A hard act well followed

The names reverberate like a sustained drumroll — Victory, Royal Sovereign, Téméraire, Colossus, Mars, Bellerophon — an overture heralding the violence that will erupt when the warships drifting slowly downwind finally break into the crescent line of the French and Spanish fleet. At midday on the 21 October, the first massive broadsides are fired, smoke obscures the scene, and, when it clears three hours later, 19 enemy ships have struck their colours, another six will shortly be taken or wrecked, and Admiral Lord Nelson lies dead.

In the two centuries since, it is less the strategic significance of Trafalgar that guarantees its fame than the operatic tragedy of the hero dying in the moment of victory. For the participants too, the emotional loss outweighed the triumph. In his official despatch, Admiral Collingwood confessed, ‘My heart is rent with the most poignant grief for the death of a friend — a grief to which even the glorious occasion in which he fell does not bring the consolation which perhaps it ought.’