Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero. Adam Nicolson

      It is an analogy that is everywhere in the navy. Lord Barham, First Lord of the Admiralty, a carping, wheedling, occasionally intemperate and unattractive man, who never hesitated to wag the finger, nor remind his superiors of the length, intensity and importance of his labours, who congratulated himself on ‘having naturally a methodical turn of mind’, saw his job simply as ‘keeping the engine moving’. As he wrote to Pitt on 22 May 1805, ‘I thought it right to lay these few ideas before you, that, if possible, the whole machine should be made to move a little brisker, so as to afford us some prospect of success. We may flatter ourselves, from what has passed, that our skill in the management of ships and the activity and bravery of our seamen will bear us out; it is a fallacy, which will manifest itself in a few months if we are not furnished with men for our ships.’

      Work, business, the oiling of the machine, and the keeping of the wheels turning, the provision of men by the press gangs, of timber, tar, and flax, from America, the Baltic and the Far East: that was Barham’s task. In the making of its ropes, the Royal Navy was thought to consume 14,935 tons of hemp a year. For its sails 95,585 bolts of canvas were required. Barham ensured that teak-built battleships were commissioned in Bombay, and both light frigates and ships-of-the-line from the Russians in the White Sea in Archangel. Supplies of English oak were running desperately thin, as they were all over Europe. Large loads of central and eastern European oak, carted to Baltic ports and then trans-shipped to England, were found on arrival to be useless. The navy surveyors were told they ‘must cordially agree to substituting elm, fir, beech and any other timber for oak, where it can be used.’ England must be scoured, as Barham had written in a memo entitled Forethought and Preparation and ‘Country gentlemen, and others who have small quantities to sell must be canvassed.’ He was keen to show anyone who would listen ‘the advantages of forethought and preparation in every kind of business and more particularly in naval matters. By such means an enemy is overpowered before he can prepare himself.’ His task was ‘to take the whole business upon myself until the machine was set agoing.’ Whoever decides the disposition of forces ‘must be a perfect master of arrangement. Without this, he must be in continual perplexity.’

      Orderliness was in the air. Over 200 English grammars had been published in the second half of the 18th century, by which the wild sprouts of the language were to be disciplined and trained. The water closet with a ball-cock to control the inrush of water into the cistern had been invented in 1778. Public hangings at Tyburn in the west end of London had been done away with in 1783. Branding of criminals had been abolished. The Ordnance Survey, by which every inch of the British Isles was to be precisely triangulated, surveyed and mapped, had been founded in 1793. Income tax had been imposed by Pitt for the first time in 1798. Deduction at source had followed two years later. The first National Census had been conducted in 1801. A year later Thomas Telford had spanned the Thames in one leap with the new London Bridge. In 1803 Luke Howard had named the clouds for the first time. The numbering of London houses became compulsory in 1805. In January 1806, on station off the coast of South America, Captain Francis Beaufort developed the first version of the Beaufort scale by which, ever since, wind has been calibrated in precise increments.

      The entire value system of a figure such as Barham was based not on the Nelsonian virtues of dash, inspiration and the heroic but on understanding, reason, clarity and order. Barham’s cousin and predecessor at the Admiralty Lord Melville had declared that his purpose was ‘to know with perfect accuracy the real state of the British navy as it now stands, with reference as well to the immediate calls upon it, as with a view to its progressive improvement to meet future contingencies. It is my duty to communicate the result of my investigation, for the information of his Majesty and his confidential servants.’ Latinate, explicit, attentive, prospective, urgent: this language forms the essential bedrock on which the fleets of 1805, the victory at Trafalgar and the 19th-century idea of the English hero were all laid.

      It was, at some intuitive level, an appreciation of the fleet which had penetrated deep into English national consciousness. The navy was beautiful, substantial, orderly and English. Wordsworth would stand on the Dorset shore and stare, as his sister Dorothy wrote to their brother, ‘at the West India fleet sailing in all its glory.’ William Cobbett, as a boy, had felt his entire sense of being shift into another plane when, in the 1770s,

      from the top of Portsdown, I, for the first time, beheld the sea, and no sooner did I behold it than I wished to be a sailor. But it was not the sea alone that I saw: the grand fleet was riding at anchor at Spithead. I had heard of the wooden walls of Old England: I had formed my ideas of a ship, and of a fleet; but what I now beheld, so far surpassed what I had ever been able to form a conception of, that I stood lost between astonishment and admiration. I had heard talk of all the glorious deeds of our admirals and sailors [which] good and true Englishmen never fail to relate to their children about a hundred times a year. The sight of the fleet brought all these into my mind in confused order, it is true, but with irresistible force. My heart was inflated with national pride. The sailors were my countrymen; the fleet belonged to my country, and surely I had my part in it, and in all its honours…