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

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СКАЧАТЬ his ordinariness. It was not unknown to be shot at in London. Horace Walpole, the Prime Minister’s nephew, had to dodge pistol shots in Hyde Park. ‘Anything that looks like a fight,’ one French traveller, Henri Misson, wrote home, a little scandalised, ‘an Englishman considers delicious.’

      They liked to bet on anything. The craze for cricket, which swept the country, was largely fuelled by gambling on the outcome of matches, or even on the turn of a single ball. Twenty thousand people came to see Kent play Hampshire in 1772. Lord Sackville batted for a Kent side captained by Rumney, his head gardener. The delights of risk and chance were high on the list of English pleasures. Between its medieval and its 19th-century proprieties, the English spirit of the 18th century had become astonishingly mobile. They were no longer bound to the land. They had made the great escape from the essentially static patterns of a rural agrarian world and moved into the accelerated, modern rhythms of the commercial, the urban, the industrial and the sudden. ‘Nobody is provincial in this country,’ Louis Simond, a Swiss-American visitor in the first years of the 19th century wrote.

      You meet nowhere with those persons who never were out of their native place, and whose habits are wholly local—nobody above poverty who has not visited London once in his life; and most of those who can do so, visit it once a year. To go up to town from 100 or 200 miles distance, is a thing done on a sudden, and without any previous deliberation. In France the people of the provinces used to make their will before they undertook such an expedition.

      They were, by European standards, strikingly literate. By 1790 there were 14 London morning papers and another in the evening. The first Sunday paper began production in 1799. Papers were read at breakfast and as a result an English tradition had already begun: conversation at breakfast was never ‘of a lively nature’. They were clean and well fed. The Duc de Rochefoucauld considered the English the cleanest people in Europe. They were also immensely sociable, milling through the streets in crowds. ‘I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly thinking there was a mob,’ Horace Walpole wrote, ‘and it was only nymphs and swains, sauntering and trudging.’ It was a harddrinking country. There were 16,000 drink shops in London; William Pitt, who had been administered daily glasses of port as a sickly child, was by the 1790s a fourbottles—a-day man (although the port was not so alcoholic and the bottles smaller than ours.) People horded into taverns, where, according to Dr Johnson, ‘the true felicity of human life’ was to be found. They loved a show. The theatre in Drury Lane held over 3,600 people. George III would read little but King Lear as his own madness came on. Boxers were media stars: Jim Belcher, Dutch Sam, Bill Stevens ‘The Nailer’, Tom Crib and Daniel Mendoza all wrote their boxing memoirs and were feted in the streets. One London show featured Bruising Peg, a woman gladiator, accompanied by Macomo the Nubian lion tamer. In Charlotte Street in London there was a brothel staffed by flagellants. It was the first great age of the hunt, the aristocracy of England pursuing hounds across hedgerows in precisely the way, 150 years later, they would take up skiing.

      This is the other side of the French and Spanish view of the English as rapacious, amoral go-getters. It was, needless to say, only obliquely related to the English view of themselves. They saw themselves as the apostles and champions of freedom, set against the various benighted tyrannies, whether revolutionary or Catholic, which had Europe in their grip. The poet laureate, Henry James Pye, who was only given that title because he was a supporter of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, celebrated the English vision of modern Englishness in his 1798 poem Naucratia: or Naval Dominion. As a good Tory, gazing out over his acres from the beautiful Palladian villa which he built at Faringdon in Oxfordshire, as loyal MP for Berkshire and a vengeful police magistrate for Westminster, said to be ‘destitute alike of poetic feeling or power of expression’, he had embraced the civilising beauties of Britain’s business mission:

      By love of opulence and science led,

      Now commerce wide her peaceful empire spread,

      And seas, obedient to the pilot’s art,

      But join’d the regions which they seem’d to part,

      Free intercourse disarm’d the barbarous mind

      Tam’d hate, and humaniz’d mankind.

      The British warships were not usurping the freedom of the seas; they were establishing it, a maritime, commerceextending force of Roman good. ‘Opulence’ had yet to acquire its derogatory modern note. Wealth was still unequivocally marvellous. Edmund Burke loved to describe the British House of Commons as ‘filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and political distinction, that the country can afford.’ How delicious life was! By the end of the century, a profoundly satisfying complacency had come to settle on British consciousness and the eminently respectable Pye effortlessly embodied it. Not unlike the King he adulated, Henry Pye was the sort of person for whom the Battle of Trafalgar was fought.

      If smugness was widespread, even the self-congratulation of Naucratia does not quite match the breath-taking complacency of some other contemporary propaganda. An anonymous song, published in about 1801, was to be sung in the voice of ‘The Blind Sailor’:

      A splinter knocked my nose off,

      ’My bowsprit’s gone!’ I cries

      ’Yet well it kept their blows off,

      Thank God ‘twas not my eyes.’

      Scarce with these words I outed,

      Glad for my eyes and limbs,

A splinter burst and douted¹

Both my two precious glims.²

      I’m blind and I’m a cripple,

      Yet cheerful would I sing

      Were my disasters triple,

      ’Cause why? ‘twas for my King.’

      However grotesque that kind of statist propaganda might now seem now—and did seem then, to those radicals in England opposed to the war and its savage carelessness with poor men’s lives—there is nevertheless an important point about the degree to which England was prepared, throughout the period from 1689 until 1815, to subscribe to war. Over that period, the country had been at war for more than half the time. The only long gap was the 16 years of Robert Walpole’s consciously peace-seeking administration from 1713 until 1729. Throughout the long 18th century, Britain was either at war, preparing for war or paying off the enormous costs of war. At least three-quarters of all government expenditure during the century had gone on fighting or on paying off the debts which fighting had incurred. In 1793, at a time when the annual tax revenue rarely exceeded £20 million, the national debt stood at £242.9 million. Pitt and his successors taxed and borrowed without hesitation to fight the French. By 1802, when the navy was costing £7 million a year, three times as much was being spent each year on subsidies to Britain’s allies on the European continent. Between 1793 and the end of the war in 1815, the British government raised in taxes, and borrowed from the English people, a total of £1.5 billion, a figure which can safely be multiplied by 60 for its modern equivalent. By the end of the war, the national debt had risen to £745 million, or somewhere near thirty years’ government revenue. Pitt and his successors, in other words, put the country in hock, the most radical national gamble of all, pouring money into ships and allies as though their life depended on it, which it did.

      This is the second critical difference between Britain and her enemies in the Napoleonic wars: not only СКАЧАТЬ