Nelson

by John Sugden

  During much of July and August he was kept busy in Portsmouth. Nelson was one of a twelve-captain court occasionally convened on the Pegase, but no longer the presiding officer. Four cases of desertion were proved and the offenders flogged around the fleet.60

  The fire of Nelson’s naval masters soon became unmistakable. Hood, whom he looked upon as his patron, flew his flag from the Triumph at Portsmouth, and seemed less enthusiastic about seeing him again than Nelson expected. And at the end of August, when the captain returned to Kentish Town and visited the Admiralty, he found the first lord even more saturnine and impenetrable than usual. Nelson raised the matter of the dockyard abuses Wilkinson and Higgins stood ready to expose, and expressed a wish to command a ship of the line, but Howe was interested in retrenchment and had set himself against any but necessary promotions.

  The letters from the Admiralty were critical. Throughout July and August he was justifying one matter after another – the Pegasus muster book, the Schomberg affair, the sending of the Pegasus and the Rattler to Jamaica, the pardon given Able Seaman Clark, the commissions of Church and Wallis, and the appointment of a boatswain, Joseph King, to be an assistant to the sailmaker at English Harbour. The Admiralty even threatened to cut the expenses that the redeployment of the Rattler had caused them out of Nelson’s pay.

  He realised that those few months with William Henry had done him considerable harm, and though he continued to court the prince’s friendship he found it easier to shrug off the prince’s baleful influence once back in England. For the first time he counselled the temperamental prince in the spirit of conciliation. With overdue words that mirrored Nelson’s own true instincts for leadership, he urged William Henry to forgive Schomberg and save a useful naval career. It was good that a court martial had been avoided, he wrote to the prince. It would ‘ever’ have ‘hurt’ Schomberg:

  Resentment I know your Royal Highness never had or I am sure ever will bear anyone. It is a passion incompatible with the character of a man of honour. Schomberg was too hasty certainly in writing his letter, but now you are parted, pardon me my prince, when I presume to recommend that Schomberg may stand in your royal favour as if he had never sailed with you, and that at some future day you will serve him. There only wants this to place your character in the highest point of view. None of us are without failings. Schomberg’s was being rather too hasty, but that, put in competition with his being a good officer, will not, I am bold to say, be taken in the scale against him.61

  It was vintage Nelson, and the prince’s reply in December was likewise true to form. ‘I must confess myself surprised that you should recommend him after what I have so often said, and in what we do both agree: namely, the never forgiving an officer for disrespect. Rest assured, I never shall, and particularly Schomberg.’ As for other matters, they went happily for William Henry. ‘In my own ship I go on pretty well,’ he chirped. ‘I have had two courts-martial, one on the master-at-arms, who was broke and received 100 lashes, and the other on a seaman who received 50 lashes on board his own ship. [Lieutenant] Church is confined. With him I have had some unpleasant work, and I am afraid he is of a sulky disposition.’62

  Nelson’s attempt to reform the prince had been fiercely rebuffed, and though William Henry wrote of his willingness to take ‘young Andrews’ or another of Horatio’s protégés aboard his ship, there were doubts about the extent and utility of the royal favour. When the Reverend William Nelson began scavenging for ‘interest’, Horatio told him he had no sway with the prince at all.63

  But of all the shots fired at him that summer and autumn, few hurt Nelson more than the slights to his officers. As his efforts on their behalf failed Nelson was upset both on their account and his own, for his standing as a captain depended upon his ability to protect and promote followers. He failed to persuade the Navy Board to give William Cutts a warrant as a sailmaker, and more strenuous efforts to assist Joseph King, who had fallen upon difficult times, likewise foundered. King, a native of Lisbon, had been ‘one of the best’ boatswains Nelson had seen, fit no doubt to stand beside the fugitive Scotland, but sunstroke and other afflictions had temporarily disabled him. Nelson had found him indoor work in the Antigua dockyard, but the appointment of such workers was primarily a matter for dockyard officers, not naval captains, and Nelson’s good intentions provoked an outcry. It would be many years before Horatio could offer King more secure and suitable employment.64

  Lieutenant Wallis worried Nelson even more. He had brought the Rattler into Spithead only eighteen days after the arrival of the Boreas, having executed Nelson’s orders to the letter, and it was heartbreaking to tell him that Parker was overturning his appointment as acting commander. Nelson urged the Admiralty to confirm the promotions of Wallis and Church, believing that he had acted within the powers left him by Hughes and that any failure to regularise the appointments would reflect adversely upon his conduct. Through William Henry he even got the Prince of Wales interested in the officers’ plight. But Howe was not listening. Church’s commission as lieutenant was regularised, probably to avoid offending William Henry, but Wallis was not promoted. He eventually reached the rank of commander six years later, in January 1794. 65

  Nelson was mortified. It seemed that he used his initiative only to be slapped down, and the Admiralty wanted mere dog-like servitude. On 18 July he resentfully told the board ‘that in future no consideration will ever induce me to deviate in the smallest degree from my orders’. Whether their lordships detected the hidden barb in this submission was questionable.66

  Other business helped to occupy his mind when he visited London at the end of August, much of it private. Fanny and her uncle had reached England, and Herbert moved into a fashionable house at 5 Cavendish Square, sporting a first-floor balcony and a front door flanked by ornamental pillars. Nelson probably used it during visits, and Fanny temporarily lived there while her husband cast around for something more permanent.

  Nelson had also to get the many presents he had brought home off his hands. The hold of the Boreas contained gifts for Locker, Kingsmill, Lord Walpole and the like, but the customs duties imposed by Pitt’s money-raking government outmatched the captain’s purse. He thus unashamedly resorted to smuggling, one of the brisker trades of the day. Locker was then in Kensington preparing to take charge of the impress service in Exeter. His sixty-gallon cask of rum and half a hogshead of Madeira, Nelson informed him, would be shipped through the London customs house, but the tamarinds and noyau would have to be ‘smuggled, for [the] duty . . . is so enormous that no person can afford the expense’. Friends were useful for such services, and later in the year Nelson was shifting some of his imports to the Scipio guard ship, under his old commander Captain Lutwidge.67

  Of the business outstanding from the Leeward Islands the professional issue that most engaged him after his return to England was that of dockyard abuses. He felt honour bound to pursue the charges made by Messrs Wilkinson and Higgins, charges he resolutely believed to be well-founded. Of several bodies originally approached by Nelson the most interested appeared to be the Navy Board, at the head of which sat the reforming Sir Charles Middleton. When interviewed by Middleton in London, Nelson impressed. Sir Charles asked the captain to write to Wilkinson and Higgins and assure them that matters could safely be put in the board’s hands, and it was the comptroller who gave the two merchants their first official response by addressing them himself on 14 November. Middleton also loaned Nelson books containing all the instructions the board had sent to the dockyards. From these Nelson deduced that the regulations were indeed being widely flouted. Dockyards were supposed to advertise for the cheapest tenders, but Nelson could remember no notices in the island papers, while although naval bills of exchange were inscribed with the specific rates to be used, local dealers were gaining up to 7 per cent on them during encashment.

  Middleton’s interest in reform gave Nelson faith. It made him feel that he had done and was doing something valuable, but it could n
ot arrest a growing disaffection. The Admiralty, not the subordinate Navy Board, employed commissioned officers, and Nelson’s next orders, issued on 15 August and transmitted through Hood, were not attractive. They assigned him to the impress service in the Nore, and he sailed on the 18th.68

  On 23 September the ship moved from the Little to the Great Nore, but it was already a day into its job of recruiting men. Her boats, with those of other ships, were out regularly, raiding the waterfront, shifting more or less recalcitrant recruits from place to place and boarding merchantmen. Eleven hundred men were pressed in a single night. It was degrading if not dull work, and for the most part Nelson remained aboard the frigate several miles offshore, brooding over the censures and his failure to obtain a line of battle ship. The men were also restless. Wages had been paid in August, and returning to England after years of service tempted some to desert. The number of floggings aboard the Boreas rose. There were none in August and September and fifteen the following month.69

  Fanny remembered those first difficult months in England for a long time. Her husband was bitter, and spoke about resigning his commission and joining the Russian Navy, as Sir Charles Knowles had done seventeen years before. He also considered working ashore, but could not see how ends could be met. Yet even the campaign against abuses, from which he alone derived satisfaction, stumbled forward on leaden feet. Horatio was constantly applying a whip. Middleton still remained at his post, but the Treasury, to which Nelson had sent additional papers in July, was keeping mum. One day Nelson called unannounced upon George Rose, the secretary of the Treasury. Rose, like Middleton, was impressed by the young man’s public spirit, and arranged to see him over breakfast the following day. They talked from six in the morning till nine, and when Nelson left he had a promise that the whole business would be laid before Pitt, the first lord of the Treasury, at an early opportunity.70

  By the time the Boreas returned to Sheerness finally to be paid off on 30 November, Nelson was deeply frustrated. A sensitive man, he was acutely vulnerable to those daily lacerations of the spirit inseparable from life and suffered from occasional depression. Twice in his career he would talk about quitting the service altogether, both times from a sense of neglect. This was the first. According to his biographers, Clarke and McArthur, he confided in the senior officer in the Medway one morning. If true, the conversation was probably with Vice Admiral Richard Edwards, commander-in-chief in the Medway and at the Nore. He was glad his ship was being paid off, and that he was going to be discharged from an ‘ungrateful service’, Nelson said, and he intended to surrender his commission. Edwards is said to have tried to dissuade Nelson from so drastic a course, and to have alerted the Admiralty. As Clarke and McArthur heard it, Howe responded immediately. He wrote Nelson a generous letter, inviting him to come to London after the Boreas was paid off. The first lord still did not have a ship to offer him but he promised to serve him in the future, and presented him to the king at the next levee day.71

  If Nelson’s hopes of getting another command rose, he was to be disappointed. The talk of war subsided, few ships were put in commission and Captain Nelson was left on the ‘beach’. The only ranks he joined were those of the unemployed. It was thoroughly disheartening. In the past he had made little money, but believed that if he followed his profession dutifully it would provide him with means and glory enough. Now he was not so sure, though somehow he could not convince himself that justice would not be done. As he told his newly retired ‘old friend’ Hercules Ross on 6 May 1788:

  But in this next, my friend, you have got the start of me. You have given up all the toils and anxieties of business, whilst I must still buffet the waves – in search of what? That thing called Honour is now, alas, thought of no more. My integrity cannot be mended [improved upon], I hope; and my fortune, God knows, has grown worse for the service. So much for serving my country. But the Devil, ever willing to tempt the virtuous (pardon this flattery of myself) has made me offer, if any ships should be sent to destroy His Majesty of Morocco’s ports, to be there, and I have some reason to think that should any more come of it, my humble services will be accepted. I have invariably laid down and followed close a plan of what ought to be uppermost in the breast of an officer: that it is much better to serve an ungrateful country than to give up his own fame. Posterity will do him justice. A uniform conduct of honour and integrity will seldom fail of bringing a man to the goal of Fame at last.72

  XVI

  BEACHCOMBING

  While war shall rage around,

  May Nelsons still be found,

  To guard our Isle.

  A Lady’s Additional Verses to

  ‘God Save The King’, 1803

  1

  FOR several months Nelson moved from place to place looking for health, home and work. He had not seen Burnham Thorpe for five years, and only twice since childhood, but busy visits to London had kept him abreast of the local news. At the end of August 1787, with the Boreas rocking gently at the Nore, he had lodged at 10 Great Marlborough Street rather than impose upon convenient relatives, but there had been reunions with his brother Maurice and the Sucklings of Kentish Town. Maurice even stayed on board his frigate for a while, diverting him from the troubles of impressment, and at the end of the year, with the unhappy ship finally behind him, his thoughts again returned to Norfolk, the county of his birth.

  He anticipated putting ‘my little fellow’ Josiah, now seven, into school there. Nelson felt his own lack of a decent formal education, and recommended midshipmen to master French and dancing among the more obvious accomplishments essential to a naval officer. Unfortunately business tied him to the capital over Christmas, and in January 1788 he dispatched Josiah to Norfolk under the charge of Frank Lepee, his servant. His brother William, now rector of Hilborough, was instructed to put the boy in a suitable boarding school, but he was ‘not [to] allow him to do as he pleases’ and ensure he received ‘the same weekly allowance as the other boys’.1

  In London Nelson now lodged at 6 Princes Street, Cavendish Square, from where he reclaimed his wife from the nearby home of her uncle. He probably looked up Howe, and certainly ventured into the Navy Office, looking futilely to secure William the illegitimate wages supposedly earned as chaplain of the Boreas after the incumbent had, in fact, returned to England. More creditably and typically, he fought for his men, for while his command was over he still saw himself as ‘their friend and protector’. He tried to ensure they got their prize money, wrote testimonials and almost invariably answered calls for help. Thus, during the year following the discharge of the Boreas, two of its young gentlemen, Talbot and Lock, sought help when they were denied access to the lieutenants’ examination on the grounds that they had spent too long rated captain’s servants. Nelson supported them, but realised that the excess of apprentice officers on the Boreas had created a downside. He had wanted to provide ‘a set of young men to make officers [of], without a nursery for whom, I am well assured, our service must suffer’, but their number had outstripped the ratings available and some had consequently been stinted of necessary sea time as midshipmen or master’s mates.2

  Among others needing Nelson was the master of the Boreas, James Jameson, accused of cruelty by the former steward, Thomas Watts. December 1787 found the captain backing his master without reservation. He was ‘by no means of a cruel and oppressive disposition’, whereas Watts was ‘a bad character’ who had been flogged in Dominica for sneaking liquor to the quartermasters. ‘I am afraid that if Mr Jameson had confined the steward till I came on board,’ Nelson explained, ‘I should have punished him at the gangway.’ He suggested that in this instance the Admiralty resist any civil prosecution ‘for acts committed under martial law’, or at least defend the master at public expense.3

  Nelson’s most notable intervention took him into the witness box of the Old Bailey on 17 December. The defendant was an elderly cooper of the Boreas named James Carse, charged with murder. Carse had always been a quiet, orderly
man of good character, but the last few years had changed him. He became morose, and drew into a world of his own, and spoke to almost no one. Nelson described him as ‘melancholy’ with the appearance of ‘a man’ who ‘had seen better days’. Those ashore, who had known him years before, thought him much altered upon his return from the West Indies. What little he said was confused and rambling.4

  Carse had left the Boreas with fifty or sixty guineas of accumulated pay in his pockets, heading for his former home in Shadwell. He spent two evenings in a public house babbling about having been robbed on his way from Gravesend. The second of December found him drinking rum and water in the Ship In Distress, a squalid waterfront tavern in Wapping, where he encountered a young prostitute, Mary Mills, who ushered the inebriated sailor to a house she shared with one Sarah Hayes. Carse drank some more, got into bed and shortly rose in a befuddled panic. Apparently convinced a plot to rob him was afoot, he cried, ‘I will! I must! I must!’ and pulling out a large twopenny clasp knife he made for Hayes as she prepared to smoke her pipe in the chimney corner. Carse backed Hayes against the chimney breast and cut her throat, while Mills fled in her shift for a watchman. ‘How I got out, were I to die this moment, I cannot say,’ she recalled. Carse was apprehended with little difficulty and hauled to jail. There was no denying the offence, and the prisoner faced public execution, but he declared that he was ‘not afraid of getting through it’ for he had ‘very good friends’.

  He was relying upon Nelson, and told how the captain had addressed the ship’s company the day it was paid off, assuring all that his interest in their welfare would not end with the command. At the trial Nelson testified in the august presence of Mr Justice Heath, and speculated that some publican might have plied Carse with drink to relieve him of his pay. The cooper was not ‘by any means’ a habitual drunkard. ‘Seamen, I know perfectly, when they come home, the landlords will furnish them with raw liquors. I saw myself thirty or forty men from that ship [Boreas] that were as mad as if they were at Bedlam, and did not know what they did.’ Nor was Carse violent, but ‘the quietest, soberest man that I ever saw in my life’, if one increasingly melancholic and reserved.