Victory at Trafalgar
Triumph, sacrifice & the fall of a legend
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Great& gallant
220 years ago, Horatio Nelson’s heroic victory at Trafalgar saved Britain from French invasion – but it was to be his last battle. We look back at his extraordinary life and lasting legacy
On the evening of 21 October 1805, as smoke lingered on the seas west of Cape Trafalgar in southwest Spain, a fleet of British sailors, their ears still ringing from the pounding of the guns, toasted a resounding victory in one of the most legendary battles in naval history.
Showing superior skill and tactical cunning, they had routed a combined French and Spanish force that both outclassed and outnumbered them, with 33 ships to their 27, and 30,000 men to their 18,000. They had taken or destroyed at least 18 enemy ships, while losing not a single one of their own, and captured or killed as many as 24,000 enemy sailors.
The famous clash came at a pivotal point in Britain’s war with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, which had begun in 1803. The Emperor and his armies had been storming Europe, conquering states and coercing allies.
As recently as summer 1805, the Corsican had been poised to effect an invasion via the English Channel,
Even before his last and greatest victory at Trafalgar, Lord Nelson was a British hero – a man ladies swooned over and schoolboys longed to be
and the fear of French boots on British soil lingered.
That changed at Trafalgar. Any dreams Bonaparte still harboured of invading Britain were quashed forever. The Royal Navy had established its supremacy at sea, and decimated the Franco-Spanish fleet. Morale soared, on navy ships, in government offices and among ordinary people on the home front. But it was a bittersweet victory, as the London newspapers acknowledged when they finally got hold of the news a fortnight later.
“We do not know whether we should mourn or rejoice. The country has gained the most splendid and decisive Victory that has ever graced the naval annals of England; but it has been dearly purchased. The great and gallant NELSON is no more.”
Horatio, Lord Nelson, the Admiral in command of the Trafalgar fleet and mastermind of its triumphant battle plan, had not survived to bask in glory. At about 1.15pm on 21 October, as he paced the quarterdeck on his flagship, HMS Victory, he had been shot in the shoulder by a sniper standing high in the rigging of a French ship.
By the time the news of his death hit the press, his body, carefully preserved in alcohol, was already heading back to England, and plans were underway to give him a spectacular state funeral. For even before his last and greatest victory at Trafalgar, Nelson was a British hero – a man ladies swooned over and schoolboys longed to be.
The son of an impoverished clergyman, he was born in 1758 in Burnham Thorpe, a small village in Norfolk, not far from Holkham Hall. He joined the Navy aged just 12, but his meteoric rise to fame only really began during the revolutionary war with France in the 1790s. Though
Previous page: Lemuel Francis Abbott's Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, 1758–1805 (1799)
Clockwise from above:
The Death of Nelson; JMW Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar (1822–24) will be displayed in the Queen's House, Greenwich, to mark Trafalgar Day this year; HMS Victory, now moored at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard
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