Nelson (65 page)

By the time the
Boreas
returned to Sheerness finally to be paid off on 30 November, Nelson was deeply frustrated. A sensitive man, he was acutely vulnerable to those daily lacerations of the spirit inseparable from life and suffered from occasional depression. Twice in his career he would talk about quitting the service altogether, both times from a sense of neglect. This was the first. According to his biographers, Clarke and McArthur, he confided in the senior officer in
the Medway one morning. If true, the conversation was probably with Vice Admiral Richard Edwards, commander-in-chief in the Medway and at the Nore. He was glad his ship was being paid off, and that he was going to be discharged from an ‘ungrateful service’, Nelson said, and he intended to surrender his commission. Edwards is said to have tried to dissuade Nelson from so drastic a course, and to have alerted the Admiralty. As Clarke and McArthur heard it, Howe responded immediately. He wrote Nelson a generous letter, inviting him to come to London after the
Boreas
was paid off. The first lord still did not have a ship to offer him but he promised to serve him in the future, and presented him to the king at the next levee day.
⁷¹

If Nelson’s hopes of getting another command rose, he was to be disappointed. The talk of war subsided, few ships were put in commission and Captain Nelson was left on the ‘beach’. The only ranks he joined were those of the unemployed. It was thoroughly disheartening. In the past he had made little money, but believed that if he followed his profession dutifully it would provide him with means and glory enough. Now he was not so sure, though somehow he could not convince himself that justice would not be done. As he told his newly retired ‘old friend’ Hercules Ross on 6 May 1788:

But in this next, my friend, you have got the start of me. You have given up all the toils and anxieties of business, whilst I must still buffet the waves – in search of what? That thing called
Honour
is now, alas, thought of no more. My integrity cannot be mended [improved upon], I hope; and my fortune, God knows, has grown worse for the service. So much for serving my country. But the Devil, ever willing to tempt the virtuous (pardon this flattery of myself) has made me offer, if any ships should be sent to destroy His Majesty of Morocco’s ports, to be there, and I have some reason to think that should any more come of it, my humble services will be accepted. I have invariably laid down and followed close a plan of what ought to be uppermost in the breast of an officer: that it is much better to serve an ungrateful country than to give up his own fame. Posterity will do him justice. A uniform conduct of honour and integrity will seldom fail of bringing a man to the goal of Fame at last.
⁷²

While war shall rage around,
May Nelsons still be found,
To guard our Isle.

A Lady’s Additional Verses to
‘God Save The King
’, 1803

FOR several months Nelson moved from place to place looking for health, home and work. He had not seen Burnham Thorpe for five years, and only twice since childhood, but busy visits to London had kept him abreast of the local news. At the end of August 1787, with the
Boreas
rocking gently at the Nore, he had lodged at 10 Great Marlborough Street rather than impose upon convenient relatives, but there had been reunions with his brother Maurice and the Sucklings of Kentish Town. Maurice even stayed on board his frigate for a while, diverting him from the troubles of impressment, and at the end of the year, with the unhappy ship finally behind him, his thoughts again returned to Norfolk, the county of his birth.

He anticipated putting ‘my little fellow’ Josiah, now seven, into school there. Nelson felt his own lack of a decent formal education, and recommended midshipmen to master French and dancing among the more obvious accomplishments essential to a naval officer. Unfortunately business tied him to the capital over Christmas, and in January 1788 he dispatched Josiah to Norfolk under the charge of Frank Lepee, his servant. His brother William, now rector of Hilborough, was instructed to put the boy in a suitable boarding
school, but he was ‘not [to] allow him to do as he pleases’ and ensure he received ‘the same weekly allowance as the other boys’.
¹

In London Nelson now lodged at 6 Princes Street, Cavendish Square, from where he reclaimed his wife from the nearby home of her uncle. He probably looked up Howe, and certainly ventured into the Navy Office, looking futilely to secure William the illegitimate wages supposedly earned as chaplain of the
Boreas
after the incumbent had, in fact, returned to England. More creditably and typically, he fought for his men, for while his command was over he still saw himself as ‘their friend and protector’. He tried to ensure they got their prize money, wrote testimonials and almost invariably answered calls for help. Thus, during the year following the discharge of the
Boreas
, two of its young gentlemen, Talbot and Lock, sought help when they were denied access to the lieutenants’ examination on the grounds that they had spent too long rated captain’s servants. Nelson supported them, but realised that the excess of apprentice officers on the
Boreas
had created a downside. He had wanted to provide ‘a set of young men to make officers [of], without a nursery for whom, I am well assured, our service must suffer’, but their number had outstripped the ratings available and some had consequently been stinted of necessary sea time as midshipmen or master’s mates.
²

Among others needing Nelson was the master of the
Boreas
, James Jameson, accused of cruelty by the former steward, Thomas Watts. December 1787 found the captain backing his master without reservation. He was ‘by no means of a cruel and oppressive disposition’, whereas Watts was ‘a bad character’ who had been flogged in Dominica for sneaking liquor to the quartermasters. ‘I am afraid that if Mr Jameson had confined the steward till I came on board,’ Nelson explained, ‘I should have punished him at the gangway.’ He suggested that in this instance the Admiralty resist any civil prosecution ‘for acts committed under martial law’, or at least defend the master at public expense.
³

Nelson’s most notable intervention took him into the witness box of the Old Bailey on 17 December. The defendant was an elderly cooper of the
Boreas
named James Carse, charged with murder. Carse had always been a quiet, orderly man of good character, but the last few years had changed him. He became morose, and drew into a world of his own, and spoke to almost no one. Nelson described him as ‘melancholy’ with the appearance of ‘a man’ who ‘had seen better days’. Those ashore, who had known him years before, thought him
much altered upon his return from the West Indies. What little he said was confused and rambling.
⁴

Carse had left the
Boreas
with fifty or sixty guineas of accumulated pay in his pockets, heading for his former home in Shadwell. He spent two evenings in a public house babbling about having been robbed on his way from Gravesend. The second of December found him drinking rum and water in the Ship In Distress, a squalid waterfront tavern in Wapping, where he encountered a young prostitute, Mary Mills, who ushered the inebriated sailor to a house she shared with one Sarah Hayes. Carse drank some more, got into bed and shortly rose in a befuddled panic. Apparently convinced a plot to rob him was afoot, he cried, ‘I will! I must! I must!’ and pulling out a large twopenny clasp knife he made for Hayes as she prepared to smoke her pipe in the chimney corner. Carse backed Hayes against the chimney breast and cut her throat, while Mills fled in her shift for a watchman. ‘How I got out, were I to die this moment, I cannot say,’ she recalled. Carse was apprehended with little difficulty and hauled to jail. There was no denying the offence, and the prisoner faced public execution, but he declared that he was ‘not afraid of getting through it’ for he had ‘very good friends’.

He was relying upon Nelson, and told how the captain had addressed the ship’s company the day it was paid off, assuring all that his interest in their welfare would not end with the command. At the trial Nelson testified in the august presence of Mr Justice Heath, and speculated that some publican might have plied Carse with drink to relieve him of his pay. The cooper was not ‘by any means’ a habitual drunkard. ‘Seamen, I know perfectly, when they come home, the landlords will furnish them with raw liquors. I saw myself thirty or forty men from that ship [
Boreas
] that were as mad as if they were at Bedlam, and did not know what they did.’ Nor was Carse violent, but ‘the quietest, soberest man that I ever saw in my life’, if one increasingly melancholic and reserved.

William Garrow, the defence counsel, asked Nelson if Carse was ‘likely to commit a deliberate foul murder?’.

‘I should as soon suspect myself,’ came the reply, ‘because I am hasty; he is not.’

Nelson even posited an explanation of the cooper’s strange behaviour: a brain-damaging fever induced by sunstroke. ‘At the island of Antigua, I think it was, he was struck with the sun, after which time he appeared melancholy. I have been affected with it [myself]. I have
been out of my senses. It hurts the brain.’ He had hospitalised Carse and would have sent him home had the ship itself not been recalled. The cooper was said to have been cured, but Nelson doubted it, and speculated that the fever might have returned under the influence of drink. The testimony was decisive. Carse was convicted but referred for further consideration rather than sentenced to the gallows. He was eventually pardoned, but the discharge was conditional upon his being taken on another ship and in the meantime he went to Newgate prison. There the unfortunate fellow languished until April 1795, but at least he lived.

While Horatio wound up naval affairs, Fanny coughed her way through a cold, wintry Christmas wreathed in London smoke. The couple abandoned the idea of keeping a house in the city, and in January 1788 Nelson bundled his wife onto a coach for Bath. There he established her in relative comfort before proceeding to Plymouth at the invitation of William Henry, who was holding outrageous court in the town. Nelson confessed himself ‘sorry’ that the prince remained bitter towards Schomberg, but still found much to admire. The old
Pegasus
appeared in good order, while William Henry not only remained independent of mind (‘the great folks above now see he will not be a cipher’) but also ‘respected by all. Those who knew him formerly say he is a most altered young man, and those who were prejudiced against him acknowledge their error.’
⁵

On 24 January he was back in Bath to share its fabled recuperative processes with Fanny. In March they were fit enough for an extended foray into the milder West Country, taking the coach to Bristol to stay at Redlands with the Tobins, some of Fanny’s in-laws. The Tobins had made their fortune in Nevis, and for Fanny there was also a delightful reunion with their mutual friends the Pinneys, who had settled in Bristol four years before. Then the couple proceeded to Exmouth by way of Plymouth, with Horatio feeling his strength returning. ‘As usual my health is got up again, after the doctors telling me they could do nothing for me,’ he told Hercules Ross. ‘Dame Nature never has failed curing me.’
⁶

Older concerns still lapped around, however, rolling from the Caribbean on the warm westerly currents. Some appeals were still pending against the sentences condemning American ships he had taken, and suits for damages could not be ruled out. Nelson referred these disturbing correspondents to the Admiralty, trusting the Treasury would defend him, but he took greater pains when letters from Messrs
Wilkinson and Higgins reached him, asking what progress he was making on the issue of the West Indian frauds. By threatening to expose rampant corruption, Wilkinson and Higgins had ruined themselves in the islands, where every trader’s hand was now against them. Even John Burke, the solicitor general of Antigua, in whom Nelson had inadvertently confided, was obstructing the investigation and encouraging creditors to drive the informants to the wall. Receiving nothing from London but a letter from the Navy Board, the whistle-blowers were desperate to know that Nelson was still behind them. New frauds were emerging all the time, they wrote to him in January: ‘The amount is immense beyond even our expectations . . . Would to God we had you now here, with fit powers to complete the good work you have begun!’
⁷

Apart from his interest in rooting out corruption, Nelson felt responsible for Wilkinson and Higgins, for more than any one else he had encouraged them. He felt honour-bound to back them, even if it transpired that people he had respected, such as Dr Young of the hospital in Antigua, were implicated in the frauds. It was obvious from their letters that Wilkinson and Higgins presumed he had approached the Sick and Hurt and Victualling boards, though in fact Nelson’s overtures had been to the Admiralty, Navy, Ordnance and Treasury boards. Perhaps he felt remiss, although he had been far from idle. The Admiralty had waived their interest in favour of the Navy Board, where Middleton was still showing interest, while the Treasury, Nelson thought, had been kicked into action by his visit to Rose. Nevertheless, from the Ordnance Board the captain had heard nothing. They had mislaid the letter he had written from Antigua, and did not take the matter up until Wilkinson and Higgins themselves wrote to them in January 1788.
⁸

Nelson sent his collaborators an inspiring reply. He had not forgotten them, nor lost his determination to expose malpractices. His ‘interest’ was ‘very small’ but he relied upon his known ‘integrity and public spirit’ to gain his points, and believed the boards he had canvassed would respond. Nelson suggested Wilkinson and Higgins write to the Sick and Hurt Board, which managed the naval hospitals and supplied surgeons and medical supplies to the fleet, and promised to follow the matter up personally when he reached London. If appropriate, he would also try to interest the Victualling Board in Wilkinson and Higgins’s proposals.
⁹