Nelson (60 page)

But why? How can this peculiar myopia be explained in a man whose intellect and professional expertise were so exceptional? The answer seems to lie in Nelson’s simple view of patriotism, his susceptibility to flattery and to self-interest.

Nelson was a strong monarchist. To him the monarchy, the Church of England and the nation were almost synonymous. They were interchangeable symbols of the country itself and demanded the loyalty of
every patriot. As Nelson said of William Henry, ‘as an
individual
I love him [and] as a
prince
I honour and revere him’.
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But to be the prince’s commanding officer and principal confidant amidst a plethora of pageantry and pomp was also deeply flattering. Wherever William Henry went the elite of the islands obsequiously jostled for his hand, fawning, flattering and eulogising for all they were worth. Nelson tired of the dinners and dances, but he had long been intoxicated with attention. We must remember that only a short time before he had been almost an outcast in the islands, at odds with its premier citizens and in danger of arrest. Those battles were still being fought, and in February 1787 Nelson had opened a new round with complaints about the fees charged by the vice-admiralty courts of Barbados and Grenada.
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The prince was changing that. He wholly agreed with Nelson about ‘the commerce in these islands’ and ‘the maritime laws’, and writing to his father fully credited the captain with educating him about those subjects. More, he was not only under Nelson’s command and a willing subordinate but transparently also his best friend. Anyone seeking access to the royal presence had to deal with Nelson, and suddenly the remaining opposition to the captain of the
Boreas
went under-ground, hidden beneath an unseemly display of servility to the prince. William Henry was a reinforcement of overwhelming power and multiplied Nelson’s importance. He was besieged with invitations and fair words. It might have been reflected glory, but to Nelson it was no less sweet.
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Another consideration was Nelson’s need of ‘interest’. He had relatively little family influence left, and his career prospects were overly dependent upon the uncertain goodwill of Lord Hood. Nelson felt his weakness keenly. Often he cheered himself with the words of his late Uncle Maurice, that the country would always reward good service, but he had seen too many good men neglected to completely believe them. He needed powerful patrons, and would have been less than human not to have seen William Henry as a tool of considerable utility. This was a man destined to command huge influence.

From the beginning Nelson milked his new friend. Ten days after meeting him Nelson told Fanny that the prince ‘has made me promise him that he shall be at my wedding, and says he will give you to me’. Two months later he was writing home about his brother Maurice. ‘I have never lost sight of his preferment in the line he is in,’ he said, ‘but my interest is but rising. I have already spoken to His Royal
Highness about him, but it must take time to get on, and the prince has it not in his power to do all he wishes at present.’ Yet again, Horatio was simultaneously raising Fanny’s worries with William Henry, and finding him ‘anxious’ to return a ‘favour’. Nelson hoped that in due course the prince would pull some powerful strings for him, and occasionally William Henry spoke encouragingly. A decade later, when he was expecting to sit at the head of the board of Admiralty, he reminded Nelson that ‘I loved and esteemed you from the beginning as an ornament to the service’. But the dream was illusory; the prince never delivered.
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In 1786 and 1787 Nelson found it hard to criticise the wilful and explosive William Henry and to risk his displeasure. The more the prince confided in him or bestowed kindnesses, the less resistance Nelson was capable of offering. He always reacted positively to goodwill, valued loyalty fiercely and made emotional and strong attachments. Now patriotism, self-interest and generosity alike stripped him of objectivity. Rather than antagonise a man notoriously resistant to interference, he allowed the prince to go his way, and found himself being sucked into the wake, towards a world of inept authoritarianism.

On 13 December the
Boreas
,
Pegasus
and
Rattler
reached Antigua, where Nelson would be detained for two months, apart from a brief trip to Nevis. The
Pegasus
was in poor shape. Her timbers needed repairing and bolts replacing, while some of her men were sick, and she docked in English Harbour to be readied for her captain’s progress through the islands. Since Hughes’s departure Nelson had been using the commanding officer’s house at the dockyard, but he generously placed it at the prince’s disposal and resigned himself to bunking aboard the
Boreas
. William Henry would not hear of it, and for a few weeks the two friends shared the accommodation ashore.
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Perhaps it was here that they ‘fought over again the principal naval actions in the American war’, as the prince later remembered. ‘Excepting the naval tuition which I had received on board the
Prince George
, when Rear-Admiral G. [Richard] Keat[e]s was lieutenant of her, and for whom both of us equally entertained a sincere regard, my mind took its first decided naval turn from this familiar intercourse with Nelson.’ Lieutenant James Wallis of the
Boreas
also remembered Nelson’s interest in fleet tactics during this period, and said he
was ‘continually forming the [ships into] line [of battle], exercising [the men, and] chasing.’ Probably both witnesses exaggerated, looking back more than twenty years. Yet unquestionably Captain Nelson, ‘a young man’ of ‘sound judgement’, imparted some things to the prince. ‘I received vast pleasure from his instructive conversations about our service in general,’ His Royal Highness informed Lord Hood at the time.
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Such musings were squeezed between the joyous outpourings of the residents of Antigua, who launched into a glittering round of balls, dinners and ceremonies for the royal visitor. William Henry appeared in full-dress naval uniform and the bigwigs were beside themselves. The assembly and the merchants composed addresses, but John Burke, solicitor general, fumbled through the former almost tongue-tied. Sir Thomas Shirley, who had learned that he was to become a baronet after all, performed no better as the host of a dinner at Clarke’s Hill. He ‘never cut a worse figure’ in Nelson’s opinion, and ‘was in such a tremor that he could scarce articulate a word’. Towards Christmas there were three consecutive nights of dining and dancing in St John’s. Captain Nelson jogged daily across the island on horseback to spend hours watching the prince pursuing Miss Anne Athill (‘a beautiful young lady of respectable family’, according to one witness) and other finely dressed ladies around tables and ballrooms before crawling back to bed in the early hours of the mornings. The new year stimulated more festivities, and Horatio was dragged to regimental dinners, mulatto balls, dances and cockfights. He confessed himself an unsuitable courtier, hanging on to the prince’s coat-tails like a two-legged guard dog, but was wretchedly ‘reconciled to the business’ and figured that ‘if we get well through all this I shall be fit for anything’. In private he scribbled necessarily short and prosaic letters to Fanny, and wished the new commander-in-chief, daily expected in Barbados, would come and take this cup from him.
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When the tedium of the social round was relieved, it was in the least desirable way. Relations aboard the
Pegasus
went from bad to worse. William Henry spent much of his time ashore, but his midshipmen were kept on board and the lieutenants had to sign in and out as they came and went as if they were untrustworthy schoolboys. More pointedly, the prince eschewed the established naval tradition of inviting lieutenants to dinner, and would have none of them in the house he shared with Nelson ashore. Horatio did nothing to educate his guest in harmony and
esprit de corps
, and was openly
criticised by the officers of the
Pegasus
for encouraging him. ‘The lieutenants of the
Pegasus
I saw were displeased with me,’ Nelson later admitted, ‘and the officers of the
Boreas
told me they attributed HRH[’s] change of conduct to me.’
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One bone of contention aboard the
Pegasus
was a book in which the prince caused his standing orders to be entered. Some of these instructions were onerously trivial and a few crass beyond belief. The men, for example, were prohibited from raising huzzahs as they performed great labours and from hanging laundry out to dry between decks, while the barge crews were ‘not by any means [to] move their heads from side to side but [to] look steady’ on pain of severe punishment. The prince’s habit of publicly reprimanding officers for the smallest infraction was another source of grief. In January the captain exchanged words with Schomberg over the lieutenant’s failure to collect sheets from the hospital. The public rebuke was followed by a testy exchange of letters in which Schomberg excused his conduct by referring to ‘the visible change in your Royal Highness’s conduct since the
Pegasus
arrived in English Harbour’. The prince fulminated against disobedience and neglect of duty and threatened a court martial, and Schomberg eventually made a humiliating apology before the junior officers.
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Matters quickly ran to a head. On 22 January the prince accused Schomberg of sending a boat ashore without his permission, and entered the incident in the order book, damning him as negligent and disobedient for all to see. It was a public censure Schomberg felt unable to ignore. He also concluded that the captain was trying to push him into a court martial to break him, and the next day, while William Henry was dining with Nelson ashore, the lieutenant launched a pre-emptive strike. He addressed a letter to Nelson, the senior officer on the station, demanding a court martial on the issue of the boat. If he was acquitted, or simply rebuked, as he no doubt expected, he could reasonably expect a transfer to another and more equitable berth and be done with the whole business.
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That same evening William Henry was giving Nelson his own version of the affair as they travelled home. He was furious that Schomberg should disobey him so soon after being forgiven over the matter of the sheets, and declared that in future he intended to record every such transgression in the public order book. Nelson did not disagree. He did not even seem to construe the incident as the product of poor leadership, and apparently uncritically accepted the prince’s
interpretation. At least, he would write to Locker that William Henry ‘had more plague with his officers than enough’. But when a tired Nelson returned home that evening and found Schomberg’s letter he realised that new levels of gravity were being reached.
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For courts martial tried accusers as well as accused. There were no good witnesses to the altercation over the boat, and the court would have to decide which of the contending principals was to be believed. If Schomberg was convicted, a fine officer would be ruined. If he was acquitted the prince stood to be dishonoured. And there were other implications. If Schomberg got a transfer to another ship by demanding a court martial on so trivial an incident, might it not encourage similar indiscipline from any junior officer who disliked a superior?

As it happened Nelson could delay the ordeal. Even when the
Maidstone
joined him on 14 February he did not have enough captains to form the necessary quorum for a court martial. Pending that, Nelson suspended Schomberg from duty, sparing him further dealings with his captain, and more or less confining him to his cabin. On the face of it Nelson’s action was a neutral one, but when he issued a general order five days later, cautioning other officers against resorting to courts martial on any ‘frivolous pretence’, his criticism of the stricken lieutenant was obvious. Certainly William Henry used Nelson’s order to mount another vindictive tirade against Schomberg. Summoning the suspended lieutenant and other officers to his cabin, he read it aloud. ‘I told him [Schomberg] in the presence of the officers, I should try him
after
his court-martial for mutiny, that if he was found guilty he should be hung or broke . . . that if a court-martial could not investigate the business for the particularity of the case, I should send the business to the Admiralty, who have it in their power to scratch his name off the list . . .’
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For weeks the disgraced lieutenant was confined with ‘unwarrantable severity’ by the prince, forced to pace his small cabin and the main deck, and to fraternise only with officers willing to risk being ostracised. Lieutenant William Johnstone Hope, whom the prince libelled an instigator of ‘mutiny and sedition’, was also threatened with a court martial and searched anxiously for an escape to another ship, while the young gentlemen of the
Pegasus
, traduced in the ubiquitous order book for ‘shameful inattention and remisseness’, particularly disliked their captain. Perhaps it was one of them who broke into the store room one day to steal William Henry’s spare cot in a pathetic display of resentment. At any rate, Midshipman Martin found
himself excluded from the captain’s table after mixing with Schomberg. ‘I was rather a green hand,’ he recalled, ‘unskilled in the sycophancy of the courtier.’
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Nelson was tossing on the horns of a dilemma. For some time His Royal Highness would admit of no reconciliation. When Schomberg offered to make amends on 12 February and urged his captain to ‘forget and forgive’ he was turned down flat. Several months later Commodore Alan Gardner, who commanded the Jamaica station, would find a way to bring the two together to avoid a damaging court martial, but whether or not that was possible earlier it is difficult to say.
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