by John Sugden
At the end of 1794 Horatio Nelson was thirty-six, but he looked younger, and despite his quiet, introverted manner quite capable of attracting women. It was in December that he succumbed to Fanny’s requests for a likeness and sat to an unknown Leghorn miniaturist for his second official portrait. Compared to the magnificent Rigaud canvas the result was modest, painted in oils upon a tiny card, and Nelson and Josiah were not the only ones who thought the likeness a bad one. But most people disagreed, and saw much in the portrait that was true – the slim figure, contemplative features, sensitive, mobile mouth, long nose and physical fragility. Most notably, although the miniaturist included the small scars above Nelson’s right eye and below his left, and shaded the grey into his long hair, he successfully captured the almost perennial youthfulness of the sitter’s appearance. He suggested the body and face of an innocent midshipman rather than an experienced, war-hardened post-captain. Certainly Fanny loved the portrait, and within two years was wearing it proudly around her neck. She continued to wear it long after suffering her husband’s final and irreparable betrayal, and treasured it to her dying day. It was perhaps ironic that even as Nelson sat for that priceless memento he was living with a mistress of whom Fanny never knew.28
If the portrait shows a not unattractive man, it is likely that Nelson’s relationship with Adelaide Correglia arose out of prostitution rather than a fortuitous attachment. There are grounds for believing that she was, in fact, a superior call girl serving officers and gentlemen, and that the consul, John Udny, facilitated the introduction. Like most ports, Leghorn had its prostitutes. Anchoring ships were beset with boats loaded with musicians and sweetly singing women, and ashore ‘dollies’ could be found for secret liaisons, among them ladies who regarded the officer class as their clientele. According to Fremantle, Captains Wells and Rowley ‘had doleys [sic] to dinner with them daily’. The more select women used the theatre or opera house and other sophisticated places to meet their customers, and Udny may have acted as a procurer. To all appearances a homely old English gentleman down to the harpsichord, his services to countrymen far from home seem to have gone beyond the realms of postmaster, prize agent, victualler and consul. ‘Called on old Udney,’ Fremantle entered in his diary in December 1794. ‘Went to the opera with him. He introduced me to a very handsome Greek woman.’ Certainly Udny knew Adelaide, and almost certainly she offered casual sexual services, so it is entirely possible that some similar episode marked the beginning of her more enduring relationship with Nelson.29
Adelaide was discreet, though she went aboard the Agamemnon when invited and met Nelson’s friends. Her poor English inhibited her in such gatherings, for her native tongue was Italian and Nelson wrote and possibly spoke to her in bad French. He had secured a French master for his stepson and William Hoste, and conveniently benefited from the lessons himself. The likelihood is that most of the papers that passed between the pair were destroyed in 1797, when Nelson burned sensitive documents before launching a dangerous attack upon Teneriffe, and only one survives today. It is undated and written in painful French deficient both in syntax and grammar. ‘My dear Adelaide,’ he wrote, ‘I am setting out to sea this very moment. A Neapolitan ship is sailing with me to Livorno [Leghorn]. Believe me always to be your dear friend, Horatio Nelson. Be a great success.’30
This, like most other pieces of evidence about Adelaide, scarcely lifts the veil of secrecy surrounding her. She kept a home for Nelson in Leghorn for perhaps eighteen months or more, and was on hand to help him entertain, but always mysteriously. ‘Dined with Nelson and Dolly,’ Fremantle wrote on 27 September 1795, just after both host and mistress had returned from Vado Bay. ‘Very bad dinner indeed.’ But the next day he was back and wrote, ‘Dined at Nelson’s. Went to see at the theatre a man who was blind play upon a flute well enough.’ On such occasions we can imagine Adelaide hovering in the background while the English officers talked a language she barely understood, fondly returning the occasional remark and filling the wineglasses.31
She no doubt consoled Nelson during his depression, and diverted him from the wearisome duties of an inactive command. For much of the time the captain of the Agamemnon had nothing more stimulating to attend than courts martial in Leghorn roads or St Fiorenzo. His ship was ready for sea in December, but Hotham put into Leghorn at about the same time and had the whole fleet lingering there for ten days.32
Then and afterwards Nelson’s close associates met and accepted Adelaide, and through him paid their respects to her. ‘Make my compliments to la belle Adelaide,’ Admiral Jervis wrote to him in July 1796. But they never spoke of her back home, not even young Josiah, who was doubtless misled about Adelaide’s function but was unquestionably aware of her existence. Many naval officers serving far afield had relationships with local women, but they learned to remain silent about them on home ground, screening one world from the other.33
Nelson would enjoy a far more notorious mistress in time, but Adelaide was the one about whom Fanny never knew.
5
He told Fanny he loved her, collecting ‘many little things’ for her on his travels, and she had no reason to believe otherwise. ‘Indeed, my dear Fanny,’ he wrote, ‘my love, regard and esteem for you cannot, I think, be exceeded by any man whatever.’34
Yet she was undeniably lonely, deprived of her ‘dearest husband’ and child, and living in what was still something of a foreign land. He was always talking about coming home but never did. In the autumn of 1794 his plan to return with Hood raised her hopes. After toasting his second birthday away from home at Kentish Town, she wrote, ‘I . . . look every day for one telling me you are coming.’ The news that he was, after all, to remain at sea devastated her. ‘My disappointment in not seeing you and my child as soon as you gave me some hope that I should is very great,’ she admitted. ‘The thoughts of soon seeing my affectionate husband had made me quite well, but still I flatter myself it will not be very long before you will come home. This winter will be another anxious one. What did I not suffer in my mind the last?’35
It was unfair on both of them, imprisoned as they were in situations beyond their control. Nelson tried to reassure his wife that the war could not last long, and that if there was peace in the spring ‘we must look out for some little cottage’ where he would ‘return to the plough with redoubled glee’, but he was hardly telling the truth. Even Fanny, reading newspapers and talking to her few friends, doubted the war was reaching its end, though she and her father-in-law encouraged each other to think that Nelson might in some way soon return to the suffocating domesticity he hated. They both needed him, and wanted him to enliven their small, quiet world, barely comprehending the fire that fed his soul. While he thirsted for glory, they worried that the battle he longed for might cheat them of a beloved husband and son. ‘I hope the French will not get out so as to give you an opportunity of engaging them,’ Fanny wrote to him. ‘Could I hope for this, I should endeavour to make myself easy. My mind and poor heart are always on the rack.’ So too wrote the good reverend, eager to spend his last days with his favourite human being. ‘Let others hear a little of the roaring cannon,’ he urged. ‘I trust the fatigue of life is over with you. In days of peace you will enjoy your cottage.’36
Month after month, year after year, those hopes were crushed, and Fanny’s grass-widowhood continued. At the beginning of December 1794, Hood wrote to Nelson that he expected to return to the Mediterranean in the spring, and that the Agamemnon was due for recall. Nelson formed the idea of taking some leave in England, and then transferring his company to a seventy-four and going out again with Hood in the spring. The plan, attractive because it combined seeing his wife with a return to duty under his hero, was shipwrecked by the growth of French naval power in the Mediterranean and British delays in reinforcing Hotham’s fleet. In those circumstances the acting commander-in-chief clung to every ship he had. Nelson was genuinely disappointed but tried to console. The war might not last long. Perhaps this year, or the n
ext. And at least remaining in the Mediterranean would furnish more money for the Norfolk cottage he wanted. ‘Much as I shall regret being so long parted from you,’ he told Fanny, ‘still we must look beyond the present day, and two or three months may make the difference of every comfort or otherwise in our income.’37
For Nelson, depressing as the lull in the fighting had become, the Mediterranean was still a fascinating honey pot that might at any time produce a life-changing opportunity. Battles at sea were rare at any time, but now the competing fleets seemed to be bracing themselves for just such an encounter. If it happened Nelson wanted to be there. As he explained to Drake, the ‘object’ of a sea officer was ‘to embrace the happy moment which now and then offers – it may be this day, not for a month, and perhaps never’. If Hood resumed command of the fleet, as everyone expected, that tantalising prospect would brighten, but whether he came or not it possessed Nelson night and day, and kept him at his post.38
Like many sailors’ wives Fanny was lonely, but she was also rootless. After Nelson’s departure she had considered living at Swaffham in Norfolk, where the Nelsons had relatives and associates and the social amenities boasted assembly rooms, but she felt cold, sick and isolated there, and her father-in-law invited her to winter with him in Bath. The summer and autumn of 1794 were spent at Shepherd’s Spring in Ringwood with the Matchams, but Kate was pregnant and ill and left for London so Fanny gratefully accepted an invitation to Kentish Town. She liked the Sucklings, especially Miss Elizabeth, then pursuing Captain Henry Wigley of the Scots Greys (Nelson would send her a diamond ring for their wedding in November 1796), and stayed with them until November, when she removed to Bath with Nelson’s father. Some references to occasional sallies further afield, for example to Plymouth in 1794 and Lyme Regis two years later, may reflect attempts to repair broken health. Fanny appears to have been a rather frail individual, commonly troubled by aches and anxieties.
The Reverend Edmund Nelson had left his parsonage in the hands of a younger son, the newly ordained and habitually ‘reclaimed’ Suckling, who acted as curate and worked the glebe land. With his daughter-in-law and such domestics as the Thurlow girls of Burnham, he eventually rented a terraced house at 17 New King Street in Bath. Considering how apprehensive Edmund had once been at the thought of meeting Fanny, the strange pair formed an exceptionally close friendship, each supporting the other ‘in mutuall comfort’, and sharing their ambitions for the return of ‘our precious treasure’. At first Edmund stood as the guardian. ‘If you can put yourself under my protection, a poor substitute [for Horatio], all shall be done that can be. Don’t . . . consider the expense; it can, it shall be made easy,’ he wrote to her. But as he grew older and weaker he became more dependent upon his daughter-in-law. He was still able to ride, once falling from a pony near his church in 1793, but tired easily and recoiled from travelling afar, where ‘bad roads, dirty inns and insolent post boys’ seemed the order of the day. Bath became Edmund’s favourite ‘place of warmth, ease and quietude’. He could make gentle pilgrimages to Ann’s grave, bathe in the waters and linger at home, where Fanny fulfilled his need to ‘chat’ and supplied his ‘news-reading eyes’ by reading aloud to him from the newspapers. The bonds the two forged in those years were never broken, and held strong during the difficult years ahead. ‘Mrs Nelson,’ admitted the old man, ‘truly supplies a kind and watchful child over the infirmities and whimsies of age.’39
As for Fanny, in between ‘cheerful’ visits to the theatre, concerts and friends, and occasional rides into the countryside, she too tended to remain indoors. Her father-in-law absorbed some of her energies, and she explored a new pianoforte, but was in a continual ‘hurry and fret’ about her husband, imparting her ‘little news’ to him in modestly penned letters she barely felt capable of writing. They told of the doings of her relatives, such as the Hamiltons, Herberts and Mortons, and of chance meetings with mutual acquaintances. Sir Thomas Shirley had visited, effusive about the captain he had once decried; a Miss Hawkins had said that two of the Andrews girls, one of them probably Elizabeth, as well as a younger brother had gone to the East Indies; and the Scriveners had fallen on hard times, the wife dead and the husband odder than ever. The Hoods were attentive to Fanny in Bath, and invited her to join them on Christmas Day, but she found the admiral a rather dour companion. ‘Of all the silent men, surely he is the most so,’ she wrote to her husband, but ‘I was determined to make him smile.’40
Fanny perked up most when officers from the Mediterranean brought news of her missing men. Josiah, Hood told her, was ‘one of the finest colts he ever saw’, but she continued to mother him, and reminded Horatio that the boy had to clean his teeth up and down, and not across. John Harness, formerly the fleet’s physician, brought her stories of Nelson in Corsica. He ‘spoke so handsomely of you, and did tell me many little things which to bystanders might be thought trifling, but to me highly gratifying. I have heard of your breakfast on the fig tree. My son – they all say I shall not know him.’41
Of the many services Fanny did Nelson in the years he was away, the most essential was the care of his father, but she proved a valuable aid in other ways. She was affable and able enough to converse with the useful, including Sir Andrew Hamond, the comptroller of the Navy Board, and the Hoods, and gently to fight her husband’s corner. She also handled everyday naval and family business on his behalf, drawing upon Nelson’s London agent, Marsh and Creed of 23 Norfolk Street in the Strand, for money. She wrote letters for her husband, and saw to the gifts he was forever sending to friends and relations. The captain remained as generous as ever, even when far from home. It was Fanny who sent sugar, tea and wine to Nelson’s aged Aunt Mary at Hilborough, and the rector who distributed his son’s largesse in Burnham Thorpe. Like the good patron he was, Nelson felt an obligation to the poor of his parish, and customarily sent £200 each Christmas to provide warm clothing for the needy. ‘Accept our best new year’s gift [in return],’ Edmund replied at the beginning of 1795, ‘good wishes, the poor man’s all!’42
In many respects Fanny made a good wife, and she shared some of her husband’s characteristics. She was a regular churchgoer, and no respecter of those who would subvert the hallowed British constitution. Believing the treasonable stories in the newspapers, she was sure that the reformer John Horne Tooke and the leaders of the London Corresponding Society then being tried for their lives by an alarmed government were ‘a wickeder set’ of men than ever existed. And like Horatio, Fanny was never a slave to money (‘the love of wealth ruins many’), could mix with the grand without envying them, and if she was less self-righteous than her husband she was no less dutiful. To the end Fanny played the loyal daughter-in-law, mother and wife. She never failed her ‘father’, the ailing rector. She never failed Josiah. And as far as she was able, she never failed Nelson. Fanny delighted in pleasing her husband. When he cautioned her against travelling by coach she replied, ‘No stage coach, I give you my honour, do I travel in, [nor] do anything in your absence that I thought would give you an opportunity to say that you wished it had been otherwise. No, not for the world.’43
The one thing she could not share with Horatio was his passion for fame. Fanny would have been content to live in her cottage, married to a retired rear admiral, and building a sedate social world around them, but she never felt his fierce need to achieve. Nor in the early years did it seem to matter.
6
For a naval officer the alignment of time, place and circumstance that made the ‘happy moment’ was always elusive. At the beginning of 1795 Nelson had been in the navy for twenty-four years without seeing a fleet action, but now that was about to change.
The first cruises of 1795 portended nothing so remarkable. Still more than a hundred men short of a full complement, the Agamemnon sailed with Hotham’s fleet on 21 December, but the voyage was a thumping ‘series of storms and heavy seas’ and deposited Nelson in St Fiorenzo on 9 January. The weariness of Leghorn was renewed in wh
at Nelson declared a ‘damned place . . . where nothing is to be had for love or money’, and relieved only on the 15th when the seventy-four-gun Berwick rolled over and lost her masts. For eight days Nelson sat in the great cabin of the St George as part of a court trying her officers. He felt sorry for the ‘poor young man’ who commanded her, but Captain William Smith and two of his officers were held accountable for the disaster and dismissed.44
The fleet sailed on 7 February and forged through ‘a perfect hurricane’ to reach Leghorn on the 24th. It was ‘a very bad cruise’, Nelson concluded. Many of the ships were damaged and sickness was returning. ‘Agamemnon wants almost a new ship’s company,’ he said. ‘I have just sent 40 to the hospital and I have 100 on board without strength or spirits. Indeed, we are equal to an English 50-gun ship, nor is myself [free] from complaints. I have been so low by a flux and fever this last cruise that I sometimes thought I should hardly get over it. I am now on shore by leave from the admiral to see if I can get up again.’45
Then, on 8 March, came the news the British were waiting for. The French were at sea with fifteen sail of the line and several smaller warships. Hotham’s look-out sloop, the Moselle, hovering off Leghorn, also saw the fleet in the northwest, steering south. It seemed as if the French were heading for Corsica.
