Nelson (61 page)

Nelson does not appear to have tried. Probably he expected Hughes’s official replacement to arrive and relieve him of the burden, and perhaps it was as well that he did not intervene for he had shown himself less than an unprejudiced broker.

Nelson was ill and lovesick as well as beleaguered. ‘Poor Nelson is over head and ears in love,’ Prince William wrote to Hood. ‘I frequently laugh at him about it. However, seriously my lord, he is in more need of a nurse than a wife. I do not really think he can live long.’
²⁶

Amidst the seemingly interminable social engagements and the festering problem of Schomberg, Captain Nelson spoke of Fanny to the prince. ‘His Royal Highness often tells me he believes I am married,’ he admitted to his fiancée with more temerity than tact, ‘for he says he never saw a lover so easy, or say so little of the object he has regard for. When I tell him I certainly am not, he says then he is sure I must have a great esteem for you, and that it is not what is vulgarly – no, I won’t make use of than [that] word – commonly called love. He is right, my love is founded on esteem, the only foundation that can make love last.’
²⁷

Nelson was certainly not well. Three years in the West Indies had damaged him as surely as they had ravaged the timbers of the
Boreas
, and one of his doctors was soon advising a return to England. Nelson occasionally alluded to his health in letters, but he had learned to live with discomfort and was not unduly alarmed. Rather, he set his mind on marriage, a voyage home and a more congenial appointment. He had never liked the Leeward Islands and was desperate to see the back of them.

He reached Nevis at the end of January but it was only a flying visit, and the
Boreas
was soon being steered back for Antigua with John Richardson Herbert on board. Perhaps the prospective father-in-law was winding up business affairs in preparation for his retirement to England, but he was no sooner in sight of shore than he went down with a fever. Captain Nelson cheered himself in the knowledge that the next leg of the prince’s progress would incorporate Nevis. Leaving the rotting
Rattler
behind, Nelson sailed from Antigua with the
Boreas
,
Pegasus
and the
Solebay
on 10 February. A few days were wasted on jollification in Montserrat but they reached Nevis on the 15th, where the
Maidstone
was already at anchor. The royal person went ashore two days later to the roar of twenty-one-gun salutes, and enjoyed £800 worth of island hospitality, including such doubtful delights as a hundred-man dinner, horse races and cockfights. At some stage Nelson introduced him to Fanny and she shared a dance with him. In between dancing to the prince’s tune himself and fixing his wedding day with his fiancée and her relations, Nelson was more than fully employed.
²⁸

The prince’s relationship with Fanny got off to a shaky start. Inadvertently he created a minor difficulty visiting George Forbes, a friend he had made from a previous tour of duty in the West Indies. Fanny’s uncle, back from Antigua, was mortified to find his own, and prior, invitation from Forbes suddenly withdrawn. The prince, it seems, wanted a quiet evening alone with an old friend, free of weary formality. Herbert was deeply wounded, and fancied the prince objected to his presence, brooding about how he might have warranted such disfavour. Nelson, too, felt the sting when he heard of it, but soon satisfied himself that no slight had been intended. The prince, it appeared, had been entirely ignorant of Herbert’s invitation, and Forbes alone was responsible for its cancellation. Somehow Nelson smoothed things over, and his wedding plans advanced to the next hurdle.

President Herbert was still infuriatingly reserved about how much money Fanny might expect from him, and when he suggested the betrothed couple should postpone marrying until they were all in England it smacked of prevarication. Whatever happened, Nelson would have no delay. In the end he was sure the president would ‘do everything which is handsome’ and save his niece from poverty, and he was eager to distinguish his wedding with a royal presence. The prince was due to leave the station in May or June.
²⁹

Horatio loaded Fanny’s pianoforte on board the
Boreas
, where a
tuner was set to work, and moved the prince on to St Kitts on 22 February, where Governor William Woodley and other dignitaries paid homage in another exhausting schedule of dinners and balls. William Henry found more entertainment chasing ladies, but in one of his regular epistles to Fanny Nelson described it as an unrelieved ‘fag’:

Today we dine with the merchants. I wish it over. Tomorrow a large party at Nicholas Town, and on Friday [another] in town here. Saturday, sail for Old Road [also St Kitts]. Sunday, dine on Brimstone Hill. Monday, [with] Mr Georges [chief justice of the Leeward Islands] at Sandy Point, and in the evening the Free Masons give a ball. Tuesday,
please God
, we sail.
³⁰

The festivities at St Kitts were performed beneath a punishing sun and debilitated both Nelson and the prince, but on 8 March they limped back to Nevis to recuperate before attempting the final leg of the royal tour to Tortola. During that brief respite Nelson was married.

On Sunday 11 March, on a fair day that opened with rain, the finest of the island trooped seven hundred feet up a hill to gather expectantly within the impressive white walls of Montpelier, President Herbert’s home three miles from Charlestown. The clerk and rector of Figtree church, William Jones, performed the ceremony. Only one of the groom’s relatives was present, Horatio’s cousin, Midshipman Maurice Suckling, but some of his officers were there and the ship’s company of the
Boreas
sent their best wishes in the form of a silver watch. Mustering his undoubted charm, William Henry gave the bride away as he had promised, and signed as a witness. Fanny put her name to the marriage certificate below Nelson’s, and signed ‘Frances Herbert Nisbet’. She kept it forever.
³¹

Nelson also pronounced himself satisfied at the time. He made a will in the presence of Lieutenant Wallis and Master James, naming his new wife his sole beneficiary and his uncle William Suckling the only executor. Captain Locker learned that he had married ‘an amiable woman’ and was ‘morally certain she will continue to make me a happy man for the rest of my days’.
³²

Others were not so sure. The next day that irrepressible Scot, Captain Thomas Pringle, formerly of the
Daedalus
, was on hand to confess to Lieutenant Wallis that the navy had lost its ‘greatest ornament’. He, like many another officer, regarded marriage as a serious impediment to a successful naval career, something that often led men to abandon the sea altogether. Perhaps William Henry agreed, for
much as he took pleasure in Nelson’s joy he too doubted the outcome. ‘He is now in for it,’ the prince wrote to Hood a few days later. ‘I wish him well and happy, and that he may not repent the step he has taken.’
³³

A month later, on 13 April, two gentlemen of St John’s delivered a package to Captain Nelson for the attention of Prince William Henry.

They were back in Antigua. Eight days after the marriage the
Boreas
and
Pegasus
had sailed for Tortola, but the further royal entertainment done they returned to Nevis at the end of the month and anchored in English Harbour by 6 April. Nelson expected to be recalled at any moment, and needed to prepare his frigate for an Atlantic voyage. There was little more he felt able to accomplish in the islands and he was impatient to take his bride home. This phase of his career, he thought, was drawing to its close. Then along came Messrs William Wilkinson and Joseph Blake Higgins.

They were merchants, what people in those days called ‘men of business’, and shrewd and sensible if Nelson was any judge. Both had been associates of William Whitehead, who, with his late partner, Francis Colley, had supplied government establishments throughout the West Indies, including the naval hospital and the dockyard at Antigua. Certainly Wilkinson and Higgins were extraordinarily well versed in public expenditure, and the former had been employed by the Victualling Board and for five years had sat in the Antigua assembly. Now the two had a startling proposal for His Royal Highness. They promised a massive exposure of fraud throughout the islands and the means of ripping it out root and branch. Millions of pounds of public money would be saved.

For those days the figures were stunning. According to Wilkinson and Higgins, £900,000 or so was annually being lost in Antigua, St Lucia and Barbados, while upwards of another million was being siphoned off in Jamaica. Whitehead’s company had been at the core of the frauds. When it had been dissolved, Wilkinson and Higgins had purchased the business, with both its stock and debts, and in due course acquired its books and papers. It was from these that they planned to lay bare the whole corrupt operation. Their proposal to William Henry was a simple but attractive one. If he would prompt a full-scale investigation on the lines they suggested, they would ask
for no additional reward from government. Their sole remuneration would be a percentage of whatever sums they helped to recover, 15 per cent on the first £100,000 and half that amount on any further sums.

Although the prince made encouraging noises, he had no time for the business at present, but Captain Nelson took a different view. His enquiries revealed that the remarkable proposal followed a history of ill will between Whitehead and Wilkinson and Higgins. Whitehead was filing a suit, and Wilkinson and Higgins were threatening to retaliate by exposing Whitehead. According to John Burke, the solicitor general of Antigua, whom Nelson consulted, Wilkinson and Higgins had even demanded ‘hush money’ from dockyard officials implicated in the frauds. Nevertheless, in Nelson’s opinion all of that merely worked to the government’s advantage. If an opportunity to detect corruption had appeared as a result of a falling out, it ought to be seized with enthusiasm. From his own experiences, Nelson was sure that dishonesty and peculation were rife in the islands, and now a way of bringing the perpetrators to justice had come into his hands.
³⁴

Wilkinson and Higgins drove one charge home with the skill of a Nantucket harpooner. They told William Henry that Whitehead had been the principal prize agent during the last war and that thousands of pounds of prize money due to British sailors remained unpaid. If nothing else, the thought of honest hard-working tars being swindled by shore-bound sharks was guaranteed to elicit Nelson’s interest.
³⁵

The enforcement of the navigation laws had been one arm of Nelson’s purification campaign, and despite preoccupations with the prince, his orders to the squadron were still to make illegal traders a prime concern. Collingwood of the
Rattler
had been his busiest weapon. The previous September, Collingwood had taken the
Fanny
brig of North Carolina and the
Maria
ship at Grenada, and in January 1787 he was at Barbados taking possession of the
Dolphin
schooner. The vice-admiralty courts at Grenada and Barbados were both unreconstructed, and history repeated itself. Collingwood was told he had no authority to seize, and in both places he was asked to pay advance fees. The attorney general in Barbados, Brandford, had handled Nelson warily, but his insistence on being paid to press the suit of the
Dolphin
forced Collingwood to release her. In February, Nelson renewed his campaign, this time pouring a fire upon the corrupt prize courts.
³⁶

When Wilkinson and Higgins came forward with their charges they found a reforming but frustrated naval captain ready to attack on new
fronts. He rode to St John’s a few times to interview the two merchants, fired demands for documents to the dockyard and greedily pored over the sample materials his informants produced. Backed by pages of item-by-item accounts, with bundles of receipts and vouchers, their indictment appeared truly formidable.
³⁷

What Wilkinson and Higgins termed ‘the English Harbour plunder’ originated, they said, with three men – Whitehead, Peter Alsop, the ordnance storekeeper at the dockyard, and James Young, the surgeon at the naval hospital. After 1779, when Anthony Munton became naval storekeeper and clerk of the cheque at English Harbour, the devious trio soon ‘initiated [him] into the mysteries of defrauding government’. As examples of the frauds, Wilkinson and Higgins presented Nelson with irrefutable evidence of two types of scam. In one, false musters were concocted for the hospital and certified by Young, so that inflated sums for the subsistence of the sick could be extracted from government. Accounts for one quarter in 1782 showed that Young’s share of the proceeds from the phantom patients amounted to £544.
³⁸

The second type of fraud involved charging government for more than supplies and services had actually cost, and pocketing the difference. Thus, during one quarter of 1781 the government paid £6,878 for articles of ordnance when the real cost, including ‘above twelve per cent’ commission for Whitehead as agent, amounted to only £5,528. The difference was split fifty-fifty between Whitehead and Alsop. Similarly, in a three-month period of 1782, Anthony Munton paid £12,357 for items that should have cost a total of £9,190. In this instance Whitehead and Munton divided the excess profits with the master shipwright and the master attendant of the dockyard. According to Wilkinson and Higgins, frauds of a like nature permeated the whole service, from the hire of black labour to the use of watering vessels.
³⁹

Nelson noted that there was no effective system for ensuring that goods and services were supplied to government at competitive prices. Contractors were supposed to certify the current market prices of wares on vouchers, but they were suffered to set down the highest rather than the going rate. He discovered that Munton even appeared to be purchasing government supplies from himself, under the fictitious name of ‘Cornelius Cole’.
⁴⁰