play an even more fateful part in the Napoleonic saga.

Aboard the
Victory
, the long, heroic, pathetic and tragic tableau of Nelson’s death was unfolding. When the ship’s surgeon reached his side, Nelson told him, ‘I am mortally wounded. You can do nothing for me, Beatty. I have but a short time to live.’ Beatty prodded the wound with his finger and realized his admiral was right. He was running a high temperature and desperately thirsty. ‘Drink, drink, fire,
fire’ he kept repeating and was given lemonade, water and wine. He asked repeatedly for Hardy. The captain came after an hour during a lull in the fighting. ‘Well, Hardy, how goes the day with us?’ Nelson asked. Hardy replied that twelve or fourteen ships had surrendered. ‘I hope none of our ships have struck, Hardy?’

‘No, my Lord, there is no fear of that.’

‘I am a dead man, Hardy,’ the admiral replied. Hardy returned to his duties and Nelson turned back to the doctor: ‘All pain and motion behind my breast is gone and you know I am gone.’ Beatty concurred. ‘God be praised. I have done my duty,’ breathed Nelson. Meanwhile the counter-attack by the returning French van had been blunted by the
Victory
and other ships: three more prizes were taken. Hardy returned to inform Nelson that it was now certain that fourteen or fifteen prizes had been taken. ‘That is well. But I had bargained for twenty,’ was the grudging reply.

Nelson’s seamanship and prescience remained to the last. The fleet, having comprehensively defeated its enemies, was now facing a more dangerous one still: catastrophe from the weather, a threat Collingwood, in the thick of battle, seemed to be neglecting. Nelson gave his last order. The growing swell, in spite of the fine weather, had alerted the great man that seriously bad weather was on the way: catastrophe threatened partially disabled British ships and wholly disabled prizes, which could be driven by the wind on to a lee shore. With all his energy Nelson suddenly called out, ‘Anchor, Hardy, anchor!’ Hardy remarked that Collingwood was now in charge. ‘Not while I live, I hope, Hardy. No, do you anchor, Hardy.’ After a while he said, ‘Don’t throw me overboard. You know what to do.’

With the poignancy of a child facing an unknown threshold about to be crossed, Nelson called out for human comfort. ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’ The burly captain kissed his cheek. ‘Now I am satisfied. Thank God I have done my duty.’ Hardy leaned over to kiss him again on the forehead. ‘Who is that?’ ‘It is Hardy.’ ‘God bless you, Hardy.’

After Hardy had left again for the quarter-deck, Nelson told the ship’s chaplain, who was rubbing his chest to ease his pain, ‘Remember that I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Horatia as a legacy to my country.’ He added a moment later, ‘I have not been a great sinner,
doctor.’ He wept, repeating, ‘Thank God I have done my duty.’ His last words were ‘God and my country’. He died at about four o’clock.

The battle raged on a little longer before Admiral Dumanoir called off the last four French ships still fighting. Fifteen minutes later the Spanish commander, Admiral Gravina, ordered his crippled remaining ten ships back to Cadiz. After about another half hour, the fighting ended. The ‘grim and awful scene’, as Codrington was later to describe it, was over. The fact that it had taken place at sea in those huge floating wooden stately homes that were the great ships of the time could not conceal the fearsome toll of the battle. More than 7,000 men had been killed or badly wounded altogether, the casualty levels of a major land battle. The decks were covered in blood, with bodies and limbs lying everywhere. The swelling sea itself was reddened and packed with floating corpses as the hulks of great and crippled vessels milled about directionless.

Alongside the horror of the scene, awareness of a colossal British victory began to dawn on the men. Seventeen French and Spanish ships had been taken in all, and one had blown up spectacularly in battle. The remaining fifteen had escaped. The British had not lost a single ship, although several were badly mauled. The British had lost some 450 killed and 1,400 wounded, compared to 3,400 French dead and 1,200 wounded, and 1,000 Spaniards killed and 1,400 wounded. Some 4,000 prisoners had been taken.

Of the remaining French and Spanish ships, eleven escaped to Cadiz while four were attacked a fortnight later by a British squadron off Cape Ortegal under Captain Richard Strachan, and were captured without a fight. Of the eleven, five attempted a breakout two days after Trafalgar, recapturing two of the British prizes, but three were lost in the gale. The remainder were virtual prisoners in port, and the French ships were eventually to be seized by the Spanish. The colossal fleet of thirty-three warships had been effectively annihilated. Although not quite as complete as the Battle of the Nile, it had been an overwhelming victory.

The significance of Trafalgar went even further, although no one realized it at the time, for the French consoled themselves with the
thought that their shipyards could always rebuild the fleet. It made a major contribution to the Spanish decision to turn against the French. Napoleon was only once to attempt a major naval engagement again – and that with caution. The plans for invading England would never be renewed. He would never consider the project seriously again. Trafalgar was to Britain what the Battle of Britain was in the 1940s – a lifting of the shadows of invasion, fighting in the towns and countryside of Britain and enemy occupation.

The travails of those exhausted, exultant seamen were not over yet. As the dying Nelson had realized, with his last fevered ounce of seamanship, a fate almost as dangerous as an enemy fleet would soon be upon them. As though in heavenly rage at the the appalling suffering inflicted by man that day, a truly devastating gale struck the British fleet. Collingwood had decided to ignore Nelson’s orders to anchor, partly because some of the anchors aboard British ships had been lost in the fighting, and partly to move as far as possible from the dangerous lee shore of Spain, with its treacherous shoals at Trafalgar.

Whether he was right or not, he sailed straight into the teeth of the gale on that fateful night of 21 October. Colossal waves battered the ships, many of them already crippled, rolling about helplessly with gaping holes and hundreds of wounded men lying in agony aboard. The
Redoutable
, the French hero of the fight, sank behind the ship towing her. The flagship
Bucentaure
had to be cut adrift and was seen crashing on to the shoals three miles away with the loss of the remainder of its crew. The whole fleet was being driven back towards the rocks. During the gale, as the ships struggled to maintain position and feared that they would all perish ashore, the wind veered abruptly, allowing them to gain a few miles distance. As dawn struck the storm continued unabated, and other French prizes went aground, sank or had to be destroyed.

Blackwood, towing the once mighty
Santissima Trinidad
, the floating colossus that had been the pride of the Spanish fleet, evacuated the crew and burned the ship; the
Santa Anna
, its proud, unwieldy sister, suffered the same fate. ‘The French commander-in-chief is at this moment at my elbow’, commented Blackwell. Villeneuve gazed out impassively at the wild and fearful scene of these towering infernos
tossing and turning in a raging gale. His emotions can only be imagined at the loss of his greatest ships, wrestling with relief that at least they would not now join the British fleet.

Blackwood wrote to his wife: ‘Ever since last evening we have had a most dreadful gale of wind, and it is with difficulty that the ships who tow them [the prizes] keep off the shore. Three, I think, must be lost, and with them, above 800 souls each. What a horrid scourge is war.’ It was one of the strangest scenes in history, a glimpse into the Apocalypse. Altogether twelve prizes were destroyed in three days of continuous raging gales. The British limped home with none of their ships lost, but with, only four prizes out of the original sixteen. In the hold of the
Victory
, the body of Nelson had been preserved in a huge cask filled with brandy.

It was Guy Fawkes night, and the same evening an officer aboard the fastest messenger in the English fleet, the schooner
Pickle
, landed and was conveyed at speed up to London to reach the Admiralty at one o’clock in the morning with the news of the victory and of Nelson’s death. The secretary of the Admiralty received him and conveyed him to the sleepy, elderly First Lord, Barham. The two men promptly informed Pitt, who unusually could sleep no longer, and the King, who was dumbstruck for five minutes, before settling down to write by urgent despatch to dozens more, including Fanny and Lady Hamilton.

The latter fell into a catatonic trance for ten hours. The wife of George Fremantle, a captain who had survived, remarked accurately that ‘regret at [Nelson’s] death is more severely felt than joy at the destruction of the combined fleet’. Lady Harriet Cavendish observed: ‘Poor Lord Nelson. The universal gloom that I hear of from those who have been in town is the strongest proof of the regret he so justly deserved to occasion as otherwise I suppose such a victory at such a moment is everything, both for our honour and safety, and could have driven us half wild.’ The Prince of Wales was unable to compose himself.

The report that the ‘combined fleet is defeated but Nelson is no more’ ran like wildfire into the streets. Lady Bessborough commented: ‘How truly he has accomplished his prediction that when they met it must be to extermination. He could not have picked out a finer close to
such a life. Do you know, it makes me feel almost as much envy as compassion; I think I should like to die so.’ The
Morning Chronicle
wrote sadly: ‘What is likely to be the inward ejaculation of Buonaparte? – “Perish the twenty ships – the only rival of my greatness is no more!” – He was, as a captain, equal in his own element of the sea, to what Napoleon, with a base degeneracy of motive, has proved himself to be on land.’

A day later the London mob went wild in celebration of Trafalgar. On 9 November Pitt gave a brief and laconic reaction after his carriage was drawn by huge crowds to the Lord Mayor’s banquet. ‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’

Modern historiography has understandably tried to demythologize Nelson and rightly has focused upon his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Of the former he had plenty: the early readiness to suck up to his masters, including such unworthy objects of his attentions as Prince William, his colossal vanity, his severity, his involvement in the corruption and brutality of the Neapolitan court, his obsession with Emma Hamilton, who was nothing if not a hard-boiled social climber for all her charms (although she may have genuinely been devoted to him). But these were the defects of a naïve, not a bad man. Even his friends considered him a ‘baby’ in many respects. Like many sailors he was a simpleton when it came to politics and women, and he should not be faulted for being so. He certainly aspired to heroism and gloried in fame, but saw no need to moderate his private conduct accordingly. He had become a symbol in a country desperate for heroes after years of hardships and unrelenting war, and quite understandably felt that this should not invade his personal life.

He was also the greatest commander of fleets Britain ever possessed, a fearless leader of men with a magnificent understanding of how to lead his ships. Like so many masters of their craft he saw no need to adjust his habits to the expectations of the crowd: it was enough that he delivered the victories they needed. The road to glory was arduous, dogged by ill-health, false starts and setbacks. The string of victories attests to his genius – Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. He was peerless, in a country that depended on the naval service for its survival.

His personal conduct was childish rather than malevolent, and comparatively mild for the period: his affairs in ports overseas were standard practice among most naval officers, and the infatuation of a middle-aged man with a lusty girl half his age far from exceptional in an age graced with the likes of the Prince Regent and Napoleon himself. Childlike vanity can be excused in a man who had so much to be vain about.

There was to be the inevitable unseemly bickering around his bier. His grasping and worthless elder brother William was to secure the earldom that Nelson never had, as well as his pension, of which some £100,000 was paid as a lump sum and £5,000 a year was granted to himself and his successors tax-free in perpetuity – colossal sums for the time. Nelson’s long-suffering wife Fanny, by contrast, secured only £2,000 a year as a pension, and the £1,000 a year her husband had left her – which however provided for a comfortable middling existence.

Emma received the house at Merton and just £500 – a belated official revenge. She was shunned. Bitterly she wrote: ‘Let them refuse me all reward. I will go with this paper fixed to my breast, and beg through the streets of London, and every barrow woman shall say, “Nelson bequeathed her to us.” ’ She soon got through her modest inheritance from Nelson and her more generous one from Sir William Hamilton, dying at the age of fifty in Calais, pursued by her creditors. Horatia was longer lived and married a clergyman.

It was ironical that in death Nelson was to serve his country almost as much as in life. For catastrophe had overtaken Britain’s continental allies of such a magnitude that without Nelson’s victory the will of the British people to go on fighting might have been destroyed. At the very instant that Nelson was paying for his last and greatest feat with his slow and agonizing death, his equal on land, Napoleon Bonaparte, was on his way to execute the first of the truly devastating strokes in his career that were to establish him as one of the greatest military commanders that ever lived.