Men of Honour by Adam Nicolson Read Free Book Online Page A

the 1620s.
    Nevertheless, the higher ranks in the French navy were strikingly incompetent. Fleet commands were more often than not given to old and decrepit admirals. Only three of the 22 vice-admirals promoted between 1715 and 1789 had ever commanded fleets at sea and the rank of lieutenantgeneral, a pivotal fleet position, was equally carelessly filled with the clueless: only eighteen of the sixty-eight lieutenants-généraux appointed between 1720 and 1784 had held seagoing commands. The man in charge of the navy as a whole, the Admiral of France, was the Duc dePenthièvre, a relative of the king, who had never been on board a ship and treated the navy merely as a useful source of income.
    It would be a mistake, though, to think of the French naval officers as doing little more than living out a selfdeluded, aristocratic fantasia. It is true that they were deeply attached to and proud of their aristocratic traditions. It is equally true that there was fierce regional conflict between the Breton aristocrats and the Provençal aristocrats with which the Brest and Toulon fleets were officered. And it is true that to many of them their membership of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, or the Knights of Malta, the order of military Christian Knights founded in the 12th century as one of the vehicles of an ardent Christianity fighting Islam in the Mediterranean, was of equal importance to them as their duties with the French navy.
    But these educated and professional men were inevitably alert to the forces of the Enlightenment unfolding around them. Their élitism had adopted modern dress and many of the Grand Corps thought of themselves as modern scientific men. In the 1780s, the French naval officer began to take up serious modern studies in navigation, the fixing of longitude, the rationalist understanding of the essence of sea-battle and other aspects of the sea, cartography and ship-building, as well learning and exercising in gunnery and fleet tactics. But, whatever its dress, the attitudes remained élitist, a step away from the antique Spanish grandeur, but at least as far removed from the British practice, which, from the very beginning, engaged the young midshipmen with the workings of the ship and its men.
    The overall commander of the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar came from precisely such a tradition, as did his two deputy admirals. All three were aristocrats. Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre Villeneuve was,until 1793, de Villeneuve, when he quietly dropped the incriminating preposition. He became what all selfpreservative aristocrats in revolutionary France became, a ‘ ci-devant ’, a Heretofore. But there was little he could do to disguise his patrician origins. He was a grandee from Provence, in all probability a pious Catholic, perceptibly well bred, reserved in manner, exquisite in dress and refined in demeanour. One ancestor had fought alongside Roland in the pass at Roncesvalles; others had been on the crusades. He was the 91st Villeneuve to be a Knight of Malta. He was an educated man, who would quote lines from the great French tragedians, with an alert and supple sense of irony at the predicament in which the revolutionary era had placed him, and with a devastating sense of honour and duty which would, in the end, be his downfall. Napoleon, comparing these qualities with his requirement for all-consuming ardour, called Villeneuve a poltron de tête , an intellectual coward, a man perhaps too refined for the brutalities which the moment required of him.
    The navy of which Villeneuve was now a part was scarcely recognisable from the one he had joined as a boy. After 1789, it became an obvious target of revolutionary rage. It was a symbol of royal power in the French provinces, easily attacked by the populace when in harbour, and it was an organisation boiling over with the discontent and argumentativeness on which revolutionary movements feed. The Bourbon