advantageous manner than if he could have followed my orders” (he never mentioned or gave any hint by which I could understand who it was he intended for this distinguished service).[12] He continued, “With the remaining part of the fleet, formed in two lines, I shall go at them at once if I can, about one third of their line from their leading ship.”  He then said, “What do you think of it?” Such a question I felt required consideration.  I paused.  Seeing it he said, “But I will tell you what I think of it.  I think it will surprise and confound the enemy.  They won’t know what I am about.  It will bring forward a pell-mell battle, and that is what I want."[13]

Here we have something roughly on all-fours with the methods of the First Dutch War.  There are the three squadrons, the headlong ‘charge’ and the melee.  The reserve squadron to windward goes even further back, to the treatise of De Chaves and the Instructions of Lord Lisle in 1545.  It was no wonder it took away Keats’s breath.  The return to primitive methods was probably unconscious, but what was obviously uppermost in Nelson’s mind was the breaking up of the established order in single line, leading by surprise and concealment to a decisive melee.  He seems to insist not so much upon defeating the enemy by concentration as by throwing him into confusion, upsetting his mental equilibrium in accordance with the primitive idea.  The notion of concentration is at any rate secondary, while the subtle scheme for ‘containing’ as perfected in the memorandum is not yet developed.  As he explained his plan to Keats, he meant to attack at once with both his main divisions, using the reserve squadron as a general support.  There is no clear statement that he meant it as a ‘containing’ force, though possibly it was in his mind.[14]

There is one more piece of evidence relating to this time when he was still in England.  According to this story Lord Hill, about 1840, when still Commander-in-Chief, was paying a visit to Lord Sidmouth.  His host, who, better known as Addington, had been prime minister till 1804, and was in Pitt’s new cabinet till July 1805, showed him a table bearing a Nelson inscription.  He told him that shortly before leaving England to join the fleet Nelson had drawn upon it after dinner a plan of his intended attack, and had explained it as follows:  ’I shall attack in two lines, led by myself and Collingwood, and I am confident I shall capture their van and centre or their centre and rear.’  ‘Those,’ concluded Sidmouth, ‘were his very words,’ and remarked how wonderfully they had been fulfilled.[15] Hill and Sidmouth at the time were both old men and the authority is not high, but so far as it goes it would tend to show that an attack in two lines instead of one was still Nelson’s dominant idea.  It cannot however safely be taken as evidence that he ever intended a concentration on the van, though in view of the memorandum of 1803 this is quite possible.