Nelson

by John Sugden

  Now Nelson was sure there were members of the Admiralty who had it in for him. In July, Hood wrote to explain that his patronage was ‘of no use to anyone’ while so many unemployed captains were lobbying Chatham, but that he would certainly try to get him a ship if war broke out. Yet only a month earlier the board had appointed Collingwood, a junior captain, to the command of the Mermaid frigate.52

  Back in Kentish Town Uncle William Suckling had a large enough family of his own to protect. William junior was now an army officer, Benjamin a rector and Horace a student, while a daughter, Eliza, and a grandson, William Benjamin, still enlivened the house. But Suckling had a special affection for his naval nephew and sympathised with his predicament. He tried to reach Lord Chatham through Lord Hawkesbury, but with no apparent effect. About the same time Nelson himself was writing to anyone he thought capable of applying pressure. In September he wrote over the head of the Admiralty secretary to the first lord himself. He addressed barren appeals to the Duke of Clarence, now captain of a ship of the line. ‘Dear Nelson . . . by God there is no man I should so soon go out of my way to serve as yourself,’ shouted the prince, but despite the flattering sentiments in his miserably written letters he achieved little for Nelson. The only other straw of encouragement came from Lord Mulgrave, who as Commodore Phipps had led the young Nelson to the Arctic. He was now a commissioner for the affairs of India, and said it would give him the ‘greatest pleasure’ to help Nelson get a ship.53

  By then time was running out. On 28 October Spain agreed to a humiliating convention recognising Britain’s prior claim to the Pacific Northwest, and the need for ships and captains eased. Nelson’s ambition was dashed again, and he was disappointed in friends he had loved and respected. As an officer he had always responded when worthy subordinates called for his help; others, he reflected bitterly, seemed less constant. ‘I certainly cannot look on Lord Hood as my friend,’ he complained, and as for Cornwallis, who had gone to the East Indies without him, ‘I may now tell you that if Kingsmill had gone to India, I was to have been his captain, and the senior one sent out.’54

  Events the following spring deepened his emptiness. A dispute with Russia had Pitt mobilising the fleet once again, and Hood himself was to command twenty-nine sail of the line. Several of Nelson’s friends were earmarked for ships, and March and April saw Horatio again trudging around London. He left a message at Hood’s door but received no answer. The Duke of Clarence, he was relieved to find, still welcomed him and spoke as loudly as usual, this time about commanding a division in a fleet bound for the Mediterranean. Briefly Nelson fooled himself into believing his luck might change. He did not underestimate the difficulties of campaigning in the Baltic (‘narrow seas and no friendly ports are bad things’), but judged that neither Pitt nor Catherine the Great, whom he compared to England’s own Elizabeth I, would back down. As it happened, it was the British Parliament that blinked and refused to support its first minister. Nelson made another sad journey home.55

  There seemed no way forward, and Nelson’s next trip to London more than a year later was to a large extent less self-serving. Again, he was answering calls of distress. In March 1791 we find him writing to the Navy Board in an effort to clear the name of a seaman of the Albemarle unjustly listed as a deserter. The next year he received a letter from Donald Trail, the former master of the same ship, asking Nelson to testify to his character. Trail was in a serious mess. He had voluntarily surrendered to answer charges of brutality and murder relating to his command of the convict ship Neptune, and was incarcerated in Newgate awaiting trial at the Old Bailey before the High Court of Admiralty. Trips to London always gave Horatio the opportunity of ‘bowing to the high and mighty potentates’, as his father put it, but it was primarily to help Trail that the captain arrived ‘in town’ in June 1792. 56

  Waiting for Trail’s case, Nelson sat through the trial of Captain John Kimber on 8 and 9 June. Kimber, a Bristol slaver, was indicted for appalling acts of cruelty said to have been committed upon a slave girl during a second leg of the infamous triangular run from Africa to Grenada in the West Indies. Broadcast by the emancipator William Wilberforce, the affair attracted considerable public interest, and Nelson found himself sitting beside such illustrious observers as the Duke of Clarence, Lord Sheffield and Admiral Barrington, most of them friends of the accused. Kimber was acquitted, but Nelson took exception to one published account that alleged Clarence had tried to influence the result by ‘gestures’ and ‘improper conduct’.57

  Trail and his boatswain, William Ellerington, were tried in three hours on Friday 9 June. The Neptune had left England in February 1790 with five hundred convicts bound for the penal colony in Australia’s Botany Bay, and returned by way of China. Nelson regarded Trail as an exceptional master, but had never seen him command a ship and listened to some very disturbing charges. One seaman was supposed to have died after being strapped to a longboat and then flogged and kicked. Evidence was given that another who died had suffered beatings involving fists, feet and a rope, and was left in irons on an exposed deck for days and nights in violent winds. A third alleged victim was John Joseph, a Portuguese cook guilty of some minor misdemeanour. According to the prosecution he was punched by the boatswain and hit with a rope and some wood before being bound to the rigging and flogged. After receiving punishment Joseph was reported to have been kicked as he lay unable to walk, and put in irons for several hours. A quartermaster testified that he ‘went to Joseph that night and found him very ill and crying in his cot’, and that though he eventually resumed his duties he was ‘never . . . well afterwards’ but ‘got worse and worse’. A cabin boy who saw him dying in a Macao hospital said the cook ‘thought he was going to a better world’ but asked that his family be told that he had been murdered. The cat Trail used for floggings, said one witness familiar with naval discipline, was ‘too severe for anybody but a sodomite’.58

  But Nelson was relieved to see the prosecution collapse. It appeared that most of the stories originated with crewmen who had deserted in China and had been refused their wages. They were now trying to justify their actions and regain their pay by proving ‘bad usage and want of victuals’. Nor were the allegations consistent. They said Trail had allowed female convicts to be used by the crew, and also that he had antagonised the men by refusing to allow them among the women. After hearing the case against Trail the justices, Sir James Marriott and Sir William Henry Ashurst, dismissed the prosecution as malicious. It does not appear that Nelson and the other defence witnesses were even called upon to testify.

  While he was in London Nelson probably called at Lord Hood’s house in Wimpole Street to leave his respects, but the admiral was not to be found and Horatio made no ground in his fight for employment. There seemed so little to do, with such slight prospect, that he spent only a few days in the capital before boarding a coach for Norfolk. To get a ship, it seemed, he first needed a war.

  6

  According to ‘the very best authority’ a young Whig joining His Majesty’s ship Agamemnon in 1793 was treated by his commander to a piece of heartfelt advice. ‘There are three things, young gentleman, which you are constantly to bear in mind,’ Captain Nelson reputedly said. ‘First, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form an opinion of your own respecting their propriety; secondly, you must consider every man as your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman as you do the devil.’59

  This famous if unverifiable quotation offered at least two principles upon which Nelson generally founded his conduct: his uncomplicated love of king and country. If, for an unthinking obedience, we substituted a reverence for the supreme deity, as envisaged by the Church of England, we would have what the captain regarded as a sacrosanct trinity: God, king and country.

  Like most Britons in the eighteenth century he directly linked the three. The law was rooted in God’s commandments, and the Almighty, Nelson believed, had ordained the institution of mon
archy and the unequal nature of society, which, he presumed, had developed naturally in accordance with divine wishes. Providing the monarch was a good pastor who protected his people, there could be no reservations about serving him, for God, king and country advanced together beneath supernatural providence. Faithful service to them would make a just claim for assistance and ultimate reward in the hereafter. As Nelson told the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, which regularly supplied him with bibles and prayer books for his ships, he was sure ‘that good to our King and country may have arisen from the seamen and marines having been taught to respect the established religion’.60

  Piety, indeed, was never far from this preacher’s son. Every one of his cabins was furnished with a bible, and a bulky edition of The Book of Common Prayer he took aboard the Albemarle can still be seen in the Nelson Museum in Monmouth. ‘When I lay me down to sleep I recommend myself to the care of Almighty God,’ he wrote in a private journal of 1793. ‘When I awake I give myself up to His direction. Amidst all the evils that threaten me, I will look up to Him for help, and question not but He will either avert them or turn them to my advantage. Though I know neither the time nor the manner of my death, I am not at all solicitous about it because I am sure that He knows them both, and that He will not fail to support and comfort me under them.’61

  In Nelson’s mind the essential relationships between a man and his god, a flock and its pastor, a subject and his ruler and a seaman and his captain were similar. They involved accepted differences in power and position, with benign superiors dispensing aid and protection in recognition of loyalty and service. Nelson was an eighteenth-century paternalist, politically as well as spiritually. He accepted the hierarchical nature of society, and supposed that the deference and obedience of inferiors would bond them to superior but caring patrons. Upward social mobility was entirely acceptable if it was achievable, but those locked into their station were also entitled to consideration. The system, as we have seen, was demonstrated on board his ships. He expected men to obey, and punished to reclaim or deter transgressors, but in turn offered protection. The instances of Scotland, Carse and Trail confirm how seriously he took that obligation. Those vertical social relationships, in which men of all levels reciprocated commitment, were keynotes of Nelson’s view of the world.

  Rather naively, Nelson often assumed that his values leavened British society in general, and it is true that the gist of his conservatism was very widely diffused at the time. As one historian has written, ‘the widespread manifestations of popular conservatism were the result of deep-rooted prejudices and widely-held opinions in favour of the existing constitution in church and state. The desire to preserve traditional institutions and established values was not restricted to the propertied elite, but was shared by a majority of the middling and lower orders.’62

  Perhaps it was the intensity, rather than the nature, of Nelson’s beliefs that marked him out, especially with regard to paternalism. Later, in the midst of increasing industrialisation and class conflict, writers such as William Cobbett harked back nostalgically to a supposed pre-industrial golden age dominated by such benign paternalism, but in reality its existence had always been questionable. There had never been a land of lost content. Of course, it was necessary for the ruling classes to appease the masses below by some attention to their needs, but naked self-interest was all too evident. Landowners enclosed the open fields, sweeping away the customary rights of villagers to glean and graze, and driving them into the ranks of the landless wage labourers. Capitalist clothiers laid off their outworkers, spinners and weavers harnessed to punishing cottage industries, whenever markets contracted. Grimy women toiled along dark, subterranean tunnels in mines, hauling coal on their backs, while raw-faced puddlers shortened their lives stirring molten iron in the searing heat of new reverberatory furnaces. In none of these cases did paternalism offer much protection, but Nelson believed in it and generally tried to live accordingly.

  In the later eighteenth century the British people were predominantly conservative, but naval officers who spent their lives in the king’s service were even more universally so. Their pride was the English constitution, a mature constitution which, it was said, secured the nation the most liberal governments in Europe and the blessings of a limited rather than an absolute monarchy. Nelson agreed entirely with Collingwood that ‘miseries . . . would undoubtedly be the consequence of any attempt to disturb the present most excellent constitution’. In theory, it was a balanced constitution, dividing power between the crown, the House of Lords and people (the latter represented by the House of Commons), and preventing the concentration of authority that always bred tyranny. It created stability, adjusting the interests of one group to another, protected Britons from slavery and conserved their basic freedoms and rights. So, at least, thought Nelson. He inflexibly upheld the principle of monarchy and accepted the pretensions of the aristocracy. But his ideal sovereign, the head of the Church and figurehead of the nation, was not only a benevolent but a constitutional monarch, governing wisely and honourably in return for the fealty of his subjects, but also accountable to the Lords and Commons in Parliament.63

  Nelson distrusted anyone who tinkered with the constitution, including the Whigs, who affected to be the people’s defenders against a potentially tyrannous crown. They stood ready to attack any unwarranted royal imposition that would tilt the balance of the constitution against the people, but their obsessive suspicion of the crown struck Nelson as unpatriotic, and their attacks on the king’s government during the American war almost treasonable. Nelson viewed the Whigs as self-serving and devoid of principle, critics of government corruption out of office and willing beneficiaries of it in. His disdain showed in his refusal to join their celebration of the centenary of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, one of the sacred milestones in Whig history.

  There was little egalitarian or democratic about Nelson. He had no interest in reforming an increasingly outmoded and inequitable representative system, and little understanding of the political dimensions of economical reform, which for him was simply a practical matter of saving public money. He regarded the constitution as fundamentally sound. However, Nelson was by no means insensitive to injustices and hardships suffered by the people, but attributed them to the inadequacies of members of the ruling classes or public servants rather than to any systemic failure. For such delinquents Nelson had some very hard words. He eventually came to the conclusion that the Prince of Wales was a criminal spendthrift who deserved to be punished for the burdens his profligacy imposed upon the poor, and that both the Tories forming around Pitt and the Whigs were mere competitors for the spoils of public office. ‘The changes and politics of ministers and men are so various that I am brought to believe all are alike,’ he wrote. ‘The ins and outs are the same, let them change places.’64

  We do not think of Nelson as a radical in any sense, but although his thought remained intrinsically conservative in nature, his belief in the wellbeing of the underprivileged could have eventually made him a Tory radical. In fact, in his inherent conservatism, belief in monarchy, distrust of the emerging political factions and conviction that only independent Members of Parliament could work any good, he approached the philosophy of the Burdettite radicals of the early nineteenth century.

  The shortcomings of rulers struck Nelson as betrayals of the necessary bonds between masters and servants. So long as the people were loyal, their betters were obliged to protect them, and the miseries of the poor were symptoms of a shameful dereliction of duty. They damaged Nelson’s illusion of the paternal society. We will remember his powerful reaction to the gross disparities between the rich and poor when he visited pre-revolutionary France. During his years of unemployment in Norfolk he also witnessed the struggles of the English farm labourers at first hand. In 1794, when his finances had recovered, Nelson began to demonstrate his personal commitment to the needy of Burnham Thorpe with Christmas donations. ‘Accept our bes
t new year’s gift [in return],’ his father wrote, acknowledging a gift of £200. ‘Good wishes, the poor man’s all!’ Earlier, on 10 December 1792, Nelson had put the plight of the poor before the Duke of Clarence:

  That the poor labourer should have been seduced by promises and hopes of better times, your Royal Highness will not wonder at when I assure you they are really in want of everything to make life comfortable. Part of their wants, perhaps, were unavoidable from the dearness of every article of life; but much has arose from the neglect of the country gentlemen in not making their farmers raise their wages in some small proportion as the prices [of] necessaries increased. The enclosed paper will give your Royal Highness an idea of their situation . . . I have been careful that no country gentleman should have it in his power to say [that] I had pointed out the wants of the poor greater than they really are. Their wages have been raised within these three weeks, pretty generally, one shilling a week; had it been done some time past they would not have been discontented, for a want of loyalty is not amongst their faults; and many of their superiors in many instances might have imitated their conduct with advantage.65

  In an enclosure Nelson itemised the annual income and outgoings of a labourer in full employment in Norfolk with a wife and three children. Shoes (including ‘mending’) cost £2 3s. 0d.; clothes (two shirts, a pair of breeches and a jacket, and ‘woman’s and children’s clothes’) £1 19s. 0d.; rent £2 0s. 0d.; soap and candles, 12s. 10d.; and coal £1 19s. 0d. When deducted from what could be earned in the fields, these expenses left the family with only £14 7s. 2d. to feed five people throughout the year. ‘Not quite two pence a day for each person,’ Nelson noted, ‘and to drink nothing but water, for beer our poor labourers never taste, unless they are tempted, which is too often the case, to go to the Alehouse.’ Nelson’s appeal not only illustrated his belief that the poor were being betrayed by the ruling classes, but also the conditions in the agricultural counties of eastern England that were shortly to prompt the controversial Speenhamland system of poor relief.