by John Sugden
From the beginning Nelson milked his new friend. Ten days after meeting him Nelson told Fanny that the prince ‘has made me promise him that he shall be at my wedding, and says he will give you to me’. Two months later he was writing home about his brother Maurice. ‘I have never lost sight of his preferment in the line he is in,’ he said, ‘but my interest is but rising. I have already spoken to His Royal Highness about him, but it must take time to get on, and the prince has it not in his power to do all he wishes at present.’ Yet again, Horatio was simultaneously raising Fanny’s worries with William Henry, and finding him ‘anxious’ to return a ‘favour’. Nelson hoped that in due course the prince would pull some powerful strings for him, and occasionally William Henry spoke encouragingly. A decade later, when he was expecting to sit at the head of the board of Admiralty, he reminded Nelson that ‘I loved and esteemed you from the beginning as an ornament to the service’. But the dream was illusory; the prince never delivered.15
In 1786 and 1787 Nelson found it hard to criticise the wilful and explosive William Henry and to risk his displeasure. The more the prince confided in him or bestowed kindnesses, the less resistance Nelson was capable of offering. He always reacted positively to goodwill, valued loyalty fiercely and made emotional and strong attachments. Now patriotism, self-interest and generosity alike stripped him of objectivity. Rather than antagonise a man notoriously resistant to interference, he allowed the prince to go his way, and found himself being sucked into the wake, towards a world of inept authoritarianism.
3
On 13 December the Boreas, Pegasus and Rattler reached Antigua, where Nelson would be detained for two months, apart from a brief trip to Nevis. The Pegasus was in poor shape. Her timbers needed repairing and bolts replacing, while some of her men were sick, and she docked in English Harbour to be readied for her captain’s progress through the islands. Since Hughes’s departure Nelson had been using the commanding officer’s house at the dockyard, but he generously placed it at the prince’s disposal and resigned himself to bunking aboard the Boreas. William Henry would not hear of it, and for a few weeks the two friends shared the accommodation ashore.16
Perhaps it was here that they ‘fought over again the principal naval actions in the American war’, as the prince later remembered. ‘Excepting the naval tuition which I had received on board the Prince George, when Rear-Admiral G. [Richard] Keat[e]s was lieutenant of her, and for whom both of us equally entertained a sincere regard, my mind took its first decided naval turn from this familiar intercourse with Nelson.’ Lieutenant James Wallis of the Boreas also remembered Nelson’s interest in fleet tactics during this period, and said he was ‘continually forming the [ships into] line [of battle], exercising [the men, and] chasing.’ Probably both witnesses exaggerated, looking back more than twenty years. Yet unquestionably Captain Nelson, ‘a young man’ of ‘sound judgement’, imparted some things to the prince. ‘I received vast pleasure from his instructive conversations about our service in general,’ His Royal Highness informed Lord Hood at the time.17
Such musings were squeezed between the joyous outpourings of the residents of Antigua, who launched into a glittering round of balls, dinners and ceremonies for the royal visitor. William Henry appeared in full-dress naval uniform and the bigwigs were beside themselves. The assembly and the merchants composed addresses, but John Burke, solicitor general, fumbled through the former almost tongue-tied. Sir Thomas Shirley, who had learned that he was to become a baronet after all, performed no better as the host of a dinner at Clarke’s Hill. He ‘never cut a worse figure’ in Nelson’s opinion, and ‘was in such a tremor that he could scarce articulate a word’. Towards Christmas there were three consecutive nights of dining and dancing in St John’s. Captain Nelson jogged daily across the island on horseback to spend hours watching the prince pursuing Miss Anne Athill (‘a beautiful young lady of respectable family’, according to one witness) and other finely dressed ladies around tables and ballrooms before crawling back to bed in the early hours of the mornings. The new year stimulated more festivities, and Horatio was dragged to regimental dinners, mulatto balls, dances and cockfights. He confessed himself an unsuitable courtier, hanging on to the prince’s coat-tails like a two-legged guard dog, but was wretchedly ‘reconciled to the business’ and figured that ‘if we get well through all this I shall be fit for anything’. In private he scribbled necessarily short and prosaic letters to Fanny, and wished the new commander-in-chief, daily expected in Barbados, would come and take this cup from him.18
When the tedium of the social round was relieved, it was in the least desirable way. Relations aboard the Pegasus went from bad to worse. William Henry spent much of his time ashore, but his midshipmen were kept on board and the lieutenants had to sign in and out as they came and went as if they were untrustworthy schoolboys. More pointedly, the prince eschewed the established naval tradition of inviting lieutenants to dinner, and would have none of them in the house he shared with Nelson ashore. Horatio did nothing to educate his guest in harmony and esprit de corps, and was openly criticised by the officers of the Pegasus for encouraging him. ‘The lieutenants of the Pegasus I saw were displeased with me,’ Nelson later admitted, ‘and the officers of the Boreas told me they attributed HRH[’s] change of conduct to me.’19
One bone of contention aboard the Pegasus was a book in which the prince caused his standing orders to be entered. Some of these instructions were onerously trivial and a few crass beyond belief. The men, for example, were prohibited from raising huzzahs as they performed great labours and from hanging laundry out to dry between decks, while the barge crews were ‘not by any means [to] move their heads from side to side but [to] look steady’ on pain of severe punishment. The prince’s habit of publicly reprimanding officers for the smallest infraction was another source of grief. In January the captain exchanged words with Schomberg over the lieutenant’s failure to collect sheets from the hospital. The public rebuke was followed by a testy exchange of letters in which Schomberg excused his conduct by referring to ‘the visible change in your Royal Highness’s conduct since the Pegasus arrived in English Harbour’. The prince fulminated against disobedience and neglect of duty and threatened a court martial, and Schomberg eventually made a humiliating apology before the junior officers.20
Matters quickly ran to a head. On 22 January the prince accused Schomberg of sending a boat ashore without his permission, and entered the incident in the order book, damning him as negligent and disobedient for all to see. It was a public censure Schomberg felt unable to ignore. He also concluded that the captain was trying to push him into a court martial to break him, and the next day, while William Henry was dining with Nelson ashore, the lieutenant launched a pre-emptive strike. He addressed a letter to Nelson, the senior officer on the station, demanding a court martial on the issue of the boat. If he was acquitted, or simply rebuked, as he no doubt expected, he could reasonably expect a transfer to another and more equitable berth and be done with the whole business.21
That same evening William Henry was giving Nelson his own version of the affair as they travelled home. He was furious that Schomberg should disobey him so soon after being forgiven over the matter of the sheets, and declared that in future he intended to record every such transgression in the public order book. Nelson did not disagree. He did not even seem to construe the incident as the product of poor leadership, and apparently uncritically accepted the prince’s interpretation. At least, he would write to Locker that William Henry ‘had more plague with his officers than enough’. But when a tired Nelson returned home that evening and found Schomberg’s letter he realised that new levels of gravity were being reached.22
For courts martial tried accusers as well as accused. There were no good witnesses to the altercation over the boat, and the court would have to decide which of the contending principals was to be believed. If Schomberg was convicted, a fine officer would be ruined. If he was acquitted the prince stood to be dishonour
ed. And there were other implications. If Schomberg got a transfer to another ship by demanding a court martial on so trivial an incident, might it not encourage similar indiscipline from any junior officer who disliked a superior?
As it happened Nelson could delay the ordeal. Even when the Maidstone joined him on 14 February he did not have enough captains to form the necessary quorum for a court martial. Pending that, Nelson suspended Schomberg from duty, sparing him further dealings with his captain, and more or less confining him to his cabin. On the face of it Nelson’s action was a neutral one, but when he issued a general order five days later, cautioning other officers against resorting to courts martial on any ‘frivolous pretence’, his criticism of the stricken lieutenant was obvious. Certainly William Henry used Nelson’s order to mount another vindictive tirade against Schomberg. Summoning the suspended lieutenant and other officers to his cabin, he read it aloud. ‘I told him [Schomberg] in the presence of the officers, I should try him after his court-martial for mutiny, that if he was found guilty he should be hung or broke . . . that if a court-martial could not investigate the business for the particularity of the case, I should send the business to the Admiralty, who have it in their power to scratch his name off the list . . .’23
For weeks the disgraced lieutenant was confined with ‘unwarrantable severity’ by the prince, forced to pace his small cabin and the main deck, and to fraternise only with officers willing to risk being ostracised. Lieutenant William Johnstone Hope, whom the prince libelled an instigator of ‘mutiny and sedition’, was also threatened with a court martial and searched anxiously for an escape to another ship, while the young gentlemen of the Pegasus, traduced in the ubiquitous order book for ‘shameful inattention and remisseness’, particularly disliked their captain. Perhaps it was one of them who broke into the store room one day to steal William Henry’s spare cot in a pathetic display of resentment. At any rate, Midshipman Martin found himself excluded from the captain’s table after mixing with Schomberg. ‘I was rather a green hand,’ he recalled, ‘unskilled in the sycophancy of the courtier.’24
Nelson was tossing on the horns of a dilemma. For some time His Royal Highness would admit of no reconciliation. When Schomberg offered to make amends on 12 February and urged his captain to ‘forget and forgive’ he was turned down flat. Several months later Commodore Alan Gardner, who commanded the Jamaica station, would find a way to bring the two together to avoid a damaging court martial, but whether or not that was possible earlier it is difficult to say.25
Nelson does not appear to have tried. Probably he expected Hughes’s official replacement to arrive and relieve him of the burden, and perhaps it was as well that he did not intervene for he had shown himself less than an unprejudiced broker.
4
Nelson was ill and lovesick as well as beleaguered. ‘Poor Nelson is over head and ears in love,’ Prince William wrote to Hood. ‘I frequently laugh at him about it. However, seriously my lord, he is in more need of a nurse than a wife. I do not really think he can live long.’26
Amidst the seemingly interminable social engagements and the festering problem of Schomberg, Captain Nelson spoke of Fanny to the prince. ‘His Royal Highness often tells me he believes I am married,’ he admitted to his fiancée with more temerity than tact, ‘for he says he never saw a lover so easy, or say so little of the object he has regard for. When I tell him I certainly am not, he says then he is sure I must have a great esteem for you, and that it is not what is vulgarly – no, I won’t make use of than [that] word – commonly called love. He is right, my love is founded on esteem, the only foundation that can make love last.’27
Nelson was certainly not well. Three years in the West Indies had damaged him as surely as they had ravaged the timbers of the Boreas, and one of his doctors was soon advising a return to England. Nelson occasionally alluded to his health in letters, but he had learned to live with discomfort and was not unduly alarmed. Rather, he set his mind on marriage, a voyage home and a more congenial appointment. He had never liked the Leeward Islands and was desperate to see the back of them.
He reached Nevis at the end of January but it was only a flying visit, and the Boreas was soon being steered back for Antigua with John Richardson Herbert on board. Perhaps the prospective father-in-law was winding up business affairs in preparation for his retirement to England, but he was no sooner in sight of shore than he went down with a fever. Captain Nelson cheered himself in the knowledge that the next leg of the prince’s progress would incorporate Nevis. Leaving the rotting Rattler behind, Nelson sailed from Antigua with the Boreas, Pegasus and the Solebay on 10 February. A few days were wasted on jollification in Montserrat but they reached Nevis on the 15th, where the Maidstone was already at anchor. The royal person went ashore two days later to the roar of twenty-one-gun salutes, and enjoyed £800 worth of island hospitality, including such doubtful delights as a hundred-man dinner, horse races and cockfights. At some stage Nelson introduced him to Fanny and she shared a dance with him. In between dancing to the prince’s tune himself and fixing his wedding day with his fiancée and her relations, Nelson was more than fully employed.28
The prince’s relationship with Fanny got off to a shaky start. Inadvertently he created a minor difficulty visiting George Forbes, a friend he had made from a previous tour of duty in the West Indies. Fanny’s uncle, back from Antigua, was mortified to find his own, and prior, invitation from Forbes suddenly withdrawn. The prince, it seems, wanted a quiet evening alone with an old friend, free of weary formality. Herbert was deeply wounded, and fancied the prince objected to his presence, brooding about how he might have warranted such disfavour. Nelson, too, felt the sting when he heard of it, but soon satisfied himself that no slight had been intended. The prince, it appeared, had been entirely ignorant of Herbert’s invitation, and Forbes alone was responsible for its cancellation. Somehow Nelson smoothed things over, and his wedding plans advanced to the next hurdle.
President Herbert was still infuriatingly reserved about how much money Fanny might expect from him, and when he suggested the betrothed couple should postpone marrying until they were all in England it smacked of prevarication. Whatever happened, Nelson would have no delay. In the end he was sure the president would ‘do everything which is handsome’ and save his niece from poverty, and he was eager to distinguish his wedding with a royal presence. The prince was due to leave the station in May or June.29
Horatio loaded Fanny’s pianoforte on board the Boreas, where a tuner was set to work, and moved the prince on to St Kitts on 22 February, where Governor William Woodley and other dignitaries paid homage in another exhausting schedule of dinners and balls. William Henry found more entertainment chasing ladies, but in one of his regular epistles to Fanny Nelson described it as an unrelieved ‘fag’:
Today we dine with the merchants. I wish it over. Tomorrow a large party at Nicholas Town, and on Friday [another] in town here. Saturday, sail for Old Road [also St Kitts]. Sunday, dine on Brimstone Hill. Monday, [with] Mr Georges [chief justice of the Leeward Islands] at Sandy Point, and in the evening the Free Masons give a ball. Tuesday, please God, we sail.30
The festivities at St Kitts were performed beneath a punishing sun and debilitated both Nelson and the prince, but on 8 March they limped back to Nevis to recuperate before attempting the final leg of the royal tour to Tortola. During that brief respite Nelson was married.
On Sunday 11 March, on a fair day that opened with rain, the finest of the island trooped seven hundred feet up a hill to gather expectantly within the impressive white walls of Montpelier, President Herbert’s home three miles from Charlestown. The clerk and rector of Figtree church, William Jones, performed the ceremony. Only one of the groom’s relatives was present, Horatio’s cousin, Midshipman Maurice Suckling, but some of his officers were there and the ship’s company of the Boreas sent their best wishes in the form of a silver watch. Mustering his undoubted charm, William Henry gave the bride away as he had promised, and
signed as a witness. Fanny put her name to the marriage certificate below Nelson’s, and signed ‘Frances Herbert Nisbet’. She kept it forever.31
Nelson also pronounced himself satisfied at the time. He made a will in the presence of Lieutenant Wallis and Master James, naming his new wife his sole beneficiary and his uncle William Suckling the only executor. Captain Locker learned that he had married ‘an amiable woman’ and was ‘morally certain she will continue to make me a happy man for the rest of my days’.32
Others were not so sure. The next day that irrepressible Scot, Captain Thomas Pringle, formerly of the Daedalus, was on hand to confess to Lieutenant Wallis that the navy had lost its ‘greatest ornament’. He, like many another officer, regarded marriage as a serious impediment to a successful naval career, something that often led men to abandon the sea altogether. Perhaps William Henry agreed, for much as he took pleasure in Nelson’s joy he too doubted the outcome. ‘He is now in for it,’ the prince wrote to Hood a few days later. ‘I wish him well and happy, and that he may not repent the step he has taken.’33
5
A month later, on 13 April, two gentlemen of St John’s delivered a package to Captain Nelson for the attention of Prince William Henry.
They were back in Antigua. Eight days after the marriage the Boreas and Pegasus had sailed for Tortola, but the further royal entertainment done they returned to Nevis at the end of the month and anchored in English Harbour by 6 April. Nelson expected to be recalled at any moment, and needed to prepare his frigate for an Atlantic voyage. There was little more he felt able to accomplish in the islands and he was impatient to take his bride home. This phase of his career, he thought, was drawing to its close. Then along came Messrs William Wilkinson and Joseph Blake Higgins.