Seize the fire Book

More than a book about the battle, Nicolson (the author of the splendid "God's Secretaries") has produced a "meta-history" of the 21st of October, 1805. And most of the book helps the reader imagine the minds of the officers, men, and land-lubbers on that day. So if you want the social connotation of naval warfare, this is the best I've read.

Other books contain more technical detail about the battle; this one is about Nelson and Trafalgar's time, and place in history. If you're looking for military history, look elsewhere.

Nicolson argues that Trafalgar was the triangular divergence of three conceptions of statehood:

1) Authoritarian and traditionalist Spain; hopelessly incapable of reform -- their ships were "Castles in transit";

2) Revolutionary France, having cast out many of the old without providing a competent path for replacing with the new -- the "spontaneity and shock" on which Napoleon depended on land couldn't replace the "steadiness and practice" necessary to navies; and

3) An evolving enlightenment and commercial England, where the curtain between first and third estates was torn aside and men could seek advancement of "place" -- "the navy was beautiful, substantial, orderly and English," with libertarian and Atlanticist values, wrapped in cloaks of "King and Country", if not Medieval Chivalry.

Advancement of place (prizes) allowed sons of country parsons or third sons of landed gentry opportunity, which only could be secured by summoning "a scale of aggression" previously unavailable to Gentlemen who would (no matter what) return to being Gentlemen. As a result, only a few years after publication of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", England's Navy was almost a perfectly functioning market.

But all this took place in a culture whose conception of hero was changing from Hercules to ordinary mortals, men with humanity. Enter said son of country parson, Horatio Nelson.


"What, in the end, would Nelson be without humanity? As cold and admired as the Duke of Wellington."

"The great and dreadful victory at sea on 21 October 1805 played itself out in the mind of Englishmen as a near-perfect example of the violent moral theater whose sublime beauty relied on its distance and it dreadfulness. . . This understanding of war lasted, at full strength, until the shock of the trenches."