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class has an implication of settled propriety. But that is an anachronism and something much rawer has to be put in its place. The rampant energy of 18th-century England is founded on the idea of dynamic change. By 1805, the bourgeoisie were only on the cusp of acquiring the strait-laced solidity and evangelical worthiness by which they would come to define themselves in the century that followed. The Georgian bourgeoisie was wilder than that. Tumultuousness, extravagance and flightiness were given full rein alongside tight-fistedness and cold ambition. Add to that background the knowledge that the 1790s had been a desperate time in Britain. A series of bad harvestshad meant that the cost of poor relief had gone up to over £4 million a year, almost three times what it had been in the 1770s. The revolutionary events in France had issued a violent challenge to the status quo in England, and 1790s Britain felt like a system in crisis, as the armies of revolutionary France had brushed aside the old order in Europe. It was a time of immense strain. From a brief moment of peace in November 1801 Pitt looked back on it, as if on a traumatic crossing of a wild sea:
We have the satisfaction of knowing that we have survived the violence of the revolutionary fever, and we have seen the extent of its principles abated. We have seen Jacobinism deprived of its fascination; we have seen it stripped of the name and pretext of liberty; it has shown itself to be capable only of destroying, not of building, and that it must necessarily end in military despotism.
    These are the initial elements of Trafalgar: antique Spanish stiffness; French post-revolutionary uncertainty; and British commercial, bourgeois dynamism, portraying itself to itself as defending the ancient honour of England against the flashy, subversive allure of pretended revolutionary freedom. Or to put it another way: a Spanish navy acting to a pre-modern code of chivalric honour; a French navy surviving as a dysfunctional amalgam of aristocratic hauteur, Enlightenment expertise and revolutionary ideological fervour; and a British navy actively creating a global commercial network but thinking of itself as the guardian of ancient freedoms.
    In the Royal Navy, a man’s seniors, at least at the level of the officer class, never used ‘obedience’ as a term of approval. Enterprise was what was required and a man was invariably recommended for his ‘zeal’. Zeal was theamalgam of energy, commitment, what we would call ‘hunger’, an enterprising spirit that wants to land the deal, or in these circumstances, to put the competitor out of business. It was a mechanism that worked within the navy as a whole, within fleets and within ships. Zeal is what Nelson was commended for, above all qualities, by his Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Earl St Vincent. ‘Your Lordship has given so many proofs of transcendent Zeal in the service of your King and country,’ the old flatterer wrote, ‘that we have only to pray for the preservation of your invaluable life to insure everything that can be achieved by mortal man.’
    Emerging from a society in which neither revolutionary equality nor ossified rank was the guiding principle, but a sort of bourgeois capitalist middle ground between those two, something the 18th century would have called the acquisition and retention of Place became the motor behind the zeal. They all wanted and needed to win. ‘ Place ,’ Adam Smith wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘that great object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world.’ Of course, in The Wealth of Nations published in 1777, Smith identified this individual ‘emulation to excel’ as the mechanism by which social good was achieved. That idea became