by John Sugden
Nelson would miss home, for all its grim silences and stunted horizons. He remembered his early associates in Norfolk with great affection, and referred to them often in his letters to William. There was Horace Hammond, ‘my old school-fellow’, the son of Dr Horace Hammond, who had not only married a cousin of Nelson’s mother but stood as one of the boy’s godparents. And among those whose kindnesses remained with him were Dr Poyntz, Henry Crowe, Lord Walpole, and Mrs John (Charlotte) Norris, daughter of Edward Townshend, sometime Dean of Norwich, and another of the Suckling–Walpole–Townshend tribe.30
But homesickness would have to be cured, for as Horace sat excitedly beside his father, shaken this way and that as the coach sped over rutted roads to London, he could not have known that he would not see Burnham Thorpe again for ten years.
III
CAPTAIN SUCKLING’S NEPHEW
From thence a NELSON, – DUNCAN sprung,
Brave HOOD, and numbers yet unsung;
Let not then a despiteful tongue,
Defame the name of midshipman.
‘Peter’, The Midshipman, 1813
1
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY London was very different from the London of today. No part of it was more than an afternoon’s carriage ride from the open country, and while the main roads that stretched from its nucleus like tentacles were built up for miles, the ground between was covered in fields, market gardens and rural villages. But it must have still seemed overwhelmingly stirring to a twelve-year-old from Norfolk, even one familiar with Norwich. Pedestrians of every description thronged the pavements, while carts, coaches, sedan chairs, carriages and wagons plied furiously through the streets. The air was full of the smells of an eccentric sewage system and new sounds, the echo of wood and iron on cobbles, the chimes of huge bells and the incomprehensible cries of street vendors. The Reverend Edmund Nelson might have led his wide-eyed son through myriad interesting sights to the house of William Suckling, apparently then at New North Street in Red Lion Square. Horace knew that Uncle William had been with the customs service as a boy. His station was probably the Customs House off Thames Street, but at home he lived with his wife Elizabeth (née Browne) and their nine-year-old son, also called William. There was little time for Horace to explore, however. After completing his sea outfit, which included navigational instruments and the long, plain single-breasted uniform coats of a midshipman, he was soon careering downriver on the Chatham stage with instructions to find the Raisonable and report to Captain Suckling.1
In all probability the ship was at Sheerness, for it had slipped down to the mouth of the Medway on 15 March. The Raisonable still had only about half of its complement of five hundred men, but was already being licked into shape. On 1 April a man received the customary twelve lashes for fighting. The ship’s rigging was being set up, and stores of beef, bread, wood, beer, pork, oatmeal, butter, cheese and water were loading.2
When the bewildered Horace finally arrived at the moorings there was no one to meet him or take him aboard. According to the story told by his brother William, Horace wandered forlornly about the quayside until an officer acquainted with Captain Suckling encountered him, and, learning his plight, took him home for refreshments. When Horace did reach the Raisonable, it was to the news that his uncle, the captain, had not yet arrived. He stowed his gear and spent that day and several that followed pacing the quarterdeck, lonely and homesick. Even William, still enduring the mercies of ‘Classic’ Jones, seemed to have been dealt a kinder hand.3
It was an uncomfortable introduction to the dark, arduous, cramped and dangerous world of the eighteenth-century warship, but slowly Horace adjusted to its tarry smells, the creaks and groans of wood and rope, the shifting, ceaseless swell beneath him, the shouts and oaths and running feet, and the crowded sights of an arterial waterway. If the Raisonable did little but rock at anchor, other vessels glided here and there beneath billowing sails, ships with such names as the Conquistador, Glasgow, Cornwall and Augusta. One, a passing yacht, drew a rumbling gun salute, and Horace would have learned that it contained Lord Sandwich himself, recently restored to the head of the board of Admiralty.
While new recruits climbed aboard and volunteers received their ‘bounties’ from the dockyard clerk of the cheque, Horace tackled the everyday complexities of shipboard life as a ‘young gentleman of the quarter-deck’ training to be an officer, from mastering sleeping in a hammock and keeping himself in a presentable condition to fathoming the mysteries of navigation and seamanship at the behest of the sailing master, William Clark. He also quickly learned to jump at a word from the superior officers on the quarterdeck: the captain himself, and Matthew Anderson, St Alban Roy, William Scott and Faithful Adrian Fortescue – lieutenants with the king’s commission in their pockets.
There were new friends to be made too, many of them aspirants like himself, including a score of ‘captain’s servants’ and five other midshipmen. It was the last – Thomas Underwood, John Cook, Thomas Pewtress, William Swan and Charles Boyles – who were his immediate associates. Boyles was his favourite and he probably assumed the role of a protective older brother. Five years Horace’s senior, he was a lively Norfolk lad whose father, the collector of customs at Wells, was known to the Nelson–Suckling families. In fact, Charles owed his presence on board to one of their Townshend relatives. Horace watched Boyles mature into ‘an exceedingly good character’, very ‘much beloved’ by his colleagues. He was capable too: he became a post-captain in 1790, distinguished himself in Calder’s action with the French in 1805 and reached flag rank a year later.4
The Raisonable was supposed to be bound for the Falklands but did not put to sea. The dispute between Britain and Spain subsided when the Spanish restored a British post they had seized on the islands, and the two powers agreed to let the question of sovereignty simmer. Raisonable was decommissioned, but Captain Suckling was not returned to the half-pay list. Instead, he was transferred to a larger warship, the seven-year-old, seventy-four-gun Triumph, which was anchored at Blackstakes, an anchorage on the River Medway, doing duty as a guardship. On 15 May the captain shifted to his new berth, and among those duly following was his nephew. Horace was discharged from the Raisonable on Tuesday 21 May 1771, and the following day rated a captain’s servant on the Triumph. 5
As we have seen, the navy was a logical choice for boys of Nelson’s means, status and connections, but he was probably tempted by what seemed to him a glamorous profession, one that was also adventurous, prestigious and popular. The life was hard, but those who endured it, whether officers or common seamen, walked ashore with a certain pride and approbation. For in the eighteenth century the Royal Navy was not an occasionally useful but secondary arm: it was the very foundation of the security, independence and prosperity of an island nation living in dangerous times.
Going aboard the Raisonable and the Triumph, Horace was taking his place in the front line of his country’s defences. Britain had been involved in three significant wars since the beginning of the century: the wars of Spanish and Austrian Succession of 1702–13 and 1740–48, and the Seven Years War of 1756–63, which for the British, French and American Indians began in skirmishes along the Ohio River in 1754. France was the principal adversary in each of the conflicts, and remained a major threat to Britain’s sovereignty and her greatest rival for overseas empire. Compared with France, Britain was a poor under-populated country of eight million people and militarily weak. But, luckily, she was also an island power with the sea for her borders and a powerful navy to protect her from invasion and allow a degree of freedom of action.
The Royal Navy both shielded the realm and enabled its politicians to distance themselves from continental wars, ready to profit while more vulnerable European powers with debatable land frontiers were sucked into ruinous conflicts. The British tended to risk their redcoats on the mainland sparingly, to prevent strategic areas, such as the Low Countries across the English Channel, falling under the control of a threatening power;
to protect essential sources of supply, such as the naval stores acquired from the Baltic; or perhaps to stem the growth of hostile combinations of power inimical to Britain’s interests. Britain had developed a maritime strategy, subsidising heavyweight allies doing their fighting in Europe, and using the navy to destroy Spanish and French sea power, shipping and colonies.
This blue-water strategy had yielded dividends of which most Englishmen were becoming proud, despite war debts. Its potential had been demonstrated in the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, conflicts which in Europe pivoted upon the competing territorial ambitions of Prussia and Austria in Silesia. During the general conflagrations that ensued, Britain used European allies to divert France and Spain on land while she shredded their sea-going capacity and colonies elsewhere. Britain emerged from the Seven Years War in 1763 as the most powerful of all maritime and colonial powers. She possessed the largest mercantile marine in the world, more than half a million tons of shipping, and the Royal Navy was able to field one hundred and thirty ships of the line with eighty-five thousand men, a force larger than the fleets of Spain and France combined. In the fighting she had stripped her rivals of Canada, Louisiana (east of the Mississippi), Tobago, Dominica, St Vincent, the Grenadines, Florida and Minorca, and eliminated French competition in India.
An impressive roll of victories had stirred British hearts, bringing the names of such new heroes as Robert Clive and James Wolfe to the fore, but everyone knew that the country’s achievements were ultimately predicated on sea power. Even as a young child, Horatio Nelson must have understood, however imperfectly, that the navy was not only vital to the country’s power and security but also a service of terrific prestige and popularity. He had probably listened to stories of Admiral Hawke’s famous victory over the French at Quiberon Bay (1759), won when Horace was little more than a year old, and heard the lusty strains of the ubiquitous ‘Hearts of Oak’, celebrating the battle:
Come cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer,
To add something more to this wonderful year.
The navy was a shield, but it was also a protector and creator of trade and wealth. Britain was still largely an agricultural country, dominated by aristocratic landowners, but her growing middle classes depended upon a thriving overseas trade, and the gathering momentum of her manufactures, racing towards the ‘industrial revolution’, was spearheaded by the export of textiles. The country had won vast overseas possessions, where markets and raw materials were to be had or strategic areas secured, but it was more interested in customers than colonies and in building a trade empire. Though some of Britain’s older markets, such as the Levant and the Iberian peninsula, were declining, Atlantic, West Indian and East Indian trades were creating a new prosperity, and in 1760 Britain’s exports far exceeded the government’s national budget.
And it was almost universally understood that naval power was essential to that rising wealth. Nothing illustrated the acceptance of that premise more graphically than the navigation laws, which were at the heart of the country’s mercantilist system. Those laws attempted to bind the mother country and her colonies into an interlocking, self-sufficient trade system that would shut out commercial rivals and maintain the foundations of naval power. They stipulated what each colony might manufacture and export, and from where it might import other necessaries, and insisted that such trade be carried in ships built in Britain or her dependencies and predominantly navigated by their citizens. Similarly, about half the European goods imported into Britain had to be carried either in the ships of the producing country or in ‘British bottoms’, and all European goods destined for the British colonies had to be shipped through Britain and in British vessels. By protecting ship-building and a pool of experienced seamen, the maritime laws supported the foundations of naval power and underlined the interdependence of war and trade.
With land frontiers and continental rivals to watch, France and Spain were unable to match the resources Britain willingly channelled into her might at sea, and when Horace joined the Royal Navy it was a vast organisation by the standards of the eighteenth century. Indeed, its most prominent living historian has accounted it ‘by far the largest and most complex of all government services’ and ‘by a large margin the largest industrial organization in the western world’. Apart from the enormous fleet of ships of the line, frigates, sloops, brigs and tenders, the Admiralty office in Whitehall controlled extensive auxiliary services, including dockyards at home – in Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham, Sheerness, Portsmouth and Plymouth – and abroad – at Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean, Halifax in Canada, and Antigua and Jamaica in the West Indies.6
Nelson had not stepped into a backwater but into a powerful, vibrant, professional fraternity of the utmost importance to his country, and a shaper of its destiny. But there was a long road to travel before he could stamp his own personality and purpose upon it. He had taken his first steps towards becoming a commissioned king’s officer, but from the beginning ‘interest’ was an essential prerequisite for progress. There were no formal entry qualifications for an aspiring officer, but an influential patron, usually a serving captain, was needed to take the hopeful aboard, either as a captain’s servant or midshipman or even a master’s mate or able seaman. These protégés might be selected from promising common sailors already on board, but most were friends or relations of existing naval officers and drawn from the middling or upper classes.
An early start and rapid promotion were essential if maximum benefit was to be derived. In theory, to qualify for a lieutenant’s commission ‘young gentlemen’ had to serve at least six years at sea, two as a midshipman or master’s mate; be twenty or more years old; and pass an examination of nautical competency. Once a lieutenant, the officer’s object was to be made post-captain as soon as possible, for that put him on a captains’ list from which neither interest nor wealth could oust him. Moreover, an officer ascended the captains’ list to admiral or flag rank purely by seniority. The snag was that the process was a protracted one, and only an officer who had been ‘made post’ at a reasonably early age could expect to live long enough to reach the head of the list and achieve his flag. The importance of interest, therefore, both for entry and a speedy promotion to the captains’ list, was paramount.
2
Horatio Nelson relied entirely upon his uncle to clear a way for him, and that support was already working. Young men who were not the sons of naval officers were supposed to enter the service at the age of thirteen or above, but Nelson got in at twelve. Furthermore, by rating Horace’s service from 1 January rather than from March or April, when he actually came on board, Captain Suckling had given his nephew two or three months’ additional ‘sea time’ towards the six years he needed to qualify for a lieutenancy. These were, of course, subterfuges, but subterfuges were far from uncommon in the scramble for promotion and position that characterised the life of the young naval officer.7
Nelson’s patron was still an imposing figure. The captain of the Triumph was just turning forty-five and in his prime, apart from having what he called ‘gout’ in his right hand. His hair was thinning, but he was handsome and slim, and seven years earlier had struck a dramatic pose sitting to the painter Thomas Bardwell at Woodton Hall, near Norwich, the ancestral home of the Sucklings. Captain Suckling’s mettle had been shown in battle. As captain of the Dreadnought he had joined two consorts in an engagement with seven French ships off St Domingo in the West Indies on 21 October 1757. The battle was indecisive, but Suckling acquitted himself gallantly and his ship suffered the greatest British losses. Perhaps even more important from Horace’s point of view, Captain Suckling made friends easily, and many would live to serve his nephew. They included John Rathbone, master’s mate of the Dreadnought; Captain Peter Parker, who had served with Suckling in the Mediterranean; and Captain John Jervis, who had benefited from Suckling’s kindness as a boy aboard the Gloucester. 8
Professionally, Suckling was in a fai
rly strong position. His name had adorned the captains’ list for fifteen years, and he had prospects of becoming an admiral. As it was, he advanced steadily. On 26 June 1771 he received the additional responsibility of superintending naval affairs in the Medway and the Nore. The job was unexciting, but the Medway and the Nore were principal channels for ships passing along the Thames, and Chatham and Sheerness were dockyards of the first importance. Suckling was soon handling a considerable range of duties, including naval discipline and the deployment of marine detachments and fourteen or so ships at a time.9
One reason for Suckling’s success was the interest at his disposal, for notwithstanding the views of some historians to the contrary, the captain had powerful friends. His great uncles had included Galfridus Walpole, treasurer of Greenwich Hospital and postmaster general; Horatio, Lord Walpole; and the great Sir Robert Walpole himself. Indeed, it was under the auspices of the latter that Maurice had first gone to sea under Captain Thomas Fox. By the time Sir Robert died in 1745 Maurice had become a lieutenant, and further preferment was to be had at the hands of George Townshend (the son of his great aunt, Dorothy, Viscountess Townshend), who was himself a naval officer. In 1748, at the end of the War of Austrian Succession, when ships were being decommissioned and less favoured officers retired on half-pay, Suckling was appointed lieutenant of the Gloucester, bound for the West Indies under Townshend. Later, as post-captain of the Dreadnought, he was briefly Townshend’s flag captain in Jamaica, where the latter was a rear admiral.10
