Trafalgar then & now.

The many celebrations of the bicentenary of Admiral Lord Nelson's death at the battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805 tell us much about how Britons view themselves in the early twenty-first century. No one has waited until the autumn itself for the festivities to start; they are already in full swing. Yet there is also a tangible sense of atavism, yearning, and perhaps even sorrow about the anniversary, for the way it italicizes the contrast between Britain's former naval greatness and national heroism and her present unprecedented maritime weakness.

Nothing highlighted this so forcibly as the International Naval Review on June 28, when the Queen reviewed 167 ships anchored off Portsmouth. When her grandfather, King George V, reviewed the fleet there for his Silver Jubilee in 1935, there were 160 warships present, every single one of them from the Royal Navy. This June, ships from thirty-five foreign countries had to make up the numbers because the Royal Navy is now far too small to be able to mount a review on its own. It could not even furnish the largest vessel, which was the 223-yard-long French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. The Queen reviewed the fleets not from her own yacht, which was scrapped by John Major's government, but instead from the Antarctic survey ship HMS Endurance.

For the first time in modern history, the French navy is larger in terms of tonnage, manpower, and firepower than the Royal Navy. Writing to the French ambassador Count Sebastiani in January 1840, Lord Palmerston, then the British foreign secretary, said, "Public opinion and ministerial responsibility will never allow an English government, whether it is Whig or Tory, to allow our active fleet to be in a minority with the French Fleet, either in time of Peace or in time of War." He could not, however, have foreseen the prospect of a New Labour government.

Of course, the thirty-three ships of the French and Spanish fleets at the battle of Trafalgar were also larger in terms of tonnage, manpower, and firepower (though crucially not rates of fire) than the twenty-seven ships of the Royal Navy, but the Admiralty Board of those days was not continually seeking ways to cut back on naval expenditure. On July 6, with the Fleet Review safely over, Britain's defense secretary, John Reid, announced that from the end of 2005 there will be only one frigate or destroyer on patrol in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean instead of the two that have hitherto been involved in counter-terrorism patrols and in protecting shipping in the narrow Gulf waterway. The very day after the government announced this cutback in the war against terror, four suicide bombers killed fifty-six people in London and injured over 700 more. For all the defiant statements made after those atrocities, the government is cutting back on the Navy's anti-terrorism capability.

With the fleet being reduced from thirty-one frigates and destroyers to a mere twenty-five by New Labour, Britain is at her weakest in terms of relative sea power than at any time since the reign of Henry VIII, the monarch who built the modern Royal Navy. There are more admirals on the Service List today than there are warships in commission, and the vessel that is assigned to the Atlantic Patrol Task North, which takes part in the fight against the Caribbean drug trade, will now only be on station between July and October, rather than all the year round. With one of our three aircraft carriers, HMS Invincible, being withdrawn from regular service six months earlier than planned, and HMS Ark Royal in refit, it is doubtful that the Falklands operation could be restaged were Argentina ever to reinvade Las Malvinas.

Rightfully, this sad tale did not put off the crowds of over a quarter of a million people from watching the International Fleet Review in the Solent on June 28, but there was another cringe-making aspect of modem-day Britain to come. In order to save the French and Spanish participants in the Review any embarrassment at having been defeated two hundred years ago, the reenactment of the battle was fought not between the British and Combined Fleets, but between what were euphemistically dubbed the red and blue fleets. Although an actor playing Nelson, with eye patch and empty shirtsleeve, was rowed on board the sailing ship representing HMS Victory, for reasons of political correctness the Navy organizers did not want formally to identify the reenactment as actually being of Trafalgar itself. "I didn't want to go in for some great triumphalist gesture," said the First Sea Lord, Sir Alan West. The Queen was able to visit Washington during the Fourth of July bicentennial in 1976, which represented the loss of a great empire for Britain, yet the French were not deemed ready to come to terms with the commemoration of a lost battle.

As Lord Nelson's and Emma Hamilton's great-great-great-granddaughter Anna Tribe, aged seventy-five, pointed out, "The idea is silly. The French and Spanish are adult enough to appreciate we did win that battle." Sure enough, when the French rear-admiral who commands the Charles de Gaulle was asked about the result of 1805, he merely gave a classic Gallic shrug and talked about future naval cooperation with NATO, as one might expect. With political correctness running rampant through the British education system, however, one wonders how long it will be before schoolchildren are taught a history curriculum that is designed not to offend our European partners. The Battle of Waterloo, teachers will one day tell their pupils, was fought between the red and the blue armies.

Much more heartening has been the way that British publishing has risen to the opportunities offered by the bicentenary. Some truly first-class books have been released this year, featuring, inter alia, over five hundred unpublished letters written by Nelson; a quite superb new biography of Nelson by Roger Knight; an insightful cultural appreciation of the battle by Adam Nicolson; The Trafalgar Companion, a fine standard history of the day itself edited by Alexander Stillwell; and good biographies of some of Nelson's band of brothers, such as Cuthbert Collingwood by Max Adams and Philip Durham by Hilary Rubinstein. These will doubtless be the longest lasting of the bicentenary's legacies, and they are a tribute to the present vigor and scholarship of British history writing.

In addition to publishing, the auction industry has cashed in successfully on the bicentenary. Descendants of Trafalgar survivors, especially those of Nelson's captains, have been waiting, in some cases for years, for this opportunity to sell off their Nelsonia. The results have been spectacular. In Edinburgh, a letter from Nelson referring to his perfect recovery after losing his right arm fetched 42,000 [pounds sterling], ten times its estimate. At Bonhams auction in London, in July, the lots fetched a total of 1.8 million [pounds sterling], achieving five world-record prices. A cased Lloyd's Patriotic Fund Trafalgar Sword that had been awarded to Charles Tyler, captain of HMS Tonnant, fetched 179,200 [pounds sterling], and the Naval Gold Medal awarded to Captain Eliab Harvey of HMS Temeraire fetched 95,200 [pounds sterling]. A silver meat dish and a silver plate from Nelson's dinner service at the Nile campaign fetched 60,000 [pounds sterling] and 26,400 [pounds sterling], respectively. On October 19, Christie's will hold a special auction of pictures, objets, manuscripts, locks of hair, medals, arms, and militaria associated with Nelson and Napoleon, which will include a set of the battle orders for Trafalgar personally signed by Nelson. On a more modest scale, the Christie's estimate for a letter signed by Nelson to one of his captains, William Bedford, about two other admirals, for one of whom he stood as character witness in a manslaughter charge over a duel, is only 3,000 [pounds sterling].

The veneration of objects relating to the battle has been taken to its logical, triumphant conclusion at the magnificent "Napoleon and Nelson" exhibition at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, which lasts until November 13 and includes the musket ball that killed Nelson (visibly dented where it hit his bones) as well as the blood-stained breeches in which he died (cut open to the groin by his surgeon William Beatty). There is also Napoleon's absurdly extravagant Egyptian-style hooded cape and the rest of the clothes Nelson was wearing when he was shot, along with his bloodstained purse, his pigtail, Beatty's manuscript account of the death, and Napoleon's surrender letter--all lovingly preserved.

According to recent surveys, fewer than half of British eleven- to eighteen-year-olds know that Nelson sailed in HMS Victory at Trafalgar. One hopes that by the end of this bicentennial year that proportion will be far higher. Winston Churchill once minuted his education secretary R. A. Butler: "How do you make children more patriotic? Tell them Wolfe took Quebec." The same thing can be achieved by teaching them that Nelson, even at the cost of his own life, won Trafalgar. Monthly magazines like History Today, Literary Review, and BBC History have all done their bit to educate Britons by putting large pictures of Nelson on their front covers, advertising important articles about him within.

Nevertheless, British daily newspaper journalism would not be the perverse and argumentative phenomenon it is unless somebody attempted to decry all this veneration of Nelson and Trafalgar. Sure enough, there have been some attempts to introduce such jarring notes into the festivities. An article in The Times by the historian Ben Macintyre in June was wittily entitled "Nelson: Enough Blind-Hero Worship." This pointed out how monumentally vain Nelson was, how he was the first self-made super-celebrity of modern times (a precursor of Diana, Princess of Wales), and how he treated his wife badly. Most of what Macintyre wrote was fair and factual, although it was too much to say that Nelson's blind eye and missing arm were a crucial part of the brand, considering that Nelson could hardly have sprouted new ones. The only truly substantial criticism Macintyre made was that Nelson was guilty of a war crime in hanging ninety-nine Neapolitan rebels in 1799, after they had been given safe passage.

More tendentious was the author Adam Nicolson's attack on the International Fleet Review as glorifying Trafalgar in an unacceptable way. Writing in The Guardian, Nicolson--himself the author of an excellent new book about the battle--argued that what he called "today's jamboree down at Portsmouth" should not have been staged because Trafalgar was a horrific, bloody occasion on which thousands of people died. He asked whether we would celebrate the battle of Passchendaele in the same festive manner. The answer, of course, is that while there are people alive today whose fathers and grandfathers fought at Passchendaele, no one knows anyone who fought at Trafalgar, or indeed probably anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone. So the analogy breaks down, and with it Nicolson's moral point. We are celebrating the moment when Britons knew for sure that the country was safe from invasion and subjugation by a murderous and tyrannical foreign empire: thus, festivities are wholly in order.

And what celebrations there shall be! Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip will be dining with all the surviving First Sea Lords of her reign in the captain's cabin of HMS Victory on Trafalgar Day itself, Friday, October 21, the same evening that literally hundreds of dinners, great and small, will be taking place up and down the country to toast the Immortal Memory of the greatest military hero of our long island history. That night there will hardly be a sober breath drawn by any Briton who has any patriotism in his soul, let alone any seafaring connections. Rum will be drunk by those who otherwise rarely touch the stuff.

Special Trafalgar exhibitions are being staged in the Norfolk Nelson Museum (Great Yarmouth), the Royal Naval Museum (Portsmouth), the Nelson Museum (Monmouth), the Maritime Museum (Bucklers Hard), the National Fishing Heritage Centre (Great Grimsby), and the Australian National Museum. Scores of conferences are being organized by Portsmouth, Greenwich, Exeter and Oxford Universities, the Institute of Historical Research, the Royal Society of Medicine, the 1805 Club, the Nelson Society, the Society for Nautical Research, the British Academy, and so on. A sequence of bell-ringing in churches will begin in New Zealand on Trafalgar day and will be taken up as dawn breaks in Australia, then South Africa, then Gibraltar. The English-speaking peoples intend to celebrate this bicentenary with gusto.

Of course, if the British are accused of venerating and being fascinated by Nelson in this bicentenary year, it is small beer besides the obsession the French have had for Napoleon every year since his fall in 1815. Here is the new French premier, the notoriously Anglophobic and anti-American Dominique de Villepin--who has written a book about Napoleon--writing about the Elysee palace in his 2002 work The Cry of the Gargoyle:

   Napoleon and de Gaulle still haunt these
   walls. At this late time of night, I feel their
   breath in the office which was once the chapel
   of one of them during the Hundred Days and
   the council chamber of the other at the beginning
   of the Fifth Republic.

Elsewhere in his book, which is full of the kind of prose-poetry verbiage that no Anglo-Saxon politician could ever get away with without facing coruscating ridicule, de Villepin writes things like "France is a large old oak tree, flail of everlasting sap," "The man free of baggage walks along the horizon, eating the dust and the sky, forever watching out with his black eyes for the call of the god within himself," and (my personal favorite):

   Let us stop drinking from the everlasting
   waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia
   those who want to quench their thirst, and let
   us dare to taste those fresh waters that run
   from the lake of Memory as the words say on
   the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus,
   that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending
   reincarnation.

France might well be a large old oak tree full of everlasting sap, but her prime minister is full of something that rhymes with it.

Overall, Britain can be very proud of the way she is commemorating one of her most sublime victories, and the death of one of her greatest military heroes. Although it was, ironically enough, the French who preserved our sovereign independence earlier this year by voting NO in the European constitution referendum on May 28, the tangible sense of patriotism engendered by the Trafalgar bicentenary reassures us that, if we had only been given the chance, Britons would have done the same by an even bigger margin. The only sadness is that, given the unrelenting Treasury pressures on the Royal Navy over the last two decades, on October 21, we will have to sing about how Britannia rules the waves with a decided sense of irony, nostalgia, and betrayal.