Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [559]
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 The British forces in Germany had to be hastily withdrawn.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: