by John Sugden
In a sense it was a triumph for the junior captains, although one that must be seen in context. The strict enforcement of the navigation laws was hardly the noble cause Collingwood and Nelson supposed, and their victories were of very doubtful utility. Even in St Kitts and Nevis, where the courts had supported the navy, the ‘rigid execution’ of the laws was blamed for inflation ‘at a time when our situation could ill bear any additional burthens, and when we had cause rather to expect the fostering assistance of the parent state’.
Then again, in 1786 the complaints of Nelson and the Collingwoods prompted the Admiralty to declare unequivocally that American ships built during the rebellion and found engaging in trade were as liable to seizure as those launched after the peace of 1783. They were equally deemed to be foreign vessels. At home the government thought it was protecting native shipbuilding by insisting that trade moved in ‘British bottoms’, but merchants in St Kitts knew that their coastal trade went in American ‘droghers’ built since 1776 and subsequently purchased by islanders. Wood decayed quickly in the West Indies, vessels had to be replaced regularly and the closest supply of ‘droghers’ remained the United States. The Admiralty’s new regulations outlawed the ‘droghers’ at a stroke. Sugar piled up in creeks and bays, unable to be moved to the ports, and British merchantmen sat idle, waiting to ship it to England. In the spring of 1786 the islanders asked Governor Shirley to suspend the new regulations, at least until the harvest was cleared and the matter could be reconsidered.48
Ultimately the navigation laws, serving neither Britain nor the West Indian islands, could not be defended. For a while the government persisted, passing an act to tighten the registration of ships in 1786, and renewing orders to naval and civil officers to stamp out illegal trade. But the islands needed the foreign trade, and hopes that the Canadian colonies would supply their wants proved delusive. As late as 1790 Nova Scotia was importing large amounts of American grain, foodstuffs and timber, the very products it was supposed to be supplying the British West Indies. Nor were the contrary arguments of Shirley and others entirely ignored. When the Navigation Act was renewed it contained a clause allowing governors the discretion to permit imports from foreign ‘islands’ in cases of acute public distress. They jumped upon it. In the Leeward Islands, Sir Thomas was besieged with applications for a relaxation of the navigation laws, and by July 1787 was having to grant general indulgences permitting merchants to import goods from America and foreign islands in the West Indies. The same year the British governments declared partially free ports throughout their possessions in the Caribbean.49
However, if Nelson’s cause was doomed to eventual retreat, he had triumphed in the short term, and his campaign had encapsulated the man’s weaknesses and strengths. It showed him hasty, myopic, arrogant, disobedient and contentious, but it also betokened leadership and tremendous moral and physical courage. He had refused to be overawed, intimidated or swerved from a matter of principle; his willingness to lead where others hesitated in the face of danger had seized the initiative from superiors, and inspired followers; and he had persevered, making light of difficulties, until a victory had been won. He had engaged propertied merchants, artful lawyers and shifty officials in the strange ill-lit labyrinthine world of imperial and prize law, and emerged victorious into the sunlight. It is not surprising that the reputation that spread through the islands was that of a young man worthy of weighing in any reckoning.
7
Among the few who had admired Nelson in the darker days was the president of the council of Nevis, Mr John Richardson Herbert. Herbert was an unlikely benefactor. He was one of the richest merchants in the colony and related by marriage to the governor of Barbados. It was a niece Herbert shared with Governor Parry – Miss Parry Herbert – who may, in fact, have been the means of bringing Nelson and the president together. In the spring of 1785 Nelson transported Miss Parry from Barbados to Nevis, and probably for the first time walked between the globe-topped stone pillars that welcomed visitors to the Herbert mansion, Montpelier. Soon, it seems, Nelson found himself being observed rather closely at the dinner table, and shortly afterwards an intrigued female guest at Montpelier was penning her impressions to a friend:
We have at last seen the little captain of the Boreas, of whom so much has been said. He came up just before dinner, much heated, and was very silent, yet seemed according to the old adage to think the more. He declined drinking any wine, but after dinner, when the president as usual gave the three following toasts, the king, the queen and royal family, and Lord Hood, this strange man regularly filled his glass, and observed that those were always bumper toasts with him, which having drank, he uniformly passed the bottle and relapsed into his former taciturnity. It was impossible during this visit for any of us to make out his real character. There was such a reserve and sternness in his behaviour, with occasional sallies, though very transient, of a superior mind. Being placed by him, I endeavoured to rouse his attention by showing him all the civilities in my power, but I drew out little more than ‘yes’ and ‘no’. If you, Fanny, had been there, we think you would have made something of him, for you have been in the habit of attending to these odd sort of people.50
The recipient was yet another of Herbert’s nieces, a twenty-four-year-old widow named Mrs Frances Nisbet. A little later, early in May, she met Nelson herself, apparently for the first time, and they talked of a mutual acquaintance who had been in Nevis some years before. Writing to his brother William on the 12th of the month, almost as an afterthought, Nelson recounted how he had ‘just come from Nevis, where I have been visiting Miss Parry Herbert and a young widow [Frances Nisbet], the two latter known to Charles Boyles [who commanded the Barbados on the station in 1784]. Great inquiries after him by the damsels in that island.’51
That ‘young widow’ would become Nelson’s wife.
XIV
DEAREST FANNY
Nelson for ever – any time
Am I his to command in prose or rhyme!
Give me of Nelson only a touch,
And I save it, be it little or much:
Here’s one our Captain gives, and so
Down at the word, by George, shall it go!
Robert Browning, Nationality in Drinks
1
NELSON saw much of Nevis in the months after he met Fanny. The capture of the American ships in May, the trial in June and the contingent controversy kept him on the island for much of the spring and summer of 1785. After Nelson’s victory in the local vice-admiralty court he spent some time as a guest in Herbert’s house, Montpelier. The trips away were brief and increasingly to be regretted. Sometimes the Boreas crossed the shallow two-mile strip to St Kitts to search for more foreign traders, but Nevis kept drawing him back with intensifying power.
The island itself was not unattractive. Merely six miles by eight, it was the tip of a submerged and dormant volcano, rising from the sea to some three and a half thousand feet and a peak so often wreathed in white clouds that distant voyagers were reminded of the snowcapped mountains in Europe. What settlements there were hugged the lower reaches. Sugar plantations were cut into the green slopes, a collection of picturesque, red-roofed houses formed the capital, Charlestown, on the west coast, and a little to the south, where an imposing three-storey stone house provided accommodation, the afflicted eased rheumatic limbs in famous thermal springs. In all fewer than ten thousand people lived on the island, 1,500 of them whites and the rest coloured slaves. Montpelier, to which Nelson’s feet kept taking him, was one of the largest of the plantation houses, but it was Mrs Frances Nisbet who attracted him.
Everyone called her Fanny. She was baptised Frances Herbert Woolward in St George’s Church, Nevis, in May 1761, and belonged by birth to the colonial elite of the islands. Her mother, Mary Herbert, was one of three sisters of John Richardson Herbert. The Herberts were descended from a younger son of the fourth Earl of Pembroke, and Mary and John’s uncle had himself been president of the council until
his death in 1768. William Woolward, Fanny’s father, had been a senior judge on Nevis, and a partner in the firm of Herbert, Morton and Woolward. She grew up close to plenty, and owned a black manservant named Cato. Given these circumstances Fanny might have expected a comfortable and privileged life.1
It was not to be so. Fanny was little more than a child when she lost her mother, but she was old enough to witness the sufferings of her sick father, who reportedly died of tetanus in February 1779 before she was eighteen. Woolward was only fifty-three. He left £100 to his brother, Thomas, and the rest of his property to his only child, but most of the assets seem to have been devoured by creditors. Orphaned three years short of her majority, Fanny commemorated her lost parents by placing a tablet in the local church of St John’s, but only months after her father’s death she married, on 28 June 1779. The groom, Josiah Nisbet, MD, was a physician, qualified in Edinburgh in 1768, and approaching his thirty-second birthday.
Whether Fanny went hastily into marriage to fill the vacuum left by the loss of her family will never be known, but she was loyal to her husband and the match was a fair one on the face of it. The Nisbets were a Scottish family. Josiah’s father was Walter Nisbet (a junior grandson of the fourth Earl of Moray), who had migrated to Nevis, established the estate of Mount Pleasant and connected himself to a prestigious local family through his marriage to Mary Webbe in 1743. He had died a member of the island council in 1765, leaving his eldest boy, Walter, to inherit Mount Pleasant and four other children to share his legacy. Josiah may not have been wealthy, but he had received £1,000 from his father, practised as a doctor, and was probably a man of some means.
Unfortunately, Fanny’s marriage had been brief. The couple had gone to England, where they lived in Cathedral Close, Salisbury, where property may have been inherited from the Webbes. Perhaps Nisbet hoped to get well, for he was seriously ill soon after reaching England and died on 5 October 1781, supposedly insane. Certainly, he made no provision for his wife and young Josiah, her seventeen-month-old son, and many of their possessions, including Fanny’s beloved harpsichord, were auctioned. For the second time in her short life she found herself testifying to her love for the lost. A pathetic plaque recording the regard an ‘affectionate widow’ held for a dead husband was placed in the church of Stratford-sub-Castle.2
Widowed at twenty and in a strange land, Fanny’s position was hardly enviable. Her husband’s money had disappeared, along with, it seems, some £2,000 promised by her uncle, John Richardson Herbert, on her marriage. But though a fragile and understated little creature, Fanny possessed unexpected reserves of resilience, courage and discipline, and she was not entirely alone. A few old Nevis friends were at hand, and for a while Fanny appears to have acted as a guardian to three offspring of the Nevis planter John Pinney. Indeed, when John Pinney returned to England in 1783 and Fanny presented his children to him he did not recognise them. ‘Good God! Don’t you know them?’ exclaimed Fanny. ‘They are your children!’ Pinney’s wife was so surprised she set her headdress alight on a nearby candle.3
Eventually, Fanny returned to Nevis, where her uncle opened his home to her, and when Nelson used to call she was sharing the house with the widowed president, his ailing, unmarried sister, various other nieces, the infant Josiah and a babbling stream of guests. Herbert had lost his wife and was on poor terms with his only child, Martha, who was about to marry into the same Hamilton family that spawned the famous American federalist. It was, therefore, upon Mrs Nisbet that the old man bestowed the most affection.
Providentially, therefore, Fanny had become, at least to outward appearances, the belle of the island – young, reasonably pretty, single and what was more an heir of the richest and most powerful man in Nevis. President Herbert had lost track of how much he owned. Jointly with Magnus Morton, a brother-in-law, he held a lease to the large estate of upper Gingerland, and many houses on the island were mortgaged to him. He had slaves and livestock in abundance, exported five hundred casks of sugar a year, and was described by Governor Shirley as the ‘senior councillor’ of Nevis and ‘a gentleman of the first fortune in this country’. Nelson not only recognised ‘a man who must have his own way in everything’ but also one who was ‘very rich and very proud’.4
Captain Nelson and President Herbert should not have been friends. In his attack upon trade abuses the former was tilting dangerously at the planting class Herbert exemplified. Yet the two men liked each other, and Herbert did not object when Nelson began spending more time with his niece. He offered to stand bail for Nelson if he was arrested on account of irate merchants, and spoke well of him to important island officials. There is an attractive but entirely uncorroborated story that it was five-year-old Josiah who first forged the bond between Fanny Nisbet and Horatio Nelson. The captain certainly loved children. One he played with remembered in adult life that Nelson ‘was kind in the extreme, and we all loved him’. We are told that on one occasion President Herbert emerged from his dressing room at Montpelier to find Nelson under a table playing with his niece’s child.5
Truthfully, however, no one can say exactly what drew Herbert or Fanny to the embattled young captain of the Boreas. Fanny herself was capable of attracting him, lonely, frustrated and far from home as he was. She was a woman of some accomplishments. She painted with watercolours and produced fine embroidery, to judge from relics carefully preserved by the family. More impressive, she spoke excellent French and served her uncle as an interpreter when diplomats visited Nevis, a skill that mystified Horatio to the end of his days. Her penmanship in her own tongue was comparable to Nelson’s, though less vigorous and informed, and narrow in scope, extending little beyond the doings in her social circle.
People thought Fanny pleasant looking rather than beautiful. To Prince William Henry she seemed ‘pretty and sensible’, while Midshipman Hotham of the Solebay, who saw her test Nelson’s limited social skills by joining him in the minuet on Nevis, remembered her as ‘pretty and attractive, and a general favourite’. A less gallant midshipman, while admitting that Fanny had ‘some beauty, and a freshness of countenance not common in that climate’, considered her intellect unremarkable. Fanny’s portraits suggest a slim, delicate and dainty woman, but Sir Gilbert Elliot, who met her a dozen years after she met Horatio, thought her ‘a buxom widow, and just the sort of wife he would like. She is a much better one than . . . Lord Malmsbury will be able to make for some time.’ Beyond question the Nevis belle was kind, well-intentioned, courteous and steadfastly loyal, though perhaps she lacked the sparkle that had been so attractive in Mrs Moutray.6
Nonetheless, before the end of June 1785 Nelson had decided to ask for her hand in marriage. In an oblique reference to the Shakespearean hero of Much Ado About Nothing, he told his brother on the 28th, ‘Do not be surprised to hear I am a Benedict, for if at all, it will be before a month. Do not tell.’7
2
Before returning to Antigua to sit out hurricanes in August, Nelson had proposed and been accepted, at least provisionally. The couple needed Herbert’s blessing, and Horatio put his intentions in a letter to him and left it in Nevis. He waited anxiously for a reply.
On 19 August, when the first of his gossipy letters to Fanny was produced, he was still waiting, but trusted her uncle would not stand in their way. ‘Most sincerely do I love you,’ he pledged somewhat stiffly, ‘and I trust that my affection is not only founded upon the principle of reason but also upon the basis of mutual attachment. Indeed, my charming Fanny, did [I] possess a million [pounds] my greatest pride and pleasure would be to share it with you; and, as I am, to live in a cottage with you I should esteem superior to living in a place with any other I have yet met with.’
Despite his temper (‘I possess not the art of concealing it’) and situation, which he confessed told against him, he felt sufficiently secure in her affections to unload a farrago of news, chatter (‘Kelly I could and would tell you a long history of was I sure this would come safe to your hands’), and
trivial tales (‘Captain Acres’ and ‘your shoe friend, Captain S., a gentleman well versed in the business of carrying off young ladies’, had conspired to help an unidentified ‘Miss’ to elope from Antigua). Among good news was word from his brother William that the death of their uncle Robert Rolfe had given him the living of Hilborough, worth £700 a year, and that a long letter from Mrs Moutray had arrived. ‘A more amiable woman can hardly exist,’ Nelson told Fanny. ‘I wish you knew her. Your minds and manners are so congenial that you must have pleasure in the acquaintance.’8
When it came the awaited letter from Herbert was ‘deferring’ on the main question, but promised a discussion when they met and left Nelson’s expectations undiminished. He was painfully conscious of his comparative poverty, though he turned it into a virtue, since ‘the world knows I am superior to pecuniary considerations in both my public and private life, as in both instances I might have been rich’. He convinced himself he would not be penalised for putting duty before money, and that the president would respect the wishes of his niece. Some explanation for the delay in communications from Nevis was also afforded by news that Fanny’s aunt had died after a long illness. He consoled her with the thought that her aunt was released from pain, and that ‘religion’ should ‘convince you that her conduct in this world was such as will ensure everlasting happiness in that which is to come’.9
The hurricanes gone, Nelson hurried to Nevis for a reunion with Fanny and that man-to-man talk with Herbert. As he later recounted the conversation, Nelson ‘told him [Herbert] I am as poor as Job, but he tells me he likes me, and I am descended from a good family, which his pride likes. But he also says, “Nelson, I am proud, and I must live like myself. Therefore, I can’t do much in my lifetime. When I die she [Fanny] shall have twenty thousand pounds; and if my daughter dies before me, she shall possess the major part of my property. I intend going to England in 1787, and remaining there my life. Therefore, if you two can live happily together till that event takes place, you have my consent.”’10