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Once he became a fleet-commander, Nelson always liked to lead his ships into battle flying naval signal number sixteen from his topgallant mast-head. Signal number sixteen consisted of two flags, one above the other: the uppermost white with a blue cross, the one below a patriotic red, white and blue. Even at the battle of Trafalgar, after he had issued the immortal message ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, Nelson hoisted signal number sixteen as his last general command to his battle fleet.

Its meaning was a dare as much as an order, and it was particularly relished by his officers, his ‘band of brothers’, who considered it typical of Nelson’s attitude to life in general. Signal number sixteen, applicable in all conceivable circumstances, meant: ‘Engage the enemy more closely’.

It was flying at 1pm on 21 October, 1805, when Nelson was hit by a musket ball on the quarter deck of the Victory; and it was still flying when he died three hours later, in the surgeon’s cockpit, asking Captain Hardy to kiss him farewell, and to tell him how many enemy ships had surrendered.

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Even before his heroic death at Trafalgar aged forty-seven, Nelson had become a national legend in a way that was virtually without precedent. His personal bravery, his astonishing aggression in battle, his loyalty to his fellow officers and his kindness towards his able seamen (especially his young midshipmen), were famous throughout the Royal Navy. But his gallantry, his self-sacrifice, and his fervent patriotism had made him a celebrity, in a quite modern sense, throughout the whole of England.

There were, of course, historical reasons for this. The patriotic war against revolutionary France, which began in earnest in 1793, brought growing fears of invasion and subversion. By 1800, the military successes of Bonaparte had personalised this threat, and even brought fears of defeat and dictatorship. This slowly transformed the mood of radical discontent, and popular disaffection, that had gripped England (and especially its writers and intellectuals) for over a decade. Nelson became the personal focus of a deep, stirring movement of national unity and recovered common purpose. It was no coincidence that he led the most glamorous and successful of the British armed services of the period, and that there were very few families of the landed and middle classes–the families of Jane Austen’s novels–who did not have a father, brother, son, grandson, or uncle in the navy.