Nelson (49 page)

The sense of impending loss did not blind Nelson to the other gossip on the Leeward Islands station.

Come [he told William] I must carry you to our love scenes. Captain Sandys has asked Miss Eliot –
refused
. Captain Sterling [Stirling] was attentive to Miss Elizabeth Eliot, but never having asked the question, Captain Berkeley is, I hear, to be the happy man. Captain Kelly is attached to a lady at Nevis, so he says. I don’t much think it. He is not steady enough for that passion to hold long. All the Eliot family spent their Christmas at Constitution Hill – came up in
Latona
. The
Boreas
, you guessed right, [was] at English Harbour. Rosy [Hughes] has had no offers. I fancy she seems hurt at it. Poor girl! You should have offered; I have not gallantry enough. A niece of Governor Parry’s [of Barbados] is come out. She goes to Nevis in the
Boreas
. They trust any young lady with me, being an old-fashioned fellow.
⁵⁶

Mary Moutray looked forward to England but promised to write to Nelson and Collingwood, and started packing the family possessions. Nelson sailed north again towards her, and on 26 February anchored in English Harbour for a precious thirteen days. Collingwood joined them on 7 March for a final rendezvous, and three days later the
Boreas
slipped out of harbour after a difficult parting. ‘My sweet amiable friend sails the 20th for England,’ wrote her captain. ‘I took my leave of her with a heavy heart three days ago. What a
treasure
of a woman. God bless her.’
⁵⁷

Collingwood remained about the island for a dozen more days and saw Mary again. When she gave him a purse, which she had made as a ‘trifle’ keepsake, the stern sea captain was moved to verse:

Your net shall be my care, my dear,

For length of time to come,

While I am faint and scorching here,

And you rejoice at home.

To you belongs the wondrous art

To shed around your pleasure;

New worth to best of things impart,

And make of trifles – treasure!
⁵⁸

For some time Nelson’s own heartaches remained, mixing promiscuously with other troubles. He called at Dominica on Locker’s business, but found the house Admiral Parry had bequeathed him levelled and the soil round about unprofitable, and the problem of the navigation laws refused to go away. With Mary gone, everything irritated him. The people in the islands were ‘a sad set’, he concluded. ‘Yesterday, being St Patrick’s day, the Irish colours with thirteen stripes in them was hoisted all over the town [St Kitts]. I was engaged to dine with the President, but sent an excuse, as he suffered those colours to fly. I mention it only to show the principle of these vagabonds.’
⁵⁹

Returning to English Harbour was the hardest of all. At seven in the morning of 26 April the ship anchored below Windsor once again. Sometime during the day, in moderate weather punctuated by an occasional stiff breeze, he climbed the hill for the last time and reflected mournfully about the empty house. It was silent in the sunlight, but in Horatio’s mind still echoed with the ghostly laughter of the woman he had loved and lost. ‘This country appears now intolerable, my dear friend being absent,’ he told William. ‘It is barren indeed. Not all the Rosys can give a spark of joy to me. English Harbour I hate the sight of, and Windsor I detest. I went once up the hill to look at the spot where I spent more happy days than in any one spot in the world. Even the trees drooped their heads, and the tamarind tree died. All was melancholy. The road is covered with thistles. Let them grow. I shall never pull one of them up. By this time I hope she is safe in old England. Heaven’s choicest blessing[s] go with her. We go on here but sadly.’
⁶⁰

He consoled himself by anticipating her letters, anxious at the time that passed without them. Actually, Mary was beset with troubles of her own. In June 1785 the Moutrays went to Bath, where John hoped to recover his health. He applied for light work with the Navy Board or in one of the outposts, but did not get well, and he still worried
about the relationship between his wife and the two captains across the Atlantic. When Mary wrote to them, he (or someone) broke the wafers sealing both letters before they were posted. ‘They are welcome to read mine,’ Nelson observed to Collingwood. ‘It was all goodness, like the dear writer.’
⁶¹

John Moutray died at Bath on 22 November. By the terms of her marriage settlement, signed at Berwick two days before her wedding, Mary had a pension of £150 per annum on Roxobie and four other properties in Scotland, willed by her husband to their children. She also inherited the use of furniture, plate and linen for the period of her life. But with two youngsters to bring up, the future looked bleak, and she petitioned the Admiralty for an allowance. It was refused, and Mary’s second letter to Horatio was ‘full of affliction and woe’ and talked about retiring to France, where the cost of living was cheaper. ‘What has this poor dear soul undergone in one twelve months,’ Nelson sighed. ‘Lost father, mother, husband and part of her fortune, and left with two children.’
⁶²

Mary was supported by a generally positive outlook, however, and lived a long life. Her son James entered the navy, won the praise of Hood and Nelson, and died of a fever at the age of twenty-one. In October 1805 the surviving heir, his sister Catherine, sold the Scottish properties to William and John Adam (of the famous architect family) for about £9,000. Kate, as everyone called her, then married Thomas de Lacey, the archdeacon of Meath, in Sussex in 1806, although when she died some ten years later she appears to have been childless. Mary outlived them all. Her last decades were spent in Ireland, where she died in her ninety-first year in 1841.
⁶³

It is surprising that Mary, who was widowed in her mid-thirties, never remarried, and we are left to ponder what might have happened if Commissioner Moutray had died nine months earlier, in Antigua rather than Bath. The impression Mary had made on Nelson and Collingwood endured. A decade later Nelson leaped to her defence over ‘a scandalous report’, protesting that no more ‘amiable woman or a better character exists on earth’. But his last letter to ‘my dear Mrs Moutray’, written in 1803, was a polite but terse nine-line affair. She had approached him in support of Lieutenant Edmund Wallis of the
Victory
, but while he agreed to be useful he squashed immediate prospects of promotion. His reply, neither offering nor soliciting personal news, suggests that the flame kindled in English Harbour had at last been extinguished.
⁶⁴

Not so with Cuthbert Collingwood, who corresponded warmly with Mary until his death in 1808. She asked for his portrait and keep-sakes; he, though happily married with a family of his own, forever concerned himself in her affairs. Cruising off Toulon shortly before his death the ageing admiral wrote to her, ‘I wish you had one of those fairy telescopes that can look into the hearts and souls of people a thousand leagues off. Then might you see how much you possess my mind, and how sincere an interest I take in whatever relates to your happiness, and that of your dear Kate.’
⁶⁵

One finds it impossible to disagree with writer Tom Pocock who voiced the opinion that if Mary had lost her husband in Antigua she might have married one of her naval admirers, but that person would probably have been Cuthbert Collingwood.

‘He was a thorn in our flesh,’ came the reply –

‘The most bird-witted, unaccountable,

Odd little runt that ever I did spy.’

Robert Graves,
1805

M
AJOR
General Sir Thomas Shirley, captain general and governor-in-chief of His Majesty’s Leeward Caribee Islands, was fifty-six and at the stage of life when an honourable and rewarding retirement looked attractive.

He had come to the islands from England, but colonial service was in his blood. Boston born, he was the son of Lieutenant General William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts and commander-in-chief in North America at the outbreak of the Seven Years War. Both Thomas’s older brothers had died defending Britain’s North American empire, one with Braddock’s ill-fated army, slaughtered by Indians and French on the Monongahela River in 1755, the other during a march from Oswego. Sir Thomas himself had been in the army since 1745, fought at Louisbourg, Minorca and Belle Isle, and commanded a regiment in Portugal. He had served as lieutenant governor of Dominica.

Since May 1781 Shirley had governed the Leeward Islands, and to him had fallen the task of protecting Antigua, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis during the last dangerous years of the American war. In February 1782 he had made a creditable though not uncriticised defence of Brimstone Hill against superior and ultimately overpowering French
forces invading St Kitts. Both Nevis and St Kitts had fallen, but they were restored to Britain by the Peace of Paris, and Shirley resumed his stewardship from within the impressive walls of Clarke’s Hill, his residence in St John’s. Sir Thomas had enemies but he was widely respected in the islands, where he was known to be ‘a mild and humane governor’, but he was hoping to write a handsome finale to his full career. His wife had been dead some years, but he had a young son, William Warden, and before he withdrew to England he wanted to ennoble his posterity by petitioning the crown for the restoration of a family baronetcy extinct since 1705.
¹

Retirement would bring relief, for it had not taken Shirley long to discover that peace was sometimes little less turbulent than war. He was an astute man. In one of his earliest letters as governor, for example, he had drawn attention to the ecological consequences of deforestation, which he realised exposed and dehumidified the soil – a remarkably modern view. Unlike Horatio Nelson, the governor respected the islanders, and knew them to be fundamentally loyal to the crown. ‘I have always met with a very cheerful concurrence on the part of this island to the requisitions I have occasionally made to them for the good of His Majesty’s service and the protection of the colony,’ he wrote. The local press was squarely loyal in sentiment, and fussed over royalty, and during the war the islanders had invested large sums in defence. Antigua alone had spent £88,000. Though their merchants had occasionally indulged in treasonable trade with foreigners, their motives had been commercial rather than political. After all, they needed Britain. Unlike the mainland American colonies, which were relatively secure from traditional European enemies after the conquest of New France, the islands were vulnerable to Spanish and French forces. They looked to the British crown for protection.
²

But loyalty, Shirley knew, was not written in stone. If the rebellion in America had taught him anything it was that the empire could only thrive with the consent of the governed, and that was what was beginning to worry him about the navigation laws. Some of the island traders were doing well. With a monopoly of the British sugar market their exports were picking up nicely, though the rum trade, which depended more upon American outlets, was faltering. But there was a widespread perception that the crown’s strict enforcement of the navigation laws spelled ruin.
³

The truth was that Antigua was still impoverished. The war had disrupted trade, and forced the colonists to spend heavily on
fortifications, improvements to the ports and the maintenance of extraordinary numbers of British troops. The embarrassments had coincided with a run of wretched harvests that year after year returned less than cost. In 1779–80 the distress was such that the crown granted a loan of £20,000, but though that money had to be repaid, the economy got no stronger. The sugar harvest of 1783 was only a tenth of what it had once been, and Antigua’s debt to Britain stood at £38,000. In July the assembly begged the king to consider their many disbursements and seven years of drought,

the severity of which cannot be more justly described than by a detail of the disappointments and misery it has produced. Our crops have been destroyed, our labours and industry frustrated, our debts accumulated by a deprivation of the only means to reduce them. Families, falling from ease and affluence into penury and want, have been obliged to abandon the estates of their ancestors. Our lands, which when blessed with rains were fruitful and abounding, are become sterile, and debarred thereby of our usual resources, our expences in the cultivation of our plantations have continually increased. Such has been, and such still is, our situation, and this too at a time when the calls upon us for the defence of our country, and for the accommodation of your Majesty’s garrison, required more than usual supplies. And at this unfortunate period, when your Majesty’s faithful subjects thought the measure of their woes complete, they saw their metropolis [St John’s] a second time in flames, and the most valuable parts of it, which had before escaped a similar conflagration, were now laid in ashes.
⁴

Nor were these merely the words of paranoid planters. ‘This country is poor, most of the landholders being impoverished from a series of bad crops previous to the last three years,’ reported one visitor. ‘In fact the greater part of the estates in this island are in trust or under mortgage to the merchants of London, Liverpool and Bristol.’
⁵

Similar problems beset most of the other British West Indian islands, and just when the fractured American trade was beginning to return and relieve their battered economies, the issue of the navigation laws swept ominously in from the sea. Everywhere people worried that the exclusion of essential American supplies would dry up provisions, fuel inflation and blight recovery. There were riots in Barbados and St Kitts, noisy complaints in the press, inflammatory handbills and an increasing number of anti-British voices in the local assemblies. Petitions were prepared in the islands while in England in 1785 the
Society of West India Merchants and Planters lobbied Parliament for a committee of enquiry. Antigua begged the crown to rescind its debt, and in 1783 petitioned that ‘foreign bottoms’ be allowed to deliver provisions at moments of crisis.
⁶