Poor Villeneuve! It was a pitiful and hapless closing to a career that had opened with such bright promise for a certain young garde de la Marine on the quarter-deck of De Suffren's Héros[115]; a sad, unworthy ending for one in whose veins ran the blood of eight-and-twenty knights of St. Louis, St. Esprit, and St. Michel; for one who in his own right was of the highest of the old noblesse of Royal France, for a member of a House that had given one of the most famous of Grand Masters to the Order, and a Saint and ten Bishops to the Church.[116] Poor Villeneuve! —where moulders his unhappy dust? The summer visitor from England, at the price of a cheap ticket, may see where the poor remains of the vanquished of Trafalgar rest to-day—if, that is, he can find the place. Beneath no storied monument is it, among his country's greater dead; not in the vault of the Villeneuves where his high-born kinsmen sleep:—not there. In a forgotten spot in the old burial-ground at distant Rennes, a Provençal he among stranger Bretons, the most luckless of his line lies there in a suicide's desolate grave. And it is all the more pitiful too, when one thinks of our own Trafalgar chiefs laid to their rest together in honour in St. Paul's. Side by side in the vaulted crypt beneath the Cathedral dome rest our three Trafalgar admirals in honour evermore. Brothers-in-arms in life, like brothers in death they lie; till, pealing out on land and sea, the dread Archangel's trump shall sound their final call to quarters. Poor Villeneuve! What a contrast!
THE TÉMÉRAIRE ENTERING PORTSMOUTH HARBOUR ON HER RETURN FROM TRAFALGAR. Dec. 20, 1805
The Téméraire followed the Euryalus to England some days later. She brought on board, like the other returning ships, three hundred French prisoners, together with, as her special passenger. Captain Infernet of the French Intrépide. She arrived at Spithead on the 5th of December, the day after the Victory, with Nelson's remains on board, had anchored at St. Helens, and on the 20th of December went up Portsmouth Harbour to go into dock. It so chanced that an artist, John Christian Schetky, afterwards marine painter to King George the Fourth, William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria, was at Portsmouth on the day the Téméraire came in, cheered to the echo on all sides by crowds on the Platform and Point batteries and by every boat and ship that she passed. Sketchbook in hand Mr. Schetky made good use of his opportunity.
Captain Harvey arrived in England to find himself a Rear-Admiral, one of the officers specially promoted in honour of Trafalgar, included in the promotion caused by the creation of the rank of Admiral of the Red. He handed over the Téméraire to Acting-Captain Larmour who, six weeks later, paid the ship off for a refit and repair in Portsmouth dockyard which lasted several months. Admiral Harvey was one of the pall-bearers at Nelson's funeral. When in January 1815 he became a K.C.B. he was granted as a special motto above his crest, the name Téméraire, together with as supporters to the Harvey family arms,—a triton with a laurel-wreathed trident, and a sea-horse with a naval crown inscribed 'Trafalgar,' bearing underneath all as an additional motto the legend Redoutable et Fougueux.
How for six years after Trafalgar the Téméraire did her duty before the enemy, at one time helping to keep Marshal Soult out of Cadiz, at another taking her part in holding in check the powerful new fleet that Napoleon created in Toulon to avenge Trafalgar on some future day that never came—all that is another story. Her last shotted guns were fired to silence a French battery in Hyères Bay, near the entrance to Toulon harbour, which rashly opened fire on the Téméraire one day. The Téméraire closed with the battery and gave the French gunners one tremendous broadside that practically cleared the battery out. Not a shot came from it again. The war story of the Téméraire ends six months later with her final paying off at Plymouth.
There only remained for the Téméraire, after that, to complete her allotted span and await the striking of the inevitable hour.
For age will rust the brightest blade,
And time will break the stoutest bow;
Was never wight so starkly made,
But age and time will bring him low.
She outlasted, indeed, her old captain at Trafalgar. In 1836, six years after Sir Eliab Harvey had been gathered to his fathers, his old ship entered on her last turn of duty, harbour service at Sheerness as Guardship of Ordinary, Captain-Superintendent's ship for the Fleet Reserve in the Medway. By an interesting coincidence, the officer who last of all hoisted his pennant on board the 'Fighting' Téméraire was the man who had been her first lieutenant at Trafalgar, now a grey-headed old post-captain, holding his last appointment before retiring from the Service as Captain-Superintendent of Sheerness dockyard, Captain Thomas Fortescue Kennedy. Actually the last guns that were ever fired on board the 'Fighting' Téméraire were for the Royal Salute in honour of Queen Victoria's Coronation Day. Six weeks after that, on the 16th of August 1838, the Téméraire was put up for auction and sold for £5530 to Mr. Beatson, the Rotherhithe shipbreaker. She was sold out of the Navy 'all standing,' with her masts and yards still in her, just as her guard-ship crew left the vessel, as Turner saw her and has faithfully painted her: a fact, also, that explains what has puzzled many critics of the famous picture, the removal to be broken up of a man-of-war rigged and masted and with yards across.