Nelson

by John Sugden

  But in the meantime he would have to find other ways of satisfying his love for Fanny. In August he wrote to her:

  Monday, seven in the evening: As you begin to know something about sailors, have you not often heard that salt water and absence always wash away love? Now I am such a heretic as not to believe that faith, for behold, every morning since my arrival I have had six pails of salt water at day-light poured upon my head, and instead of finding what the seamen say to be true, I perceive the contrary effect. And if it goes on so contrary to the prescription, you must see me before my fixed time. At first I bore absence tolerably, but now it is almost insupportable, and by and by I expect it will be quite so. But patience is a virtue, and I must exercise it upon this occasion, whatever it costs my feelings. I am alone in the commanding officer’s house, while my ship is fitting, and from sunset until bedtime I have not a human creature to speak to. You will feel a little for me, I think. I did not use[d] to be over fond of sitting alone. The moment old Boreas is habitable in my cabin, I shall fly to it, to avoid mosquitoes and melancholies. Hundreds of the former are now devouring me through all my clothes. You will, however, find I am better, though when you see me I shall be like an Egyptian mummy, for the heat is intolerable. But I walk a mile out at night without fatigue, and all day I am housed. A quart of goat’s milk is also taken every day, and I enjoy English sleep, always barring mosquitoes, which all Frank’s [Lepee’s] care with my net cannot keep out at present. What nonsense I am sending you!56

  Weddings, indeed, were very much on the minds of the Nelson– Suckling brood as 1786 came to an end. There was a veritable stampede to the altar. Uncle William Suckling married in October, while Horatio was visiting Martinique, and a few weeks later, on 9 November, Nelson’s brother William finally abandoned the attentions of Cousin ‘Miss Ellen’ and her fortune of £2,000 to marry Sarah, the daughter of the Reverend Henry Yonge of Great Torrington in Devon. The Reverend Yonge was a cousin to the Lord Bishop of Norwich, and Sarah probably met William in East Anglia. In time she would become ‘Norfolk Sally’, and her compassion and beauty would contrast with the rotund figure and avaricious nature of her husband. Early the following year, 1787, it was the turn of Horatio’s younger siblings. On New Year’s Day the feckless Suckling arrived in his finest at St Stephen’s, Norwich, to marry Sophia Smith of Bungay, while the next month the baby of the family – Horatio’s beloved Kate – became Mrs George Matcham in Bath.57

  Horatio seemed glad that these things were so, for he regarded marriage as the natural condition. ‘So then,’ he chided his brother William, ‘you are at last become a husband. May every blessing attend you. It is, I have no doubt, the happiest – or otherwise – state, and I believe it is most generally the man’s fault if he is not happy.’ Somehow, even then, he knew.58

  XV

  THE PRINCE AND THE POST-CAPTAIN

  Admirals all, for England’s sake

  Honour be yours and fame!

  And honour, as long as waves shall break

  To Nelson’s peerless name!

  Henry Newbolt, Admirals All

  1

  ROSEAU Bay, in Dominica, the largest of the British Windward Islands, Saturday 2 December 1786. Captain Nelson of the frigate Boreas, acting commander on the Leeward Islands station, had found what he was looking for, anchored among His Majesty’s ships riding serenely off the one significant settlement boasted by this newly acquired territory. For there, fresh from Barbados with the Amphion, Solebay and Rattler, was the twenty-eight-gun frigate Pegasus and her unusual captain. Forewarned, Nelson had been waiting for Prince William Henry, the king’s sailor son. His task, according to ‘secret’ instructions inherited from Hughes, was to show the prince around the station, acquaint him with the crown’s possessions, and then to return him to Commodore Herbert Sawyer in Halifax, Canada, by ‘the second week of May’. Now an irritating spell of ‘prince hunting’, something Horatio thought ‘a bad sort of business’, was over and he could discharge his burden.1

  Within a few hours of her arrival, the guns of the Boreas were reverentially saluting the royal personage as he came on board. Nelson had last seen William Henry at Windsor Castle, preparing to visit Hanover. The prince had been a midshipman then, but the uncommonly short period of time since had made him captain of the Pegasus. The previous April, a mere ten months after passing for lieutenant, the twenty-year-old had skipped the grade of commander and been made post-captain by Lord Howe at the irresistible suggestion of His Majesty. Then the prince’s interest in the daughter of the Portsmouth naval commissioner had intervened. With the approval of the king and Lord Hood, still a leading adviser to all persons royal, the Admiralty had packed William Henry off to Canada, where he had served out of harm’s way before coming south to the West Indian islands.

  The meeting at Dominica brought together the greater part of a small squadron that effectively became Nelson’s first supra-ship command. He had lost Cuthbert Collingwood, who had taken the Mediator home the previous summer, and some of the other ships that had served Hughes, but for the six months following the rendezvous at Roseau Bay Nelson headed the frigates Boreas, Pegasus, Solebay and Maidstone, and the sloop Rattler. It was a small force, but the personnel were far from contemptible. Henry Newcome of the Maidstone had been a captain for four years and was destined for distinction fighting the French in the East Indies, while John Holloway of the Solebay, a plain-speaking, honest, pious Somerset man, was also a thorough professional. Almost fifteen years older than Nelson and married to a woman of Antigua, he eventually became governor of Newfoundland. The other captain, William Henry, would become King William IV, the sailor king.2

  Nelson had liked William Henry three years before, and admired his occasional generosity and dedication to the service. Today the Royal Navy has become an almost obligatory part of the education of a prince of the blood, but for this pioneer it was much more. William Henry saw it as a career and something worthy of a life’s work. Even at the end he considered himself a naval officer as well as a sovereign. The prince cut a more impressive figure than Nelson remembered, with a manly bearing and fashionable hair that compensated for the remains of puppy fat, but if he looked a naval officer and still showed some virtues, his was a character of peculiar difficulty.

  Nelson noticed it straight away. As a junior captain William Henry was under Nelson’s command, but had the status to manipulate. He showed the captain of the Boreas two sets of instructions, one from Lord Howe of the Admiralty and the other in the hand of Commodore Sawyer of the North American station. The first ordered the prince to return directly to Halifax upon completing his tour of the Leeward Islands, but it was obvious he preferred Sawyer’s orders, which allowed him to go where he pleased in the West Indies provided he returned to Canada by the middle of June. Nelson had to explain that, if the orders were inconsistent, Lord Howe’s instructions would have to prevail.3

  Nelson also saw that all was not well aboard the prince’s ship, Pegasus. William asked Nelson about his officers and he replied that they were entirely to his satisfaction. The prince observed that he wished he could say the same of his own men, ‘for although I think mine know their duty, yet . . . they give themselves such airs that he could not bear them. Do you know that they would not go to the ball which Governor Parry gave me at Barbados, which I think a mark of great contempt to me?’

  William Henry reserved his principal fire for his first lieutenant, Isaac Schomberg, a man of aristocratic and handsome cast and more than thirty years old. Nelson knew Schomberg to be a good officer and a favourite of Lord Hood. In fact, it was effectively Hood who had put the lieutenant on the Pegasus to ‘dry nurse’ the inexperienced prince, but the task was defeating him. William Henry resented any interference in his management of the ship and bad blood was soon running. While Schomberg remained popular with the junior officers, disenchantment with the captain spread. Midshipman Martin would recall that ‘the strictness’ with which the prince enforced duty amounted �
��almost to torture, so that as growing boys we had scarcely strength for the work he took out of us’.4

  The next day Nelson got a glimpse of that bad blood for himself. He went aboard the Pegasus to find His Highness preparing to receive a party from a French twenty-gunner, La Favourite, which arrived to invite the prince to visit Martinique. William had ordered his men into formal dress and was distracted to find them still casually attired. ‘Sir,’ he snapped to his first lieutenant in Nelson’s presence, ‘I ordered the ship’s company to have their uniform jackets on.’

  Schomberg said that he thought the weather too hot. The uniforms were too warm for the West Indies, but if the captain wished it he would see to it directly. Horatio noted that ‘the manner [in] which this was spoke made a much greater impression upon me than all [that] happened afterwards, for I plainly saw all was not right’.

  A day later these suspicions were confirmed in a conversation with Captain Brown of the Amphion, who had come with the Pegasus, Solebay and Rattler from Barbados. He warned Nelson that a court martial was threatening and advised him to try to head it off. Nelson understood what Brown meant. If Schomberg demanded a court martial on account of some rupture with the prince, and was acquitted or even merely reprimanded, it would reflect badly upon William Henry. The dignity and honour of the royal family were at stake. After landing this grim bombshell, and predicting that Nelson’s time would be ‘disagreeable’, Brown set about taking the other ships to Antigua. Nelson was left with the unhappy Pegasus and the unenviable job of chaperoning the prickly prince around the islands.

  2

  There were several related problems.

  To start with, William Henry was still dissolute, and easily lapsed into a miasma of drinking, gambling, wenching and coarse table talk. His own family fully acknowledged the difficulty. The king and queen were continually bombarding their son with paper broadsides, reproving him for the company he kept, and they lamented that his annual allowance of £3,000 had been blown within six months. His brother also admitted William Henry’s ‘natural inclination for all kinds of dissipation’, while one who spent three months with the prince shortly after his visit to the Leeward Islands breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was over. ‘I believe I shall never spend three months in that way again,’ he said, ‘for such a time of dissipation, etc., etc., I cannot suppose possibly to happen [again].’5

  At Dominica, Nelson witnessed the prince’s boisterous and boorish indecorum at innumerable functions thrown in his honour. Horatio was ill-fitted for such nonsense. Though he wore his full dress uniform ashore and enjoyed attention, he was quiet in company and a modest drinker. Tea was Nelson’s daytime drink, and while he occasionally enjoyed a glass of champagne after dinner he seldom touched wine. In all the prince’s stupefied revels he never once saw Captain Nelson drunk. Nonetheless, from the beginning Nelson gave William Henry the benefit of any doubts. In a letter to Fanny he owned that the royal guest was driving women from the dinner table, but spoke strongly in his favour:

  Our young prince is a gallant man. Some ladies at Dominica seemed very much charmed by him. He is volatile, but always with great good nature. There were two balls during his stay, and some of the old ladies were mortified that His Royal Highness would not dance with them. But he says he is determined to enjoy the privilege of all other men, that of asking any lady he pleases. Mrs Parry dined at table the first day at the Government House, but afterwards never appeared at dinner, nor were any ladies at Governor [John] Orde’s dinner.6

  Another major problem was the prince’s attitude to command, which verged upon sadistic bullying. He relied on coercion rather than example, resorted to the cat-o’-nine-tails with a will and gathered little love with his flint-filled, stiff-faced autocracy. Nor was William Henry’s violence confined to crews. Later, at English Harbour, a German artist waited on him with a letter of introduction from the governor of Dominica. At first all went well, but after some upset the outraged prince had the German sprawled over a gun and a whip vigorously applied to his posterior. The man beat an undignified retreat, but subsequently sued and won several hundred pounds to meet his medical expenses. Even women could be threatened with rough justice. When one subsequently spoke with less than the required respect at court, the prince threatened her with ‘a stinging dozen before all the pages of the back stairs’. This was not a man to endear, nor did he always care. He was happy to be ‘respected and feared’.7

  Given the talent for leadership that Nelson developed, it may seem surprising that he failed to temper the prince’s deficiencies. Yet such, sadly, was the case. In fact, far from improving in Nelson’s company, the prince’s fitness for command deteriorated. He became increasingly petty and hypercritical. As Midshipman Martin of the Pegasus noted, ‘a change took place in the conduct of our royal captain on reaching the Leeward Islands station . . . it was as discreditable to him as it was unjust and disgreeable to all on board’.8

  But there was worse. Despite the problems Nelson detected aboard the Pegasus, and the clear symptoms of incompetent leadership, he did more than fail to reform the prince; he actually imbibed some of William’s bad practices and sullied his own record.

  Consider the following. On the one hand the prince, overbearing, autocratic and aloof. ‘In the navy we must keep the officers at a distance in order that they may remember the respect due to their captain,’ he said. On the other hand Nelson, whose generosity to and consideration for brother officers became legendary, a man who built a career on drawing commitment and affection from subordinates, and forging teams. Yet as early as 29 December 1786, within a month of dining and talking with the prince, we find Nelson admitting to his brother, ‘I begin to be very strict in my ship, and as I get older, probably shall be more so. Whenever I may set off in another ship, I shall be indifferent whether I ever speak to an officer in her but on duty.’ This appalling maxim, which Nelson fortunately forsook in time to change history, would have been entirely in place in a letter from Prince William Henry. But in Horatio Nelson it was nothing less than an aberration.9

  Unfortunately, Nelson even persisted with his new policy when its inevitable consequences began to surface. ‘I fancy the king’s servants and the officers of my little squadron will not be sorry to part with me,’ he wrote in February 1787. ‘They think I make them do their duty too strictly . . .’ It sounded as if the Boreas was turning into the Pegasus. However, he went on, it hardly mattered for William Henry ‘has honoured me as his confidential friend’, and Nelson loved him ‘as a man and a prince’. These passages are not only sad ones, but carry a thoroughly depressing import. They tell us that when William Henry and Nelson mixed, it was the older and wiser head that fell under the spell of the other.10

  Neither the first lord of the Admiralty, Earl Howe, nor Hood would be impressed by Nelson’s performance in respect of William Henry. They hoped he would mentor the prince and help Schomberg to keep him on an even keel. Instead, Nelson seemed mesmerised by William Henry. ‘He has his foibles as well as private men,’ he wrote, ‘but they are far over-balanced by his virtues. In his professional line he is superior to near two-thirds, I am sure, of the [captains’] list, and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officers, I know hardly his equal . . .’ In time he would assure the board of Admiralty that Pegasus was ‘one of the first disciplined frigates I have seen.’ Nelson was able to suppress the evidence of disaffection on the ship from his mind and present a radically deficient portrait of his royal master.11

  But why? How can this peculiar myopia be explained in a man whose intellect and professional expertise were so exceptional? The answer seems to lie in Nelson’s simple view of patriotism, his susceptibility to flattery and to self-interest.

  Nelson was a strong monarchist. To him the monarchy, the Church of England and the nation were almost synonymous. They were interchangeable symbols of the country itself and demanded the loyalty of every patriot. As Nelson said of William Henry, ‘as an individual I lo
ve him [and] as a prince I honour and revere him’.12

  But to be the prince’s commanding officer and principal confidant amidst a plethora of pageantry and pomp was also deeply flattering. Wherever William Henry went the elite of the islands obsequiously jostled for his hand, fawning, flattering and eulogising for all they were worth. Nelson tired of the dinners and dances, but he had long been intoxicated with attention. We must remember that only a short time before he had been almost an outcast in the islands, at odds with its premier citizens and in danger of arrest. Those battles were still being fought, and in February 1787 Nelson had opened a new round with complaints about the fees charged by the vice-admiralty courts of Barbados and Grenada.13

  The prince was changing that. He wholly agreed with Nelson about ‘the commerce in these islands’ and ‘the maritime laws’, and writing to his father fully credited the captain with educating him about those subjects. More, he was not only under Nelson’s command and a willing subordinate but transparently also his best friend. Anyone seeking access to the royal presence had to deal with Nelson, and suddenly the remaining opposition to the captain of the Boreas went under-ground, hidden beneath an unseemly display of servility to the prince. William Henry was a reinforcement of overwhelming power and multiplied Nelson’s importance. He was besieged with invitations and fair words. It might have been reflected glory, but to Nelson it was no less sweet.14

  Another consideration was Nelson’s need of ‘interest’. He had relatively little family influence left, and his career prospects were overly dependent upon the uncertain goodwill of Lord Hood. Nelson felt his weakness keenly. Often he cheered himself with the words of his late Uncle Maurice, that the country would always reward good service, but he had seen too many good men neglected to completely believe them. He needed powerful patrons, and would have been less than human not to have seen William Henry as a tool of considerable utility. This was a man destined to command huge influence.