This produced an armistice, and hostilities had hardly ceased, when three of the English ships, including that in which Nelson himself was, struck upon the bank.  “They were in the jaws of destruction, and would never have escaped if the batteries had continued their fire.  They therefore owed their safety to this armistice.”  A convention was soon signed, by which every thing was left in statu quo, and the fleet of Admiral Parker allowed to proceed into the Baltic.  Edward Baines, the able English historian of the wars of the French Revolution, in speaking of Nelson’s request for an armistice, says:  “This letter, which exhibited a happy union of policy and courage, was written at a moment when Lord Nelson perceived that, in consequence of the unfavorable state of the wind, the admiral was not likely to get up to aid the enterprise; that the principal batteries of the enemy, and the ships at the mouth of the harbor, were yet untouched; that two of his own division had grounded, and others were likely to share the same fate.”  Campbell says these batteries and ships “were still unconquered. Two of his [Nelson’s] own vessels were grounded and exposed to a heavy fire; others, if the battle continued, might be exposed to a similar fate, while he found it would be scarcely practicable to bring off the prizes under the fire of the batteries.”

With respect to the fortifications of the town, a chronicler of the times says they were of no service while the action lasted.  “They began to fire when the enemy took possession of the abandoned ships, but it was at the same time the parley appeared.”  The Danish commander, speaking of the general contest between the two lines, says:  “The Crown-battery did not come at all into action.”  An English writer says distinctly:  “The works (fortifications) of Copenhagen were absolutely untouched at the close of the action.”  Colonel Mitchel, the English historian, says:  “Lord Nelson never fired a shot at the town or fortifications of Copenhagen; he destroyed a line of block-ships, prames, and floating batteries that defended the sea approach to the town; and the Crown Prince, seeing his capital exposed, was willing to finish by armistice a war, the object of which was neither very popular nor well understood.  What the result of the action between Copenhagen and the British fleet might ultimately have been, is therefore altogether uncertain.  THE BOMBARDMENT OF COPENHAGEN BY NELSON, as it is generally styled, is therefore, like most other oracular phrases of the day, a mere combination of words, without the slightest meaning.”

The British lost in killed and wounded nine hundred and forty-three men; and the loss of the Danes, according to their own account, which is confirmed by the French, was but very little higher.  The English, however, say it amounted to sixteen or eighteen hundred; but let the loss be what it may, it was almost exclusively confined to the floating defences, and can in no way determine the relative accuracy of aim of the guns ashore and guns afloat.