In the Hour of Victory

The Royal Navy at War in the Age of Nelson

Sam Willis

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857895721
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Between 1794 and 1815 the Royal Navy repeatedly crushed her enemies at sea in a period of military dominance that equals any in history.

When Napoleon eventually died in exile, the Lords of the Admiralty ordered that the original dispatches from seven major fleet battles - The Glorious First of June (1794), St Vincent (1797), Camperdown (1797), The Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801), Trafalgar (1805) and San Domingo (1806) - should be gathered together and presented to the Nation. These letters, written by Britain's admirals, captains, surgeons and boatswains and sent back home in the midst of conflict, were bound in an immense volume, to be admired as a jewel of British history.

Sam Willis, one of Britain's finest naval historians, stumbled upon this collection by chance in the British Library in 2010 and soon found out that only a handful of people knew of its existence. The rediscovery of these first-hand reports, and the vivid commentary they provide, has enabled Willis to reassesses the key engagements in extraordinary and revelatory detail, and to paint an enthralling series of portraits of the Royal Navy's commanders at the time.

In a compelling and dramatic narrative, In the Hour of Victory tells the story of these naval triumphs as never before, and allows us to hear once more the officer's voices as they describe the battles that made Britain great.

The Glorious First of June

Le Combat de Prairial

1 June 1794

‘The Commander of a Fleet ... is unavoidably so confined in his view ... as to be little capable of rendering personal testimony’

Admiral Richard Howe, 6 June 1794

AT A GLANCE

DATE:

1 June 1794

NAVIES INVOLVED:

British and French

COMMANDING OFFICERS:

Admiral Earl Howe and Rear-Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse

FLEET SIZES:

British, 25 ships of the line; French, 26 ships of the line

TIME OF DAY:

0915–1315, and sporadically to 1430

LOCATION:

400 nautical miles south west of Ushant

44° 26'58.38"N 13° 03' 26.81"W

WEATHER:

Fresh breeze at south by west; moderate swell

RESULT:

6 French ships captured, 1 sunk

CASUALTIES:

(including battles on 28–29 May): British, 1,098; French, c. 2,654

BRITISH COURT MARTIALS:

Captain Molloy (at his request); dismissed from command of the Caesar

DISPATCHES CARRIED HOME BY:

Captain Roger Curtis, Howe’s flag captain

The Banner

My favourite piece of maritime heritage from the age of sail is a flag, a great silk-tasselled banner in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Embroidered in gold thread in its centre is the chilling exhortation: ‘Marins La Republique Ou La Mort’ – or ‘Sailors The Republic or Death’ (fig. 2). It was flown aboard L’America, a French warship which fought and was captured by the British at The Glorious First of June. It is a special object because it is so powerful; it says a great deal about the period in which it was created and about the day on which it was captured.

The words speak of a foreign country urging its sailors to fight to the death for an elusive idea. This battle was not fought over gold or for the territorial ambitions of a distant king but for the people and by the people. The flag is not addressed to officers but to ‘sailors’, a word deliberately chosen because it encompassed everyone aboard ship. An admiral was a sailor in the same way that a powder-monkey was a sailor; to win they all had to fight, even if it was in different ways. The words scream energy and commitment because they refer to a Republic that already existed in an age when republics were forged only in misery and fire. This is not an exhortation to create a republic but to fight on behalf of an existing republic. The banner tells of risks taken and of battles already won. It thus points to the future by recalling the past, the very essence of all history, but its message is especially merciless. There is more than a hint of double-talk about its apparently simple expression. On the one hand, it suggests that French sailors were expected to fight and to die for their cause; on the other it implies that any French sailor who did not fight with sufficient commitment would be killed – by his own side. There is no doubt that the purpose of this simple order is to threaten as much as it is to encourage.

The colour, feel and texture of the flag are also special. It can now only be viewed in the unreal stillness of an archival room but it is still possible to imagine this mighty banner curling in the wind, wrapping around a giant staff carried high by a chosen standard bearer. Its silky look and imagined movement bring to mind the multi-sensory nature of fleet battle where scarlet uniforms and shining silver belt buckles could be glimpsed through smoke which stung the eyes and choked the lungs; where sea spray ran down sailors’ faces like tears and the force of explosions was so great that they were as much felt as heard. In all this confusion, the banner was as much a specific rallying point as a general exhortation to unite in a single purpose. We know that it belonged to the boarding division of L’America and one can imagine the sailors hustling together and brandishing short pikes and hand axes, the thrusting and hacking weapons that could be used in a crowd where there was little space to swing a sword.

The banner is utterly compelling. It is a powerful reminder of just how alien the period is generally, as much as it is a reminder of how alien 1794 was particularly. The French Republic, only two years old, was in the grip of the Terror, ruled through the threat of the guillotine by Maximillian Robespierre and his Jacobin colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety. All French sailors – officers, men and boys – were as terrified of being executed by their political masters as they were of being killed by the enemy. These unique circumstances led to a fleet battle unlike any that had ever been fought and one which would soon become renowned as the hardest fought battle of the age of sail.

The Extremists

The British thought that the French Revolution was rather a good idea until the French killed their King. In 1789, the year that the Bastille fell, the Revolution was praised by the British Ambassador in Paris and the House of Commons proposed a ‘day of thanksgiving for the French Revolution’.¹ A popular poem even celebrated the new-found freedom of the old enemy.

There is not an English heart that would not leap

That ye were fallen at last, to know

That even our enemies, so oft employed

In forging chains for us, themselves were free.²

This all changed in January 1793 when a man called Citoyen [Citizen] Louis Capet was marched to a scaffold in the centre of Paris where his head was roughly shaved and he was strapped to a horizontal wooden board. That board was then pushed forward so that the nape of his neck was exposed as a thin target of ivory to a dark blade that never missed. Drums rolled and the vast sea of heads that bobbed together in the Place de La Révolution stilled for a moment as the audience held its breath. Then those heads saw one other head fall into a waiting basket. It was the head of a man who had once been their king but who had been stripped of all signs and symbols of monarchy. For Citizen Louis Capet was none other than Louis Auguste de France, the 16th King Louis of France, the eighth King of the Bourbon dynasty, and the thirtieth king to have reigned in the 802 years since the foundation of the Capetian dynasty in AD 987.

It is well known that France during the Revolution was unrecognisable from France before the Revolution. It is less well known that ‘The Revolution’ can be divided into numerous periods, each of which has its own distinct cultural flavour. Even if one takes a very broad brush, there is the Revolution at the storming of the Bastille, the Revolution at the execution of Louis XVI, the Revolution under the Jacobins and the Revolution under the Directory. The battle that became known as The Glorious First of June was fought during the reign of the Jacobins, five years after the storming of the Bastille and more than a year after the execution of Louis.

The Jacobins were an unforgiving political faction that dominated French politics during a year of utter turmoil from 1793 that became known as the Reign of Terror. It was in this period that loyalty to the Revolution was strictly defined and the populace rigidly divided into its friends and foes. Enemies or, more accurately, those who were perceived as enemies swiftly found themselves under the iron blade of the guillotine, their last view of the world the bottom of a woven rush basket stained with blood. The Terror itself can be sub-divided into the First Terror of the summer of 1793 and the Second Terror of the summer of 1794, when everything accelerated into a crazy whirlwind of baseless prosecution and inequitable persecution. Over half of all the Terror’s victims died in June and July 1794 alone and, in those same two months, more were executed in six weeks than in the previous 15 months.³

The fact that The Glorious First of June was fought at the very height of the Second Terror is a major factor in considering the ‘enemy’. French society had been whipped into a frenzy of ideological fervour by the Jacobins in a bid to unite France against her enemies, both external and internal. The survival of the Revolution was threatened by foreign nations waging wars on her borders as surely as it was by civil war dissolving France’s internal order and security. The revolutionaries had succeeded in removing the monarchy with an unprecedented vision of a fair society but they were now surrounded by enemies and were fighting for survival without international allies. The ancient European monarchies that surrounded France had been horrified by the execution of Louis XVI and had united in opposition to the Revolution. With the military strength of the young Republic too weak to attract or force alliances, the enemy that faced the Royal Navy in 1794 was the French navy alone.

That navy was, however, unlike any other navy that had ever been raised by France. The Revolution had affected all sections of French society and the navy had suffered particularly severely for its close association with the ancien régime and the aristocracy. Before the Revolution, naval officers were not only r...