Nelson (124 page)

Life would never be the same for the parson’s son who had become a rear admiral, a war hero and a knight of the realm. Nor would the Nelsons stand on the same footing, although each reacted individually. His brother William, typically, was soon looking for advantage, while Maurice turned his attention towards devising a coat of arms that would reflect Sir Horatio’s naval victory. The Reverend Edmund praised God, and on his increasingly rare perambulations about Bath discovered unexpected joy in being accosted by well-wishers at every street corner. ‘He is grown young,’ said Fanny. ‘These blessings in his declining days cheer him.’
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Fanny herself has been accused of being the one significant wet blanket, and of suppressing her husband’s zest for action with ‘leave
boarding to captains’ letters. She was certainly incapable of the histrionic and hysterical outbursts of enthusiasm that were Lady Hamilton’s stock in trade, and proportionately less successful at feeding Horatio’s vanity. The notorious ‘boarding’ letter itself was written on 11 March, soon after she learned of the battle. ‘You have done desperate actions enough,’ she said. ‘Now may I – indeed, I do beg that you never board again.
Leave
it for
captains
.’ So strongly did she feel that she repeated the admonition nine days later.
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This document has damned Fanny for more than a century. It became the most quotable proof of her utter inability to understand her husband, to comprehend the essence of his spirit, or to share in any meaningful way his search for glory. She was loyal, dutiful and kind, and would have made someone a good wife, but . . .
Nelson
? Their souls were alien beings.

No one can deny the element of truth in all this, though they hardly justified Nelson’s ultimate infidelity. Fanny’s was a perfectly understandable response. She had not seen her husband for almost four years and wanted him home. She loved him and feared for his safety. Most recently those fears had been stoked by the secrecy surrounding his mission to Elba, for secrecy nearly always implied danger, and the increasing brevity and infrequency of his letters. Fanny also, as the old reverend warned her, listened to too many scaremongering ladies in Bath. She had hoped that Horatio’s promotion to commodore might have delivered her from these anxieties, but it was a dream from which the battle of Cape St Vincent suddenly awoke her. He had even boarded the
San Nicolas
while his flag captain remained behind. But however understandable, Fanny’s remarks indicate her underestimation of the passion that drove him forward.

Still, she was by no means indifferent to his reputation and achievements, and proudly passed on the heart-swelling remarks of well-wishers. There was nothing dispiriting about Hood’s opinion that Nelson’s ‘glorious share’ in the battle would ‘immortalise his name in the pages of the history of England’, or Lord Walpole’s report that ‘nothing was yet talked of in London but Nelson’. Or that ‘Mrs Pinney declares Mr P. talked in his sleep of you’, and Lady Saumarez had come breathless with a letter from her husband that placed Nelson ‘above praise’. Even the ‘leave it to captains letter’ carried several such accolades. Nor did Fanny ever hide her delight at the congratulations that deluged her, the satisfaction she took at being called ‘the admiral’s wife’ and Lady Nelson, and at receiving salutes at public concerts and shows.
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Yet Sir Horatio and his wife did dream of different futures. His featured professional advancement and public applause; hers an honourable retirement with war’s alarums far behind. The navy divided them, providing Nelson with a full, active and intermittently fulfilling life, and condemning Fanny to a barren loneliness. One senses also that Fanny never really took to England, a cold, damp place far away from the tropical islands of her birth, and her best friendships were with those who reminded her of home. Her closest companion in Bath was Anne, Lady Bickerton, whose life resembled her own. Lady Anne (1769–1850) was the daughter of James Athill, a surgeon of Antigua, and the wife of a naval officer, Sir Richard Bickerton, who she had met in the West Indies and married in 1788. Fanny suffered severely from the cold, and sometimes confined her daily travels to a visit to the post office. There were occasional out-of-town expeditions, to stay with the Sucklings of Kentish Town or the Tobins of Bristol, but the considerable burdens she discharged were also restricting. She had a house to manage, barely satisfactory servants to deploy, scarce resources to stretch, and a sick ‘father’ to attend. As the years passed, her need for Nelson merely increased.

Fanny’s letters seldom flooded with the emotion of a more expressive talent, or with any zest for world affairs, but her unwavering love for her husband rang steadfastly through her pages. She doted over the anecdotes Culverhouse and Berry brought her, and appreciated the many presents Nelson sent, including a chain, Polly the talking parrot, Italian flowers, rice, pearls from Mrs Fremantle and cloth for tailoring. Yet nothing stirred her more than a hint that he would be coming home.

My dearest husband [she began on 10 April], Your letter of March 3rd I received last week, and am glad you have had my letters, [and] that you were kind enough to say [they] give you pleasure. They are full, but truly, of nothing. Your affectionate concern for my want of health has its healing balm. The heartfelt satisfaction at your expression of returning to me ‘laughing-back’ gives me a pleasure, a something which I am certain none can feel but those who are sincerely attached to a husband. They are fine feelings, but exquisitely painful. I have never shed a tear on my Josiah’s account, but when I have known he was not with you.
⁶⁴

He brought heroism into the line of duty.
Verily he is a terrible ancestor.

Joseph Conrad,
The Mirror of the Sea

T
HERE
are times when most people dream of wealth and the better life it promises. Even the most level-headed of us are susceptible to this treacherous panacea, the sudden riches that will unlock a luxurious future, or at least decisively discharge us from everyday toil, discomfort and want. The mere smell of money, the suggestion that some life-changing treasure trove may be within reach, can bewitch, exciting wild, extravagant visions, corrupting minds, and beguiling the staid and the sensible onto difficult and improbable paths. It happened to Horatio Nelson. For most of his life wealth had been, if not an unimportant aspiration, decidedly secondary to his glory hunt, married as it was to a sense of public duty. Many times he had risked his life in ventures that offered little financial gain. But in the spring of 1797, like the Elizabethan privateers of old, he found himself thinking of Spanish treasure, and the new life it could make for him.

Approaching forty, Nelson was reaching a time when self-made men begin to feel insecure. Youth, with its long todays and endless tomorrows, had passed, and the future now beckoned. Middle age threatened diminishing powers of body and purse. Preparing for retirement could no longer be postponed to some imaginary date ahead. For Nelson the realisation that spring and summer were not indefinite
states was sharpened by a conviction that the war and the certainty of employment were coming to an end. Though he might return ‘laughing’, rich ‘in the praises of all mankind’, a life on half-pay most probably lay beyond the horizon.
¹

While his means were slender, the demands upon them only grew. His social standing had changed, for he was now a rear admiral, a Knight of Bath and a member of the elite. The idea of playing the local squire, with its opportunities for befriending the community, appealed to him, and at Christmas 1797 he would gift the poor of his native village high-quality blankets with the letter N specially woven into their centres. But it all cost money, and at the moment Rear Admiral Nelson was a knight without any of the inseparable accompaniments of gentrification. He had neither house nor land – in short
property
.
²

The financial implications of his social elevation were becoming clearer. This was an age when the expectations of the gentry were rising strongly, and houses and gardens were being beautified and estates exploited. It was also an inflationary, tax-ridden age, when every successive reckoning seemed confoundedly inflamed. Fanny knew something about what cutting a respectable figure in society cost. Her house at 17 New King Street in Bath consumed an annual rent of £90, but it was so close to the river that the smell of the sewage drove her from the city during the summers. She liked the houses in Gay Street, which occupied higher ground, but they demanded an additional £70. As for the routine outfit of ‘ladies of quality’, that was forever changing. ‘Such revolutions in our dress since you left me,’ she told Horatio. ‘Now our waists are lengthened; heads dressed flat at the sides, very high in front and low upon the forehead; short sleeves, some ladies showing their elbows; short petticoats, nay above the ankle with the fashionable; and little or no heels to the shoes. Gloves almost beyond the pocket of anyone, none but the long ones are of use. None less than three shillings a pair. Coloured and white the same price.’ Homes, grounds, clothes, horses and carriage, domestics, food, drink and entertainment all drained the modest income.
³

Property was the greatest bugbear, for in the eighteenth century it alone consummated status and power. It was the essential prerequisite for even modest amounts of political influence. In counties such as Norfolk, land yielding an annual income of £600 or more was needed to stand for Parliament, along with the endorsements of important landowners. Justices of the peace had to command estates worth
at least £1,000 a year, and to vote in a county election required a qualification of at least forty shillings freehold. The property owner had a stake in society, something to lose if public affairs were mismanaged, and he incurred considerable taxation. His right to lead, and to dominate the processes of government and administration, was accepted. Indeed, the main reason why Paine’s doctrine of universal manhood suffrage was so roundly condemned was its divorce of power from property. Nelson, however, had sprung from the indigent gentry. His previous home, the rectory at Burnham Thorpe, was a patrimony of Lord Walpole, not an independently owned ‘seat’. Now Sir Horatio had to change things, and make that decisive, inevitable step towards establishing himself in respectable society. ‘We must not be vagabonds any longer,’ he told Fanny.
⁴

Unfortunately, honours apart, Nelson’s account with Marsh and Creed demanded prudence. Fanny had everyone scouring the Norfolk land market for houses for her, but investigations always revealed disturbing snags. Too big, too small, overgrown, no land, a fallen roof – one alternative after another was discarded. Horatio hoped that £2,000 might be spared for the purpose, and while he understood the need for constraints, he realised that his new status demanded something more substantial than they had previously envisaged. ‘A cottage, my dear friend, is all I desire, and indeed all that I can afford,’ he wrote to one old associate, but his idea of a cottage was turning into a four-bedroom house with servants’ quarters and outbuildings. Fanny was sensible with money, and more restrained. She even saved on postage by sending her letters to Nelson through the Admiralty, a kindness furnished by Admiral William Young. There could be no trimmings, she insisted. ‘We must have nothing to do with more spare bedrooms than one or two,’ she explained.
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Family matters were additional complications. Though Nelson was not embattled with such encumbrances as deeds of entail, family settlements and dowries, he suffered from being the most fortunate member of a large brood. Financial burdens often fell disproportionately upon him, as relatives looked to him to meet their ambitions and needs as well as his own. To a point he accepted these responsibilities cheerfully, for he was by nature a generous man. His ‘only wish to be rich’ was in order to serve the ‘family’, he had told William years before, and it had been no idle brag. ‘I know your great liberality, and that it sometimes oversteps itself,’ his brother would have to confess. Horatio’s purse served numerous kinfolk. Money for ailing Aunt Mary
was spent to his entire ‘satisfaction’, and it was forever necessary to relieve a ‘poor father’ beset by profligate and insensitive progenies. Then there was the growing, garrulous tribe of small nieces and nephews, a dozen to date, which had their harassed uncle wondering ‘where to stop’.
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Nelson knew that there were those too eager to exploit him. ‘My brother William thinks I have been making a fortune,’ Nelson told his father, ‘but I have assured him of the contrary.’ Maurice had at last got himself out of trouble, and in May 1797 returned to the Navy Office with a salary of £300 per annum; Suckling’s new start, however, had not only been shaky but was also now being devoured by drink. After four years at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he got his BA in 1795 – but only just. One who remembered him as a student remarked that ‘his habits were not those of a man of business’, and his two final examiners were divided about whether he had reached the standard necessary for graduation. One thought him ‘totally unqualified’, but as he had already been ordained a deacon in Norwich it was felt politic to pass him, and he went to Burnham Thorpe to officiate for his father as a curate. He ‘will never . . . become respectable,’ Horatio concluded. ‘If he has again taken to drink, the more he drinks the better. It will the sooner finish his disgrace, and the part we must all bear in it.’ But however hard he talked, he ended up paying, if only because of the discomforts he sought to spare his father.
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Surveying his finances, Nelson regretfully admitted their inadequacy. Fanny’s legacy floundered interminably, with even the interest on it being withheld for reasons that Nelson found impossible to fathom. The £300 a year he had invested in funds yielded a negligible sum, and even pay promised little escape. It was always disbursed late. His pay for the
Agamemnon
totalled £814, and was increased to over £1,400 by compensation paid to captains for giving up their servants’ allowances in 1794, but it was not finally paid until the end of 1797. More regularly his rank as colonel of marines had netted him over another £500 a year since June 1795, and he had been drawing the pay of a flag officer from 10 August the following year, when he had become a full commodore. In the eight months to April 1797, Nelson’s flag pay amounted to £565, including compensation for servants. Sir Horatio considered himself unfairly deprived of the rate for the several months between his receipt of a broad pendant and official promotion to commodore, and eventually got another £63 on that account in 1799. These sums were considerable, and they would increase as
long as he remained employed since he had now been raised from commodore to rear admiral.
⁸