were happy to be taxed on their profits. What they didn’t give the government in tax, they lent it in return for government bonds. The two were connected. Uniquely in Europe, the British government was able to borrow so much from its own people because it was efficient enough at collecting tax to make sure that the annual interest was paid on the loan. It was a particularly English form of consensual government finance, without which the fleet at Trafalgar would have been as poorly equipped as its enemies’. On this consensual basis the British were able to raise far more in tax throughout the 18th century than the French, while still persuading themselves that they were the freest people on the planet.
British government finance was not without its crises but an extraordinary mutuality in the financial relationship of people and government lay behind the British naval victories in their 18th-century wars. And there is a further element to it, which makes the relationship between the British navy and the commercial classes in Britain particularly intimate and mutually sustaining. The navy was largely paid for by indirect taxes on a huge variety of goods and luxuries, from windows to servants, hair powder, nonworking horses, carriages and playing cards, as well as by excise duties levied on imports. The bulk of the tax burden, in other words, fell on the new middle classes as consumers. But the existence of the navy, very much as the great Henry James Pye described it in Naucratia, guaranteed and promoted the creation of a world commercial empire. A navy funded by the middle class and largely officered by the middle class created an empire in which the middle classes thrived. Between 1792 and 1800, the commerce of Great Britain on the seas which its navy controlled increased by an astonishing seven per cent year on year, rising from £44.5 million in 1792 to £73.7 million in 1800. Excise revenues rolled into the British Treasury. ‘If we compare this year of war with former years of peace,’ Pitt told the House of Commons in February 1801,
we shall in the produce of our revenue and in the extent of our commerce behold a spectacle at once paradoxical, inexplicable and astonishing. We have increased our external and internal commerce to a greater pitch than ever it was before; and we may look to the present as the proudest year that has ever occurred for this country.
Trafalgar, a battle fought by trade, for trade and in some ways as trade, might be seen as the first great bourgeois victory of European history, and its heroes as the first great heroes of the British middle class.
There is an important qualification to be made here. The idea of a fleet commanded by members of the British middle class has an implication of settled propriety. But that is an anachronism and something much rawer has to be put in its place. The rampant energy of 18th-century England is founded on the idea of dynamic change. By 1805, the bourgeoisie were only on the cusp of acquiring the strait-laced solidity and evangelical worthiness by which they would come to define themselves in the century that followed. The Georgian bourgeoisie was wilder than that. Tumultuousness, extravagance and flightiness were given full rein alongside tight-fistedness and cold ambition. Add to that background the knowledge that the 1790s had been a desperate time in Britain. A series of bad harvests had meant that the cost of poor relief had gone up to over £4 million a year, almost three times what it had been in the 1770s. The revolutionary events in France had issued a violent challenge to the status quo in England, and 1790s Britain felt like a system in crisis, as the armies of revolutionary France had brushed aside the old order in Europe. It was a time of immense strain. From a brief moment of peace in November 1801 Pitt looked back on it, as if on a traumatic crossing of a wild sea:
We have the satisfaction of knowing that we have survived the violence of the revolutionary fever, and we have seen the extent of its principles abated. We have seen Jacobinism deprived of its fascination; we have seen it stripped of the name and pretext of liberty; it has shown itself to be capable only of destroying, not of building, and that it must necessarily end in military despotism.
These are the initial elements of Trafalgar: antique Spanish stiffness; French post-revolutionary uncertainty; and British commercial, bourgeois dynamism, portraying itself to itself as defending the ancient honour of England against the flashy, subversive allure of pretended revolutionary freedom. Or to put it another way: a Spanish navy acting to a pre-modern code of chivalric honour; a French navy surviving as a dysfunctional amalgam of aristocratic hauteur, Enlightenment expertise and revolutionary ideological fervour; and a British navy actively creating a global commercial network but thinking of itself as the guardian of ancient freedoms.
In the Royal Navy, a man’s seniors, at least at the level of the officer class, never used ‘obedience’ as a term of approval. Enterprise was what was required and a man was invariably recommended for his ‘zeal’. Zeal was the amalgam of energy, commitment, what we would call ‘hunger’, an enterprising spirit that wants to land the deal, or in these circumstances, to put the competitor out of business. It was a mechanism that worked within the navy as a whole, within fleets and within ships. Zeal is what Nelson was commended for, above all qualities, by his Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Earl St Vincent. ‘Your Lordship has given so many proofs of transcendent Zeal in the service of your King and country,’ the old flatterer wrote, ‘that we have only to pray for the preservation of your invaluable life to insure everything that can be achieved by mortal man.’
Emerging from a society in which neither revolutionary equality nor ossified rank was the guiding principle, but a sort of bourgeois capitalist middle ground between those two, something the 18th century would have called the acquisition and retention of Place became the motor behind the zeal. They all wanted and needed to win. ‘Place,’ Adam Smith wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘that great object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world.’ Of course, in The Wealth of Nations published in 1777, Smith identified this individual ‘emulation to excel’ as the mechanism by which social good was achieved. That idea became 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 the fleets 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 single sentence the factors underlying this drive. ‘The
