In 2008, participants in a nationwide poll voted Horatio Nelson Britain's greatest military hero of all time. Nelson's death, of course, took place at his very moment of triumph: on the 31st October 1805, a lone sharpshooter, perched high in the rigging' of the French warship , fired a single shot at the figure of a senior British naval officer pacing, 50 feet below. The musket ball struck Nelson's left shoulder, smashed two ribs and tore through his left lung, severing a major artery. The funeral at St Paul's Cathedral lasted five days: a time of intense national mourning and an outpouring of genuine public grief.
