Nelson (64 page)

Parker lost no time in throwing more mud on Captain Nelson. He was furious that Nelson had sheered two ships from his squadron. Presuming that Nelson had known of his imminent arrival, Parker erroneously concluded that the
Rattler
and the
Pegasus
had been sent to Jamaica in a deliberate effort to keep them out of his hands. In particular he resented losing the opportunity to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Commander Collingwood, an important piece of patronage. Parker told Howe that Nelson had sent the
Pegasus
and
Rattler
to Jamaica purely to reward his own followers, either through the prince’s influence with Gardner or by the
Rattler
sailing direct for England. Unjustified as these charges were, Nelson would certainly have wanted the best for Wallis, and found his next task a disagreeable one to perform. When he left Antigua on the morning of 4 June, the welcome orders to sail for England in his pocket, he carried one of the new commander-in-chief’s protégés on board as a passenger. Lieutenant John Watheston, Parker wrote to the Admiralty, should be promoted commander of the
Rattler
in Wallis’s stead.
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Weary, Captain Nelson wanted only to leave. He felt dreadfully ill, and if he was fit for a ship at all he wanted it to be in the British home fleet. He called at Nevis to wish his wife and the Herberts an anxious farewell, and sailed for England from St Eustatius on 7 June. Inside the hold of the
Boreas
were presents for friends, including a sixty-gallon cask of rum for Locker, but one puncheon of spirit served an altogether more macabre purpose. It was there to receive the body of the captain if he should die on the voyage.
⁵⁹

The frigate reached Spithead on 4 July 1787 and Captain Nelson was still alive. Somewhere behind President Herbert and Fanny followed in a merchantman named the
Roehampton
.

Nelson arrived home amid talk of war. The French were building a powerful naval base at Cherbourg, and by a 1785 treaty with the Dutch had increased their influence across the Narrow Seas. In Parliament the opposition howled at Pitt for sitting a silent spectator to the growing strength of the arch enemy across the Channel.

Fanning the excitement was internal unrest in the Dutch United Provinces, where the
stadtholder
, William V, was defending his power against a reforming but fragile alliance of aristocratic families and
populist radicals. The French used their enhanced sway in the United Netherlands to encourage the ‘patriots’, so the harassed
stadtholder
turned to Prussia and Britain for help, and Prussian soldiers were soon marching across the Dutch frontier to support William and to clear the rebels out. When Horatio Nelson came home the Dutch factions were on the brink of crossing swords, and there was a possibility of the Royal Navy entering the fray.

As it happened, British arms were not needed. The French declined to intervene, the Prussians gained control of Amsterdam and the triumphant
stadtholder
, the head of the Dutch republic, was soon unscrambling the Dutch treaty with France and forming new agreements with Britain and Prussia. Yet for the brief period that the affair hung in the balance, Nelson was itching to see action, battered as he was. Though English rain and cold greeted him on his return from the tropics, adding a cold and a slight fever to other afflictions, his health was improving and he felt capable of handling another command.

Refreshed to be home and pleased to meet such old friends as Pole and Kingsmill, Nelson was still as sick in spirits as body. He believed that his conduct had been entirely conscientious and self-sacrificing. He had championed the navigation laws in a campaign praised by the government, and defended the public purse from profligacy and corruption in the dockyards, surely no unwelcome act to a government striving might and main to reduce the burden of national debt left by the late war. But instead of accolades he received a series of stinging rebukes.

During much of July and August he was kept busy in Portsmouth. Nelson was one of a twelve-captain court occasionally convened on the
Pegase
, but no longer the presiding officer. Four cases of desertion were proved and the offenders flogged around the fleet.
⁶⁰

The fire of Nelson’s naval masters soon became unmistakable. Hood, whom he looked upon as his patron, flew his flag from the
Triumph
at Portsmouth, and seemed less enthusiastic about seeing him again than Nelson expected. And at the end of August, when the captain returned to Kentish Town and visited the Admiralty, he found the first lord even more saturnine and impenetrable than usual. Nelson raised the matter of the dockyard abuses Wilkinson and Higgins stood ready to expose, and expressed a wish to command a ship of the line, but Howe was interested in retrenchment and had set himself against any but necessary promotions.

The letters from the Admiralty were critical. Throughout July and August he was justifying one matter after another – the
Pegasus
muster book, the Schomberg affair, the sending of the
Pegasus
and the
Rattler
to Jamaica, the pardon given Able Seaman Clark, the commissions of Church and Wallis, and the appointment of a boatswain, Joseph King, to be an assistant to the sailmaker at English Harbour. The Admiralty even threatened to cut the expenses that the redeployment of the
Rattler
had caused them out of Nelson’s pay.

He realised that those few months with William Henry had done him considerable harm, and though he continued to court the prince’s friendship he found it easier to shrug off the prince’s baleful influence once back in England. For the first time he counselled the temperamental prince in the spirit of conciliation. With overdue words that mirrored Nelson’s own true instincts for leadership, he urged William Henry to forgive Schomberg and save a useful naval career. It was good that a court martial had been avoided, he wrote to the prince. It would ‘ever’ have ‘hurt’ Schomberg:

Resentment I know your Royal Highness never had or I am sure ever will bear anyone. It is a passion incompatible with the character of a man of honour. Schomberg was too hasty certainly in writing his letter, but now you are parted, pardon me my prince, when I presume to recommend that Schomberg may stand in your royal favour as if he had never sailed with you, and that at some future day you will serve him. There only wants this to place your character in the highest point of view. None of us are without failings. Schomberg’s was being rather too hasty, but that, put in competition with his being a good officer, will not, I am bold to say, be taken in the scale against him.
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It was vintage Nelson, and the prince’s reply in December was likewise true to form. ‘I must confess myself surprised that you should recommend him after what I have so often said, and in what we do both agree: namely, the never forgiving an officer for disrespect. Rest assured, I never shall, and particularly Schomberg.’ As for other matters, they went happily for William Henry. ‘In my own ship I go on pretty well,’ he chirped. ‘I have had two courts-martial, one on the master-at-arms, who was broke and received 100 lashes, and the other on a seaman who received 50 lashes on board his own ship. [Lieutenant] Church is confined. With him I have had some unpleasant work, and I am afraid he is of a sulky disposition.’
⁶²

Nelson’s attempt to reform the prince had been fiercely rebuffed, and though William Henry wrote of his willingness to take ‘young Andrews’ or another of Horatio’s protégés aboard his ship, there were doubts about the extent and utility of the royal favour. When the Reverend William Nelson began scavenging for ‘interest’, Horatio told him he had no sway with the prince at all.
⁶³

But of all the shots fired at him that summer and autumn, few hurt Nelson more than the slights to his officers. As his efforts on their behalf failed Nelson was upset both on their account and his own, for his standing as a captain depended upon his ability to protect and promote followers. He failed to persuade the Navy Board to give William Cutts a warrant as a sailmaker, and more strenuous efforts to assist Joseph King, who had fallen upon difficult times, likewise foundered. King, a native of Lisbon, had been ‘one of the best’ boatswains Nelson had seen, fit no doubt to stand beside the fugitive Scotland, but sunstroke and other afflictions had temporarily disabled him. Nelson had found him indoor work in the Antigua dockyard, but the appointment of such workers was primarily a matter for dockyard officers, not naval captains, and Nelson’s good intentions provoked an outcry. It would be many years before Horatio could offer King more secure and suitable employment.
⁶⁴

Lieutenant Wallis worried Nelson even more. He had brought the
Rattler
into Spithead only eighteen days after the arrival of the
Boreas
, having executed Nelson’s orders to the letter, and it was heartbreaking to tell him that Parker was overturning his appointment as acting commander. Nelson urged the Admiralty to confirm the promotions of Wallis and Church, believing that he had acted within the powers left him by Hughes and that any failure to regularise the appointments would reflect adversely upon his conduct. Through William Henry he even got the Prince of Wales interested in the officers’ plight. But Howe was not listening. Church’s commission as lieutenant was regularised, probably to avoid offending William Henry, but Wallis was not promoted. He eventually reached the rank of commander six years later, in January 1794.
⁶⁵

Nelson was mortified. It seemed that he used his initiative only to be slapped down, and the Admiralty wanted mere dog-like servitude. On 18 July he resentfully told the board ‘that in future no consideration will ever induce me to deviate in the smallest degree from my orders’. Whether their lordships detected the hidden barb in this submission was questionable.
⁶⁶

Other business helped to occupy his mind when he visited London at the end of August, much of it private. Fanny and her uncle had reached England, and Herbert moved into a fashionable house at 5 Cavendish Square, sporting a first-floor balcony and a front door flanked by ornamental pillars. Nelson probably used it during visits, and Fanny temporarily lived there while her husband cast around for something more permanent.

Nelson had also to get the many presents he had brought home off his hands. The hold of the
Boreas
contained gifts for Locker, Kingsmill, Lord Walpole and the like, but the customs duties imposed by Pitt’s money-raking government outmatched the captain’s purse. He thus unashamedly resorted to smuggling, one of the brisker trades of the day. Locker was then in Kensington preparing to take charge of the impress service in Exeter. His sixty-gallon cask of rum and half a hogshead of Madeira, Nelson informed him, would be shipped through the London customs house, but the tamarinds and noyau would have to be ‘smuggled, for [the] duty . . . is so enormous that no person can afford the expense’. Friends were useful for such services, and later in the year Nelson was shifting some of his imports to the
Scipio
guard ship, under his old commander Captain Lutwidge.
⁶⁷

Of the business outstanding from the Leeward Islands the professional issue that most engaged him after his return to England was that of dockyard abuses. He felt honour bound to pursue the charges made by Messrs Wilkinson and Higgins, charges he resolutely believed to be well-founded. Of several bodies originally approached by Nelson the most interested appeared to be the Navy Board, at the head of which sat the reforming Sir Charles Middleton. When interviewed by Middleton in London, Nelson impressed. Sir Charles asked the captain to write to Wilkinson and Higgins and assure them that matters could safely be put in the board’s hands, and it was the comptroller who gave the two merchants their first official response by addressing them himself on 14 November. Middleton also loaned Nelson books containing all the instructions the board had sent to the dockyards. From these Nelson deduced that the regulations were indeed being widely flouted. Dockyards were supposed to advertise for the cheapest tenders, but Nelson could remember no notices in the island papers, while although naval bills of exchange were inscribed with the specific rates to be used, local dealers were gaining up to 7 per cent on them during encashment.

Middleton’s interest in reform gave Nelson faith. It made him feel
that he had done and was doing something valuable, but it could not arrest a growing disaffection. The Admiralty, not the subordinate Navy Board, employed commissioned officers, and Nelson’s next orders, issued on 15 August and transmitted through Hood, were not attractive. They assigned him to the impress service in the Nore, and he sailed on the 18th.
⁶⁸

On 23 September the ship moved from the Little to the Great Nore, but it was already a day into its job of recruiting men. Her boats, with those of other ships, were out regularly, raiding the waterfront, shifting more or less recalcitrant recruits from place to place and boarding merchantmen. Eleven hundred men were pressed in a single night. It was degrading if not dull work, and for the most part Nelson remained aboard the frigate several miles offshore, brooding over the censures and his failure to obtain a line of battle ship. The men were also restless. Wages had been paid in August, and returning to England after years of service tempted some to desert. The number of floggings aboard the
Boreas
rose. There were none in August and September and fifteen the following month.
⁶⁹

Fanny remembered those first difficult months in England for a long time. Her husband was bitter, and spoke about resigning his commission and joining the Russian Navy, as Sir Charles Knowles had done seventeen years before. He also considered working ashore, but could not see how ends could be met. Yet even the campaign against abuses, from which he alone derived satisfaction, stumbled forward on leaden feet. Horatio was constantly applying a whip. Middleton still remained at his post, but the Treasury, to which Nelson had sent additional papers in July, was keeping mum. One day Nelson called unannounced upon George Rose, the secretary of the Treasury. Rose, like Middleton, was impressed by the young man’s public spirit, and arranged to see him over breakfast the following day. They talked from six in the morning till nine, and when Nelson left he had a promise that the whole business would be laid before Pitt, the first lord of the Treasury, at an early opportunity.
⁷⁰