Men of Honour (16 page)

This may well be the old admiral flirting outrageously with the most beautiful woman in Europe, but it is clear that this medievalist talk did not seem absurd at the time. The Middle Ages, above all else, embodied both honour and a conception of England which went beyond the compromises and tricksy dealing of its modern commercial culture. The all-powerful presence of that new, rampant bourgeois culture of course created the appetite for something which stood outside it. The fantasy of an honourable medieval purity lay conveniently to hand, almost as a form of pastoral, a place where morality was still clear and duty obvious. It seems at times that the navy itself, for all its rapaciousness, tedium and dangers, represented to its officers a place apart from the modern world of getting and spending, a place of innocence, where honour still lived.

Nelson was entranced with the medieval. Again and again he quoted from the battle speeches of
Henry V
, the great 15th-century warrior and self-dramatising man of honour. The very phrase the ‘Band of Brothers', which he used to describe the captains who fought with him in the Mediterranean, was drawn from it. And he misquotes
Henry V in a way that measures the role of honour in his own mind. Writing to St Vincent in September 1801, Nelson, already a peer and the holder of three battle medals, says, in the unequivocal way which was his habit and one of the foundations of his charm:

I feel myself, my dear Lord, as anxious to get a medal, or a step in the Peerage as if I had never got either,—for ‘if it be a sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive'.

That, Nelson thinks, is a quotation from the words Shakespeare gave to King Harry. But it is not. As part of the great St Crispin's Day speech to his cousin Westmoreland, Shakespeare in fact wrote:

But if it be a sin to covert honour,

I am the most offending soul alive.

Honour and glory have become inseparable and interchangeable in Nelson's mind. Glory is inaccessible without honour; honour is the foundation of the glorious. The speech as a whole, which portrays itself as the thinking of a medieval king, is in fact founded on a new, post-medieval conception of honour. For Shakespeare's Henry, as for Nelson and the other officers in his fleet, honour is not a question of social rank but an amalgam of daring, fame, and manliness. As King Henry says, the man who fought at Agincourt, (no class or social status attached) will

strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin's day'…
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speak
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

That is a speech Nelson undoubtedly knew by heart and it would serve as a guidebook to the place of honour in the British fleet at Trafalgar. It thrives on manliness and companionship. It substitutes valour, or perhaps honour, for rank. As a speech, it is physical, engorged and primitive. There is a latent sexuality in it, circling around the ideas of manliness and manhood, of men who can ‘stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood', disparaging those now lying flaccid in bed in England, but celebrating their own potency, imposing themselves and their honour on the world abroad.

One word glows out of it: ‘England', the name not of the increasingly efficient, ruthless modern state which paid for the fleet at Trafalgar, which is Britain; but of the pre-existent, half-fantasy kingdom of medieval honour which embodied not the grubby commercial ambitions of the modern country, but the higher ideals to which this fleet aspired.
Henry V
is full of this imagined ‘England': ‘Now all the youth of England are on fire,' ‘And you good yeomen,/Whose limbs were made in England, show us here/The mettle of your pasture.' This England, in a play about the ruthless and at times deeply disturbing pursuit of fiercely destructive and yet honourable ends by war, is what motivates the single most famous moment on the morning of Trafalgar.

Nelson had been below in his cabin. When he returned to the quarter-deck the enemy were little more than two miles away to the east-southeast. Nelson spoke to Lieutenant John Pasco, the flag lieutenant on
Victory
, returned to
duty after his bout of sickness. As an old man in the 1840s, Pasco described the scene to Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas:

His Lordship came up to me on the poop, and after ordering certain signals to be made, about a quarter to noon, he said, ‘Mr Pasco, I wish to say to the fleet, “England confides that every man will do his duty”;' and he added, ‘you must be quick for I have one more to make, which is for Close Action.' I replied, ‘If your Lordship will permit me to substitute the
expects
for
confides
the signal will soon be completed, because the word
expects
is in the vocabulary, and
confides
must be spelt'. His Lordship replied in haste, and with seeming satisfaction, ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly.'

Nelson's instinct for ‘confides' rather than ‘expects' was right. To ‘expect' is to command but to ‘confide' is to trust. It is the binding word, it represents the community of honour, and the mythical ‘England' to which it appeals is a place where duty is a matter of trust, not of instruction or obedience. But the heart of the idea survived the translation into flags. ‘England', not ‘Britain'; ‘duty', not ‘obedience'; and ‘every man', not ‘every officer and man' as Henry Blackwood remembered it: a summation of Nelson's method of command, founded on inspiration, rigour, and inclusiveness, the three elements of the modern notion of honour.

The working admiral, conscious that time is short, accepted the compromise and the famous signal was made with the flag signalling system developed by Sir Home Popham. ‘England', ‘expects', ‘every', ‘man', ‘will', ‘do' and ‘his' all had a designated flag. ‘Duty' was spelled out with flags 4, 21, 19 and 24, and, ship by ship, the British fleet—not English: at least a third of the officers and a higher proportion of the men came from Scotland, Wales, Ireland
and abroad—gave three cheers as the message was conveyed. Collingwood at first complained that Nelson was signalling too much. They all knew what to do. But when he was read the meaning of the signal, he too welcomed it. In the violence to come, the necklace of ideas represented by ‘England', ‘expectation', ‘manhood' and ‘duty' would sustain a fleet in the horror and grief that would surround them.

October 21st 1805
11.30 am to 12 midday

Distance between fleets: 2 miles—1 mile
Victory
's heading and speed: 101° at 3 knots

Love: to regard with passionate affection; to regard with the affection of a friend.
S
AMUEL
J
OHNSON
,
A Dictionary of the English Language
, 1755

Three ships behind the
Victory
, just astern of Fremantle in the
Neptune
, was the
Leviathan
, the ship-of-the-line which had shepherded Coleridge's convoy to Malta the year before. The ship was ready for battle. Hammocks had been stowed in the netting alongside the upper decks, soft bulwarks to absorb musket balls. Other nets had been spread above the deck and poop to catch falling debris. Further anti-boarding nets had been rigged up. Cabins had been dismantled to give a clear run from stem to stern on the gundecks. Furniture had been stowed far below in the hold, thrown overboard or hauled up into the rigging. Animals were usually slaughtered, sent down to the hold, or in a crisis also thrown into the sea. Nelson had at times on a chase in the Mediterranean pushed bullocks overboard to lighten the ship and to clear them out of the way. This morning off Cape Trafalgar,
Leviathan'
s goat
was explicitly saved from any such fate by her captain, 39-year-old Henry Bayntun.

He too brought a version of England to the battle. Bayntun was an immensely experienced officer, who had spent most of his life since he was in his early teens at sea in the West Indies, a career full of danger and aggression. He is a forgotten figure now but Nelson knew him and trusted him; they had been watching the Toulon fleet for many months together (British sailors called it ‘Too-Long') and in pursuit of Villeneuve's fleet in the summer of 1805 they had crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic together. Nelson had defended him against some aspersions from the Admiralty, calling him an ‘excellent officer' and ‘extremely correct and proper'.

It would be easy enough to consider him, from these facts alone, as little but a hardened warrior. His personal papers are now preserved among the Bedfordshire County Records and from them a subtler picture emerges. They include his annotated copy of
A Treatise on Practical Navigation and Seamanship
by William Nichelson, published in 1792. Nichelson was Master Attendant at Portsmouth and from time to time Bayntun has written ‘Note!' in the margins of this standard work. The emphasis of what Bayntun—the son of the Consul-General at Algiers—marked was consistently towards the need for an understanding of the general shared humanity on board a warship. Order was necessary; without order the great machine would not work; but subject to that order, all were men and all should be treated as human beings. ‘There is a sort of doctrine,' Nichelson had written,

which I hope will never gain credit in the service, and which cannot be too much discountenanced or reprobated, which is, that it is possible to be a good Officer without being a good Seaman, which
I positively deny, it being a flat contradiction of reason and common sense; I believe it to be generally favoured by those Officers who came too late into the service to be initiated into a Seaman's duty; wishing at once to become officers, they were perhaps placed to command, instead of being placed in the tops, or other parts of the ship to be taught a sailor's duty.

Bayntun drew asterisks in the margins next to this passage. It is a measure, for all the distinctions of rank, of the communality in the British man-of-war. The form of organic order on which such a ship relies is in fact dependent on recognising that communality:

There is a confidence also which the men have in their commander; when they find he is a seaman, the duty is carried on with a good will and a steady chearfulness because they know he is a competent judge of all that can be expected in the performance of their duty.

Only when that sharedness is absent does the system disintegrate. It is not that sailors are the usual run of men. They are not like soldiers, ‘since any able bodied landsman will make a soldier, a plowman taken from the plough today, in two or three months may be made a good soldier.' But a seaman ‘should be understood to be quite different from all other classes of men, he does not spring up like a
Mushroom
, it requires many years to make him a seaman, with fatigue both of body and mind.'

That is why naval officers needed to be seamen first and officers second: if an officer does not truly know the ways of a ship, he will be deceived and cheated at every turn. And if he doesn't know what to expect, he will punish unfairly: ‘how often has it happened, that a whole set of top-men have been flogged because the top-gallant yards have not
been got across so soon as other ships?' Nichelson asked, and Bayntun took due note.

Of all the passages he marked, the most heavily starred was this, a sermon on the nature of shared danger, in which Nichelson rises to some rhetorical heights, emphasising the need for the commander to be a man like other men, and for a single social fabric to cover all parts and all manner of men within the ship:

It is night time, or it is foggy or very hazy weather, that you cannot see the ship's length, which is as bad as if it were night time; under those circumstances the mariner's art, skill and experience are put to the trial, he is loaded with care and anxiety, but this is the time to shew himself a man of experience and true knowledge of his profession, as a Seaman and an Officer, to conduct and govern a ship or ships in such times as those; It is not
hats and periwigs, powdered hair or silk stockings, fribbles or beaux
, that are equal to the task required to be performed at this time, it must be men with heads and brains, the Seaman and the Officer, that must support the man at all times.

These are some of the ideas deep in the pre-conceptions of those on board the British fleet at Trafalgar. It is, for all the severity of its corporal discipline and the essential violence of its methods, a humane world and Henry Bayntun, by the evidence of his own letters was a humane as well as an energetic, resourceful and, in Nelson's word, ‘excellent' man.

When appointed to the frigate
Quebec
in the West Indies in 1799
,
he was, as new captains are, constantly busy perfecting his ship: applying to swap his old-fashioned 6-pounders for the more powerful new man-smashing carronades; changing the way in which the
Quebec
was
ballasted; requiring another officer of marines; writing for a new supply of boys from England as well as a new 8-oared deal cutter instead of a heavy barge; replacing the gun carriages which were unserviceable; stowing the bread in ‘Iron Bound Casks'; commissioning new casks for the all-important scurvy-preventing lime juice; complaining of the lack of onions. He was, as he needed to be, zeal in action and his commanding officers saw the best in him.

From Robert Montague, Admiral

22 Oct 1801 in Port Royal

I desire to know who you wish to have for a Lieutenant and I also desire you will at all times ask, respecting your Officers appointments without any Ceremony as I am sure you will never wish to promote any person who is not Zealous in the public Service & I shall be happy at all times to evince by my Actions, how extremely high I hold your conduct in Estimation.

There is a little Boy named Thomas on board your Ship whose story excites my Compassion, I wish to see him immediately in order to give him a little Money, which perhaps may be acceptable: the Boat shall bring him back.

I am Sir Your Humble Servant Robert Montague, Admiral

When the admiral asked him to inspect the prison and hospital ships in Port Royal in Jamaica, Bayntun was appalled. There was nothing like enough awnings to protect the prisoners when on deck, nor windsails with which to direct breezes down into the foetid spaces below.

Bayntun was horrified to find that half of them were naked, that their guards beat them ‘with more brutality than is absolutely necessary', that there were no safety ropes to prevent them falling down hatchways and that
some of them were so ill fed and emaciated that they were on the point of death.

This is the voice of compassionate humanity confronted with a situation which had probably persisted ever since naval forces had taken prisoners. There were officers who thought ships could be run on kindness, a sin known in the 1805 navy by the significant term ‘fraternizing with the people', as though the lower deck was a form of enemy. It was not to be tolerated and Bayntun was not one of them. He flogged when necessary, and at times more than the regulation maximum of 12 lashes to which a ship's captain was limited. Nevertheless, when humanity was called for, he applied it:

Aug 28 1800

H.M.S.
Quebec
, Port Royal, Jamaica

Richard Wilton a Seaman of the said Ship was sentenced by a Court martial to receive one Hundred & Fifty Lashes for Desertion. He received Seventy Five Shortly after. But from Youth and Delicacy of Constitution could not at that time receive more. His character in other respects stands fair. Has been confined in Harbour and a prisoner at Large at Sea ever since.

And it is significant that among the papers discovered in the attic of his Bedfordshire house when his descendants sold it in the 1950s were both the log and muster book of the
Leviathan
for 1805. These were documents which by law Bayntun should have surrendered to the Admiralty at the end of a voyage but which he had kept. Out of pride? Or affection? It is impossible to say but they remain poignantly evocative documents.

Both are covered in stained and filthy sailcloth,
made into a loose wrap almost like a fitted bag. The grey, coarse-woven covering is spotted with lamp oil and grease from food. Candle wax is dripped all over the cover on which the name of the ship is written in ink in huge Roman capitals.

The log itself is a coarse, working document, each page bearing not only the entries of the officers of the watch, each succeeding the other, but the signs of the weather, sea-splashed, sun-bleached. This morning—and the reality of the moment is never more insistent—there is an air of excitement, repetition and muddle to it:

Light airs and cloudy—at daylight observed the Enemy's fleet to Leeward 35 sail; [
corrected to 33
] bore up, made sail pr sig [
ie per signal
] out first reef Topsails [
ie the full depth of the topsails, the main driving sail of a man-of-war, shaken out to catch the wind
] Cleared for action. At [
illegible
] hours [
illegible
] light airs and cloudy weather. All sail set standing down for the Enemy's Fleet; they consisting of 35 [
changed to 33
] Sail of Line 5 Frigates and 2 Brigs Empd clearing ship for action. In company with 26 [
changed to 27
] sail of the Line 4 frigates and a schooner and Cutter.

One can all too easily imagine Admiral Sir Henry Bayntun, as he was to become, at home with his grandchildren in Bedfordshire, reading out to them from the
Leviathan'
s log of his day of glory. The muster book is its companion, bound and lettered in precisely the same way, the long list of the men with whom Henry Bayntun entered the cockpit of battle. The nominal complement of the ship, subjected to a weekly muster, is 640 people. But for the whole of 1805, there are never more than 515 men on board. The
Leviathan
, like every ship in every navy in the world, was undermanned. Some 180 of them were Irish,
and of them 116 were listed as ‘landmen', or men who had no previous experience of the sea and had been driven on board not by the press gang but by the wages, preferable to the pittance which an Ireland, already moving towards congestion, poverty and starvation, could afford. Apart from them, it was mixture of England, Scotland and a world community: Jamaica, Bermuda, Barbados, men from Bremen, from Norway, a John Ferris from ‘Russia', men from Ostend, Rotterdam, Philadelphia, Boston, Maryland, New York, Marblehead, and a man called Domingo, an armourer's mate, from ‘Bengall'.

Every officer, it was said in the best ships, knew the name of every man. This was no undifferentiated mass of humanity. Every man was allocated a precise task in handling the ship and another precise task in the station he was to take up for battle. Ships carried precise descriptions of each of member of the crew, useful in case of desertion but also in the daily management of a large concentrated body of young men. It may be a step too far to say that Henry Bayntun's keeping of this precious muster book at home was a sign of love but it is at least a sign of attachment to his men.

That method of command was what his men expected. When a commanding officer fell short of that level of humanity, ships complained to the Admiralty. The company of HMS
Terpsichore
presented a petition in about 1800:

We are constantly on deck and beat and kicked about by Captain Mackellar and Mr Hall and the Boatswain now carries a stick cut of rawhide, plaited and served over with tarred twine, with which he cuts and slashes all he come near. We your petitioners have been seven years in this ship and always behaved ourselves as loyal and true-hearted subjects both by sea and land, under Admirals St Vincent and Nelson.

It was in part a question of simple dignity. The men of HMS
Centaur
, lying in Plymouth harbour, complained in 1812:

We the humble petitioners, the crew of His majesty's ship the
Centaur
beg leave to inform you of doleful complaints. The first act of White's cruelty was break up the hogsty and suffer the swine to range the main deck to the annoyance of the crew…

In exposing the private parts of a man's body to public view and flogging on the posterior instead of the back; in terming damned useless trash and degrading us beneath brutes.

We therefore beseech you to extend your lenity to us and disperse us throughout the navy, The divine blessing will be on you for it.