Nelson's Battles. Nicholas Tracy
conjecture, but it is significant that Emma was more than happy to oblige in this respect.
In December 1795 Admiral Sir John Jervis succeeded to the Command in Chief of the Mediterranean station. He was a commander to Nelson’s exacting standards, and in Nelson he recognised a subordinate of the highest capacity. On their first meeting in January 1796 Jervis offered Nelson promotion to Rear Admiral, if approved by the Admiralty, and an immediate promotion to the post of Commodore, which was then a temporary rank.
Nelson’s service with the Mediterranean fleet was important to his later triumphs because he experienced Jervis’s methods of discipline, and of fleet management. Jervis was a very strict disciplinarian, but his severity was all directed to the goal of conditioning officers and men for combat, and training the fleet for action in all weathers. Conditions of service at the end of the eighteenth century had grown increasingly hard, and the French Revolution stood as an awful warning of the consequences of the breakdown of authority. Irish nationalism added to the discontent in a fleet manned with pressed men of whom many were Irish. In the summer of 1797 the discontent was to turn to mutiny at the fleet anchorages at Spithead off Portsmouth, and the Nore in the Thames estuary. The Spithead mutineers, who would certainly now be thought of as taking highly responsible collective action and who were careful to leave no one exposed to reprisal, succeeded in their demands for improved conditions, and received a royal pardon. Those at the Nore were more isolated, the mutiny was crushed, and the men who had allowed themselves to appear as leaders were hanged. There was to be no mass mutiny in Admiral Jervis’s command, however, because he resolutely stamped out any sign of disaffection, and because he took good care to look after his men’s health.
Courts martial became a regular occurrence on the ships which were sent out to join his command in the months after the mutiny, and when the death sentence was passed it was always carried out. Jervis once ordered four mutineers hanged on a Sunday to demonstrate his determination, and sent home Vice Admiral Charles Thompson when he protested at the profanation of the Sabbath. He always obliged the condemned man’s mess-mates to carry out the execution, and ordered that two armed marines from each ship be sent to ensure that it was carried out. This fierce control was matched by a no less fierce insistence that the ships and supplies sent to him should be in a condition fit for service, and for consumption. It was Jervis’s training that made the officers who were to be Nelson’s band of brothers at the battle of the Nile.
The general action under Hotham was the first in which Nelson had held command. From that date, however, his career was to be meteoric. Agamemnon was worn out with service, many of her original crew had been dispersed, and Nelson was persuaded to hoist his new pendant on the 74-gun Captain. As her captain, and commodore, he was to establish his reputation so convincingly at the battle of Cape St Vincent that a year later he was appointed over the heads of more senior officers to command the detached force with which he annihilated the French Mediterranean fleet at the battle of the Nile.
Sea Power
Nelson is remembered for the battles he fought, and for the tactics he used which made the best use of the high morale he inspired in the officers and men of his ships. To a considerable extent because of Nelson’s successes, great battles came to be regarded as so self-evidently the means of winning wars that they virtually became an end in themselves. When in 1902 the Admiralty prepared a ‘Memorandum on Sea-Power and the Principles Involved’ for the Imperial Conference, they advised the Dominion leaders that:
To any naval Power the destruction of the fleet of the enemy must always be the great object aimed at…. In the foregoing remarks the word defence does not appear. It is omitted advisedly, because the primary object of the British Navy is not to defend anything, but to attack the fleets of the enemy, and, by defeating them, to afford protection to British Dominions, supplies and commerce. This is the ultimate aim.37
Great victories can be sterile, however, or even counter-productive – the Pyrrhic victory of classical times. The task of the fleets Nelson commanded was fundamentally that of supporting the foreign policy of the British government in peace and war. If war could not be avoided it had to be won, but battles were only a means to that end. As battlefleet commander on detached service, Nelson was well aware, as the Prussian General Von Clausewitz was to write a few years after Nelson’s death, that ‘war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means’.38
During the eighteenth century the French navy had gradually developed a strategic modus operandi that largely sought to avoid battle. The task of French fleets was to mount enough of a threat that invasion of France became a difficult operation, and to maintain contact with French garrisons in America and Asia. Generally, these purposes could be undertaken while avoiding battle. Besides those defensive necessities, the French navy had a tradition of supporting the efforts of privateers who sought to make a profit out of naval war. This objective could be served by the maintenance of forces ‘in being’, safe in defended harbours. Because they might sortie at any time, Britain was obliged to keep her fleets in tactical formations ready for battle. Offensive use of the French navy to escort troop carriers, for invasion of the British Isles or other states, posed a greater risk of battle. There was always the hope, however, that clever deployments might enable the navy to evade British defences. This was Napoleon’s intention when he took an army to invade Egypt in 1798, and during the following years when he sought to concentrate Franco-Spanish naval forces for the invasion of England. His commanders were under instruction to avoid battle unless the odds were very much in their favour.
The incentive to avoid battle was great because France, although a richer country than Britain, had to devote resources to the defence of her borders with continental neighbours. The French navy never had the same claim on the treasury as did the British navy. Furthermore, the fact that pre-revolutionary France did not give political power to the bourgeoisie ensured that they were unwilling to pay the taxes needed to support a fleet capable of seeking a quick decision in battle. Navies are capital-intensive institutions, and depended more on a money economy than did unmechanised armies. The revolution changed the political structure of France, but a partnership between commerce and government could not be created instantly. When Napoleon came to power he employed the French navy in a traditional strategy of manoeuvre while avoiding battle unless circumstances were ideal.
The naval potential of Britain was greater than was that of France for several reasons. Perhaps most important was the respected position commercial interests held in British society, unlike the situation in absolutist France. The partnership between businessmen, the aristocracy and government meant that there was more money in circulation in Britain even though its total economy was smaller than was that of France. The important role of the House of Commons in British government, and the presence of trading interests in the House, meant that it was easier for British administrations to raise tax revenue to pay for the navy which benefited all, but especially the monied interests. In the middle of the eighteenth century Parliament was even willing to permit the administration to run a debt for the maintenance of the navy, which periodically Parliament was asked to pay off. In effect, Parliament was willing to trust the administration with a blank cheque for the support of the navy.
The trading community in Britain supported the largest mercantile marine in the world, with the largest number of sailors. This made it possible for Britain to maintain in wartime the largest fleet. The availability of sailors was the true test of the capacity of a nation to keep a fleet at sea. In the Seven Years War Britain had been able to raise 84,770 sailors to man about 129 ships of the line, and in the following decades those numbers were used as benchmarks of the total naval effort of which Britain was capable.39 In 1795 the British battle fleet listed 123 ships of the line, and in 1805 that number had been pushed up to 135, but to do so conditions of service were made so hard that it led to the 1797 general mutiny at the fleet anchorages of Spithead and the Nore.40
The principal restraint on Britain’s capacity to man her fleet was the means of recruitment. Britons cherished the personal liberties that had been established over the centuries. As a consequence, they were not willing to see the development of a methodical system of conscription. The result, perversely, was that wartime recruitment was left on the basis of medieval concepts of compulsory service, which by the eighteenth