Free Men of Honour by Adam Nicolson

the British and American orthodoxy. ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,’ Smith wrote, ‘but from the regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but their self-love.’
    This legitimising and release of a surging hunger to excel, to achieve and to satisfy the self, was a critical part of the British frame of mind in 1805. Nelson had made his instructions to his captains quite clear. He would bring thefleets to battle, but once there, they were to rely on their own zeal. He would create the market, but once it was created he would depend on their enterprise. His captains were to see themselves as the entrepreneurs of battle. In Nelson’s secret memorandum, written on board Victory on 9 October 1805, a fortnight before the battle and circulated to his captains, he makes this explicit. He describes how they are to attack in the columns in which they have been sailing, but
Something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a Sea Fight beyond all others. Shot will carry away the masts and yards of friends as well as foes…Captains are to look to their particular Line as their rallying point. But, in case Signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an Enemy.
    That is the essence of Trafalgar: the liberation of individual energies to ensure victory. The battle is founded on a clear commercial analogy. Trafalgar worked according to the basic principle enunciated by Adam Smith that the individual’s uncompromising pursuit of the end that will satisfy him will also serve the general good. What is good for one is good for all and a fleet which promotes and relies on individual zeal will be more likely to achieve a productive end than one controlled by a single deciding government or admiral.
    While the French fleet was acting to an authoritarian pattern (Napoleon had forbidden Villeneuve to tell his captains at any stage what the grand strategy might be) and the Spanish to an aristocratic one, the British mentality and tactics were bourgeois and market-liberal to the core. Edmund Burke, the great anti-revolutionary orator, and defender of English gradualism, had put into a singlesentence the factors underlying this drive. ‘The laws of commerce,’ Burke had told the House of Commons, ‘are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.’ There was no arguing with them.
    As these 47,000 men are moving inexorably towards battle, with the wind on their cheeks wafting them towards the fight, it seems clear that the new, commercial, selfmotivating and wage-based conception of the self which the changes in Britain had created over the previous century was the key factor lying behind the extraordinary winning power of the British Royal Navy. Compared with the fixed peasant/aristocratic mentalities of the Spanish crews and the uncomfortable mix of ancient and modern in the French, it was the commercial form of English life that made them into better fighters and killers. Nelson’s fleet carried a capitalist charge.
    Soon after eight o’clock that morning, with the two columns of the British fleet slowly growing on the western horizon, Villeneuve was faced with a decision. The Combined Fleet, still making efforts to get into line of battle, with many ships still out of place and out of order, were heading southeast for the Strait of Gibraltar. The French frigate Hermione , on station to the west, made another signal to Villeneuve: ‘The enemy number twenty-seven sail of the line’. From his own quarter-deck on the Bucentaure , he still could not see them but this was more than he had reckoned. He knew, from interrogating the neutral merchantmen that had made their way into Cadiz, that the British fleet contained several three-deckers, all of them heavyweight punchers, and despite his own numerical