by John Sugden
Nelson had known that cult all his life. He had met those same ideals of patriotism, honour and martial heroism in the Classics drummed into him at school, and greatly admired Benjamin West’s famous painting, The Death of Wolfe, depicting the hero dying at the moment of victory. Even more, he had been influenced by his role models, Captain Suckling and William Locker, and by the patriotic plays of Shakespeare, with their frequent allusions to national triumphs over Gallic rivals. Nelson was particularly fond of the stirring close to King John, with its proud boast:
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror . . .
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
Most lovingly of all did Nelson misquote the words Shakespeare gave his hero Henry V before the battle of Agincourt:
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost . . .
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
As several of Nelson’s biographers have remarked, the admiral made a significant substitution in his version of the speech. In 1801, for example, he wrote, ‘I feel myself . . . as anxious [now] to get a medal or a step in the peerage as if I never had got either, for “if it be a sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive”.’11
Why Nelson needed this public acclaim no one can now say. Psychologists might probe his childhood, and ponder the mark those lonely Norfolk years made upon a boy who lost his mother before he was ten and whose father spent long months from home; perhaps also the transition into adolescence and manhood spent at sea in a man’s world of hard work and danger. It is entirely possible that Horatio’s lifelong need for attention and affection was in some way rooted in that turbulent and deficient upbringing, but while these speculations must trouble the novelist, historians are unable to enlarge upon them. What we do know is that from an early age Nelson fought for every scrap of glory he could get, and fiercely resented any denial of his just deserts.
Back in 1780, while fighting for life against a diseased body, Nelson found his deep-seated drive for recognition a powerful weapon of survival, and acknowledged its importance in one of the most revealing of all his early letters. It was addressed to Hercules Ross, who had so often put his house, carriages and purse at Nelson’s disposal in those difficult days in Jamaica. On 1 September, as the enfeebled captain stirred himself for the passage home, he talked about riding to Ross’s house. ‘Now assured I return to England, hope revives within me,’ he confessed. ‘I shall recover, and my dream of glory be fulfilled. Nelson will yet be an admiral. It is the climate that has destroyed my health and crushed my spirits. Home, and dear friends, will restore me.’12
3
Captain William Cornwallis took Nelson home in the Lion. Horatio was entered on the ship’s books from 16 August, the day after his discharge from the Janus. He was a supernumerary, entered for victuals only, and took with him only two or three followers, including Frank Lepee and William Irwin as servants. Nelson was not the only invalid aboard. Thirty others were brought from the hospital on 2 September, but Nelson probably received the most attention. He already knew some of the ship’s officers, including the third lieutenant Joseph Bullen, formerly of the Hinchinbroke, the surgeon, James Melling, who had signed his sick certificate, and Cornwallis himself. The captain of the Lion was the son of an earl and belonged to a distinguished military family, but a modest man compared to Nelson, yet they nonetheless gelled. In fact Nelson credited the senior man’s ‘care and attention’ with saving his life.13
The Lion left Jamaica at four-thirty on the morning of 4 September. There was convoy work to be done and for several days other contingents joined up. From his ship Nelson saw a sea studded with white sails, some 127 merchantmen shepherded by warships he knew – the Magnificent, Niger, Thunderer, Sultan, Elizabeth, Conqueror, Bristol, Sterling Castle, Berwick, Hector, Trident and Ruby, all controlled by Rear Admiral Joshua Rowley from the Grafton. They went west before steering east, by way of the Grand Caymans and the Strait of Florida, but on 24 September Cornwallis parted with the convoy and pushed northwards into the cold Atlantic. At the end of October, east of Newfoundland, Nelson would have been interested in the warship that stood towards them masquerading under French colours. She turned out to be the old Raisonable, now under Sir Digby Dent, and the eighteen days she accompanied the Lion on the homeward leg must have reawakened memories in Horatio of his first lonely days at sea. Other than that there was little of interest, though Nelson witnessed a novel penalty when Cornwallis had an incorrigible thief ‘punished by all the boys in the ship’ and compelled to wear an onerous collar.
The ship reached Spithead on 25 November, finding the Diligent flying the flag of Admiral Sir Thomas Pye and other ships, some of them from among the escorts that had left Jamaica with the Lion. Nelson and his servants were discharged the same day, and the captain made his way to London, where he temporarily lodged at the home of Sir Peter Parker. He also made an inevitable visit to Captain Locker’s rooms at Gray’s Inn before taking a coach out of town in search of that ‘most precious jewel’, his health. Like many sick people, he was beginning to appreciate what the fit take for granted.14
In Nelson’s day health meant one place above all others: the town of Bath, close to the border of Wiltshire and Somerset, the last word in resorts for ailing men and women of fashion. It was an eighteenth-century health farm with a clientele that included almost every layer of the ‘gentler’ classes, from royalty to parsons. Horatio had known about it most of his life. His father regularly wintered there, and his sister Susanna had served her apprenticeship at Watson’s, a local milliners, before working as a shop assistant in the town until she married in 1780. Almost everyone had heard of the famous but mythical healing properties of Bath’s thermal spring waters, and Nelson believed the stories implicitly. Accordingly, the Bath Journal of 22 January 1781 proclaimed his arrival in the town in its customary roll call of visiting dignitaries.
The town had numerous attractions. It was packed with apothecaries and physicians, a few of them respectable, but many peddling cure-all cordials and pills to the sick, old and lame. The waters, they said, relieved everything from gout and jaundice to deafness and infertility, whether imbibed in the Pump Room or taken immersed to the neck in one of the five baths. The streets were full of puffing sedan chairmen, hauling patients to and from the baths. Once there, admission fees included the loan of linen waistcoats, shorts or smocks, all yellowed by the sulphur in the water, and towels. That winter of 1781 Nelson must have shivered as he padded barefoot over the cold stone passages that led from the dressing rooms to the steaming open-air ponds in which he was supposed to wallow to the musical accompaniment of bathside bands.
It was certainty a novelty for one who had spent years at sea, and in addition to the bathing there was the chance of making useful contacts among the well-to-do who gathered in the town. They sat and talked in coffee houses and tea rooms, danced in their best finery in the new assembly rooms, and turned the town into a maelstrom of gossip, spiced not only by local newspapers but also the London dailies that arrived in Bath within hours of publication. Aesthetes patronised the circulating library, the bookshops and a floundering philosophical society, or watched Sarah Siddons perform at the Theatre Royal on Orchard Street. More frivolous souls defied the gambling laws and entertained themselves with such games of chance as Evens and Odds, a forbidden form of roulette. Nor was sexual titillation very far away in Bath. The streets were haunted by prostitutes, some mere children of fourteen or fifteen, and though attendants at the popular Cross Bath were supposed to preserve propriety the place was said to be ‘more famed for pleasure than cures’. In it were ‘performed all the wanton dalliances imaginable; celebrated beauties, panting breasts, and curious shapes, almost expose
d to public view; languishing eyes, darting killing glances, tempting amorous postures, attended by soft music, enough to provoke a vestal to forbidden pleasure, captivate a saint, and charm a Jove’. In some Bath circles a man of modest sexual appetite was considered an ‘unfashioned fellow of no life or spirit’.15
Horatio boarded in the house of an apothecary, Joseph Spry, at no. 2 Pierrepont Street. It was a mid-terrace property with attic windows in the pitched roof and a basement for the servants, but Nelson probably occupied the ground floor to the left of the front door because his legs were still extremely weak. A physician and a surgeon attended him, the former Dr Francis Woodward, a man of almost sixty, who practised from no. 8 Gay Street. Yet notwithstanding their services, Nelson told Locker that he was ‘so ill’ that he ‘was obliged to be carried to and from bed with the most excruciating tortures’. He was ‘physicked’ thrice a day with pills and cordials, drank the waters at the Pump Room near the abbey as often, and in the evenings, when the crowds had dispersed, bathed, probably either in the Cross or the King’s Bath. ‘Worst of all,’ he said, he abstained from drinking wine with his meals. Nelson was generally a rebellious patient, but on this occasion he was eager to command a ship again. While scrutinising the Navy Lists to gauge his standing among post-captains, this time he stuck to his regime.16
For a while Horatio remained debilitated, ‘scarcely able to hold my pen’, but gradually felt himself ‘a new man’. On 15 February he was able to declare that ‘my health, thank God, is very near perfectly restored, and I have the perfect use of all my limbs, except my left arm, which I can hardly tell what is the matter with it. From the shoulder to my fingers’ ends are as if half dead, but the surgeon and doctors give me hopes it will all go off.’ His ailment was probably polyneuritis, a legacy of the illnesses that had floored him in Nicaragua. The immediate cause was the degeneration of the nerve fibres in the small nerves, and recovery was slow because of the need to grow replacement nerve fibres.17
During this extensive rehabilitation Locker was his favourite correspondent. He sent Nelson news from London, and acted as a kind of referee for him. Whenever Horatio met sea officers he introduced the name of Locker as a talking point, and was forever passing their compliments back to his old mentor. In short, he was using Locker to introduce himself to professional colleagues, and to gain credibility by the relationship. Locker would have wished it no differently, and though many years Nelson’s senior was unrelentingly enthusiastic about their friendship. He happily referred old comrades to his young protégé. One such was Captain James Kirke, under whom Locker had gone to the West Indies when himself a youngster in 1747. Kirke and his sick wife arrived in Bath at the end of February 1781 with Locker’s advice to call upon Captain Nelson at an early opportunity. The Kirkes took different lodgings, but Nelson recommended his own doctor and surgeon, and was sure the bathing would be of ‘infinite service’ to Mrs Kirke. Sadly, her condition proved incurable: ‘I am very sorry for her, poor woman,’ wrote Nelson, ‘it must be a most lamentable situation to remain in her state for the number of years she may live.’18
Locker also handled Nelson’s affairs in London, visiting Rigaud’s studio to supervise further work on the portrait which Horatio wanted altering so that it depicted a captain rather than a teenage lieutenant. The likeness was one of three portraits of individuals that Locker appears to have been overseeing, one of them of their mutual friend Captain Charles Pole. ‘When you get the pictures, I must be in the middle,’ Nelson wrote, ‘for God knows, without good supporters, I shall fall to the ground!’19
Locker had not put his own health problems behind him and Nelson tried to persuade the captain to join him. ‘I wish you had come to Bath when your sons went to school, instead of being cooped up in Gray’s Inn without seeing any body,’ he said. ‘I am sure yours is a Bath case, and therefore you ought to come for a month or six weeks.’ There was a vacancy in Kirke’s lodgings, but Locker went instead to an older friend, Captain Robert Kingsmill of Sidmonton Place, near Newbury, Berkshire. Indeed, Kingsmill extended the invitation to Nelson. A little weak but feeling better, Horatio took the London stage on the morning of Monday 15 March, travelling as far as Newbury with the Kirkes. There he enjoyed a brief reunion with Locker and found Kingsmill a remarkably agreeable companion, before proceeding to London to stay with his uncle, William Suckling.20
Suckling had acquired a country house in what was then the village of Kentish Town, an agreeable rural area waiting to be swallowed by the rapacious metropolis and reached by a short coach ride from the city. The house was a regular-fronted two-storey residence on the west side of Kentish Town Road, adjacent to the Castle Tavern and Tea Gardens and sporting a view from the rear towards the famed beauty spot of Primrose Hill. The extensive grounds, both front and back, were ornamented with shrubs and ‘extraordinary box trees’ that later generations decided were planted by Nelson himself.21
It was Uncle William who led Horatio’s campaign for employment. Nelson was a post-captain, and would ascend the captains’ list by seniority as a matter of course, but he had no wish to remain on ‘half-pay’ without a command, and used his surviving interest to get a ship. There was less of it now, after the comptroller’s death, and William Suckling was the best patron at Nelson’s disposal. He lacked the standing of his brother, Maurice, but was still deputy collector at the Customs House on the river and had a few useful friends.
The most powerful of these was Charles Jenkinson, the secretary for war, who may have become acquainted with Suckling when he was Lord of the Treasury. Suckling wrote to him at least once, and perhaps twice. Accordingly, on 12 February 1781 Jenkinson tackled Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, on behalf of the ‘nephew of the late comptroller’, a young man, he understood, of ‘very good character’. Sandwich hesitated, but on 6 May Nelson personally appeared before him at the Admiralty, and the first lord promised to employ him at an early opportunity. With that, for the time being, Horatio had to be satisfied.22
During his short stay in London Nelson returned to Rigaud, and had him complete his portrait and add the castle of San Juan to the background. There were also friends to look up, including his brother Maurice and Locker, and new physicians to find. He placed himself in the care of Robert Adair, the surgeon general to the army. In May a relapse cost him a temporary loss of the use of his left arm and part of his left leg, but Adair assured him that a few weeks’ rest would repair the damage. In the meantime his account with Robert Winch, apothecary, for ointments, vial drops and decoctions ran to nearly £9 in two months.23
Nelson’s resources were modest, and his pay was slow in coming. As captain of the Janus he had been too ill to keep adequate records, and although he petitioned the Victualling Board to pass his deficient accounts, a portion of his wages would be withheld for four years. But moving here and there about town demanded a new wardrobe, and Nelson presented himself to one Richard Shepherd, a gentleman’s outfitter. To judge from his purchases his taste was entirely suited to a sober parson’s son. Though he chose ‘silver Tishua’ and ‘striped satin’ waistcoats, he preferred black outer garments, and ordered a ‘super fine cloth coat lined with silk’ and Florentine breeches, the four items costing him £6 12s. 0d. He also had an existing pair of silk breeches dyed black. Three years later we find him at the same store, replenishing his civilian attire with another black cloth silk-lined coat, a black silk waistcoat and breeches, and a sleeved flannel under-waistcoat for £7 5s. 0d. There were other necessities, and buried among his accounts are payments for such items as stockings, shirts and lace and for the dressing of his hair. Nor, as he prepared for his next ship in 1781, did Nelson forget the requirements of his servant – probably Frank Lepee, whom he had retained. Domestic staff were essential tokens of gentrification, and their deficiencies an almost indispensable subject of polite conversation. Nelson paid Shepherd £2 7s. 0d. to mend his servant’s coat and breeches and supply him with a new suit of ‘thickset materials’.24
Adair was right about getting Nelson on his feet, for in May he felt fit enough to brush the cobwebs off an old promise. ‘Now you will say, “Why do[es] not he come into Norfolk?”’ he wrote to his brother William on 7 May. Some time in the late spring or early summer of 1781, after ten long years away, Captain Nelson returned to the quiet county of his childhood. William, he discovered, had just been awarded his Master of Arts and was on the verge of being ordained a priest, while his sister Susanna and her new husband, Thomas Bolton, a worthy merchant in corn, malt and coal, were established at Wells. Horatio’s younger brothers, Edmund and Suckling, were both apprentices, ‘Mun’ to one Nicholas Havers of Burnham and Suckling to a linen draper, Mr Blowers of Beccles.25
Much as he loved Burnham and thought of it as his home, Horatio found it a lonely, provincial place, far from the affairs that had now become his life and the news he longed to hear. Almost indecently he hurried back to London, and the letter he had been awaiting from the Admiralty. On 15 August 1781 he was appointed captain of the frigate Albemarle, fitting out at Woolwich.
4
Nelson was on the ship the same day, and watching it being caulked, repaired and readied for coppering in the dock. His commission was read to the assembled company. Albemarle was a prize taken from the French and converted into a twenty-eight-gun, nine-pounder ship, among the weakest class of frigates, but her new captain was proud of her and brought friends aboard. Captain Locker thought the ship deficient, as she indeed proved to be. She had the lines of a ponderous store ship rather than a fast frigate, and would serve her purposes ill. But Nelson’s less practised eye saw no imperfections in his new command. After taking his brother Maurice aboard on 23 August he declared himself ‘perfectly satisfied’ with the Albemarle, and fancied her far superior to the Enterprize being fitted alongside. Though he acknowledged that the space between the Albemarle’s decks was low, ‘she has a bold entrance and clean run’.26