“We’re Nelson’s watchdog all right.”
They watched the fleet all day and all night. The enemy was constantly moving about. Each time Villeneuve’s ships changed their tack, Euryalus fired a signal gun. Every hour, she burned a blue light to show the English fleet that she was watching. And every signal she made was passed back, from frigate to frigate, and along the chain of battleships to the Victory herself.
They did their work well. Not a motion of the French fleet was missed.
Then Nelson came out into the open, and bore down upon them.
He did what he had been planning to do for months: he divided his own force into two, one half, the weather column, he led himself, the other, the lee, was led by Collingwood in Royal Sovereign. Then, aiming to converge somewhat above the centre of the huge, crescent-shaped line of the French, they began their approach.
The performance of the Euryalus had been faultless. As he made his formation at six o’clock that morning, Nelson summoned the little frigate to Victory’s side, and ordered Captain Blackwood aboard to congratulate him.
“We shall surprise the enemy now,” he declared. “They won’t know what I am about.”
As the advance began, Euryalus rode proudly by Nelson’s side.
“One eye and one arm,” an old seaman told Peter, “but you see what he does with what he’s got left!”
At eight o’clock Villeneuve reversed course, but he could not now avoid Nelson’s battle.
The final approach began. At 11.45 am, the famous signal from the flagship went out:
“England expects every man to do his duty.”
“And when we have,” Midshipman Robert Wilson remarked, “I dare say it’ll be the end of the French.” Then under his breath he said a prayer.
As for seaman Peter Wilson, he said no prayer; but he gave the wedding ring a nervous squeeze and muttered: “You see me safe out of this.”
The battle began at noon.
The great sea battles of the tall-masted sailing ships were slow, ponderous, stately affairs – at least until they came in close. The final approach took an hour. There was a gentle Atlantic swell; the wind a slight breeze from west-north-west; the day was clear, and as the huge crescent of the French fleet stood before them, Peter Wilson stood with the older seamen and watched with fascination. There was Collingwood, in almost parallel course with them, leading the mighty British warships: Mars, Bellerophon, under John Cooke, Achilles, Revenge, and others. There, ahead of them, was the huge Bucentaure, the flagship of Villeneuve; close by it, Neptune, Heros. San Leandro.
“See there,” one of the sailors pointed far down the French line. “Recognise her?”
“By God I do,” cried another. “’Tis one of ours.” And he showed Peter, far in the distance, where the English ship Swiftsure that had been captured by the enemy some years before, now sailed in the French line.
“We’ve another to match her,” he laughed.
For it was one of the curiosities of the battle of Trafalgar that in Admiral Collingwood’s column under Captain William Rutherfurd there now sailed a new British ship, once again named Swiftsure – so that two British ships of the same name fired upon each other from different sides.
The two collisions of the British columns with the French – first Collingwood, then Nelson – were unlike anything Peter Wilson could have imagined. As he saw the Royal Sovereign split through the line first, saw her, minute after minute edge with painful slowness between the enemy ships who poured broadside after broadside in to her, he could not believe that any ship could survive. Even from a distance, it seemed to him the whole sky must crack open with the roar of the mighty guns.
“And that,” he would say afterwards, “was before we entered the mouth of hell ourselves.”
Nelson made the most of every inch of his journey. First he headed towards the van. Then, suddenly, he swung up, straight at the centre and at Villeneuve himself. It was a daring move. And Peter Wilson, as the little frigate bobbed by Victory’s side, thought the world had come to an end.
For by crossing the line as he did, Nelson exposed himself to withering enemy fire, to which he could not reply, for half an hour. As crash after crash shook the ships, it seemed to Peter that he was in the midst of a huge thunderstorm; the cannon-balls chat whizzed over the water, smashing their way through sides, sails, rigging sending up a shower of sparks and splinters were like thunderbolts. It seemed it would never end. Then they were through right in amongst the enemy line: Victory and Temeraire, locked in mortal combat with the Bucentaure and Redoubtable. This was the close fighting at which the English navy excelled.
The battle lasted all afternoon. It reached its height between one and two, as more and more of the English ships ploughed into the French line. At 1.45, the flagship Bucentaure struck its colours. Three more ships were taken soon afterwards. In Collingwood’s column the battle went even better. By half past three, he had taken eleven ships, more were still falling. Amongst those taken back that day was the original Swiftsure.
It was in early afternoon that they knew Nelson was hit. They saw the signals from Victory to Collingwood in Royal Sovereign. But in the blistering engagement, there was so much to do that Peter Wilson had little time to think about it. For soon afterwards the Euryalus played another key role in the battle when she was summoned by Collingwood to his side. He was in acting command now, but except for a tottering foremast, all Royal Sovereign’s masts were down. So it was that Euryalus, hanging close by the stricken ship’s side, made from her own masts the signals to the fleet for the second half of the battle of Trafalgar.
Her final hour was at the end of the battle, when Collingwood transferred his own flag to her and, though her main and topmast rigging had been shot away, the mauled little ship towed the mighty Royal Sovereign from the battle.
When did Peter Wilson know that Nelson was gone? The tragic knowledge seemed, in retrospect, to colour the whole day, as though someone had placed a dark filter over the whole thundering, echoing sky. But it was not so. It was in late afternoon, just as he had been busy on the deck running up the colours for a signal, that he saw Robert Wilson look towards Victory, turn, tears in his eyes, and say:
“He’s gone, Wilson of Christchurch. He’s gone.”
The victory of Trafalgar broke the French fleet for ever. It was never again able to launch any attack more important than an occasional raid on commercial shipping. The threat of invasion was over.
But the threat from Bonaparte in Europe was not.
Two days before Trafalgar he had forced the Austrians back at Ulm. And in December at the extraordinary battle of Austerlitz, he advanced straight to the centre of the massive joint army opposing him and broke the Austrians and Russians in a single hammer-blow. The British forces in Germany had to be hastily withdrawn. Pitt’s grand alliance had utterly failed. Instead of crushing the upstart tyrant, the coalition had collapsed and now Napoleon had taken whole pieces of the crumbling Austrian empire as well.
Broken by the news in January 1806, William Pitt the younger died.
Napoleon was still at large.
But none of this mattered to Peter Wilson. For in 1806, he was allowed to go home.
When his family discovered he had been at Trafalgar he was treated as a hero. He walked happily around Christchurch and his friends gave him free drinks. It was all very satisfactory.
His financée, not expecting to see him again, had married.
He shrugged, then grinned.
“When I go courting again,” he announced, “I’ve already got the ring.”
Three weeks later, he delivered a keg of brandy to the house of Canon Porteus.
Things were back to normal.
Though he lived in comfort at the Forests’ estate in the north, and though he was never in any physical danger, of the two men exiled from home – Peter Wilson and Ralph Shockley – it was Shockley who suffered more. The experience changed him: for if the contemplation of revolutionary
theories had made him truculent and argumentative, the knowledge of real suffering, as it always does, gave him a certain quietness.
Neither the conditions of his own life, nor his pupils was the problem. The Forest boys were ten and eight years old: both dark and slender with long, pale faces. They did as he asked, learned their lessons quickly and gave him no cause for complaint. Their grandfather made periodic stays in his several houses; their parents were mostly in London, but although they were left alone with their tutor in the huge northern house, the boys seemed quite contented. He soon decided that they were, more than any other children he had known, strangely self-sufficient. They take what they need from me. They are polite. And that is all, he thought.
There was something else. As he saw more of the Forest family on their periodic visits, and of their guests on these occasions, he began to understand it better.
They treated him well; as tutor, he was almost like one of themselves, yet though the good manners, even of the children, made them capable at times of a delicacy towards him that would never have occurred to Porteus, he sensed that, deep down they simply did not care what he thought. There was no personal animosity towards a man of the middle classes like himself in the charmed lives of these aristocrats: in a way, it made all dealings with them very easy and restful. But sometimes it seemed to him that he could see in their eyes a callousness that only comes from generations of living selfishly apart.
“They are hard, these aristocrats,” he murmured.
The house, by the standards of the great houses of the time, was not enormous, but it covered several acres and had fifty bedrooms besides the servants’ quarters – a maze of numberless chambers in the roof reached by back stairs into which he never penetrated. There was a fine landscaped park, and a tree-lined drive a mile long. The stone arch through which one entered the drive was so broad and high that it seemed to frame a sizeable portion of the sky.
It was not the family nor the house that troubled him: it was what he saw outside the park gates.
The first relevation came three months after his first arrival at the northern house when old Lord Forest came to spend a few weeks with them. He heard the steward remark that his lordship was going into Manchester to inspect some of his property and Ralph asked if he could accompany them. Forest had no objection. Thus, on a crisp February morning, he found himself rolling through the Lancashire countryside towards the growing city.
The countryside was beautiful: rolling ridges of oak woods dipping down to broad valleys where the farms lay in their rich fields. The new industries in the cities and the minefields had begun to bring wealth to the area, but had not yet scarred it or raised into the sky the great cloud of grime that was to darken the face of so much of northern England. It seemed to Shockley, as they went along, that the cottages and farmhouses had about them a richer air than the often dilapidated little villages he was used to seeing in the bare sheep country around Sarum.
“They do well here, by comparison,” Forest remarked. “The north grows richer than the south every day.”
They came to the outskirts of Manchester. These had about them the atmosphere of a military camp. Everywhere Shockley looked it appeared that new buildings were going up: a warehouse here, a factory there; on a nearby slope, two rows of neat terraced brick houses, solidly built, suggesting a new, if somewhat regimented prosperity. With so much fresh activity, such a plethora of carts, piles of materials and digging, it seemed as though the whole surface of this part of the world was being scraped by a huge rake before a new raw world was planted.
Then they reached the cotton mill.
It was a long brick building, three storeys high, with big staring, rectangular windows and large doorways every dozen yards. Even before the carriage door was opened, he could hear the hum of machinery from within.
But nothing had prepared him for what he saw next, and he never forgot it.
The cotton industry of England owed its truly remarkable rise to two machines, and to two minerals. Like the production of woollen cloth, cotton too requires two processes – spinning yarn and then weaving it. The first machine was for spinning. Since long before the Shockleys first opened their fulling mill, only two major innovations had taken place in the process of spinning yarn. The first was an elementary spinning wheel on which the yarn could be wound, the second, which had only come the previous century, was an improvement on the spinning wheel – the jenny – on which multiple spindles could be set. But now this improvement on the old spinning wheel was fast disappearing. For hardly surprisingly, the principle of the jenny had been extended. By means of a powered system to drive it, the basic spinning wheel, now become a monster machine, could drive eighty, a hundred or more spindles. The familiar whirr and click of the spinster in her cottage was passing forever from the countryside of England, leaving behind it only a name, applied for some reason to unmarried rather than married women. This was the first part of the story.
The reason for Manchester’s triumph lay in a development of the jenny. At first, the yarn from the jenny, lacking the careful handling of the old spinning wheel, was not so strong. It was good enough for the cross thread, the weft, but not for the warp – the lengthwise thread which took the strain of the loom. Then came Arkwright’s water frame; an improvement on an earlier machine which, by a system of rollers spinning at different speeds could stretch and then twist a yarn which was, though a little coarse, consistent and strong enough for warp and weft. In order to produce a cotton to rival the finest imported from India, one further refinement was needed: a machine to produce yarn that was both fine and strong. It had appeared in the 1780s, a combination of the jenny and Arkwright’s water frame. It was invented by Samuel Crompton. And, being a combination of exciting inventions, it was called the Mule.
It drove all before it.
“The Mule and the power loom will change everything,” Forest told him.
It was this that Shockley was about to see.
For the second invention that had ensured the triumph of the north was the mechanical loom. For centuries the business of weaving had been done by hand. When Shockley and Moody, two and a half centuries before, had organised their weavers into a primitive factory, it had still been no more than a collection of men, sitting in pairs at a loom, tossing the shuttlecock between them that threaded the weft across the warp. But now, Edmund Cartwright had set up a steam-driven power-loom.
“So,” Lord Forest remarked, “to make cotton we hardly need weavers any more.”
And the two minerals that were about to transform the world? Iron and coal, which together produced machines, driven by steam.
It was all this that Ralph Shockley saw as he entered the cotton mill.
But it was not the huge machines, the seemingly endless lines of thread that turned and clicked like so many soldiers on an eternal parade ground; it was not the monotonous thumping of the great steam engine that, in another area, drove the looms: it was not the fact that, as he saw for the first time a full-scale northern factory at work and understood, at that instant, what it really meant – that the old ways, the Wessex ways his ancestors had always known, would soon be gone for ever: it was not even the terrible, mechanical din and inhumanity of the place that turned his stomach.
It was the fact that half the machines were manned by ragged children.
Forest glanced at him.
“Children are cheaper,” he remarked calmly. “We treat them better here than in other factories. I won’t allow them to be flogged.”
And for once Ralph Shockley had the sense to be silent. As he looked about the huge, pulsating monster he realised also, for the first time, that he personally was completely powerless.
“As powerless,” he would afterwards recall sadly, “as those children.”
Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel had no illusions.
“It will be many months before Porteus allows him to return,” he told Agnes. “And Porteus will decide everything.”
&nbs
p; The canon, indeed, was only reflecting the mood of the city at that time, which was both warlike and conservative. Long before his final triumph, the council had awarded Nelson the freedom of the city. In an astounding act of generosity, the city had even offered to equip six hundred volunteers for the war. Some of the Wiltshire Volunteers had been drilling in the cathedral cloisters. They had made rather a mess of the place, and one of them had made charcoal drawings of his comrades on the walls. But nobody seemed to mind what was done in the cause of the war. A few in the close even wore the white cockades of the royalist Bourbon cause. To the canon’s huge delight, a series of local petitions against Catholic emancipation had even been prepared. All his causes were in the ascendant.
“If Porteus tells them Ralph is a traitor, he’d better not show his face here,” the doctor concluded.
Sarum thought of nothing but the war. Porteus, cold and self-righteous, could be inflexible.
In the months after the departure of Ralph, Barnikel often saw Agnes. She lived now at her own small house in New Street; but most afternoons, when Canon Porteus was out, she would be found with Frances, and it was there that Barnikel would call, twice a week, before escorting her back to her own door, where he left her. He gave presents to the children. Sometimes, either with Frances or alone, he would walk with her, but always in some public place, usually in the cathedral close.
Several times he also met Frances alone and would ask her whether Porteus showed any signs of relenting.
“Not yet doctor, I fear,” she would reply stiffly, and it was impossible to tell what she really felt about the matter. The nearest hint came early in 1805 when one day, without meeting his eye she remarked: “My husband is like Mr Pitt, doctor. His passion is very great, but it is for his country.”