Little personal information is known about Mansfield, but a good deal is known about the ships in which he served, and their record almost summarises the wars against Revolutionary America and France.

Mansfield’s exact date of birth is still unknown, but we know that he was christened on 13 December 1760 at Stoke Damerel, Devon, and was commissioned lieutenant on 25 November 1778.

Joining hms Albion as fifth lieutenant in 1779, he took part in four actions in that ship. In a fleet of twenty-six of the line under Vice Admiral the Hon John Byron (Princess Royal), he fought Vice Admiral Comte d’Estaing off Grenada on 6 July 1779. Four dismasted British ships escaped, ‘the French admiral’s seamanship not being equal to his courage.’ He was then in a squadron of eight liners under Hyde Parker (also Princess Royal) that captured nine sail of a French convoy, burned ten others and engaged the escort off Fort Royal, Martinique, on 18 December 1779. Under Rodney (Sandwich), he took part in two inconclusive engagements against Vice Admiral Comte de Guichen, thirty miles west-south-west of the north of Martinique, on 17 April 1780, and twenty miles east of the island on 15 May 1780.

An opportunity then arose to gain greater experience of seniority in a smaller ship, and in 1781 he became first lieutenant of the frigate hms Fortunée, a French prize captured on 21 December 1779 by hms Suffolk north-west of St Lucia. The date of his transfer to the Fortunée is uncertain but he may well have participated in the extremely disappointing encounter twelve miles north-east of Cape Henry, Virginia, between Rear Admiral Thomas Graves and Vice Admiral Comte de Grasse, on 5 September 1781, that was partly responsible for the fall of Yorktown.

His next appointment, in 1783, was as third lieutenant in hms Irresistible, followed in the same year by the first lieutenancy in hms Monsieur, a former French privateer captured in 1780. After 1783, with the end of the War of American Independence, he seems to have had a ‘career break’: his next appointment was not until 1790, when in the Revolutionary War with France he was made first lieutenant of hms Lion. What happened in the intervening years? Did he marry and have children? He was of an age to do so, but at present we do not know.

From the Lion he moved in 1792 to hms Assistance, again as first lieutenant, a role that he discharged for the last time on his transfer to hms Stately in 1793. On 19 July that year, he was promoted commander and moved to the sloop hms Megaera, as her commanding officer: while still in the Megaera, he jumped the great hurdle in every naval officer’s life and was ‘made post’ on 4 October 1794.

In 1795, his first command as post captain was the frigate hms Sphinx, followed later that year by another frigate, hms Andromache (32), in which he quite easily captured an aggressive Algerine (24) corsair on 30 January 1797, which had apparently misjudged the British warship as a Portuguese. The Algerine surrendered after the loss of sixty-four killed and forty wounded, against two dead and four wounded in the Andromache.

Mansfield’s next command was hms Dryad, 1799–1803, followed by hms Minotaur, which had fought with red-painted sides at the Battle of the Nile on 1–2 August 1798. In her command and in company with hm ships Thunderer and Albion, he chased and captured the French frigate Franchise (40) in the Channel on 20 May 1803. Admiral Collingwood was briefly in the Minotaur in 1803, while his ship the Venerable was away replenishing.

Few of Mansfield’s ships were really distinguished while he was present, and if the impression given here of him is that of an able but average officer, not reaching captaincy until his middle thirties, it is an impression reinforced by the Trafalgar Roll’s observation that ‘of the work of the Minotaur in the battle of Trafalgar there is not very much to be said. In company with the Spartiate in the weather division, she forced the Spanish Neptuno to surrender, losing in the encounter three men killed and twenty-two wounded. Her only damage consisted of her spars being wounded.’ For his part, Mansfield received the naval gold medal, the thanks of Parliament, and a sword of honour from the Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund – the typical rewards for the British captains present.

He did not cease service after Trafalgar, but the impression of ‘able but average’ is further strengthened by a tiny personal glimpse given by Collingwood, nearly a year after Trafalgar, in the summer of 1806: ‘I am sorry [to] hear poor Mansfield is complaining again of his rheumaticks but I hope he will be in England in the turnip season, which will cure him of all his complaints.’ In the Minotaur, Mansfield was flag captain to Rear Admiral William Essington, and third-in-command at the second Battle of Copenhagen on 2 September 1807; he died in April 1813. It may be said that from posterity’s viewpoint he had two misfortunes: the lack of correspondence and other sources of insight into his personality, leaving him relatively unknowable to us today; and the seeming fact of being an ‘able but average’ officer in an age when the average in the Royal Navy was so high. In another era, he might have been more distinguished; yet like today, it was on the ‘able but average’ that so much fundamentally depended.

SWRH