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Long-standing confusion over the date of Pilfold’s birth may be clarified here: although the precise date remains unknown, the pedigree attached to the augmentation of his Grant of Arms shows that he was born in 1768.
Pilfold appears to have had a very slow start in his naval career: having gone to sea about 1781 as a captain’s servant – a typical role for a youth hoping to become an officer – he was first listed as a midshipman in October 1788, serving in the East Indies until May 1792 in hmsCrown (64) under William Cornwallis. As master’s mate in hmsBrunswick (74), he was present at Lord Howe’s victory on the Glorious First of June (1794) and was commended by his dying captain, John Harvey, to Howe, who promoted him lieutenant and took him into the flagship hmsQueen Charlotte.
On 14 February 1795, Pilfold was transferred into hmsRussell (74) and took part in the action fought on 23 June off Britanny by Admiral Lord Bridport against Rear Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, in which three French line-of-battle ships were captured. In the following September, he was appointed to the sloop of war Kingfisher (18) as first lieutenant and assisted in the capture of several privateers, mainly on the Lisbon station; on 1 July 1797 he was also instrumental in suppressing (but not without bloodshed) a mutiny.
While in the Kingfisher, his appointment in other ships was twice sought by their captains (Sir Hugh Christian of the Russell and Sir Charles Pole of the Commerce de Marseilles), but there was no one to replace him in the sloop, where he remained until 1798, when he joined the Impetueux (74). The highlight of his time in her was the raid on the River Morbihan on 6 June 1800, when, under his direction, boats from the Impetueux and four other ships with 300 soldiers burned or captured about a dozen small French warships. His captain’s report brought him to some public attention, and when the Impetueux was paid off on 14 April 1802 he was her first lieutenant.
During the brief Peace of Amiens, aged thirty-three, he met his bride-to-be, Mary Anne Horner. They married on 20 June 1803, just over a month after the resumption of hostilities between Britain and France, and he was soon appointed to hmsHindostan (54), from which he moved the following year to hmsDragon (74) and in 1805 to hmsAjax (74), under Captain William Brown. The ship took part in Sir Robert Calder’s action off Cape Finisterre on 22 July 1805 – an ill-fated event for Brown, but one which gave Pilfold his greatest chance of naval glory.
The critical response to the Cape Finisterre action led Calder to demand a court martial for himself and Brown was called as one of his witnesses. Consequently, it was Lieutenant Pilfold, not Brown, who commanded the Ajax at Trafalgar.
In the approach to battle, a marine in the Ajax described her sailors as admirably calm, preparing as if for a parade, with some sharpening cutlasses and others dancing a hornpipe, and the many items jettisoned in preparation included six wooden ladders, ten cot frames, six stanchions, a grinding stone, a set of screens for berths, four weather sails, and thirty feet of copper funnelling for the galley stove.
The ship stood sixth in Nelson’s column, and if her log is correct, she opened fire quite early, shortly after 1pm, cutting the line a few minutes later. Engaging first the French L’Intrepide and then the Spanish Argonauta, she played a full part, if not a particularly outstanding one, in the battle, and fortunately suffered only two dead and nine wounded.
Pilfold’s real moment of triumph was on Christmas Day 1805 when, jumping the intermediate rank of commander, he was made captain. Naturally, he received the naval gold medal; in April 1808, he was granted an augmentation to his family arms; and in 1815, he was made a Companion of the Bath. But otherwise his naval life after Trafalgar was a decline even longer and slower than his rise. He did not serve at sea again but returned to private life for twenty-two years, during which he did much to support his nephew, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and entered unsuccessfully into farming. He sold up from that in 1824 and with his wife and their two daughters moved from Sussex, his county of birth, to Wales and Devon, and in 1827 – presumably from official sympathy at his financial plight – he was appointed ‘captain of the Ordinary’ at Plymouth, a care and maintenance post which he held until 1831, when he suffered a stroke and was rendered ‘quite childish’. His wife died in 1832 and he, after another stroke, died in the Naval Hospital at Stonehouse, Plymouth on 12 July 1834. His body was buried two days later at St George’s Church, East Stonehouse.