by John Sugden
Off Cadiz the next day they endured the most perilous part of their journey. A number of ships had followed the Worcester from Gibraltar, but Robinson expected other homeward-bound merchantmen to join him at Cadiz. He had arranged with Consul Hardy that any ships waiting for convoy there should be ready to join the moment the Worcester appeared. But when the ship arrived on the morning of the 15th and Robinson raised a signal to his fore-topgallant and fired a gun, nothing happened. The waiting merchantmen sat snugly in the bay refusing to budge. For six hours the Worcester lay off the port, slowly being enveloped by a savage gale at west-southwest. Robinson reduced sail, but his main yard was destroyed in the slings, and it took an hour to bring the broken spar down, clew up the main-topsail and unbend the mainsail.
For a while the ship was in a situation every seaman dreaded – crippled, with a hard squall driving it towards the shore. Indeed, a Spanish brig in a similar predicament was pounded to pieces against the rocks. Finding it impossible to work out to sea on either tack, Robinson signalled his convoy to follow him into the bay, and a local fishing boat eventually piloted them to a safe haven among the ships already secured there.
An embarrassed British consul redeemed himself by prompting the Spaniards to live up to their well-earned reputation for hospitality, and the courteous hosts provided the Worcester with various necessities, including timber for a new yard. Some of the convoy, loaded with perishables, were unable to wait and sailed on as soon as the weather improved, but the Worcester had thirty-two ships in company, eleven of them from Cadiz, when she put to sea again on 3 March. There were more reluctant passengers for Robinson to embark too, including four army deserters for delivery to Portsmouth.7
For almost two weeks strong north winds and rain scourged the stubborn ships as they furrowed towards the English Channel. Robinson’s charges were repeatedly appealing for help, to supply a new bowsprit here or a mizzen mast there, or even a surgeon to splint a broken arm, but as the voyage drew to its close they became more unmanageable and aloof. Their masters knew that the Royal Navy often impressed seamen from homeward-bound merchant ships, and all but four of the convoy slunk away to Falmouth or other places on their own hock. It was six o’clock in the evening of 2 April that the Worcester itself anchored in Spithead.
Nelson had written to his brother William from the Gulf of Cadiz, informing him of his intention to travel to London at the first opportunity. With more than six years of sea time under his belt, and a spell as acting lieutenant to boot, he wanted to confront the final hurdles that divided him from the king’s commission, hurdles anticipated, and sometimes feared, by every midshipman. He would present himself for examination to a board of three post-captains.
3
At Portsmouth Captain Robinson took to his room, his rheumatism inflamed by the inclement rigours of his latest service, while his acting lieutenant climbed inside a coach bound for London, armed with the journals of his voyages and certificates of service from their various commanders. His destination was the Navy Office, then occupying an open space within the angle of Seething Lane and Crutched Friars. Lieutenants’ commissions were issued at the Admiralty, but the drudge of examining candidates was delegated to the Navy Board, partly because the ships’ books used to corroborate claims of service were stored in the junior office.
Nelson had prepared himself for the examination as best he could, but there were hidden problems in his candidacy. He had been eighteen on his last birthday, and a commissioned officer was supposed to be at least twenty. Although the books of recent ships had falsified his age, then and throughout life he looked younger than he was, and there was a possibility that some officious inquisitor might probe the matter. Then there were the necessary six years of sea time on His Majesty’s ships. Again, officially Nelson had been in the navy for slightly more than six years, but a year of the time he was supposed to have been with the Triumph had actually been spent in the merchant service. The examiners were entitled to see his sea journals, so Horace discreetly left behind any he had kept on the Triumph.
As for the substance of the examination, it would be a limited exercise. There would be no questions about naval warfare, nothing about strategy, tactics, combat training or leadership. Professional education in the navy had not yet got that far. The examiners would simply be interested in Nelson’s ability to handle a ship and in establishing that he was eligible for a commission.
Still, there was no telling how punitive the interrogation might be, for it depended upon the particular post-captains drafted into service. Lieutenants’ examinations were sometimes perfunctory indeed, especially if ‘interest’ was at work. Two of the three who tested James Anthony Gardner were ‘particular’ friends of the candidate’s family, and only ‘a few questions’ were needed to persuade them that ‘we need not ask you any more’. On the other hand, there were midshipmen in the service who had sailed into middle age because of their inability to pass the examination.8
Horace appeared expectantly at the Navy Office in his best uniform on Wednesday 9 April 1777. After a nervous interlude he was shown into a room, ‘somewhat alarmed’ according to the story later told by his brother William. And well might he be. The three men sitting resplendent across the table were Captains John Campbell and Abraham North, both strangers, and the comptroller of the Navy Board – Captain Maurice Suckling himself.
In an effort to deny the nepotism in Nelson’s unusually swift promotion, William later gave an attractive but fictitious account of what followed. He said that the comptroller kept his relationship to the candidate to himself. Only after the youth had answered the questions with increasing confidence and mastery, and exhibited his journals and certificates, did Captain Suckling rise to introduce his nephew. His fellow captains expressed their surprise that the comptroller had not mentioned the fact before. ‘No,’ replied Suckling righteously, ‘I did not wish the younker to be favoured. I felt convinced that he would pass a good examination, and you see, gentlemen, that I have not been disappointed.’9
There can be little doubt that Nelson knew his business, and would have passed a fair examination, but William’s story is nonsense. Even if Campbell and North had not been told about the relationship between Suckling and his nephew, the clues to it were plain in the documents the boy offered for inspection. As his passing certificate records, Nelson presented journals he had kept on the Carcass, Seahorse, Dolphin and Worcester, as well as ‘certificates from Captains Suckling, Lutwidge, Farmer, Pigott, and Robinson, of his diligence, &c. He can splice, knot, reef a sail, &c. and is qualified to do the duty of an able seaman and midshipman.’ Given the modes of officer entry, it must have seemed highly probable that a candidate who began his career with Suckling was related in some way.
The comptroller put his name to a definite subterfuge, however, when he initialled Nelson’s passing certificate, which attested that the candidate ‘appears to be more than twenty years of age’. Suckling hardly rated this deception as unusual. In fact, his own former captain, Thomas Fox, had done him exactly the same favour when he had stood for lieutenant more than thirty years before.10
Passing was one thing; getting a post to confirm the rank another. But Suckling had not allowed Lord Sandwich to forget Nelson, and recommended him again while he was out in the Worcester. On 10 April, the day after Horatio passed his examination, he was accordingly appointed lieutenant to the Lowestoffe, a frigate fitting at Sheerness for the Jamaica station under Captain William Locker. Nelson was delighted, and not only on account of the employment itself. The American War of Independence was fully joined, and Jamaica held at least some promise of action and prize money. Eagerly he wrote to Captain Robinson, seeking his discharge from the Worcester (duly sent with best wishes), and even got the Admiralty to pay him a lieutenant’s rate for his acting service on that ship, including an allowance for a servant.11
Still excited five days later, Horace rushed a letter to William, then at Christ’s College, Cambridge, preparing for
his Bachelor of Arts:
I passed my degree as Master of Arts on the 9th instant (that is, passed the Lieutenant’s examination) and received my commission on the following day, for a fine frigate of 32 guns. So I am now left in [the] world to shift for myself, which I hope I shall do, so as to bring credit to myself and friends. Am sorry there is no possibility this time of [us] seeing each other, but I hope that [a] time will come in a few years when we will spend some merry hours together.12
4
William may have been far away, but other members of the family were in London to help Horatio celebrate his elevation to the ranks of officers and gentlemen. We have no information about where he stayed, but two uncles lived in the city. Captain Suckling had succeeded to a house in the parish of St George’s, Hanover Square, previously the property of his former admiral, the Honourable George Townshend, and his brother William, the collector of customs, was in Red Lion Square, not far from Gray’s Inn.13
Some of the Nelsons were also in London to congratulate him, including his father, who arrived on 11 April. Horace’s brother, Maurice, newly ensconced with his uncle at the Navy Office, still resided in the city, as now did their sixteen-year-old sister Ann. After finishing school at the age of fourteen Ann had been apprenticed to Alice Lilly, a citizen of London and member of the Goldsmiths’ Company, on 5 April 1775. She was entitled to board, lodging and tuition for the seven years of her apprenticeship, and was registered with the Chamberlain’s Court. Once fully-fledged at twenty-one, she would command all the economic privileges that went with being a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company and a ‘freeman’ of the town – provided she had the means to establish herself in business.14
Nelson had not seen Ann for more than six years, and, though he was proud of his sister now taking on the world, he must have recognised her vulnerability so far from home. Fortunately, her mistress seemed to be a responsible woman. In her forties, Alice Lilly, the daughter of a Wiltshire yeoman, had completed her apprenticeship and become a ‘freeman’ in 1754. Though a member of the Goldsmiths’ she was in fact a milliner by trade and had simply enrolled with the liveried company to obtain its benefits. Seven apprentices in millinery had successfully passed through her hands before Ann’s arrival. Some of the girls were relatives for whom Miss Lilly waived the premium, while others were the daughters of gentry, clergymen and merchants who paid considerable sums. When Ann joined Alice, she was established in a Capital Lace Warehouse at 9 Ludgate Street with Mary Lilly, a niece or cousin who had been her former apprentice. There, in a large terraced four-storey building with its upper floors lit by trios of plain, regular windows and a balustraded roof, Ann boarded with the other remaining apprentice, Sophia Vassmer, the daughter of a gentleman who was already two years into her training.15
Given Horatio’s commitment to the family it is probable that he made at least one visit to Ludgate Street to cast a protective eye over his young sister. Legend has besmirched Ann’s reputation. She is supposed to have been seduced in London, given birth to an illegitimate son and forced to return home in disgrace. These stories of skeletons in the cupboard and a lost Nelson nephew, though repeated by several biographers, appear to be entirely misguided. It is true that Ann eventually forsook her apprenticeship, and with it the prospect of becoming a ‘citizen’ of London, but her motives were altogether more prosaic. On 5 February 1777 she and her fellow apprentice had been turned over to another mistress with their full consent. Mary Ann Jackson, a spinster of Ludgate Street and citizen and wheelwright of London, who acquired the Lilly business, was no more a wheelwright than Alice had been a goldsmith, and undertook to complete Ann’s training in millinery. It is possible that the transfer unsettled Ann and contributed to a decision to abandon her trade, but two legacies were the real root of it. One from Captain Suckling, worth £1,000, was paid in 1779, the same year that the nineteen-year-old Ann quit London and returned to Norfolk to care for her aged father.16
Whatever domestic considerations may have engaged Lieutenant Horatio Nelson in 1777, he was increasingly independent and self-assured, willing to express and act upon his opinions. Those qualities, and a desire to commemorate his achievement, induced him to sit for his first portrait. He chose the artist John Francis Rigaud, a native of Turin of about thirty-five who had worked in Italy before coming to England in 1771. An associate of the Royal Academy, Rigaud was reputed to be a competent portrait painter though he also depicted historical scenes and tackled wall, staircase and ceiling work. Nelson probably sat to him in his studio in Great Titchfield Street. William Locker, his new captain, commissioned Rigaud to paint a group portrait of his family about this time, and may have recommended the artist to Nelson.
Because Captain William Locker later acquired the Rigaud portrait, biographers have assumed that it was he who actually commissioned it. There seems to have been no reason why Locker should have paid for a portrait of a lieutenant he hardly knew at the time, and the truth seems to have been that Nelson commissioned the likeness himself, through his prize agent and banker, William Paynter. Locker, who returned to England earlier than Nelson and spent more time in London, supervised its completion, and ultimately received it as a present from his young friend.
The portrait was still unfinished when Nelson left for sea. Upon his return four years later, damaged by fresh onslaughts of disease, he admitted that it would no longer ‘be the least like’ him. He authorised Locker to tell the artist to ‘add beauty’ to it, and even managed a fresh sitting. As it has come down to us, then, Rigaud’s portrait reflects the twenty-two-year-old captain of 1781 rather than the fresh lieutenant of 1777. But an X-ray of the painting, made a few years ago, peers into the original we have lost – a chubby-faced Nelson in a pigtail and lieutenant’s uniform, a hat under his arm, standing proudly at the beginning of his career as a commissioned officer of the king.17
5
Nelson joined the Lowestoffe at Sheerness. She was a thirty-two-gun frigate, launched in 1761, and ideal for prize-taking out of Jamaica. The possibility of action seemed good. Ever since the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 the quarrel between Britain and her American colonies had been growing. As far as the crown was concerned it was a matter of suppressing a treasonable trade that had developed between the colonies and the French West Indies during the war, a trade that contravened the navigation laws; of compelling the colonies to make a contribution to the cost of their own defence; and of enforcing what the king regarded as his prerogative to impose colonial taxes and duties.
But many Americans thought differently. They said the navigation laws, which regulated trade between the mother country and its possessions, were restrictive, and the standing army the British had stationed on the western frontier a potential threat to the liberties of the people. More particularly, they insisted that the colonial assemblies had the right to confirm or veto all taxes, a privilege that enabled the people to arrest any tyrannical tendencies of government. As the quarrel intensified both sides lost the will to compromise, and fighting broke out in 1775. The bloodiest battle of the revolutionary war was fought at Bunker Hill outside Boston, and on 2 July 1776 the Continental Congress approved a resolution that the ‘United Colonies’ ought to be ‘free and independent’. Two days later the birth of the United States of America was officially proclaimed.
Everywhere in Britain and America people were divided about the war. In America many stood neutral, and rather fewer remained loyal to the crown, although perhaps half supported independence. In Britain there were Whigs who saw the colonial struggle as a reflection of their own concern for the traditional rights of the people – those much-vaunted liberties Englishmen professed to enjoy as subjects of a monarchy whose powers were checked by the rights of Parliament. Others complained about the expense of yet another conflict so soon after the last, and groaned under an oppressive tax burden. And for some, including Horatio Nelson, this battle between English-speaking peoples seemed a little unnatural. Peace might have settled uncomfort
ably upon Europe for the time being, but for most Englishmen France was the traditional enemy.
Still, the war had begun and action was certain. The American navy was small, and Britain commanded the coasts as well as the cities of New York and Philadelphia. As Lieutenant Nelson prepared to cross the Atlantic, he expected no large naval battles to greet him, but there would be prizes for the taking. American merchantmen were fair game, and the West Indian waters teemed with enemy privateers. In those days the value of such captures, once condemned as legitimate seizures in the vice-admiralty courts, was distributed among the captors as incentives to duty, and Nelson, no less than every other naval officer, looked forward to supplementing his modest salary through prize money.
Locker was under orders to bring his company up to 220 men before proceeding to the Nore, but manning remained a problem, partly because thirty men went down sick before sailing. As his first lieutenant was on leave Captain Locker ordered Nelson to lead a party to a ‘rendezvous’ near the Tower of London to get more men. A rendezvous was a recruiting station, usually a tavern, where volunteers were enlisted and press gangs were based under the supervision of a regulating captain. From this particular rendezvous, gangs sallied out to round up sailors about Tower Hill.
With Nelson went another officer, a young Londoner named Joseph Bromwich. Born in about 1754, Bromwich was older than Nelson but little if any ‘interest’ smoothed his path. He had volunteered to join the Lowestoffe as an able seaman in March 1777, but Captain Locker had been impressed and re-rated him midshipman on 8 May. Though inferior in rank to Nelson, Bromwich’s extra years were reassuring to Nelson on what was perhaps his first outing at the head of an impress party. It was fortunate that Bromwich was there. Nelson was still suffering from the after-effects of the illness that had brought him from the East Indies, and was troubled by severe pains in the chest and occasional febrile onslaughts that left him weak and drained. One cold night, while searching for recruits about the Tower, his legs gave way and Bromwich carried him back to the rendezvous on his back.18
