What exactly was “The Trafalgar Action”? What was a deputation? What exactly does the term “gentleman” mean? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this episode of My Cousin Jane.
Hey everybody, welcome back to My Cousin Jane. As always, we’re going to be taking a look at the life and works and writings of Jane Austen through a lens of the deleted scenes, bonus features point of view, pointing out things that will enrich and deepen your understanding and appreciation of some of the things she wrote about in her novels.
Today we’re going to be looking at Persuasion Chapter 3.
The Peace
When this chapter opens up, we are still with Sir Walter and his family and Mr. Shepherd, talking about who we could rent out Sir Walter’s house to. Mr. Shepherd brings up the point that since this is a time of peace, there are a bunch of rich young naval officers that are coming on to shore that would be ideal tenants.
There’s some discussion about this, but I want to talk a little bit about this idea of the peace. As we talked about in chapter one, this is the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon is in exile at this point. This is right before the Hundred Days War, when he briefly makes his encore performance trying to rally the troops, so to speak. At this time period, British naval superiority has been established. The wars are over.
The Navy Lists
One of the people that they talk about as being an ideal tenant is a man named Admiral Croft. They’re talking about who’s Admiral Croft, and they’re trying to figure this out, and there’s some connections to some other people that we’ll talk about here in a minute. We get this little glimpse of the fact that Anne is a big naval aficionado.
It’s pretty interesting, because in the first three chapters, Anne Elliot is the protagonist, but she only says two or three sentences in each of the first three chapters. One of the things we learn about her in this chapter is that she keeps up with what’s going on with the Navy.
During that time, there were two ways that people largely kept up with what was happening with the wars, and with the Navy in particular. One was a published series of booklets called the Navy lists. This would detail who the different naval officers were, what their ranks were, what ships they were stationed on. Also, the newspapers would often run stories about battles and officers and things like that. Anne kept up with this for reasons that are obvious if you’ve read the novel already, but we’ll talk about that in a little bit.
Rear Admiral of the White
One of the things that she mentions: they’re trying to figure out who Admiral Croft is, and she says he is a rear admiral of the white. That is a naval rank.
During this time period, the Royal Navy was divided into three squadrons based on color. In order of seniority, it was Red Squadron, White Squadron, and Blue Squadron. Which color squadron it was also determined how it would line up during battle. The Red Squadron, the commanding squadron, would be in the center. The White Squadron would be the vanguard, or the front lines. The Blue Squadron would be in the rear.
Within each squadron you had different ranks. This shifted a little bit right before the Regency era, but there was one person in charge of everything, and that was the Admiral of the Fleet. He commanded Red Squadron; that was where he commanded from.
There was also, within Red Squadron, the Admiral of the Red, and then we had a Vice Admiral below him, and then the Rear Admiral of the Red. Then within the White Squadron, you also had Admiral of the White, Vice Admiral of the White, and Rear Admiral of the White. Then similar for Blue Squadron.
The way the ranking system worked is you had the main Admiral of the whole fleet, followed by the Admiral of the Red, Admiral of the White, and Admiral of the Blue, in that order. Then you had all the Vice Admirals of the Red, White, and Blue squadrons, and then the Rear Admirals of the Red, White, and Blue squadrons. Admiral Croft is Rear Admiral of the White.
The Battle of Trafalgar
Anne mentions that he became Rear Admiral as a result of the Battle of Trafalgar. This was a major military victory for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon had decided he was going to wipe out the British fleet. He was going to invade England. He gets all the French Navy and the Spanish Navy combined, and they launch this big attack, and the British ships were outnumbered: 27 British ships against 33 French and Spanish ships combined.
Despite being outnumbered, one of the interesting things is that the French Navy officers did not have anywhere near the same level of competence as the British Navy, as the Royal Navy. That was because a lot of the French naval officers had previously been part of the aristocracy and were royalists, and during the French Revolution all of those people were either killed or exiled or went into hiding. The people who are in command of the French Navy are fairly incompetent compared to the Royal Navy at the time.
Admiral Nelson wipes out the combined French and Spanish fleet. They didn’t lose a single ship on the British side; French and Spanish fleet lost 22 ships. Admiral Nelson, commanding the British fleet, is shot and fatally injured during the battle. However, it’s a decisive military victory, and establishes British naval superiority from this point on until World War II.
Again, the interesting takeaway from this novel is that Anne kept up with all this. She knew what Admiral Croft’s rank was. She knew how he’d achieved that rank. This is an interesting glimpse into what Anne’s point of view is, what she is interested in. We know why she’s interested in the Navy if you’ve read the book, but we’ll talk more about that.
Sir Walter and the Navy
Anne’s feelings about the Navy are pretty clear. She thinks that the naval officers are great people. This mirrors Jane Austen’s own feeling about naval officers, because two of her brothers were in the Navy. In fact, one of her brothers, Francis, became actually Admiral of the Fleet.
Jane was very familiar with naval life, had a very high respect for naval officers. That comes out quite a bit in the novel Persuasion, also to some extent in Mansfield Park, but not nearly as much as it does in Persuasion. We’ll see that, and we’ll talk about that as we go through some more of those chapters.
Sir Walter, on the other hand, unlike Anne and unlike Jane Austen, did not have very kind feelings about the Navy. The main reason for this is because, again, Sir Walter’s main concerns are about physical appearance and the importance of rank, and we talked about that in chapter one, about the irony of that. Let’s hear his points of view about the Navy and why he doesn’t like that:
“The profession has its utility, but I should be sorry to see any friend of mine belonging to it.”
“Indeed!” was the reply, and with a look of surprise.
“Yes; it is in two points offensive to me; I have two strong grounds of objection to it. First, as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of; and secondly, as it cuts up a man’s youth and vigour most horribly; a sailor grows old sooner than any other man. I have observed it all my life. A man is in greater danger in the navy of being insulted by the rise of one whose father, his father might have disdained to speak to, and of becoming prematurely an object of disgust himself, than in any other line. Persuasion, Chapter 3
Gentlemen
Mr. Shepherd then goes on to assure him that Admiral Croft is a very respectable gentleman, and he’s got a great physical appearance, and Sir Walter starts to come around to this idea.
Mr. Shepherd then tries to tell him, oh, by the way, his family has some connections here. His wife is related to someone who used to live here, and they can’t remember who it was. Anne knows who it is, and she mentions it’s Mr. Wentworth. He says, oh yes, her brother, Mr. Wentworth, the curate of Monkford.
Sir Walter brings out this distinction, because when Mr. Shepherd was trying to describe him, he says, oh yes, it was a gentleman who lived here. Sir Walter says, oh, you mean the curate of Monkford? You misled me by the term gentleman.
Again, this phrase gentleman didn’t just mean someone with good manners. It meant a member of the landed gentry, someone who had land and received their income through tenant farmers. Sir Walter does not regard the curate of Monkford, someone who had to work for a living, as a gentleman, because he was not a wealthy landowner.
If we look at Mrs. Clay, we’re going to listen to a clip of Mrs. Clay, a little iteration of different professions. This will underscore people that today you might look back on and think, oh, they were gentlemen, they had good manners and such and such. Here’s a list of people that were not considered gentlemen:
The sea is no beautifier, certainly; sailors do grow old betimes; I have observed it; they soon lose the look of youth. But then, is not it the same with many other professions, perhaps most other? Soldiers, in active service, are not at all better off: and even in the quieter professions, there is a toil and a labour of the mind, if not of the body, which seldom leaves a man’s looks to the natural effect of time. The lawyer plods, quite care-worn; the physician is up at all hours, and travelling in all weather; and even the clergyman—” she stopt a moment to consider what might do for the clergyman;—“and even the clergyman, you know is obliged to go into infected rooms, and expose his health and looks to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere. In fact, as I have long been convinced, though every profession is necessary and honourable in its turn, it is only the lot of those who are not obliged to follow any, who can live in a regular way, in the country, choosing their own hours, following their own pursuits, and living on their own property, without the torment of trying for more; it is only their lot, I say, to hold the blessings of health and a good appearance to the utmost: I know no other set of men but what lose something of their personableness when they cease to be quite young.” Persuasion, Chapter 3
An ideal lot to strive for, indeed. Mrs. Clay outlines, again, the fact that all of these people, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, are not considered gentlemen in the aristocracy’s usage of the word.
Poaching and Deputation
The last thing I want to talk about is this point that Mr. Shepherd brings up about Admiral Croft, and he mentions the fact that he occasionally takes out a gun but never kills, referring to hunting.
During this time period, hunting is interesting, because the only people that were allowed to hunt were the aristocracy. If you owned land and you had the money, you could have a gamekeeper, and his main job would be to raise game for you to hunt: pheasants, grouse, things like that. If you were a tenant farmer on the land, and this game was attacking your fields and causing trouble for your crops, you were not allowed to do anything about it.
In fact, if you were caught poaching, this was a very serious offense. If you went out and said, oh, my family’s starving, look, there’s a pheasant, I’m going to go eat it? That pheasant probably belonged to a wealthy lord. In fact, Roald Dahl wrote a funny book about this, Danny, the Champion of the World, about the dangers of pheasant poaching. If you went out in a group to go poaching and you were caught, it was very severe penalties. In fact, you could be exiled to Australia, according to some historians. This was a big deal.
One of the things that landowners would often do is they would want to invite friends over to go hunting. They were allowed to do what was called deputize, and they were able to deputize their friends, to give them the authority to hunt on their land.
When Mr. Shepherd said he would be glad of the deputation, what he means is Admiral Croft knows he has no right to kill any of the game on the land, but he would be glad to be given that authority by Sir Walter. An interesting term.
Further Reading
We’re going to talk a little bit more about the Navy and the connections to Jane Austen’s family next week when we look at chapter four.
If you are a big fan of the Royal Navy, or interested in this idea, I highly recommend the book Jane Austen and the Navy by Brian Southam, who is a big Jane Austen scholar. It goes into detail about the Royal Navy at the time period, its effects, and Jane Austen’s interactions with the Royal Navy, as well as how it’s portrayed in her novels.
There’s some interesting connections in there, that if you find this kind of stuff interesting, I recommend that book. You can find it on Amazon. I don’t think you’d be able to find it at an independent bookstore, but you can find it on Amazon, imported. You can find it in the UK pretty easily.
Conclusion
That wraps up this episode of My Cousin Jane. As always, if you enjoy the show and would like to help support us, please consider clicking the little donate button or subscribing to our newsletter. Either way, thanks so much for listening.
