Too young to die

In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, there is a memorial by Joseph Nollekens to three British captains killed at the Battle of the Saintes. It is hard to imagine that many visitors notice it, but when the news of the battle reached London from the West Indies in May 1782, it inspired the same kind of hysteria that 120 years later would greet the relief of Mafeking. The victory might not have been all it was cracked up to be — Rodney had let the French fleet escape — and yet at a time when a bitterly divided country was embroiled in a losing struggle for its American colonies and a mismanaged war with France and Spain, anything which promised that Britannia still ruled the waves and Britons could fight and die as their forefathers had done was manna from heaven.

Resolution is a double portrait of the youngest and most glamorous of Nollekens’s captains, Lord Robert Manners, and of his elder and distinctly less resolute brother Charles.