Editorial [M]y fate is fixed, and I am gone, beating down Channel with a foul wind. Nelson writing from Victory to his good friend Alexander Davison, September 1805. After the storm of Trafalgar, ‘The Hero’is dead and buried. Indeed, after a protracted bicentennial exhumation, he has been re-buried with full honours; a life lived, and long remembered, in the public gaze. Is it proper, inevitable perhaps, that this sixteenth edition of The Trafalgar Chronicleshould be characterised by a ‘post mortem’solemnity? After all, as Nelson wrote dejectedly to Alexander Davison in May 1801, ‘the dead cannot be called back, it is of no use dwelling on those who are gone’. But then again, certainly not, when we recall how the same man had in happier times boasted to his wife, ‘a glorious death is to be envied…recollect that death is a debt we must all pay, and whether now, or in a few years hence, can be of little consequence’. The re-enactment of Lord Nelson’s funeral in St Paul’s on 8 January earlier this year stirred the memory of an incident that occurred in the same place some forty years before. Toward the close of the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in January 1965, a trumpeter, high up in the Whispering Gallery, sounded the Last Post. As his final notes echoed throughout the vast cathedral, another trumpeter sounded Reveille. It was orchestrated to symbolize continuity, and like the ‘Ouroboros’, the tail-swallowing snake that adorns many portrait eulogia, it stood for eternity. Churchill, a lifelong admirer of Nelson, wanted to make the connection explicit; he had died, as his hero had, his duty to the country done. Nor, in reality, was there much time to mourn. Though Trafalgar had been fought and won, there were new theatres of war to arrest the imagination, and to test public sympathies for another ten years. These had all to be endured by a nation as its people struggled under conditions of severe economic and social upheaval. As at Trafalgar, there was to be no bright new beginning, no clear dawn to offer immediate hope. Indeed, it might have been Churchill speaking when Nelson wrote in 1804: ‘Buonaparte, by whatever name he may choose to call himself- general, consul, or emperor- is the same man we have always known, and the common disturber of the human race: it is much more dangerous to be his friend than his enemy’, and it would not be until 1815 that Nelson’s ambition, of ‘Stopping Napoleon’, would finally be realised. This year’s Chronicle follows on the success of our bicentennial number, by attracting a wide range of scholarship. The Club’s aim has always been to promote and publish research into the Royal Navy of the Georgian period, and while our emphasis is on maritime and naval history, we welcome work which reflects other approaches, or which offers new interdisciplinary insights. We are constantly commissioning new articles, as well as gratefully receiving all manner of submissions. But this is no free-for-all; we trust there is some definite order to this anthology. vi
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