Adam Nicolson - Men of Honour - Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero

For the non-enfranchised masses of early 19th-century England, these visions felt like access to a new and potent reality; and it is from those social levels that Nelson’s fleet was manned. In 1801, the most powerful of all these movements erupted in the West Country (the navy’s principal recruiting ground). Joanna Southcott, a Devon farmer’s daughter, became the conduit for incantatory and apocalyptic visions which gave rise to a national movement both among the poor and among the frustrated English radicals. The repressions of the Pitt regime had pushed political radicalism inwards, into the visionary world. ‘O England! O England! O England!’ Southcott called,

The midnight-hour is coming for you all, and will burst upon you. I warn you of dangers that now stand before you, for the time is at hand for the fulfilment of all things. But of mine enemies I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; for the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redeemed is come. The earth shall be filled with My Goodness, and hell shall be filled with My terrors…My fury shall go forth—and My Loving-kindness shall save to the utmost all them that now come unto ME.

There were at least 100,000 Southcottians in England in 1804-5, but they were far from unique. The country was filled with violently apocalyptic religious movements, many of them versions of Methodism: Ranters, Jumpers, Tent Methodists, Magic Methodists, the Bryanites, Independent Methodists. All of them understood that divinely sanctioned violence was a route to the resolution of all pain. The violence was explicit. One oath sworn in Lancashire by political radicals took its opaque and magical rhetoric from Ezekiel: ‘The sword, the sword is drawn: for the slaughter it is furbished, to consume because of the glittering.’

Such language might be used to justify genuine political revolution in England. But wherever it has appeared, millenarianism has always been able to divert its energies, to flick from radical to conservative, from subversive to patriotic, from democratic to nationalistic and back again. The energy of millenarianism acts beyond the political. This varying focus of the apocalyptic vision was certainly the mood in 1790s England, when members of angry mobs could just as easily turn on prominent radicals as on figures of the Establishment. It did not take much of a shift in consciousness to apply the millenarian rage not to the removal of the Pitt regime but to a defence of England against the wickedness and bloody excesses of revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Battle, sacrifice, the glittering sword, the rivers of blood, the midnight hour, the dangers that stand before you: all those were real enough at Trafalgar and the new millennium of peaceful dominance they led to was not something in the next world but in this—the unrivalled creation of a God-blessed, ragingly commercial British empire. This was not the millennium of political freedom and equality of which the radicals in the 1790s had dreamed; but it was the only apocalypse and the only millennium which the British regime could allow.

It is possible to see Nelson instinctively responding to this deep and half-hidden current in English thought and belief. The apocalyptic tradition required a conjuring, wise, intuitive, violent and triumphant leader. Nelson fulfilled some of those expectations. A high conception of his destiny in life, and of his relationship to the cosmic and the divine, was not alien to him. In his youth he had experienced precisely a visionary understanding of what that role was. In mid-1776, as a 17-year-old on board the Dolphin , desperately thin, only just emerging from a life-threatening attack of malaria, he had experienced an extraordinary visitation, a moment of understanding:

I felt impressed with an idea that I should never rise in my profession. My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount and the little interest [meaning connections within the navy] I possessed. I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie, in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patron. My mind exulted in the idea. ‘Well then,’ I exclaimed, ‘I will be a hero, and confiding in Providence I will brave every danger.’

Then, as Clarke and McArthur, his first biographers, who heard this story from a friend of his, Richard Bulkeley, in Ludlow, went on: ‘The spirit of Nelson revived; and from that hour in his mind’s eye, as he often declared to Captain Hardy, a radiant orb was suspended which urged him onward to renown.’

Robert Southey glossed it still further, saying that Nelson

knew to what the previous state of dejection was to be attributed; that an enfeebled body, and a mind depressed, had cast this shade over his soul; but he always seemed willing to believe that the sunshine which succeeded bore with it a prophetic glory, and that the light which led him on was ‘light from heaven’.

The overlapping tissues of belief, expectation, reinterpretation, self-aggrandisement and wish-fulfilment are subtly layered here. Stripped to essentials, though, Nelson felt led onwards through his fighting life by a prophetic and visionary fire. He, like Southcott and the others, called to England. He too was the friend of all. He too saw himself standing on a stage, habitually referring to himself in the third person. He too was calm in the face of danger and catastrophe and accepted the working of destiny as a fact of existence. He too presided over events of devastating and bloody violence. He too called on God as his guide and witness, far more often, to judge by the correspondence preserved in the Admiralty files, than any of his fellow flag officers. Nelson’s heroic conception of himself was, on one level, as the prophetic agent of apocalypse and millennium.

England by 1805 was certainly drenched in that imagery. The angel of rage and the tradition of justified wrath had become commonplaces of the English mind. Nelson fulfilled the expectations of an archetype. His sense of daring and the totality in his style of battle; his understanding of the need for destruction as a route to creation; the acceptance of self-sacrifice; his portrayal of the enemy as profoundly wicked; his ideal of England as a place of beauty and goodness: all of that fuelled his immense popularity at home. He seemed to fulfil the archetype which a national mood had prepared for him. In England, there was a need for a hero like him who was a saviour, a man not from the established ruling class but outside it, sharing its patrician grace, but a less distant and more demotic figure than that. The figure of ‘Nelson’, the fleet-burning conjuror of victory, in some ways described and in some ways floated free of the anxious, methodical, endlessly attentive, systematic and careful man that Horatio Nelson, like many other naval officers, actually was. Even in the weeks before Trafalgar, informed opinion protested at this singling out of Nelson by the populace. The Naval Chronicle , in its issue for July and August 1805, regretted ‘that ill-judged, and over-weening popularity, which tends to make another Demi-god of Lord Nelson, at the expense of all other officers in the service, many of whom possess equal merit, and equal abilities, and equal gallantry.’

Any description of Trafalgar cannot confine itself to the facts of rigging and armament, weather and weight of broadside. Other, less material expectations are just as potent a presence in battle as the concrete realities of a ship in action. This book addresses that underlayer, the subtlest and slipperiest of historical levels: pre-conceptions, and the way they shape present behaviour. It is an attempt to describe the mental landscape of the people who fought and commanded at one of the great battles in history and it asks, in particular, why and how the idea of the hero flowered here.