1806

Horatio Nelson is the best known of British naval heroes who posted the famous signal England expects that every man will do his duty before his greatest naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). He died of his wounds in the battle where the Spanish fleet were utterly routed. Viscount Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) joined the navy at the tender age of twelve and became a captain as early as twenty. 

He saw service across the globe from the West Indies to Canada, and the Baltic to the Nile. During various campaigns he lost his sight in one eye and also lost his right arm. During his travels he fell in love with Lady Hamilton, the wife of a British ambassador. 

After his death his body was preserved in a keg of naval brandy and placed inside four coffins before burial in the Crypt. His grand memorial in the crypt is the large black sarcophagus originally made for Cardinal Wolsey some three centuries earlier. His final resting place is immediately under the centre of the Dome of St Paul's. Nelson's other well known memorial is the column erected in his memory in Trafalgar square in the centre of London.