by John Sugden
5
The importance of the captain greatly increased in the severe winter of 1767 and 1768. Cold east winds from the Continent bit through the walls of the old rectory, and the snow lay deep in the lanes. Tragedy struck the Nelson household that Christmas. On 26 December 1767 Catherine died, leaving her husband with eight children, the youngest a mere nine months old. Four days later Edmund buried her in the chancel of his church, placing above the grave an armorial stone bearing a Latin inscription and the grief-stricken words ‘Let these alone – let no man touch these bones.’
More followed. Catherine’s mother, Ann, had been staying near her daughter at Burnham Thorpe, either in the rectory or a cottage in the village, and she, too, was ill. In fact, only six days before Catherine’s death she had dated her own will, beseeching the family to bury her in ‘as plain a manner’ as decency permitted but at Barsham, in the same grave as her husband. She had some £300 in the hands of her youngest son, William, and desired what her funeral left of it to be passed to her daughter, along with her household furniture, plate, china and clothes. There were also some keepsakes for four of her Nelson grandchildren – Maurice, Susanna, Ann and baby Katy. Ann, for example, received ‘my old purse containing some gold medals’. The clause dividing her daughter’s legacy between the three grand-daughters if Catherine predeceased her was eerily prophetic. Perhaps it was the death of Catherine Nelson that pushed the old woman into the abyss, for barely had the former been laid to rest than the mother died also, at Burnham Thorpe on 5 January 1768, in her seventy-seventh year.14
Stricken by these deaths Captain Maurice Suckling arrived at Burnham Thorpe, burdened with the sad duties of burying his only sister and removing the body of his mother back to Barsham. He found the Reverend Edmund heartbroken and fearful for the future of his children. The death of his wife had somehow put a little spare money into his hands, which he invested in South Sea annuities for a usable interest, but as late as 1801 it only amounted to £908. Nevertheless, he intended to educate all the children, boys and girls, and find positions for them. The boys, deemed to be future bread-winners, were a particular worry but members of the family rallied round. John Fowle undertook to place the eldest boy, his godson Maurice, in the Excise Office in London, and Captain Suckling told Edmund that he would provide for one of the others when an opportunity arose.15
The job of launching the children in life bore upon Edmund heavily, and even with the aid of nannies and maids he doubted he was equal to it. ‘As it has fallen to my lott to take upon me the care and affection of double parent, they [the children] will hereafter excuse where I have fallen short and the task has been too hard,’ he wrote. To the end of his days he fretted about his performance, and Christmas 1797 found the old man spending ‘many a useless hour at the fire in an easy chair, reflecting on the various events of a long life. It is this day twenty-nine years since your poor mother was laid in the peacefull grave. How I have acquitted myself in the important charge which then fell upon me, posterity must be my judge. In many instances I fear I shall not be acquitted.’16
Horace was nine years old when he lost his mother, but he remembered her, and when he did he recalled a line in Henry V and said it could be seen in the tears in his eyes. In fact Catherine had so often been confined child-bearing that it is unlikely her son ever got as much attention from her as he wanted. He said that she ‘hated the French’, a common enough English sentiment of the time. His father, too, became increasingly remote, spending long winter months in Bath to recover his health. The first of the fledglings also flew the nest. After turning fifteen in May 1768, Maurice went to London, where Mr Fowle put him to work as an auditing clerk in the Excise Office, off the Old Jury. Later a Mr Stonehewer facilitated the boy’s progress in the office, but for the moment the younger siblings remained at Burnham Thorpe. Their priority, Edmund decided, was schooling. The girls too, for he had no means of supplying them with attractive wedding dowries, and like their brothers they would have to pass through school to paying trades.17
Accordingly William and Horace, an inseparable pair, were soon exchanging the isolation of Burnham Thorpe for the rigours of the boarding school.
6
They went to two schools, first to King Edward VI’s grammar school in Norwich and then to Sir William Paston’s grammar school in North Walsham. We do not know when the boys made their way to Norwich; perhaps in 1768, when Edmund was wrestling with the problems left by his wife’s death. But James Harrison correctly places Nelson’s attendance at Norwich during the period of Edward Simmons’s headship.18
Edmund probably decided to send William and Horace to Norwich because he had a sister in the town, with whom they could board. The boys would have found Aunt Thomasine and her husband, John Goulty, a shoemaker and free cordwainer of Norwich, in their late thirties. In 1768 they had been married eleven years, but only one of their children up till then, William, born in 1763, appears to have survived infancy, and so there was room for nephews in the Goulty household. They lived in the parish of St Andrew, where John also seems to have based his business at 18 London Lane.19
After Burnham Thorpe, Norwich must have seemed a veritable metropolis to a small boy. It was then the second largest town in England, and home to thirty thousand people. The dwellings clustering around the cathedral alone swallowed as many inhabitants as Burnham Thorpe, while the coaches and horses clattering to and from the nearby Maid’s Head Inn made the main street of the village seem a mere farm track. Never had Horace seen a grander place than Norwich Cathedral, though he was more likely to have been impressed by the skeleton on its macabre memorial to Thomas Gooding than the magnificent vaults and arches.
The bulk of King Edward’s occupied buildings that had once been a chapel dedicated to St John the Evangelist, adjacent to the majestic cathedral. There were then probably fewer than a hundred boys in the school. Some were free scholars from the town, but others like the Nelson brothers had been recruited as fee payers from further afield and boarded in lodgings. Horace’s teacher was probably Thomas Nichols, the ‘usher’, or assistant master, who inculcated Latin grammar into the reluctant lower forms. The Reverend Edward Simmons reserved for himself the privilege of harassing the older pupils with equally colourless fare.
At home Horace had read the Bible and perhaps even some Shakespeare, but he probably found the largely incomprehensible curriculum and the long, uncomfortable wooden benches at Norwich less than adequate compensation for his rambles across the fields near Burnham Thorpe. Frustration was at least relieved by admonitions to Christian virtue, an annual production staged for the mayor, and the ‘Guild Day’ rituals commemorating the inauguration of each new dignitary elevated to that office. On Guild Days the pupils assembled at the school porch to hear one of their fellows speechify in return for a ride to a Guildhall banquet and ball in the mayor’s carriage. Nonetheless, boredom and bad behaviour still went hand in hand, surviving the occasional wielding of the rod, and so many windows were broken that Simmons was told to pay for repairs from his own pocket.20
Nelson was not long at Norwich, for by 1769 he and his brother transferred to the Paston School in the small market town of North Walsham. A Tudor foundation established close to the market place, which could be reached through a gateway at the rear of the school, the Paston had a new three-storey schoolhouse of red brick and a fresh constitution. The master, the Reverend John Price Jones, was as Welsh as his name suggests though he had formerly been a curate at Yateley in Hampshire. He delivered the inevitable Classics and a little English and Mathematics with the assistance of his good wife (Mrs G. M. Jones), an usher, James North, who managed the lower forms, and a French master known to the boys as ‘old Jemmy Moisson’.
By no means all the faces who passed beneath the coat of arms engraved above the school entrance were new ones. A number of the boys were, like the Nelsons, former pupils of Norwich Grammar, including John Ashmul of Worstead, William Booty of Walsingham, Thomas Taylor of Norwich
and Richard Ellis of Repps. The surviving names of the other youngsters also demonstrate a huge preponderance of Norfolk lads, among them Paul Johnson of Runcton, Gunton Postle of Hoveton, Nathaniel Gooding Clarke of Attleborough, Thomas Decker of North Walsham, Charles Mann of Norwich, William Earle Bulwer (whom Nelson remembered ‘perfectly well’ thirty years later), and probably also Horace’s relative, Horatio Hammond.21
Horace was a fee-paying boarder at the Paston until 1771, when the annual charge of £21 12s. 0d. covered lodgings, tuition, laundry and an entrance fee. The boys went home for holidays, and the forty-mile pony ride along the leafy lanes between North Walsham and Burnham Thorpe was the subject of one of two stories William used to tell of his brother’s schooldays. The Christmas holidays had ended, and in January 1770 the Reverend Nelson saw his boys disappear along the snowy track that passed the rectory gate. The brothers had not gone far before they were halted by the drifts and turned back. William, the elder, was their spokesman, and presented their story to a stern parent, who insisted they try again. ‘If the road should be found dangerous, you may return,’ he told them. ‘Yet remember boys! I leave it to your honour!’ On the second attempt William was again ready to retreat, but Horace urged him on. ‘Remember, brother,’ he cried. ‘It was left to our honour!’
William’s second story concerned a certain pear tree that flourished in the grounds before the schoolhouse. One night (probably in 1770) the boys lowered Horace from the dormitory window by some knotted sheets, and he rifled the tree, scaling the sheets to return with his plunder. This he distributed among his fellows, reserving not a single pear for himself. ‘I only took them because every other boy was afraid!’ he explained. Five guineas were offered for information about the theft, but no one betrayed the culprit.22
William’s stories were probably embellished, but even if they are taken at face value they misrepresent the young Nelson. Looking back upon a misty past in the distorting glare of hindsight, William paid homage to his brother’s subsequent reputation for courage and integrity, abstracting what was commendable and suppressing anything that detracted from the desired image. Horatio Nelson may have been a daring child, but he was also a boy much like any other, and it is that broader, and no doubt more colourful and ambiguous, portrait that we have lost. William’s depiction of the unshakeably fearless, disinterested and upright boy was part of familiar selective processes that turn real men and women into myths.
Two others who remembered Nelson as a schoolboy were Elizabeth Gaze and Levett Hanson. Elizabeth was a local girl, the third of seven surviving daughters of Robert and Jane Gaze, farmers who had moved to North Walsham after losing their stock in a ‘cattle plague’. Born in January 1752, she was literate and eighteen or nineteen when young Nelson saw her working as a nurse at the Paston. Elizabeth’s story that Horace went down with measles at the school – set down by one of her great-grandchildren – rings true. The disease ran rife in such establishments and Horace was a weak child, ‘much impaired by an aguish complaint’ according to his brother. Moreover, the school minutes for 9 August 1770 show that the ‘stable chamber’ and ‘space over the muck bin’ were earmarked as quarters for sick children, an entry that suggests several infectious pupils needed isolating. The following January the school governors, all of them members of the local gentry, allowed the Reverend Jones five guineas to maintain the room he had hired for that purpose.23
Levett Hanson of Yorkshire was a fellow pupil. Many years later, on 29 September 1802, he wrote to the famous admiral, ‘Your Lordship, though in the second class when I was in the first, was five years my junior, or four at least, and at that period of life such a difference in point of age is considerable. I well remember where you sat in the school room. Your station was against the wall, between the parlour door and the chimney. The latter to your right. From 1769 to 1771 we were opposites . . .’ Born in December 1754, Hanson was in fact almost four years Horace’s senior. His remark about the different classes indicates either that Nelson was already a pupil at the Paston when Hanson arrived from Bury St Edmunds in 1769 or that he was more academically advanced.24
Hanson certainly seems to have been a less than conscientious pupil. He reminded Nelson that ‘Classic Jones’ the headmaster was a ‘flogger’ of the first water, but perhaps that was merely how he chose to remember it. As an adult Hanson was a flamboyant author and traveller, fair-complexioned, red-haired and round-faced, but school records suggest an unruly boy. Just before Horace left the Paston in 1771 Hanson absconded. On 24 February Jones explained to Hanson’s guardian that the boy had been ‘out of bounds after dark’, and on one occasion had negotiated a hedge to smoke a pipe in the master’s garden with another boy. Hanson had also failed to form a Greek verb, and received one or two punitive blows over the shoulders, but Jones protested that ‘my natural disposition is rather to mildness than severity, and my punishments are never proportional to a boy’s faults’.25
There is no evidence that Nelson particularly distinguished himself at school. He was unquestionably intelligent, but his mature letters contain few of the Classical allusions Jones and his staff attempted to instil. Dawson Turner, who studied at North Walsham a dozen years later, testified that stories about Nelson were still going round at the time, and that the name of the future admiral was cut in a pew in the school church. A subsequent pupil, the father of the novelist Henry Rider Haggard, thought he discerned it carved upon a brick in the playground wall at the back of the school.26
It was of little consequence, for Horace’s schooldays ended abruptly. He was the second of the Nelson children to leave home.
7
In time the Reverend Edmund Nelson would guide all but one of his children into employment. In 1773 eighteen-year-old Susanna, who answered to ‘Sukey’, was apprenticed to Messrs Watson, milliners of Bath, and in three years became a shop assistant in the same town. William, despite a growing capacity for self-interest, went to Christ College, Cambridge, in 1774, destined for holy orders. Neat and taciturn Ann (‘Nancy’ or ‘Nan’) eventually left school in 1775 and embarked upon her apprenticeship in millinery at a ‘Lace Warehouse’ in Ludgate Street, London. Edmund (‘Mun’) and Suckling were also apprenticed, the former to Nicholas Havers of Burnham and the latter to Mr Blowers, a linen draper of Beccles, though neither would be particularly successful. Only little Catherine, who everyone called ‘Katy’, would be rescued from an apprenticeship by a timely legacy. Their father loved his children and worried that he had served them inadequately, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Ann’s apprenticeship alone cost a premium of £105, one of the highest demanded by a London trade, a clear indication that Edmund was stretching his meagre means to find good positions for his offspring.27
But, apart from Maurice, Horace left home before any of them, at the tender age of twelve. It happened suddenly.
The winter of 1770–71 was lonely and dark at the rectory, for the reverend had retreated to Bath and the boys spent their Christmas holidays under the charge of the hired help. But perusing the pages of the Norfolk Chronicle, Horace read something that enlivened even that timeless place. Britain and Spain were squabbling for possession of the Falkland Islands, and the Admiralty was commissioning additional ships, and calling captains from retirement. One of them was Horace’s uncle, Maurice Suckling, who was appointed to a new sixty-four-gun line of battle ship, the Raisonable, on 17 November. She was fitting at Chatham, and taking on men, and impulsively Horace asked William to write to their father. He wanted Uncle Maurice to take him to sea.
The Reverend Nelson probably did not blanch at the proposal. He knew that Captain Suckling had offered to take one of the boys, and the navy was by no means a bad option. Indeed, there were few more acceptable alternatives. As a clergyman Edmund had a traditional place among the country gentry, but it was a rank to which his modest income was barely equal, and like many wearing the cloth he mixed uneasily with local landowners, merchants and professional men far wealthier than hims
elf. Money was a particularly serious concern when it came to starting sons in life. The professions were the obvious outlets, but most demanded considerable and enduring investment. Promotion in the army was based upon purchase, and threatened constant embarrassment to families of limited means. The law was a possibility, but the road to the Bar through the inns of court might drain a modest purse, and even an apprenticeship with a good London attorney could cost a hundred pounds. The Church involved the expenses of a university education. The navy, however, was different. A commissioned officer had status and the prospect of making a fortune through prize money. But more immediately, provided a boy had the ‘interest’ to get aboard a ship as the protégé of some captain, his promotion would depend upon influence and kinship rather than money, and he would receive his education at the king’s expense. Edmund would have to pay for Horace’s uniforms, equipment and sea chest, but, all things considered, the navy was a respectable and inexpensive way forward. True, the service was a hard one, but then Captain Suckling would be on hand to monitor his nephew’s progress.
As William remembered it, Uncle Maurice himself was not so sure. It was common for captains to take fledgling relatives on board their ships, and Suckling had himself gone to sea at thirteen. He had also promised to provide for one of the boys, but perhaps it was William he had had in mind, rather than his fragile younger brother, so readily stricken with the mild marsh fevers of the East Anglian flats. ‘What has poor Horace done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea?’ Suckling is said to have replied. ‘But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.’28
Not yet though. The ship was still being prepared and Horace was ordered back to school with his brother for the beginning of the new term. Not until early one gloomy March or April morning in 1771 did their father’s servant arrive at the Paston with a summons. The brothers parted painfully, and the school doors closed behind Horace for the last time. He was bound for London and a new life at sea.29
