by John Sugden
Edmund junior was one of eight children of Edmund and Mary Nelson. Despite the durability of their parents, the brood does not seem to have been a particularly strong one. Three died in infancy, not unremarkable at a time of high death rates, and Edmund junior himself was afflicted with ‘a weak and sickly constitution’ throughout life, something he duly passed to his son Horatio. Nevertheless, three sisters and a brother survived to become Horatio Nelson’s paternal aunts and uncle. Mary remained single. Alice saluted the family tradition by marrying the Reverend Robert Rolfe, and Thomasine became the wife of a Norfolk shoemaker. The brother, John Nelson, did not amount to much. According to Edmund he ‘enlisted as a soldier [and] after various unlucky circumstances and misconduct embarked for some foreign service about the year 1760’ and was never heard from again.3
The younger Edmund Nelson may have been physically fragile but his mind was sharp enough and he passed through schools at Scarning, Northwold and Swaffham to reach Caius College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. With the aid of a college bursary he collected a bachelor’s degree the year Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland and a Master of Arts three years later, and he followed his father into the clerical profession. He worked as a curate, first for his father at Sporle, and then in 1747 for the Reverend Thomas Page at Beccles in Suffolk. When the elder Edmund Nelson died that year, his son succeeded to the livings of both Hilborough and Sporle. The positions were not lucrative, however. ‘The whole profit of Hilborough I gave up for the purpose of paying my father’s debts and the maintenance of my mother and her family,’ Edmund recalled. ‘Sporle’s living is about eighty pounds per annum. I resided with my mother at Hilboro’.’
Still, in one respect the young parson was lucky, for at Beccles he married a good wife.
2
Horatio Nelson’s parents were married on 11 May 1749, under the benevolent supervision of Edmund’s old friend Thomas Page.
Like her husband’s Catherine Suckling’s father was a clergyman. She was the oldest child and only daughter of the Reverend Dr Maurice Suckling, rector of Barsham and Woodton and prebendary of Westminster. She had been born on 9 May 1725, in the rectory of Barsham, where the River Waveney wound through the green rolling hills of Suffolk. Dr Suckling had died when Catherine was only five and was buried in Barsham. His grieving widow, Ann, had then taken the family to nearby Beccles, where Catherine had met and been courted by her young Norfolk curate.
Catherine was twenty-four when she became Mrs Edmund Nelson. She was pleasantly featured, though hardly beautiful if we may believe a portrait that showed her at eighteen, rather austere of countenance, with dark hair and blue eyes. Little that is reliable about her has come down to us, but the marriage was a successful one, and Edmund always spoke of his wife with unusual devotion. There is no doubt that he married for love, but providentially it was Catherine who supplied the family with what eighteenth-century people called ‘interest’.
Everyone knew what ‘interest’ meant: the ability to call upon influential people to improve one’s life chances and prospects. After marrying Catherine, Edmund could milk the patronage of a powerful fraternity. Her father, Dr Suckling, came from a line of gentlemen, military men many of them, including the Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling. But it was Catherine’s mother, Ann, who could boast by far the more impressive lineage. She was a daughter of Sir Charles Turner, a wealthy merchant of Lynn, and Mary Walpole of Houghton Hall, Norfolk – and the Walpoles were among the first families of the realm.
Ann’s maternal aunts and uncles were indeed a formidable tribe. Dorothy was married to a powerful politician, Charles, second Viscount Townshend of Rainham, sometime secretary of state, but familiar to today’s school children as ‘Turnip Townshend’ the agricultural improver. Galfridus Walpole had risen in the navy, and his brother Horatio became the first Baron Walpole of Wolterton Hall. Greater than even these distinguished siblings, however, was Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford, a Whig grandee who became the first minister of George I and George II. The ‘interest’ possessed by the Walpoles was awesome and labyrinthine, and their power to reward successively elevated their brother-in-law, Sir Charles Turner, to the boards of Trade, Admiralty and Treasury between 1707 and 1730. Time had moved on since then, and Sir Charles and Mary had both died before their granddaughter Catherine Suckling reached her fourteenth birthday. But, though less powerful than hitherto, the long arm of the Walpoles continued to exercise a benign influence upon her fortunes.
Catherine and her brothers, Maurice and William, owed their livelihoods to it. Before his death in 1745 Sir Robert Walpole had launched Maurice upon a successful naval career, while William was placed in the customs service as a boy. In 1772 he was appointed Deputy Collector of Customs in London, a post he held throughout his remaining years. There were dividends for Catherine too, bestowed upon her husband, the Reverend Edmund Nelson of Norfolk.
Soon after marrying, Edmund had taken his young bride to Swaffham, leaving his mother and aunts at Hilborough, and it was at Swaffham that the first of the couple’s eleven children were born. Two boys died in infancy and were buried at Hilborough, the second of them Horatio, named for Lord Walpole, his godfather. Another son, born on 24 May 1753 and christened Maurice for his uncle, survived. After Maurice’s birth the Nelsons moved to a rented house in Sporle, where Edmund still held a living, and had their first daughter, Susanna, on 12 June 1755. It was at this point that the Walpole arm reached out again.
Among the many properties at the disposal of the Walpoles were several in the village of Burnham Thorpe in west Norfolk. Indeed, the family held more land thereabouts than anyone else, and as late as 1796 land tax records assigned them no less than five dwellings within the tiny confines of the village itself. When Thomas Smithson, the rector of Burnham Thorpe, died in 1755 the Honourable Horace Walpole, Lord Walpole’s heir, presented Edmund Nelson with the rectories of Burnham Thorpe and Burnham Sutton and the livings of Burnham Ulph and Burnham Norton. Thus equipped, Edmund was able to resign his positions at Hilborough and Sporle and allow his mother to bestow them upon her son-in-law, Robert Rolfe. Packing his belongings he made his way towards the cluster of hamlets that graced the River Burn as it flowed briskly northwards into the wild marshes of the Norfolk coast.
And so the Nelsons came to Burnham Thorpe – an unassuming parson, his well-connected wife and their son and daughter.
3
They occupied the rectory, situated less than a mile south of the village on a narrow road that ran to North Creake. A hill dominated it to the west, while, in the opposite direction, through a small gatehouse and across the road the Burn babbled between reedy banks, only some thirty yards away. Beyond, the land was open, with flat, wide fields stretching towards the horizon.
From above, the new home of the Nelsons appeared L-shaped. The longer wing may have been the original building, a two-storey cottage with three square windows above and two flanking the door below. An attractive pitched roof of red tiles with two chimneys enclosed an attic room with its window peeping through the foliage scaling the gable end. In the smaller wing the rooms on the upper floor were lit by dormer windows. Outside there was a pump and a sixty-foot barn, built by Edmund’s predecessor, as well as thirty acres of glebe land with a selection of climbable trees that gave ample space for children to play and Edmund to indulge his love of gardening.4
With a growing household Edmund may have been glad of the sanctuary of the church, reached by a mile-long amble north, past hedgerows which the seasons adorned with snowdrops, cow parsley and poppies. It was primarily a thirteenth-century edifice, though a picturesque eastern façade in stone and black and white flint chequers may have reflected the influence of the fifteenth-century knight, Sir William Calthorpe, who lay beneath a sombre effigy in the chancel. Walking to and from his workplace, the rector passed through the village, where he might have exchanged pleasantries with his flock. Burnham Thorpe was tranquillity itself, perhaps oppressively so. Even at
the end of the century a mere 396 villagers, most of them illiterate, shared the seventy-three dwellings. Only four freeholds, one the rectory, were sufficient to warrant a vote in the county elections. There was a tavern, the Plough, and a cluster of flint cottages sandwiched between two long streets, but apart from the River Burn skirting the eastern flank of the village little stirred. Admiral Nelson remembered it as ‘lonesome’, and his father unquestionably agreed. ‘All is hush at high noon as at midnight,’ he remarked.5
Here in the rectory the younger Nelsons squalled into the world. William arrived on 20 April 1757, named for a paternal uncle and godparent, and on 29 September 1758 Horatio, the future admiral. Horatio was a weak child, and, fearing that he would not reach the public christening scheduled for 15 November, his parents had him privately baptised when he was ten days old. His sponsors, to whom he might look for ‘interest’ and protection, were the Reverend Dr Horace Hammond, who had married one of Catherine’s cousins; Joyce Pyle, a connection of the Rolfes; and the thirty-five-year-old Horace, the newly installed second Lord Walpole, to whom this new Horatio owed his name.6
The last of the Nelson children were Ann, born on 20 September 1760, whose name honoured her maternal grandmother; Edmund, who arrived on 4 June 1762; Suckling, a boy, born 5 January 1764; and Catherine, the baby of the family, who appeared on 19 March 1767. Another son died in infancy.
The sponsors Edmund and Catherine found for these youngsters reflect the range of their acquaintances. They included members of both families. From Catherine’s side came her mother and brothers, her mother’s brother-in-law (John Fowle) and relatives such as the Lords Walpole, John Berney and Sir John Turner. Edmund supplied his uncles, mother and brother-in-law, Robert Rolfe. Local gentry were also recruited for the service, among them Dr Charles Poyntz, after 1760 the incumbent of North Creake but also a canon of Windsor and prebendary of Durham; a Dr Taylor; and Sir Mordaunt Martin, a baronet of Burnham Westgate. With what he eked from his glebeland and preferments, Edmund knew his offspring would have little money to ease their passage, and that connections such as these would be necessary if they were to make ‘a way to get through life in a middle station’.7
4
Horatio Nelson’s first years were spent in Burnham Thorpe, close to the ceaseless groan of the waves. The River Burn stole northwesterly to the sea through sandhills and salt flats, and Burnham Thorpe was situated three or so miles inland, at the head of a finger-like marsh estuary that had once been navigable to barges at high tide. Around were the other little Burnhams, or ‘homesteads by the sea’ – Burnham, Burnham Norton, Burnham Ulph, Burnham Westgate and Burnham Sutton to the west of the estuary, and Burnham Overy across to the east.
Little except Saturday markets and occasional fairs excited Burnham Thorpe, where agriculture remained the principal way of life. Children discovered simple pleasures. Standing on the coast young Nelson could see small windswept islands offshore to the left and Holkham Bay to the right, while ahead tossed the cold North Sea, now grey, now blue, and its multitude of craft. Overy Staithes, a small port near the mouth of the Burn, bustled with schooners and small vessels with alluring names. Horace, as he invariably called himself, saw barley being shipped to London for the brewing industry, manufactures, wines and foodstuffs coming in, and fishermen dealing in mussels and oysters.
Inland young Horace explored narrow paths that wove around low hills in all directions, passing fascinating barns, mills and brick and lime kilns. Burnham Thorpe itself radiated several minor thorough-fares. The main road through the village struck northwest to Burnham Westgate, by far the largest of the Burnhams, and slipped southeast and around the large Holkham estate which lay less than two miles east of the rectory. A byroad to Burnham Overy boasted Thorpe Hall, the home of the prestigious Crowe family, while another passed the Nelsons’ home and the ruins of Creake Abbey to reach North and South Creake. To get to a town of any real size the Nelsons had to journey to Wells, situated on the coast on the eastern side of the Holkham estate.8
Horace spent much of his time skylarking with his older brothers Maurice and William, and such village locals as the Blacks, Bees and Jarvises. Early biographers echoed those adventures uncertainly. The most famous and least likely anecdote tells us that at the age of five or six the boy visited his grandmother, Mary (Bland) Nelson, at Hilborough. At the invitation of an older boy he went bird-nesting but failed to report at dinner time which occasioned the dispatch of anxious search parties. Finally, Horace was discovered beneath a hedge, examining the spoils of his expedition. ‘I wonder fear did not drive you home?’ scolded the grandmother when he was returned. ‘Madam,’ the boy is supposed to have replied stiffly, ‘I never saw fear!’ Given that Nelson’s reputation for courage was so vastly enjoyed by contemporaries, we are entitled to dismiss this story, improbable in itself. Although much plagiarised since its debut in 1800, no credible witness stepped forward to vouch for it.9
Mythology, in fact, is the continual bane of the Nelson student. It steals insidiously into our sources at every turn, and is difficult to expunge because it was being created by contemporaries, including Nelson himself and his associates. After the admiral’s death it multiplied. People who had known Nelson exaggerated their connections with him, and people who had never seen him said they had.
The legend of ‘Nurse Blackett’ is one of the commonest about Nelson at Burnham Thorpe. She is said to have lived at the rectory as a nanny to Horace and the younger Nelson children, but the story only comes to us second or third hand at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its source, a Mrs High, the wife of ‘Nurse’ Blackett’s grandson, included a variation on the tale of Horace going missing. In this version the seven-year-old Nelson sneaks out of the rectory one night in search of a bird’s nest, and is found asleep in the woods after Nurse Blackett raises a hue and cry. Again, the point of the anecdote is the boy’s fearlessness and his indifference to the dark.
It seems likely that the Blackett material was a weave of fact and fantasy. Mary Blackett herself existed, and may have worked at the rectory one time or another, but she was born in or around Burnham Thorpe in 1754 or 1755 and was therefore too young to have acted the part described. Possibly she supervised the youngest Nelson children after Horace himself had gone to sea, or more probably worked at the rectory as a domestic when Nelson lived there with his wife in the 1790s, but whatever truth the stories contained appears to have grown in the telling.10
Biographer James Harrison, who drew upon close associates of the admiral, occasionally supplied genuine details of Nelson’s career, but his story of the infant Horace also sounds like family folklore at best. According to this legend Mrs Nelson was asked to stop a fracas between Horace and his larger brothers, but declined with the words, ‘Let them alone. Little Horace will beat them!’ As it stands this further testimony to Nelson’s embryonic pluck and determination rests upon no certain authority, and probably tells us more about the myth of 1806 than the boy of the 1760s.11
Because his mother died young, the dominant figure in Horace’s early life was his father, the Reverend Edmund Nelson. Edmund’s portraits, as well as the remaining fruits of his pen, largely document his later career, rather than those first years he spent as rector of Burnham Thorpe, but the materials are vivid and generalisations seem permissible. Dressed soberly in dark clothes, the reverend ventured abroad in long coats and tall hats, cane in hand. His hair fell loose and long over narrow shoulders, adding distinction to an expressive face with a high forehead, a long curved nose and a gentle but firm mouth with a pronounced underlip. Little interested in the ‘dogs, guns, great dinners, claret and champaign’ so beloved by the local gentry, but firm on ‘Xtian duty’, he deployed opinions freely. Horace was admonished to work hard and honourably, pray, keep himself clean and value good schooling, and to number snuff and alcohol among the common shortcomings of his elders.12
If a little strict, Edmund Nelson was a kind, modest and generous man, willing to reac
h into his pockets for those in need and to stand and be counted in times of trouble. He had a dry sense of humour. In 1790 he described himself as ‘an odd whimsicall old man, who knows nothing of the present time and very little of any other’. His education had left him with a painfully convoluted writing style, poor spelling and a love of personification. Winter was a ‘blooming Dowager’ from which Nature emerged reluctantly. ‘She is ashamed to come forth, half-naked in tattered clothes, exposed to the ridicule of every dirty boy.’ Flowers such as primroses and violets, however, were ‘forward lasses and regard not who pluck them’. Time, he told one daughter, was ‘a subtle nimble thief’ who ‘has stolen away your one and twentieth year.’13
Their father may have been the senior figure in the lives of the Nelson boys, but there can be no doubt that an uncle seemed the most dramatic. Captain Maurice Suckling was by no means the first in the family to distinguish himself at sea. In March 1711 his grand-uncle, Captain Galfridus Walpole of the Lion, had lost his right arm in a battle with the French in Vado Bay. It brought his active career to an end, but relatives secured him a post as treasurer of Greenwich Hospital. Maurice was a year younger than his sister, Catherine Nelson, but he inherited what glamour her sons saw in their ancestry. Unemployed on half-pay after the Seven Years War ended in 1763, he was striking nonetheless. He could show his nephews uniforms and swords, and tell them stirring tales of faraway places, and – if exhorted – describe the daring scrap he had had with the French in the West Indies back in 1757. Listening to Uncle Maurice gave Horace his first taste for action at sea.
