Nelson

by John Sugden

  But first, to see that William Henry didn’t disgrace himself. There were two days of nonsense – troop reviews, tours of the dockyard and castle, and one marathon evening embracing the opera, supper at the governor’s house, and a late-night ball with what even Hood heard contained a ‘brilliant show of ladies’. The particular Spanish beauty who attracted the prince was sixteen-year-old Donna Maria Solano, one of two daughters of Admiral Don Solano, with whom the visitors were lodged. According to the prince’s earliest biographer, whose sources seem to have been generally reliable, it was Nelson who noticed the jealousies being aroused by the drooling William Henry, and who ushered him out of harm’s way. Whatever, decorum was preserved, and the prince was treated to a magnificent display when he left on the morning of 11 May. As the Spanish launches towed the Albemarle out of harbour, and the prince followed in the first of a procession of naval barges heading seawards to the rumble of another furious salute from the frigate, Nelson may have sighed with relief. One day the prince would cross his path again.59

  In the meantime, Nelson sailed for St Augustine, sent a boat ashore with the dispatches, and sailed for home on 19 May. The Albemarle reached Spithead on 25 June and anchored in Portsmouth harbour the following day. Nelson wrote first of all to Captain Locker, for whom he had brought a present of rum. ‘My dear friend,’ said he, ‘after all my tossing about into various climes, here at last am I arrived, safe and sound.’60

  XI

  LOVE IN ST-OMER

  A wonderful man, he loved a woman well

  Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts

  1

  NELSON found a room at no. 3 Salisbury Street, a small thoroughfare linking the River Thames with the Strand. It was a convenient situation. Walking along it southwards, between the large, plain but impressive three- and four-storey houses, Nelson could pass through an arch and down a flight of steps to reach wharves where boatmen plied a shuttle service here and there; in the opposite direction lay the city itself, beneath the imposing dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Nelson lodged in the third house from the Strand on the northeastern side of the street, and paid rent over a six-month period to one Thomas Hudson. He could not have known it, but this temporary home was little more than a stone’s throw from the site upon which his most famous statue would one day gaze imperiously from its column above the capital.1

  After such a prolonged absence visits were the order of the day. On 11 July, Lord Hood took him to St James’s Palace and introduced him to an ‘attentive’ sovereign, while another invitation summoned him to Windsor, where Prince William Henry wished to see him before leaving for a sojourn on the Continent. Horatio knew that royal connections could do his interest no harm, but he had little real talent for sycophancy. The day he met the king he was glad to take refuge in the quarters of the Davison brothers, at the Chapel Stair Case in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, off Chancery Lane. Alexander was at home, and after dinner Nelson threw off his walking coat, accepted the dressing gown proffered by his host and spent a pleasant evening in conversation, talking about Mary Simpson and Quebec.2

  Horatio believed he was making necessary progress socially, but the summer heat and stench of London increased the attraction of trips out of town. Pringle had asked him to Edinburgh, and of course there was Burnham Thorpe. Predictably, his peregrinations were delayed by an illness that confined him to his room for fourteen wretched July days, an ‘invalid’ but under the watchful eye of ‘an exceeding good surgeon’ who spoke confidently about ‘a perfect cure’. Nelson’s sentence was relieved by caring visitors, including his Uncle William, hotfoot from Kentish Town and a gout-afflicted wife; his brother Maurice; his sister Susanna, with her husband Thomas Bolton, another sister, and gifts of a hare and brace of game birds; and a messenger Captain Locker had sent from his home at Malling near Maidstone.3

  A few official matters also temporarily tied him to the capital. On 3 July a commissioner had boarded the Albemarle to pay off the men and close the command, but he still felt himself their protector. They had made a good company and most of the officers, as well as a high proportion of the ratings, had stayed with him throughout his command. There had been problems, of course. During his two years with the ship Nelson had posted forty-seven men as ‘run’, including his own cook (William Halloway), a corporal of marines and Alexander St Clair, a midshipman who decamped at Yarmouth on Christmas Day 1781. The high number of deserters and would-be deserters was substantially due to the amount of time the Albemarle was penned in port by bad weather. Ports provided many opportunities to desert, and were always a temptation to disgruntled seamen. On 13 November 1781, for example, seven men had jumped in a cutter at Elsinore and pulled strenuously for the shore. The long weeks in Portsmouth allowed another thirteen to ‘run’ early the following year, and when Nelson reached Capelin Bay in Canada in June two men defected in a launch, another trio bolted in the cutter, and two, not to be outdone, leaped overboard to swim ashore.

  The Albemarle had also had its share of floggings. There had been about fifty of them, involving some 14 per cent of the men who served on the frigate at one time or another during Nelson’s command. Given the two-year period it was probably considered fair discipline. The severest punishment Nelson inflicted, thirty-six lashes, was reserved for deserters or exceptionally mutinous seamen such as Evan Griffiths, though a few men received lighter sentences more than once. These recidivists included George Marr, a thief, John Cooper, a disobedient seaman who attempted to desert, and a purser’s steward named Robert Bostock, who got drunk too often. As usual, Nelson attempted to discriminate between degrees of guilt. Thus Charles O’Neal and John Hughes were flogged for theft one February, but Hughes took twice as many strokes of the cat as O’Neal.4

  In general, however, Nelson won the respect of most of the men, and characterised them with almost paternal affection as ‘my good fellows’. Indeed, the whole crew told him that if he got another ship they would ‘enter for her immediately’. Most had served him well, and though the voyage was over, still expected him to defend them in the world of officers and gentlemen beyond their ken. And he tried to fulfil those expectations, troubling the Admiralty with requests for an early payment of all wages owed his men for services during the war. Horatio particularly cursed his inability to do much for Trail, the master, and Acting Lieutenant Bromwich. ‘If I had interest with the comptroller,’ he said of the former, ‘I would wish to get him to be superintendent of some of the ships in ordinary. He is the best master I ever saw since I went to sea.’ Bromwich was also ‘an attentive good officer’ and after returning with the Albemarle passed his examination for lieutenant on 7 August. But Nelson suspected that talent would not be enough, and that Bromwich’s unfortunate loss of sea time as an acting lieutenant in 1781 would militate against his commission being confirmed. He lobbied the Admiralty. ‘Depend upon it, my Lord,’ he addressed the first lord, ‘I should not have interested myself so much about this gentleman did I not know him to be a brave and good officer, having been with me for several years.’ Unfortunately, it was to no avail. Nelson’s request was endorsed, ‘without remedy with others under similar embarrassments’, and Bromwich had to wait more than ten years for his commission.5

  Nelson’s own cause progressed unevenly. His pay as captain of the Albemarle did not reach Paynter, his prize agent and banker, till the last day of the year, and like most unemployed officers on half-pay he was short of money. Eventually he was driven to making an unsuccessful application for full pay covering the period between his quitting the Janus and arriving in England on the Lion. As for prize money, he ruefully concluded that his campaigns had not enriched him. ‘I have closed the war without a fortune,’ he told Hercules Ross, ‘but I trust (and from the attention that has been paid to me believe) that there is not a speck in my character. True honour, I hope, predominates in my mind far above riches.’6

  Recovering his health late in July, Horatio spent two days with his uncle in Kentish Town, tried and failed to visit Ross
, who divided his time between London and Scotland (‘the innumerable favours I have received from you, be assured, I shall never forget’, Nelson wrote to him), and in late August joined his brother Maurice on the Lynn diligence heading for Norfolk. His father was in Bath, attended by Ann, while Susanna and her husband had transferred their business to Ostend. With them was Horatio’s brother, Edmund, who was working for the Boltons. Yet something of a family reunion still took place, and Horatio grounded himself more thoroughly in family affairs. William was about to receive the rectory of Little Brandon from a relative, John Berney, and reckoned it worth £150 a year, and other brothers and sisters were spending the legacies left them by Captain Suckling. Fifteen-year-old Katy was spared an apprenticeship on account of her money, while Suckling was squandering his, along with sums incautiously advanced by William, in running a general store at Witton. Suckling was difficult to blame, Horatio thought. He was amiable and contented, and good company, but far too interested in greyhounds and coursing to make much of himself.7

  Early in October Horatio was back in London, but not looking for a ship. He had decided that peace offered a rare opportunity to visit Britain’s nearest neighbour and greatest rival, and to master the French language. Many times in the West Indies he had felt his want of French, even in the hailing of prizes and interrogation of prisoners. French, thought Nelson, was an essential mark of the good naval officer, and it was high time he learned it. Lille might be a good place. Accordingly, on 8 October he asked the Admiralty for six months’ leave.8

  2

  He even had a travelling companion. Captain James Macnamara, who had just returned from Jamaica, had shared the lieutenants’ mess with Nelson aboard the Bristol and many another West Indian memory. ‘Mac’, as Nelson called him, was an older but junior officer, of about forty-six years. He had been a lieutenant since June 1761, when Horatio was an infant under three, but, lacking ‘interest’ and displaying too independent a mind, he had been overtaken by more favoured officers, including Nelson. Sir Peter Parker had marked his worth though, and made him a commander in 1779 and post-captain in February 1781, when he was appointed to the Hound sloop. More experienced than Nelson, Mac had even been to France before and was probably the least incompetent of the two when it came to the language. He was an ideal partner for the enterprise.9

  Nelson loved the company of friends, and squeezed in a visit to the Parkers in Essex before starting his journey with Mac outside 3 Salisbury Street on Tuesday 21 October. Their way led them to Malling, where they dined with Locker and stayed overnight, and the next day to Canterbury. Sandys lived there, and they called upon him hoping for a bed, but as he was not home the duo continued to Dover to spend the night. At seven on the morning of 23 October the two captains caught the packet boat, and a fresh northwesterly wind had them in Calais in three and a half hours. There they breakfasted where newly arrived Britons always breakfasted. Nelson informed Locker that Monsieur Grandsire’s house just within the city gate had been depicted by Hogarth in The Gate of Calais. They marvelled at what seemed to them the bizarre manners, houses and food, but overall Nelson’s opinion of the French was every bit as sceptical as Hogarth’s had been thirty-five years before.

  At this point the two captains disagreed. Mac was all for going straight to St-Omer, where a considerable English community could give them support, but Nelson decided to ‘fix’ at Montreuil, sixty miles along the coast road to Paris. The younger man, in whom obstinacy was becoming a trait, unfortunately prevailed, and they caught the coach. As Nelson reported it:

  They told us we travelled en poste, but I am sure we did not get on more than four miles an hour. I was highly diverted with looking what a curious figure the postillions in their jack boots, and their rats of horses, made together. Their chaises have no springs, and the roads [are] generally paved like London streets. Therefore, you will naturally suppose we were pretty well shook together by the time we had travelled two posts and a half, which is fifteen miles, to Marquise. Here we [were] shown into an inn – they called it – I should have called it a pigsty. We were shown into a room with two straw beds, and, with great difficulty, they mustered up clean sheets, and gave us two pigeons for supper, upon a dirty cloth, and wooden-handled knives. O what a transition from happy England! But we laughed at the repast, and went to bed with the determination that nothing should ruffle our tempers.10

  The next day’s journey began at daylight, and the travellers were able to take breakfast in Boulogne and reach Montreuil the same evening. Nelson’s estimation of France rose as he jogged along, peering out at the countryside. It was, he confessed, ‘the finest country my eyes ever beheld’, with flourishing fields, ‘stately’ woods, splendid trees skirting the roads as if they were avenues, and game ‘in the greatest abundance: partridges, pheasant, woodcocks, snipes, hare, &c. &c., as cheap as you can possibly imagine’. Nonetheless, he added shrewdly, ‘amidst such plenty they are poor indeed’.11

  At Montreuil, which Nelson found situated on a hill in a fine plain, they camped at the inn with ‘the same jolly landlord’ described by Laurence Sterne in his A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). There was no sign, however, of what Sterne had regarded as the most interesting feature of the inn when he had passed that way twenty years before – the bold and versatile Janatone. ‘There is one thing . . . in it very handsome, and that is the inn-keeper’s daughter,’ Sterne had written in another account, Tristram Shandy. ‘She has been eighteen months at Amiens, and six at Paris, in going through her classes; so knits, and sews, and dances, and does the little coquetries very well.’ In the absence of Janatone, Nelson was left to admire the resources of the country and shudder at the divisions between rich and poor. ‘Here we wished much to have fixed,’ he told Locker, ‘but neither good lodgings, or [language] masters could be had here, for there are no middling class of people. Sixty noblemen’s families lived in the town, who owned the vast plain round it, and the rest very poor indeed.’ This was a country only half a dozen years from a revolution.12

  On Saturday 25 October Nelson and his companion proceeded to Abbeville, a large fortified town on the Somme. Momentarily, Nelson wondered whether this might be a good place to ‘fix’ but ‘unluckily for us’, Horatio told Locker, ‘two Englishmen, one of whom called himself “Lord Kingsland” (I can hardly suppose it to be him) and a Mr Bullock, decamped at three o’clock that afternoon in debt to every shopkeeper in the place . . . We found the town in an uproar.’ After being hoodwinked by a couple of English sharks, the locals were not disposed to offer the new arrivals an enthusiastic welcome, and to make matters worse Nelson could not a find a single tutor who ‘could speak a word of English’. At last Horatio confessed that Mac had been right all along, and without further ado they ought to take the north road to St-Omer, where numerous English families had gathered after the peace to take advantage of the cheap living and warmer weather. And so on Tuesday 28 October, the friends reached St-Omer after what they estimated had been a round trip of 150 miles.

  Nelson was pleasantly surprised by St-Omer. ‘Instead of a dirty, nasty town, which I had always heard it represented [to be],’ he wrote to Locker, he found ‘a large city, well paved, good streets, and well lighted.’ It had powerful fortifications and housed a large garrison, but there was a cathedral and a considerable number of English were to be encountered about the streets. This, Nelson admitted, was the place to ‘fix’ and a few days after his arrival he confidently purchased a copy of Chambaud’s Grammar of the French Tongue and proudly inscribed it with the date of 1 November. His campaign to conquer the language had officially begun.13

  They found rooms at the house of Madame Bertine Lamoury, as Nelson explained to Locker. ‘We lodge in a pleasant French family, and have our dinners sent from a traiteur’s [caterer]. There are two very agreeable young ladies, daughters, who honour us with their company pretty often. One always makes our breakfast, and the other our tea, and play a game at cards in an evening. There, I
must learn French if ’tis only for the pleasure of talking to them, for they do not speak a word of English.’ The husband, Jacques Lamoury, was a master potter in his sixties, who had accumulated several properties in the town, one a fine old house at 136 rue de Dunkerque, and another three in nearby rue Hendricq. The English officers obviously found equitable accommodation in whichever Lamoury used as his personal home, for they were diverted by the eligible daughters, twenty-eight-year-old Marie-Alexis-Hennette Isabelle and Marie-Françoise Bertine, who was two years younger. Neither was married, although the following year both attached themselves to older men, the one to a captain of dragoons and the other to a pharmacist. Given their attentions, Nelson found no space in his letters for the fifth member of the Lamoury family, a younger brother named Omer.14

  From Madame Lamoury’s the friends explored the town and soon ran into a number of fellow countrymen and women. Some were even naval officers. There were dinners with Captain William Young, but Nelson studiously avoided two other captains, Alexander Ball and James Keith Shepard, who, he observed with distaste, had adopted the French practice of wearing epaulettes upon their uniformed shoulders. ‘They wear fine epaulettes,’ Horatio informed Locker, ‘for which I think them great coxcombs. They have not visited me, and I shall not, be assured, court their acquaintance.’ The distrust was mutual. Many years later Ball would recall it for the poet Coleridge, and ascribe the coolness to uncertainty about which officer owed the first visit.15