Sam Willis - Battle of Trafalgar

Endpaper map from A School Map of English History by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, 1914, courtesy of archive.org

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First published 2019

Text copyright Sam Willis, 2019

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ISBN: 978-1-405-93410-7

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On 26 May 1805 Napoleon crowned himself King of Italy in a lavish ceremony at the Duomo in Milan. The title King of Italy had lain dormant for 249 years since the abdication of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1556, and now Napoleon, a Frenchman from modest roots on Corsica, had taken it for himself along with crucial territory in what is now northern Italy.

An extraordinary event in its own right, this was just the latest manifestation of Napoleons takeover of Europe since the coup he had organized in Paris in 1799 which had transformed him from a general to First Consul of France and a dictator in everything but name. Soon after, the floodgates of his personal ambition truly opened. In 1802 this appointment, initially for a decade, became a life consulate and changed in magnitude again in 1804 when he crowned himself Emperor of the French.

Threatened and appalled by Napoleons apparently unstoppable and global ambition, Russia, Austria and Great Britain formed a coalition against him in 1803. The difficulty of containing the military and political genius of the leaders of Revolutionary and subsequently Napoleonic France is eloquently illustrated by its name, for this was the Third Coalition formed against France since the outbreak of the French Revolution: the first two had failed abysmally.

In September 1805, the Third Coalition made its first significant move by sending ships and troops to converge on Napoleons new kingdom of Italy from north, south, east and west.

It was only at sea that the military power of France and her allies had been significantly checked.

At the first major naval battle of the Revolutionary Wars, known by the British as the Glorious First of June, of 1794, a French fleet was beaten by the British. In 1797, the two new allies of France Spain and the Netherlands, now renamed the revolutionary-inspired Batavian Republic suffered twin defeats at the hands of the British: the Spanish at the Battle of St Vincent and the Dutch at the Battle of Camperdown. The following year Napoleon suffered the worst defeat of them all at the Battle of the Nile when his fleet, supporting the army he had landed for an invasion of Egypt, was annihilated by the British. In 1801, the fleet of Napoleons newest allies, the Danes, was defeated at the Battle of Copenhagen.

Horatio Nelson, the son of a vicar from rural Norfolk but now a vice-admiral in the Royal Navy, distinguished himself at three of these battles and was personally responsible for the destruction of the French at the Nile. He was now showing the physical signs of life as a naval warrior.

In 1794, at an attack on a French town in Corsica, he was blinded in the right eye by shrapnel. Then in 1797, at the Battle of St Vincent, he was hit by flying debris so badly that when he coughed his intestines spilled out in a fist-sized hernia. Nelson considered this wound trifling. Five months later, at an invasion of the Spanish island of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, his arm was fractured by a musket ball and had to be amputated. A year after that, in August 1798, he was struck so hard in the head by a flying splinter at the Battle of the Nile that it exposed his skull and he believed he had been killed.

Fortunately for the British, he was wrong.

Napoleon was considering an invasion of England long before the outbreak of war with the Third Coalition, but from then on everything accelerated. The preparations were unprecedented. Two thousand invasion craft, including flat-bottomed boats each capable of transporting 55 infantry men, and larger sailing barges that could take up to 150 men each or guns, ammunition and horses, were built in ports all along northern France and the Low Countries. All were equipped with specially designed landing bridges. Harbours were dredged and basins dug to accommodate his flotilla.

Meanwhile, he gathered an army, unlike any seen before in France, at Boulogne, just thirty miles from the English coast. The soldiers were trained relentlessly in embarkation procedures, and at their height of skill the entire army, well over 170,000 men, could be embarked on the invasion craft in just ninety minutes. The soldiers were taught to use oars and naval artillery, even to swim in anticipation of the amphibious operation. They were given small-pox vaccinations, and the digging of wells was supervised by men responsible for the armys health. The men were skilled, lean, fit and disciplined, and to make sure that they retained their edge, Napoleon regularly inspected them. A triumphal column, based on Trajans column in Rome, began to be erected in Boulogne in anticipation of a successful invasion.

Napoleon never actually launched this army against England but the column is still there, magnificent in its impotent pomp. Thwarted repeatedly by the Royal Navy, his own poor understanding of naval operations and the immense logistical and financial problems posed by such an operation, in late August 1805 he temporarily shelved his dream of conquering Britain and shifted his priorities to his new kingdom, Italy, now threatened from land and sea.

In late August 1805, Napoleon ordered his army at Boulogne to strike camp and march east, towards the Rhine. Soon afterwards he ordered his fleet at Cadiz, boosted by a fleet of his Spanish allies, to sail to the Mediterranean to provide naval support for the defence of Italy.