Breaking the Line (30 page)

Nelson stepped from grey daylight to near darkness, to the sound of crashing marine feet and high-pitched whistles, and Hardy said to him,

‘Welcome aboard HMS
Victory
,
sir.’

24

When Nelson was piped off HMS
Victory
fifteen months later, to go ashore at Portsmouth, setting foot on land for the first time since he had embarked, he could honestly say that he was closing off the most frustrating chapter of his life. No battles, but long sea chases or an elusive enemy who did not want to meet him, and deliberate chicanery designed to cheat him out of a fortune in prize money.

The ships he had joined in the Mediterranean had had no news that hostilities had recommenced – that was brought to them by their new commander-in-chief. He had also found scurvy and low morale, both of which he had to deal with before any offensive action could be contemplated. The thought of that made Nelson smile. He had done everything possible to tempt out the Toulon fleet. Unlike most of his contemporaries he did not believe in close blockade, bottling enemy fleets in their harbours to render them ineffective.

The Nelson method, which gave them room to sail, took full advantage of the latest signalling system devised by Admiral Sir Home Popham, a truly alphabetical arrangement by which messages could be sent and understood if the weather was clear. He wanted the French at sea where they could be beaten. That was the best way to render them ineffective; by taking, burning or destroying them in battle. So he sailed all over the western Mediterranean, to Malta, the coast of Spain, Sardinia, even Naples, where his presence alarmed the court and a government who were determined this time to stay neutral in the new war.

The French popped their noses out once or twice. Under Admiral Latouche Tréville they ventured to leave Toulon when Nelson was a hundred miles away. On both occasions, having stayed at sea for twenty-four hours Tréville then dashed back, claiming to his First
Consul that he had chased the British blockading fleet off station. It would have been funny if it had not been credited by the Admiralty, who seemed to believe more of what
Le
Moniteur
printed in Paris than Nelson related in his own despatches.

The French had humbugged him once, sending Nelson off to the east again for fear that, out of harbour, that was where they were headed. Still, there was a comeuppance: Latouche Tréville, reckoned France’s best admiral, dropped dead of a heart attack soon after, it was said because he spent too much time climbing the mountain behind Toulon to look out for Nelson. He was replaced by another renegade aristocrat, a survivor of the Nile, Admiral Villeneuve.

Nelson was not at odds with his superiors in the same way that he had been with Lord Keith, yet he did argue, for they suffered from the same fears as the Scotsman. They dreaded that the French fleets should combine to achieve superiority in the English Channel, because the spectre of invasion still loomed large in their imaginations. And to make matters worse, Spain seemed to be drifting towards an alliance with France, which would give the enemy
additional
strength and ports all the way from northern Italy to the Scheldt.

Nelson’s strategy was simple. Let them try to combine in the Channel. In the process the various units, Toulon, Brest, La Rochelle, would be vulnerable to attack and should they reach the southern coasts of England he had no doubt they would suffer the same fate as the Spanish Armada. If many misconstrued this as another example of risk-taking and glory-seeking, it was just a cross he had to bear.

Eventually Spain concluded an alliance with France. The
government
in London had known this was coming, so had Nelson. But with better access to intelligence they had had a more informed expectation than he of when this would happen. They used that knowledge to cheat him and his men out of a fortune by sending a detached squadron, not under his orders, to sit off Cadiz and catch the Spanish plate ships as they came in from South America. That capture ended Spanish procrastination, and catapulted them into the war on the French side.

Studying his immediate opponent, Villeneuve, Nelson suspected a timid fellow who, having seen what his adversary could do at the Nile, had no real desire to test his mettle again. Villeneuve’s problem was Bonaparte, now Emperor of the French, and certain that at sea he enjoyed the same mastery of tactics that he held on land. Pushed repeatedly to get out to where he could be of use, Villeneuve finally sailed, eluded Nelson and got out into the Atlantic.

He sailed to the West Indies, no doubt intent on doing mischief there, but as soon as he found that Nelson had followed him, he upped anchor and skittled back east. One of Nelson’s frigates managed to catch Villeneuve’s tail, ascertained his strength and his course, and got the news back to England. The Admiralty alerted Admiral Sir Robert Calder, who had fifteen sail of the line covering Ferrol and Rochefort, to intercept, which he did, but the resulting action was inconclusive.

Nelson, unaware of this, had cracked on so hard that he got to Gibraltar before that action took place. Faced with combining British fleets, Villeneuve had run for Ferrol and Vigo on the northern shoulder of Spain to avoid battle. Now that he was back in harbour and blockaded, Nelson could go home.

On the way, thanks to newspapers given him by the Channel Fleet, Nelson had read the less than flattering newspaper reports of Calder’s action, fought at long range and indecisive, with only two enemy ships taken and no real battle joined. John Bull was used to victory, and, if the newspapers were to be believed, he was not happy, the general opinion being that Lord Nelson would have done better. The man they flattered was not so sure; he knew Robert Calder as a dogged fighter. And John Bull, or at least those who wrote for him, was not a sailor. He knew nothing of wind, tide and circumstances at sea. Nelson was prepared to believe that Sir Robert Calder had done as well as he could until it was proved otherwise.

It seemed that dawn was the natural time for Nelson to appear at Merton, and when he arrived, it was to find, as he had the first time, all the servants and gardeners up and working. But it was different; the garden was looking mature and moss had begun to mellow the newest brickwork. It was gratifying to see a low wrought-iron fence along the edge of the Nile, put there on his instructions to prevent a drowning accident, for Horatia was finally living under his roof. It was to her room he went first, not Emma’s.

The little girl was awake, still in her night-clothes, a bright-eyed four-year-old and talking. Books lay about the place and Emma’s cousin, Sarah Connors, who was governess to the little girl, could report that she was a precocious reader, could already speak a bit of French as well as English, was of a good temperament and lively. The child had not seen her father for sixteen months, but she surveyed him without suspicion, and showed no hint of fear in her startling green eyes.

‘Nelson, you cunning dog’, cried Emma. ‘Why did you not alert me to your coming?’

She was out of bed in a flash, covering his face with kisses before trying to pull him back in to her still warm, rumpled bed.

‘I travelled ahead of my own news, my love,’ he replied.

Nelson was resisting her, refusing to be dragged into bed. Having looked forward to this moment he wanted to savour it, but he could see by the look in Emma’s eyes that she thought him reluctant and he relented. Their love-making was swift and to Nelson, strangely unsatisfying. It was as if he had endowed the moment with too much and it could not meet his expectations.

Emma was conscious of this too, because she became sad, moaning that with her loss, and the resultant change of shape, she had forfeited his affection. Nelson soothed her as best he could because, truly, it was not her fault that the expected child had been stillborn, or that the difficult birth had affected her body. Indeed, there was more of Emma than there had been when he left: her waist had thickened and her breasts seemed a good third larger. Even her face was rounder, but her eyes were the same, as was her smile when he had comforted her fears. Her sunny nature could not abide gloom for long.

Nelson knew that for sailors who were away for months, sometimes years, change in those close to them was no gradual thing, it was sudden and could be shocking. It was commonplace to find a gross figure instead of the slim bride from whom they had parted, and grey hair that had been fair. Children as old as five might be looking at their father for the first time, and any child that had existed before a voyage was quite different on return. The sailor reunited was not the same fellow who had set out: men came back sick, and sometimes so changed by experience as to be unrecognisable.

He had come back to Emma expecting her to have changed, just as he expected her to see a difference in him. What he could not do, what she wanted he supposed, was to pretend he had not noticed. But parting was not all disadvantage: there was much to talk about, and usually ample time to do it. A good leave of several months saw marked differences mellow into mutual acceptance; the lover became familiar again and the sailor no longer looked for the person who had once been.

Letters had flown to the whole family, which caused them to gather post haste and fill his house with the sound he cherished; that of people he loved and who loved him chattering, eating, playing,
drinking and gently arguing. Merton was truly paradise now. The adjoining fields had been bought and he had pasture for cows, sheep and horses, a vegetable garden that was flourishing under Cribb’s careful hand, the beginning of an orchard and a hothouse in which to grow more exotic plants.

He had Emma and Horatia, who, with their guests, dined off china plates decorated with Nelson’s armorial bearings, and silver cutlery to go with it. His long polished table was set with heavy candelabra and he, at the head and in civilian clothes, could imagine this life going on for ever, unchanging and very English.

That might have been the case had his service relationships remained unchanged, but they had not, which was obvious from his first interview with the new First Lord of the Admiralty. Admiral Lord Barham had replaced St Vincent when William Pitt had
returned
as Prime Minister the year before. He had commanded ships before Nelson was born, but had not been active at sea for thirty-five years. Yet Barham was held in high regard in the Navy as the man who had done much to improve the operations of the service.

In the 1780s, his reforms had ensured that when war threatened, Britain, rather than taking months, as they had for decades, could get a fleet to sea in weeks. Nelson had praised Barham in the past, and was prone to like him now, but two men who might have got on famously had a problem. They had to deal with the grit of that
business
of Sir John Orde and the Spanish plate fleet.

‘You agree, sir, that the Cadiz station has hitherto been the province of the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet.’

‘That is so, Lord Nelson,’ said Barham. For an old man he was handsome, polished, with a warm, deep voice. What he was not, to Nelson’s way of thinking, was entirely honest.

‘Therefore,’ Nelson continued, ‘to send a squadron of ships to that place would, under normal circumstances, be seen as an addition to my strength.’

‘It would, but the circumstances were not normal.’

‘In what way?

‘Well, Sir John Orde is too senior to be put under your command.’

‘When I heard he had sailed I anticipated replacement.’

‘Then the money he has from his Spanish captures would have gone to him anyway.’

‘And to his fleet, Lord Barham,’ said Nelson testily. ‘You may feel that I am here remonstrating on my own behalf but I am not.’

Barham’s blue eyes were hard, as was his jaw. ‘I trust you are not so unwise as to remonstrate? I would remind you that I am your
superior officer and the person to whom the government has entrusted the good of the service.’

Nelson had argued with senior officers before, and the prospect held no terrors for him. ‘We can argue about words, sir. What we cannot dispute is that Sir John Orde was given a squadron of ships, and was expressly gifted an independent command to the station on which huge amounts of prize money were there for the taking. We cannot dispute that the area in question was and should have been my responsibility, nor that the officers and men of the Mediterranean Fleet have been cheated out of a substantial sum of prize money.’

Barham agreed with Nelson, but his position debarred him from saying so. How could he tell the man that the affair was wrapped up in politics; that with Pitt and Addington jockeying to form a stable government Sir John Orde, who was not, as a sailor, much entitled to distinction, had been gifted that station because of his connections? In effect, a small party of wavering Members of Parliament had extracted his appointment as a price for their support of the Pitt ministry.

Sir John Orde stood to make half a million pounds out of his capture, while Nelson, who should have had half of that, would get nothing. He might claim that he was angry on behalf of his inferior officers and seamen, all of whom would have stood to gain, but he had every right to be furious on his own account.