The many celebrations of the bicentenary of Admiral Lord Nelson’s death at the battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805 tell us much about how Britons view themselves in the early twenty-first century. No one has waited until the autumn itself for the festivities to start; they are already in full swing. Yet there is also a tangible sense of atavism, yearning, and perhaps even sorrow about the anniversary, for the way it italicizes the contrast between Britain’s former naval greatness and national heroism and her present unprecedented maritime weakness.
Nothing highlighted this so forcibly as the International Naval Review on June 28, when the Queen reviewed 167 ships anchored off Portsmouth. When her grandfather, King George V, reviewed the fleet there for his Silver Jubilee in 1935, there were 160 warships present, every single one of them from the Royal Navy. This June, ships from thirty-five foreign countries had to make up the numbers because the Royal Navy is now far too small to be able to mount a review on its own. It could not even furnish the largest vessel, which was the 223-yard-long French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. The Queen reviewed the fleets not from her own yacht, which was scrapped by John Major’s government, but instead from the Antarctic survey ship HMS Endurance.
For the first time in modern history, the French navy is larger in terms of tonnage, manpower, and firepower than the Royal Navy. Writing to
