With the retreat of Villeneuve the great concentration scheme came to an end. He retired to Cadiz followed by the screaming abuse of Napoleon, who was justly angry, if only because this ignominious end to his grand schemes tended to make him the laughing stock of Europe. Whether he was as angry as he pretended to be is another matter. Rage was one way of persuading the gallery that the failure was not his fault. He had a great and thoroughly vulgar capacity for working himself into fits of hysterical fury, and for falling to cursing like a very drab. He did not altogether resign the hope of making use of Villeneuve’s fleet. While washing his hands of all further attention to details, he gave orders that the combined fleets were to undertake operations in the Mediterranean. He also decided that Villeneuve was too great a coward to be trusted with the command any longer, and that he must be replaced by Admiral Rosily.

So far the initiative had belonged to the French, who were the assailants. Their attack had broken down, and now came the turn of the English to assail. When the arrival of Nelson raised the fleet, under Cornwallis, to forty sail of the line, the admiral felt so sure of his position that he did not hesitate to divide his forces. Nelson went home to rest, taking two liners with him. Two others were sent in for repairs. Eighteen were despatched on the 16th, under Calder, to go in search of Villeneuve. Napoleon called this separation an insigne bêtise, in view of the fact that Villeneuve might have burst into the Channel with a force very superior in numbers to the eighteen sail with Calder, or the seventeen which remained with Cornwallis. He would have had thirty-four if he had joined both the Ferrol ships and Allemand. If fleets and armies were pieces on a draft board, with fixed unvarying powers, the speculation would be worth following up. But they are composed of weapons handled by men who can do but what they can. Will an obese man who has one leg shorter than the other and weak lungs be much the better (he will, of course, be somewhat the better), if he meets two professional fighters separately, and not together. It is quite possible that if Villeneuve had come on, he would have passed Calder without a meeting. In these very months, Nelson came from Cape St. Vincent to Ushant, through seas crossed by the squadrons of Villeneuve, Allemand, and Calder, but met none of them. Allemand ranged down the coast of the peninsula to the latitude of Cape St. Vincent, went back to the Channel, came to the Penmarks, cruised, and waited for Villeneuve, till no hope remained that he could come, then turned to commerce destroying in the Atlantic with immense success, until he anchored at Aix on the 24th December. But Panic and Flight were our allies. Cornwallis suffered nothing by the division of his forces. On the 20th and 21st August he easily beat back the Brest ships, which were forced to make a show of coming out by Napoleon. Villeneuve had run for Cadiz before Calder left Ushant. He sighted Cape St. Vincent on the 17th, Allemand being then barely out of sight behind him. On the 21st he entered Cadiz observed by Collingwood, who was watching the port with three sail of the line, his fourth being then at Tetuan. Collingwood fell back slowly, just ahead of the pursuing French, resolved that if they drove him into the Mediterranean, they should be “backstrapped” into it with him. The allies gave up the pursuit, and Collingwood, with his three, resumed the watch on Cadiz. He was joined by the detached ship at Tetuan, by Bickerton from Carthagena, and at last by Calder. On the 30th August thirty English sail of the line were collected outside Cadiz. It was on the 2nd September that Nelson, then at his house at Merton, heard that the allies were in Cadiz. He hurried to town, and offered his services. It would have been strange if the Government had declined the offer of its greatest fighter of battles at such a moment. Nelson left Spithead with the Victory and the Euryalus frigate on the 15th September, picked up the Ajax and Thunderer on the 18th, and joined Collingwood on the 28th.

The battle he came to fight was offered him primarily by the obstinacy of Napoleon, but immediately by the wounded vanity of Villeneuve. The Emperor had ordered his fleet, and the Spaniards whom he ordered about as his own, not to suffer themselves to be blockaded by an inferior force, but he allowed his orders to sail to stand when he knew that Collingwood had been reinforced. Decrès, the minister of Marine, did not tell Villeneuve that he was to be recalled when Rosily reached Cadiz. The truth reached the unhappy man indirectly, and by public rumour. In a fit of selfish vanity, he, who had been so cautious in avoiding risks when a great end was to be obtained, now decided to rush to sea, when no great advantage was to be gained, and when the danger of destruction was closer than it had been at any moment since he sailed from Toulon in March—and did it wholly and solely that he might escape a personal disgrace. By his orders the allied fleet prepared to put to sea on the 18th October.

Nelson was then cruising some twenty miles west of Cadiz, in a position to steer for the Straits and intercept the enemy whenever he should come out, if, as was nearly certain, he headed for the Mediterranean. He had with him twenty-seven sail, and six were at Gibraltar watering and provisioning. It was on the 19th, when he had just sent Collingwood an invitation to dinner, that he learnt, through the vessels watching in shore, that the enemy were coming out. The wearing of the flagship and the signal for a general chase to the east told the fleet that the allies were moving. The English ships pressed on to head the enemy, each at its best rate of speed, so that the fast sailers outstripped the slow. The allied fleet had worked out of Cadiz with difficulty. On the afternoon of the 20th it was to the south of Cape Trafalgar, and the English fleet was so near that a battle could not be avoided. During the night our look-out vessels saw the long “lighted street” of lanterns which marked the position of the allies. The fleet had returned from the position attained by the general chase of the 19th, and was almost back to its cruising ground. The weather had been variable from squall and haze to calm. The ships were scattered on the morning of the 21st October—a day of very light breeze from N.W., a heavy swell, and a falling barometer, signs of a coming storm. The enemy was seen in the E.N.E. about nine miles off, heading south. The scattered condition of the English ships did not signify much. They knew what they had to do, and they knew that their enemy was incapable of baffling any vigorous attack. Immediately after joining the fleet Nelson had held a meeting of senior officers in his flagship and had explained his method for disposing of the allies—the Nelson touch. The memorandum in which he laid down the principles of his attack remains to tell us what they were. If the enemy were found to windward, then the English fleet was to attack from leeward, which it must do in close-hauled lines ahead, and was to be disposed in three such lines. One, the lee line, led by the second in command, was to cut off a smaller number of the enemy at the rear. The second or weather line, led by himself, was to cut the formation of the enemy at the centre, where his flagship would be. A third, or advance squadron, was to cut through the enemy ahead of the flagship. Nelson displays his contempt for his opponents by two assumptions. One is, that the enemy drawn out in one very long line would not meet this attack by a counter move, as D’Orvilliers had baffled Keppel’s menace to the rear of his line in the battle of Ushant in 1778. The other is that the ships of the enemy thus cut off, amounting to just more than half, could not be succoured by their van before they were crushed. Supposing the enemy to be to leeward, then the three lines were to be drawn up opposite his centre. The lee line, under the second in command, was to fall all together on a smaller number of the enemy’s rear. The weather line and advanced squadron were to be used by himself so as to prevent the centre and van from turning to support the rear. In this case Nelson does his enemy the compliment of supposing him to be capable of making a counter move. If he inverts his line by wearing together, the English lee line is to continue to attack the same ships, though they would now be van, and not rear. It is clear, however, that if this was done (and it was the obvious thing to do), the enemy’s rear and centre had only to let all draw in order to come at once to the help of the ships assailed. Nelson’s manifest conviction that his enemy could not manœuvre, and that his gunnery was bad, was thoroughly justified. It has become rather the fashion to affect a “chivalrous” respect for the enemy at Trafalgar. That is a very pretty sentiment, and is the easier to feel because the more we make of our foe the more do we make of our victory. But though the thirty-three ships of the line which left Cadiz with Villeneuve unquestionably carried thousands of gallant men, they constituted a very bad fleet. Less than half of them belonged to the squadrons which had crossed the Atlantic with Villeneuve. The rest were the raw ships from Ferrol, or Spanish vessels manned at Cadiz from hand to mouth, and at the last moment. Even the most experienced of them were incapable of manœuvring, and that by the confession of their own chiefs. Their gunnery was not only inaccurate, which in very close fighting was not of the first consequence, but was slow in the case of the French, and very slow in the case of the Spaniards. Their powder was of inferior quality and fouled the guns quickly.

It has become so much the custom to speak of everything Nelson did as in some sort miraculous that the memorandum has been treated as a revelation of original genius. Yet when we look at it coolly it is obviously only a plan to do deliberately what Duncan did on the spur of the moment, and under the pressure of circumstances, at Camperdown. The resemblance between the battles becomes still closer when we look at what was actually done on the 21st October.

After the sweeping movements and variable weather of the last few days, the fleet was in some apparent disorder. The division into three of the memorandum was not attempted. The ships were in two swarms, Collingwood’s lee division of fifteen sail, and Nelson’s weather division of twelve.

Nelson’s Division.

Victory100{
{		Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson.
Capt. T. M. Hardy.
Téméraire 98 〃 Eliab Harvey.
Neptune 98 〃 T. F. Fremantle.
Conqueror 74 〃 Israel Pellew.
Leviathan 74 〃 H. W. Bayntun.
Ajax 74Lieut. J. Pilford.
Orion 74Capt. E. Codrington.
Agamemnon 64Sir E. Berry.
Minotaur 74Capt. J. M. Mansfield.
Spartiate 74Sir J. Laforey.
Britannia100{
{		Rear-Admiral Lord Northesk.
Capt. C. Bullen.
Africa 64 〃 Digby.

Collingwood’s Division.

Royal Sovereign100{
{		Vice-Admiral Collingwood.
Capt. E. Rotheram.
Mars 74 〃 G. Duff.
Belleisle 74 〃 W. Hargood.
Tonnant 80 〃 C. Tyler.
Bellerophon 74 〃 J. Cooke.
Colossus 74 〃 J. N. Morris.
Achille 74 〃 R. King.
Polyphemus 64 〃 R. Redmill.
Revenge 74 〃 R. Moorsom.
Swiftsure 74 〃 D. G. Rutherford.
Defence 74 〃 G. Hope.
Thunderer 74Lieut. J. Stockham.
Defiance 94Capt. P. C. Durham.
Prince 98 〃 R. Grindale.
Dreadnought 98 〃 J. Conn.