ABSTRACT
Few biographers of Nelson can resist recounting the story of how the stupendous news of their hero’s victory at Trafalgar reached London. Toward midnight on 5 November 1805, according to Carola Oman’s version, two sea officers hurrying by different roads from the West Country, one on horseback, the other by carriage, clattered into the courtyard of the Admiralty at virtually the same moment. The day had been one of the foggiest in memory, so thick that few pedestrians had ventured out for fear of being run down by an errant wagon. The two exhausted officers asked to see the Secretary of the Admiralty, for whom they bore identical dispatches from Vice-Admiral Collingwood. 1 The Secretary, William Marsden, left his own account of what happened next. Mindful of the need to inform the First Lord at once, he had no time to savor being the first person in England to learn of Trafalgar. But finding his superior at such an hour did not prove easy: ‘The First Lord had retired to rest, as had his domestics, and it was not till after some research that I could discover the room in which he slept. Drawing aside his curtain, with a candle in my hand, I awoke the old peer … from a sound slumber; and to the credit of his nerves, be it mentioned, that he showed no symptom of alarm or surprise, but calmly asked “What news, Mr. M?”’ 2
