Nelson (40 page)

Horatio brought the thirty-three occupants of the launch aboard his ship and found that they included three officers of the French army. He entertained his prisoners in some style for several days before discharging them ashore, allowing the officers one of his captured schooners, and placing most of the other guests on a Dutch sloop arrested on 2 April. The brief interlude seems to have entertained all parties. Nelson relished the terror Hood’s name seemed to inspire, while one of the prisoners was so taken with the English captain that the following year he invited him to his home in Paris. What was more, it was only then that Nelson realised he had been holding no less a personage than Maximilian Joseph, Comte de Deux Ponts, then a French general travelling incognito but later to become the King of Bavaria.

After the launch Nelson took the
Alexandrine
, a French brig on its way from Nantes to Puerto Cabello. Sending the ship to Jamaica, he put the prisoners aboard a Spanish schooner seized the following day and ordered a course back to Port Royal. Since peace was imminent (the treaty had been signed in Paris and ratified in England) it was doubtful that the prizes would be condemned, and the
Albemarle
was leaking badly. But at least Nelson had ended his war on an active note.
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Admiral Hood was not in the best of moods. The order to suspend hostilities had reached Jamaica on 29 March and put an end to his
plans to destroy Vaudreuil’s fleet. The war was over, and the thirteen American colonies had won their independence, though the former French colonies in Canada remained with the British crown. Overall France, Spain and Holland, which had opportunely entered the war, gained little, more or less satisfying themselves with the restoration of the old
status quo
.

Nelson, too, wrung little satisfaction from his predicament. He had been ordered home with the next convoy and spent most of April in port. At the root of his troubles was insecurity, a fear of slipping from the notice of Hood. He wrote to the admiral promising to call and pay his respects when they were both in England, and thanking him for ‘the many favours’ bestowed. But he had one last service to perform. On the 26th he was at sea again with orders to take dispatches to St Augustine in Florida before sailing to Spithead. First, however, he was bound for Havana, where the Spanish governor, Don Luis de Unzaga, was celebrating the peace by opening the city to Prince William Henry. Hood wanted Nelson to chaperone the royal personage.
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The
Albemarle
reached Havana on 9 May, in time to join the
Diamond
as part of the prince’s retinue. Twenty-one British guns proclaimed William Henry’s appearance, and amid considerable pomp the prince and his officers went ashore. His Royal Highness was no easy burden, and Hood had swamped him with attendants, including Nelson and Captain William Merrick, two of the admiral’s favourites.
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Despite the prince’s lewd conversation, coarseness, boisterous bullying and compulsive interest in women, Nelson managed to like him. In Jamaica William Henry had been much feted, as shallow, obsequious sycophants swept aside personal shortcomings and jostled for royal attention. Nelson was quieter and more discreet, but no less aware of the advantages that might accrue from the prince’s friendship. He was also a genuine ‘Church and King’ man and flattered that William Henry obviously enjoyed his company. More commendably, Nelson actually detected admirable traits beneath the prince’s bluster. Here, for example, was a member of the royal family who intended to learn his trade and work his passage. He was dedicated to the service and showed little truck with the appointment of unqualified favourites. ‘He is a seaman, which you could hardly suppose,’ Nelson told Locker, and ‘says he is determined every person shall serve his time before they shall be provided for, as he is obliged to serve his.’ These were sentiments hardly to be expected from a young man in William Henry’s position, and certainly foundations for growth.
⁵⁸

But first, to see that William Henry didn’t disgrace himself. There were two days of nonsense – troop reviews, tours of the dockyard and castle, and one marathon evening embracing the opera, supper at the governor’s house, and a late-night ball with what even Hood heard contained a ‘brilliant show of ladies’. The particular Spanish beauty who attracted the prince was sixteen-year-old Donna Maria Solano, one of two daughters of Admiral Don Solano, with whom the visitors were lodged. According to the prince’s earliest biographer, whose sources seem to have been generally reliable, it was Nelson who noticed the jealousies being aroused by the drooling William Henry, and who ushered him out of harm’s way. Whatever, decorum was preserved, and the prince was treated to a magnificent display when he left on the morning of 11 May. As the Spanish launches towed the
Albemarle
out of harbour, and the prince followed in the first of a procession of naval barges heading seawards to the rumble of another furious salute from the frigate, Nelson may have sighed with relief. One day the prince would cross his path again.
⁵⁹

In the meantime, Nelson sailed for St Augustine, sent a boat ashore with the dispatches, and sailed for home on 19 May. The
Albemarle
reached Spithead on 25 June and anchored in Portsmouth harbour the following day. Nelson wrote first of all to Captain Locker, for whom he had brought a present of rum. ‘My dear friend,’ said he, ‘after all my tossing about into various climes, here at last am I arrived, safe and sound.’
⁶⁰

A wonderful man, he loved a woman well

Thomas Hardy,
The Dynasts

N
ELSON
found a room at no. 3 Salisbury Street, a small thoroughfare linking the River Thames with the Strand. It was a convenient situation. Walking along it southwards, between the large, plain but impressive three- and four-storey houses, Nelson could pass through an arch and down a flight of steps to reach wharves where boatmen plied a shuttle service here and there; in the opposite direction lay the city itself, beneath the imposing dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Nelson lodged in the third house from the Strand on the northeastern side of the street, and paid rent over a six-month period to one Thomas Hudson. He could not have known it, but this temporary home was little more than a stone’s throw from the site upon which his most famous statue would one day gaze imperiously from its column above the capital.
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After such a prolonged absence visits were the order of the day. On 11 July, Lord Hood took him to St James’s Palace and introduced him to an ‘attentive’ sovereign, while another invitation summoned him to Windsor, where Prince William Henry wished to see him before leaving for a sojourn on the Continent. Horatio knew that royal connections could do his interest no harm, but he had little real talent for sycophancy. The day he met the king he was glad to take refuge in the quarters of the Davison brothers, at the Chapel Stair Case in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, off Chancery Lane. Alexander was at home, and after dinner Nelson threw off his walking coat, accepted the dressing gown
proffered by his host and spent a pleasant evening in conversation, talking about Mary Simpson and Quebec.
²

Horatio believed he was making necessary progress socially, but the summer heat and stench of London increased the attraction of trips out of town. Pringle had asked him to Edinburgh, and of course there was Burnham Thorpe. Predictably, his peregrinations were delayed by an illness that confined him to his room for fourteen wretched July days, an ‘invalid’ but under the watchful eye of ‘an exceeding good surgeon’ who spoke confidently about ‘a perfect cure’. Nelson’s sentence was relieved by caring visitors, including his Uncle William, hotfoot from Kentish Town and a gout-afflicted wife; his brother Maurice; his sister Susanna, with her husband Thomas Bolton, another sister, and gifts of a hare and brace of game birds; and a messenger Captain Locker had sent from his home at Malling near Maidstone.
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A few official matters also temporarily tied him to the capital. On 3 July a commissioner had boarded the
Albemarle
to pay off the men and close the command, but he still felt himself their protector. They had made a good company and most of the officers, as well as a high proportion of the ratings, had stayed with him throughout his command. There had been problems, of course. During his two years with the ship Nelson had posted forty-seven men as ‘run’, including his own cook (William Halloway), a corporal of marines and Alexander St Clair, a midshipman who decamped at Yarmouth on Christmas Day 1781. The high number of deserters and would-be deserters was substantially due to the amount of time the
Albemarle
was penned in port by bad weather. Ports provided many opportunities to desert, and were always a temptation to disgruntled seamen. On 13 November 1781, for example, seven men had jumped in a cutter at Elsinore and pulled strenuously for the shore. The long weeks in Portsmouth allowed another thirteen to ‘run’ early the following year, and when Nelson reached Capelin Bay in Canada in June two men defected in a launch, another trio bolted in the cutter, and two, not to be outdone, leaped overboard to swim ashore.

The
Albemarle
had also had its share of floggings. There had been about fifty of them, involving some 14 per cent of the men who served on the frigate at one time or another during Nelson’s command. Given the two-year period it was probably considered fair discipline. The severest punishment Nelson inflicted, thirty-six lashes, was reserved for deserters or exceptionally mutinous seamen such as Evan Griffiths,
though a few men received lighter sentences more than once. These recidivists included George Marr, a thief, John Cooper, a disobedient seaman who attempted to desert, and a purser’s steward named Robert Bostock, who got drunk too often. As usual, Nelson attempted to discriminate between degrees of guilt. Thus Charles O’Neal and John Hughes were flogged for theft one February, but Hughes took twice as many strokes of the cat as O’Neal.
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In general, however, Nelson won the respect of most of the men, and characterised them with almost paternal affection as ‘my good fellows’. Indeed, the whole crew told him that if he got another ship they would ‘enter for her immediately’. Most had served him well, and though the voyage was over, still expected him to defend them in the world of officers and gentlemen beyond their ken. And he tried to fulfil those expectations, troubling the Admiralty with requests for an early payment of all wages owed his men for services during the war. Horatio particularly cursed his inability to do much for Trail, the master, and Acting Lieutenant Bromwich. ‘If I had interest with the comptroller,’ he said of the former, ‘I would wish to get him to be superintendent of some of the ships in ordinary. He is the best master I ever saw since I went to sea.’ Bromwich was also ‘an attentive good officer’ and after returning with the
Albemarle
passed his examination for lieutenant on 7 August. But Nelson suspected that talent would not be enough, and that Bromwich’s unfortunate loss of sea time as an acting lieutenant in 1781 would militate against his commission being confirmed. He lobbied the Admiralty. ‘Depend upon it, my Lord,’ he addressed the first lord, ‘I should not have interested myself so much about this gentleman did I not know him to be a brave and good officer, having been with me for several years.’ Unfortunately, it was to no avail. Nelson’s request was endorsed, ‘without remedy with others under similar embarrassments’, and Bromwich had to wait more than ten years for his commission.
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Nelson’s own cause progressed unevenly. His pay as captain of the
Albemarle
did not reach Paynter, his prize agent and banker, till the last day of the year, and like most unemployed officers on half-pay he was short of money. Eventually he was driven to making an unsuccessful application for full pay covering the period between his quitting the
Janus
and arriving in England on the
Lion
. As for prize money, he ruefully concluded that his campaigns had not enriched him. ‘I have closed the war without a fortune,’ he told Hercules Ross, ‘but I trust (and from the attention that has been paid to me believe) that there
is not a speck in my character. True honour, I hope, predominates in my mind far above riches.’
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Recovering his health late in July, Horatio spent two days with his uncle in Kentish Town, tried and failed to visit Ross, who divided his time between London and Scotland (‘the innumerable favours I have received from you, be assured, I shall never forget’, Nelson wrote to him), and in late August joined his brother Maurice on the Lynn diligence heading for Norfolk. His father was in Bath, attended by Ann, while Susanna and her husband had transferred their business to Ostend. With them was Horatio’s brother, Edmund, who was working for the Boltons. Yet something of a family reunion still took place, and Horatio grounded himself more thoroughly in family affairs. William was about to receive the rectory of Little Brandon from a relative, John Berney, and reckoned it worth £150 a year, and other brothers and sisters were spending the legacies left them by Captain Suckling. Fifteen-year-old Katy was spared an apprenticeship on account of her money, while Suckling was squandering his, along with sums incautiously advanced by William, in running a general store at Witton. Suckling was difficult to blame, Horatio thought. He was amiable and contented, and good company, but far too interested in greyhounds and coursing to make much of himself.
⁷

Early in October Horatio was back in London, but not looking for a ship. He had decided that peace offered a rare opportunity to visit Britain’s nearest neighbour and greatest rival, and to master the French language. Many times in the West Indies he had felt his want of French, even in the hailing of prizes and interrogation of prisoners. French, thought Nelson, was an essential mark of the good naval officer, and it was high time he learned it. Lille might be a good place. Accordingly, on 8 October he asked the Admiralty for six months’ leave.
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