by John Sugden
There were some lifelines. He spent long dark evenings reading and writing beneath wavering candlelight, poring over naval charts, rediscovering the Americas through William Dampier’s published Voyages, and corresponding with favourite sea officers. He devoured what news penetrated from the outside world, running up bills for papers with those for wine and groceries. The Norfolk Chronicle, published in Norwich every Saturday, was compulsive reading. Most of all he hungered for employment.
Frankly, his naval career had hitherto been more routine than distinguished, and his experience as a fighting seaman particularly narrow. Nelson had served with ability in the Central American jungle and led a campaign against illegal traders in the West Indies, but those achievements hardly made him a master of naval warfare. True, he had captured or destroyed thirty-odd ships as a commander, but the number was not a remarkable one, and at best his adversaries had been armed merchantmen or privateers. He had never been in a fleet action, nor ever fought a regular warship, not even a naval brig or sloop. Not only that, but there is little evidence that at this time he had any extensive or original views about fighting at sea. Later, long after he had become famous, friends alluded to the embryonic admiral they professed to have seen in those early days, but such reminiscences had probably gained from hindsight.
We search Nelson’s contemporary correspondence in vain for discussions of or allusions to the great questions that exercised the conscientious late eighteenth-century admiral. There is nothing about that formidable naval defence, the line of battle, and the difficulty of breaking or doubling it to achieve a significant victory; no references to naval theorists such as Paul l’Hoste and John Clerk, or to the limitations the signal books imposed upon developing flexible fleet tactics. Nor, for that matter, do we find any clearly stated recognition of the means by which the Royal Navy was increasingly achieving ship-for-ship battle superiority over opponents of similar strength. That superiority rested upon the exceptional gunnery and seamanship of many British crews, but Nelson’s letters show none of the preoccupation with rates of fire that would distinguish Cochrane and Broke. That he had learned much from Locker and Hood is not to be doubted, and he had exercised his crews in the manner of the time, but for the most part his views remained dormant, submerged beneath the business of the moment.38
Nelson’s career had hardly flourished, but close observers would have seen outstanding qualities in him, primitive indications of a future leader. Most notably, even the young Nelson possessed the personality to surpass. He was more than brave, conscientious and competent, the hallmarks of every good officer. He was driven. This is a quality every teacher recognises as decisive. The need to achieve matters as much, if not more, than mere ability, because it galvanises and focuses that ability towards specific goals. It imbues ability with terrific energy and purpose. Nelson brimmed with it. He desperately wanted the admiration, applause and affection of fellow creatures, and his thirst for it sharpened his aggression, energy and enterprise. It alerted him to opportunities complacent officers missed, and drove him further than others cared or thought to go. In 1780, for example, it led him not only to convoy Polson’s troops to the San Juan River but also to usurp the role of the army and lead the expedition upstream to bombard the Spanish castle.
Nelson’s zeal was also marked by a self-confident political courage that was perhaps even rarer. Rightly or wrongly, he held firm views about what the navy ought to be doing, and a readiness to discard and disobey orders he considered to be misconceived or inappropriate. In the way he had wrenched policy from the hands of his commander-in-chief and civil officials in the West Indies he had fearlessly, indeed almost recklessly, endangered his career in pursuit of a principle. No one who had witnessed those acts of a man in his twenties could have doubted that a force was in the making.
Compare Nelson for a moment with his estimable colleague, Captain Cuthbert Collingwood. Collingwood was the more experienced seaman. His crews were equal, if not superior, at their guns, and Collingwood’s courage and public spirit were unquestionable. He was every bit as intelligent and articulate as the younger man. Yet Nelson consistently outperformed Collingwood. The dour northerner was no hungry fighter. Money for its own sake he deemed an ignoble aim, and the foolish clamour of human beings a transient illusion. To him ‘contentment’ was ‘wealth’ and a satisfaction that he had done his duty was enough to allow him happiness at home. Nelson’s drive for distinction, therefore, gave him an important advantage over Collingwood. His opportunism, initiative and eagerness to take personal responsibility for actions unlicensed by others made him the leader and Collingwood the follower. We have already seen the younger man seizing control of their campaign to enforce the navigation laws in the West Indies, and in 1797 we will encounter an even more dramatic illustration of the differences between them. In the famous battle of Cape St Vincent, Nelson would pursue an independent and significant course of action that Collingwood may not have seen and, if he did, certainly hesitated to follow.39
Regrettably, Nelson’s talents had not yet found a satisfactory stage, and in the eyes of some superior officers they had been dimmed by his inability to control Prince William Henry. Not all the criticisms thrown at him on that score were justified, but some exposed the vulnerable underbelly of Nelson’s hunt for fame. It gave early notice of his susceptibility to anyone or anything that fed his insatiable ego. Good friends noticed it, even those who loved him anyway. ‘He liked fame,’ recalled Collingwood, ‘and was open to flattery, so that people sometimes got about him who were unworthy of him.’ William Henry had flattered Nelson by his friendship, and subverted his judgement in the process. There would be more and graver examples ahead.40
Doubts about Nelson seem to have damaged his standing at the Admiralty, though at that time there were more senior captains than ships in commission and few excuses were needed to leave a junior officer unemployed. Nevertheless, even in the relatively supine years of peace the name of the little officer from Norfolk had a habit of forcing its way forward. His campaign against fraud, the threat of civil suits over his actions against illegal traders and applications for a ship kept Nelson before the organs of government during this barren period.
The fraud issue was beginning to bubble, and not before time for its unfortunate instigators, Wilkinson and Higgins. January 1789 brought Nelson the sad news that the West Indian merchant Wilkinson had been jailed in Antigua the previous September. Despite being elected a member of the assembly for St John’s, his threats to expose frauds had brought enemies upon his back. On 4 June 1788 a report of both houses of the assembly of Antigua, establishing that William Whitehead – the arch conspirator at the heart of the abuses reported by Wilkinson and Higgins – had in one instance defrauded the public of £1,213, was passed by fifteen votes to two. The offender was compelled to refund his ill-gotten profits. But the island’s solicitor general, one of the dissenting voters, stimulated Wilkinson’s creditors to counterattack. The luckless merchant was thrown into prison. The situation of Messrs Wilkinson and Higgins grew increasingly invidious. While Wilkinson languished in jail, their resources evaporated and Higgins hoarded their cache of incriminating papers in his house in St John’s, jumping at shadows in fear of the building being burgled or burned down. Nelson was furious. In his view Wilkinson and Higgins were performing a public service, and if they suffered now he could not, as their ally, hold himself blameless.41
Hidden away in the Norfolk countryside and devoid of powerful friends in government, Nelson felt his weakness but flailed about with considerable spirit and effect. He had not relaxed his grip. In October he had written to the Sick and Hurt and Victualling boards, and two months later dispatched more papers to the Ordnance Board. Now he renewed his fire, trusting that ‘the good work begun under my auspices’ would be completed and the frauds investigated.42
Suddenly the cumbersome machinery of the state groaned into action. In January 1789 the Ordnance Board assured Nelson that they had fully e
mbraced the proposals of Wilkinson and Higgins, and were writing to them ‘by the next packet’. Its head, the Duke of Richmond, had sometime enjoyed a reputation as a reformer, and was keen on reducing the ordnance budget, so there were hopes for progress on that front. The Victualling Board also promised an investigation. Eventually they posted statements of their entire dealings with the West Indian islands to Wilkinson and Higgins. In June the board seemed eager to act before any misappropriated funds could be dispersed, and summoned Nelson to London for an opinion. Unlike most of the other boards, they even paid his expenses. Most weighty of all, perhaps, was the Navy Board. In February, Sir Charles Middleton called Wilkinson and Higgins to London, accepting their proposal to expose abuses for a percentage of the sums saved, and in May he framed a preliminary charge against Whitehead and Anthony Munton, the naval storekeeper at English Harbour, for frauds committed in 1782. For a while it seemed that wholesale corruption was about to be exposed.43
The assault did not proceed smoothly, however. Although the Navy and Sick and Hurt boards undertook to cover the cost of Wilkinson and Higgins’s passages to England and their legal expenses, the finances of both men were exhausted. The latter argued for an on-the-spot trial in Antigua, where records were to hand, and also for a broad-based enquiry, rather than board-by-board investigations. By the end of 1789 some officials in London were tiring of what they considered to be prevarication, and predicted it would all ‘end in smoke’. Nelson urged them to stand firm, and though the issue is unclear it seems that some satisfaction was eventually achieved. Wilkinson later congratulated himself upon having been ‘serviceable’ to various ‘departments’ of the Admiralty, while long afterwards George Rose, then secretary to the Treasury, admitted that several frauds were detected through the instrumentality of Wilkinson, Higgins and Nelson, and their perpetrators punished. One of these was evidently Munton, the naval storekeeper, who was fined and imprisoned.44
If all this happened, it was due in no small measure to Nelson. William Henry, to whom Wilkinson and Higgins had originally directed their proposals, had done nothing to investigate the charges of abuse, and it had been left to Nelson to spearhead the attack. He had done so creditably, carefully sifting the documentation, directing the allegations to the appropriate boards, and arguing Wilkinson and Higgins’s cause in letter and person. Despite his own reduced circumstances, he had stood behind the two merchants in moments of despair, and spent his own money in postage, travel and lodgings. Indeed, he neither asked nor expected any material reward for his efforts, and as far as we know was only reimbursed for the one trip he made to London for the Victualling Board in the summer of 1789. Though Nelson’s biographers have shown little interest in this sortie against Old Corruption, it testified to his tenacity in pursuit of a principle and adds to his stature.45
Sadly, whistle-blowers court reprisals, and Wilkinson ruined what was left of his life. Though released from prison in Antigua by the Insolvency Act of 1790, he was pursued by a single creditor and suffered another eighteen months’ incarceration in Virginia. Soon afterwards he showed up in London, where he was committed to the King’s Bench, a debtors’ prison for gentlemen. He was still there in 1798, counting nearly nine years in one jail or another. At that time he made another appeal to Nelson, then something of a national hero. ‘It is with sorrow I inform you that I have not the smallest power of being useful to you,’ Nelson replied, reflecting upon an episode that now belonged to his past. ‘I was probably in a great measure the cause of your exertions to detect bad men who were cheating our country, and I hope the desire of preventing bad men from fattening on the plunder of my country is still uppermost in my mind.’ But he believed his interest minimal, and could only refer the unhappy supplicant to Sir Andrew Hamond, the current comptroller of the Navy Board as well as ‘a good man’. It did no good, and the Gentleman’s Magazine recorded the miserable finale for 24 August 1798. ‘[Died] at his apartments in the King’s Bench prison, William Wilkinson, esq., of Antigua. He was one of those whose debt exceeded the limitations of the late insolvent act.’ Even though he had outlived his greatest adversary, Whitehead, who had died in England seven years before, Wilkinson’s end illustrated the crippling penalties of eighteenth-century debt.46
It was a fate that could so easily have plucked Nelson from his rural retreat and lodged him behind a powerful prison door. In 1790 he had to seek Admiralty protection as the last rumbling aftershocks of his other West Indian campaign against the contraband traders again threatened him with ruinous lawsuits. Nelson had heard the distant thunder. There had been stories of an impending pamphlet that would accuse him of branding the planters disaffected smugglers, but it was not until 20 March that the counterattack came to the door.
On that day the captain received a letter from solicitors acting for James and William Sheafe of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, owners of the Jane and Elizabeth, the American brig Nelson had seized in Barbados four years before. Nelson was invited to admit he had been ‘hasty’ and to negotiate damages; otherwise the solicitors demanded to know the attorney to whom he wanted their writ delivered. Whatever amount Nelson was being sued for, it was beyond his means. Into his third year of unemployment, his resources were evaporating, and he had just returned from a trip to London in which he had even begged the Admiralty to pay him for the time he had commanded a garrison in Port Royal more than ten years earlier. Now thoroughly alarmed, Horatio sent the letter to the Admiralty, seeking an assurance that he would not be left to the wolves. It was with relief that he learned that his case had been referred to the Treasury with a recommendation that he be defended from prosecution.47
But he did not breathe easily for long. About a month later, on 26 April, Nelson returned to the parsonage after a trip to a nearby fair, pleased with a small horse that he had purchased. Fanny greeted him with an anxious face. A man from London had called during his absence and served the aforementioned writ. Nelson examined the document. It was dated that very day, and gave notice that an action for damages would commence against him in a month’s time. The Jane and Elizabeth and its cargo of timber and fish were valued at £5,000, but Nelson was also held liable for inconveniences and such expenses as the wages of the crew and the cost of returning them to their homes. Although no overall sum was mentioned, Nelson stood to be arrested and imprisoned for debt.48
Still unsure that a definite decision to defend him had been made, Horatio immediately scribbled another letter to the Admiralty and in the meantime concocted a desperate plan to escape to France. If he was arrested and imprisoned it would be all the harder to organise his defence, so he decided to quit the country first, leaving Fanny to pack essentials and follow in the safe keeping of his brother Maurice. Fortunately, Nelson’s friends were alerted by anxious letters and rallied around. William Henry, now the Duke of Clarence, stood on hand, while Captain Pole appealed to the Prince of Wales, who declared his support for Nelson ‘in the highest terms’. More instrumentally, Captain Pringle marched into the Treasury building to confront secretary Rose. The reply was reassuring and unequivocal: Nelson was reckoned a good officer and could rely upon a publicly-funded defence. The news reached Horatio on 4 May and the flight to France was duly abandoned.49
The matter never destablised him again, but it left him shaken. Even a public defence could fail, and incarcerate and ruin him. ‘I see a person may do their duty too well,’ he sighed. It was his reputation that most worried him. ‘The character of an officer is his greatest treasure,’ he observed. ‘To lower that is to wound him irreparably.’50
5
The career of Horatio Nelson was always something of a roller coaster ride, weaving exhilarating heights and depressing lows, and the summer of 1790 ran true to form. No sooner had his morale been mended by the forthright intervention of the government over the issue of the lawsuit than it was crushed by new evidence of Admiralty animosity. His hopes for employment were raised and destroyed within months.
The spark of optimism
was struck far away, in an obscure and rocky inlet in the coast of Vancouver Island. The previous year two Spanish ships had arrived in Nootka Sound to claim this corner of the Pacific Northwest for their king. A pair of British trading ships found bartering with the local Indians were seized, their crews carried off to a Mexican jail, and the formal pretensions of the Spanish governments duly presented in London. Pitt was not impressed. He demanded the release of His Britannic Majesty’s subjects and countered with territorial claims of his own. Sabres rattled ominously.
When Nelson read about the affair he scented war, and with it a ship. Leaving Fanny at Swaffham in Norfolk, where she had decided to settle if her husband was employed, he hurried to London, depositing his belongings with his uncle in Kentish Town. At last, after many years a beached whale, he was optimistic. The navy began pressing sailors, and on 8 May Nelson found the Admiralty in a ‘bustle’ and the waiting room thronged with aspiring captains looking for ships. As Chatham was unable to see him, Nelson sat down to declare on paper that he was ‘ready to undertake such employment as their lordships shall judge most proper’. At some stage he was led to believe that though the first ships were already spoken for he would soon be employed, but then Hood delivered a thunderbolt. Gone were the days when Hood had acted the willing patron. When Nelson asked for his recommendation the reply was so crushing that he later admitted it could ‘never be effaced from my memory’. Hood flatly refused support, and declared that the king had a poor opinion of Nelson. The captain was flattened. The king rarely approved of the friends of his sons, and Nelson could only suppose that his friendship with William Henry had created offence. Deeply wounded, he returned to Norfolk. ‘My not being appointed to a ship is so very mortifying that I cannot find words to express what I feel on the occasion,’ he wrote from the depressing silence of the parsonage.51
