Authors: John Sugden
A naval captain capable of placing sons in midshipmen’s berths was a welcome addition to any locality. And so, when a new county map of Norfolk delineated the residences of the socially significant, the humble parsonage of ‘Capt. Nelson’ found itself earmarked among the grander piles of Hill, Humphreys, Townshend and Coke.
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That first winter back in Norfolk was abysmally cold, the coldest some remembered. Nelson was attacked by rheumatism and moved little beyond the bedchamber much of the time, while Fanny hardly dared stir from beneath her stout moreen bed sheets. When the weather improved and her mobility increased, the new wife examined the neighbours, but satisfying friends were few and far between the village rustics, and she missed her pianoforte and the social evenings it had allowed her. Nevertheless, her affection for her father-in-law increased, and she gamely tackled his infirmities. Fanny was an old-fashioned
wife; she might not have been a full partner in Nelson’s mission to achieve, but she fully lived up to her belief in submissive loyalty and duty.
On his part Horatio attacked the garden, where his father and old Peter Black had been raising a ha-ha, preparing beds for roses, lilacs and hyacinths, and creating a pond by digging a trench from the River Burn. He began cultivating the rough glebe land, and managing a few sheep which he turned out to graze on the salt marshes and bottom lands in the spring.
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Nelson started married life with very little money. His net half-pay only came to about £106 a year, and the couple had an annuity of £100 from William Suckling. Fanny may have received a similar stipend from her uncle, but there is no proof that it was ever paid, and on the whole Herbert had been a huge disappointment. This was a frugal income, barely enough to sustain the status of a ‘gentleman’. The wages Nelson had earned on the
Boreas
were still being paid into his account with Marsh and Creed, but most of it probably offset advances he had already received and spent. The only fresh windfalls he could expect – barring the promised legacy from his father-in-law – were occasional payments of prize money, but appeals against the condemnation of some of his American prizes dragged on uncertainly, and proceedings against two ships convicted in Nevis in 1785 were still pending four years later. Horatio therefore dipped into his savings. He and William sold £833 worth of government stocks in November 1788, and Horatio probably applied his share to setting up house in the parsonage. He also had a financial share in Bolton’s house at Thorpe, although it realised only £300 when it was sold in 1792, which, reinvested, yielded a mere £15 a year in interest. His eighth share in a ticket for Pitt’s new national lottery won him nothing at all. These resources promised a threadbare future and barely covered the couple’s costs of living. By 1793 Nelson’s annual balances with Marsh and Creed had slipped into the red.
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Horatio and his father both suffered for their generosity to others. The rector farmed his glebe land and received a modest income as a minister, but incurred considerable expenses. In 1796–7 his land taxes amounted to £18 16s. 9d. per annum, all but 8s. 9d. of it on account of the glebe which was assessed at an annual value of £92, and the rest due on a small property leased from a Mr Elliott. The years 1791 to 1793 also saw substantial repairs being made to the church in Burnham Thorpe. Windows, pews and a roof had to be replaced and
the south aisle dismantled, and it would be surprising if the rector did not make small contributions to the costs. Most distressing of all to Edmund Nelson and his son was the seemingly endless need to bail out impecunious relatives.
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Nelson’s eldest brother, Maurice, seemed perennially in want. ‘There was a day when he might have catched a gleam of sunshine [but] it is now clouded,’ said his father. Exiled in London, Maurice was still a clerk at the Navy Board, occupying the position of what we would today call a civil servant, and he rarely got to Norfolk. None of the family knew his business very well, and though he cohabited with a woman named Susannah Ford, neither his father nor brothers could say for certain whether he was ever legally married. His liaison with ‘Sukey’ reveals itself to us through a series of letters Maurice wrote to her in 1793 and 1794, after he had quit the Navy Board to become assistant commissary to Lord Moira’s forces and been sent to the West Country and the south coast. Sukey’s origins are mysterious. Maurice addressed his letters to ‘Mrs Nelson’ of 8 Rathbone Place, Oxford Street, London. Later evidence shows that Susannah’s surname was actually Ford, but in 1793 she apparently had two children, possibly by a previous paramour, John Andrews, one of Maurice Nelson’s colleagues in the Navy Office.
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The youngest brother was even more troublesome. Suckling cheerfully failed at almost everything he did. His life at North Elmham soon withered. At first he had shouldered his communal responsibilities, and in February 1787 joined other parishioners in a plan to prosecute felons, but he soon forsook their meetings. His marriage, about which none of the Nelsons spoke, ended, and his grocery business failed, consuming what he had inherited from Captain Suckling. Still in his twenties, Suckling was soon back at Burnham Thorpe sponging on Horatio and their father. They provided him with private tuition, and in 1791 packed him off to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study for holy orders. This got him out of their way from October to June of each year, but though early reports suggested he was buckling down to work, Edmund doubted that his youngest would ever amount to much. At best he might ‘pass . . . amongst a crowd of undistinguished preachers, and gain some respect . . . from his quiet disposition, his liking to a little conviviality, and his passion for greyhounds and coursing’.
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If relations tried Horatio’s meagre resources, nothing emphasised his relative poverty more than the company he was now obliged to
keep. Drinking at the Plough (licensed in the village to John Hubbard), he might have seemed the local hero, but with the Hilborough, Wells or Norwich sets he was embarrassed by his indigency. Even the Boltons and Matchams had more money at their disposal. Elsewhere some of the people with whom he had to cut a respectable figure were grander still. The Martins of Westgate Hall in Burnham Westgate made agreeable companions. Sir Mordaunt Martin, the fourth baronet, was eighteen years Nelson’s senior, and coincidentally an absentee marshal of the vice-admiralty court in Jamaica, though his job was actually performed by deputies. His wife was a local girl, the daughter of the Reverend William Smith of Burnham Westgate. At the Hall in Burnham Thorpe lived another clergyman, the Reverend Mr Crowe, whose engaging brood inspired much of the local gossip. But the large landowners who came within Nelson’s ken were Ann, Lady Camelford, who owned scattered properties about the village; the mighty Thomas Coke, who reigned to the east in Holkham; and Lord and Lady Walpole of Wolterton Hall, near Norwich. Horatio may have counted a prince of the realm a close friend, but disabled by penury he was uncertain about his standing with such folk.
Lord Walpole was Nelson’s godfather, but it was not until 1790 that the captain and his lady were invited to stay at Wolterton. Wolterton Hall was a splendid mansion, its elaborate coat of arms proudly embossed on the gable above the front entrance, and the Nelsons worried whether Fanny’s wardrobe was equal to a prolonged trial. However, the Walpoles proved to be gratifyingly down-to-earth, and the visit was so successful that it became an annual event to relieve the gloom of approaching winter. Despite that, when the third Earl of Orford, the head of the Walpole clan, died the Nelsons were not invited to the funeral. Horatio felt slighted, even though the succeeding earl, the famous writer Horace Walpole, apologised for the oversight and explained that the arrangements had not been in his hands.
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At Wolterton, Lady Walpole introduced Nelson to the greatest landowner in the county, Thomas William Coke, then a parliamentary member for Norfolk and later to become Earl of Leicester. He was one of the great agricultural improvers, and his famous estate lay only a mile east of Burnham Thorpe. Holkham was a huge chunk of countryside, with crops, woodlands strategically placed to break the chilling easterlies, pastures, a lake, ornamental grounds designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and an impressive obelisk. At its heart stood the palatial hall.
Coke visited the parsonage in 1791, and in later years greatly admired Nelson and sent gifts of game to his father. Nelson reciprocated when he could. He would find places for Coke’s protégés aboard his next ship, and must certainly have visited so important a neighbour, reaching his ornate mansion through the estate’s west gate. But it is doubtful if he was overawed: Nelson was seldom impressed by wealth alone, which he often attributed to unworthy actions, and in Coke’s case had other reservations. The Nelsons had never supported the Cokes politically. In the general election of 1768 Reverend Edmund Nelson had cast his two votes in favour of candidates de Grey and Woodhouse rather than for Wenman Coke, Thomas’s nephew. As far as Captain Nelson was concerned, Thomas Coke was a Whig grandee and an associate of Fox and his cronies, whom he stigmatised as corrupt and unpatriotic. Given these views, Nelson steered clear of talking politics at Holkham, but when Coke organised a huge party on 5 November 1788 to celebrate the centenary of William of Orange’s landing in England, a benchmark of Whiggism, the captain abruptly declined to attend.
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Nelson occasionally extended his acquaintances at social events, though he was by no means a gadabout. He visited the Lynn feast, and on 6 October 1792 was hobnobbing at the Aylsham assembly. There he talked to Lady Durrant, who looked ‘quite the old woman’ without ‘her front teeth’, though ‘Miss Durrant’ (‘a very fine tall young woman’), ‘Mr Church the clergyman’, and ‘Miss Caroline Aufrere and Miss Emily . . . who are grown extraordinary fine ladies’ probably attracted more of his attention. He even made a stab at entering sporting circles, and suppressing doubts about his marksmanship reluctantly paid forty-three shillings for his first shooting licence in September 1788 and acquired a pointer. He shot on his own glebe land, as well as further afield at Fakenham and elsewhere, but only one bag, a partridge, was remembered, and he was notorious for carrying his gun at full cock and blasting from the hip as soon as birds broke cover. Hare coursing was another common Norfolk pursuit, but Nelson did not care for it. He ‘seldom escaped a wet jacket and a violent cold’ on such expeditions, and admitted that ‘even the ride to the Smee is longer than any pleasure I find in the sport will compensate for’.
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At other times he entertained visitors at home, serving tea in the parsonage and occasionally dinner. In school holidays the house was filled with Josiah’s noise (‘Josiah came home yesterday just in time to
be shut up’), and other members of the family were frequent boarders, including Nelson’s brothers and Horace Suckling, the son of his Uncle William, who arrived in between his terms at Cambridge. Space and money limited Nelson’s hospitality, and in April 1792 we find him warning his brother William that, with one of his two or three rooms undergoing repair, he ‘could only offer you the tent bed through our room’. But the visits were essential to keeping up with the local gossip the Nelsons enjoyed. Thus, in one of the letters Horatio used to send his sister Kate after she left Barton Hall in 1791, he eagerly reported that Miss Crowe had danced pleasurably with Lieutenant Robert Suckling of the Royal Artillery at the Norwich sessions ball. His information was good. Lieutenant Suckling and his brother Maurice, both old West Indian friends and the last once his midshipman, had stayed at the parsonage a few days, while Robert Crowe had called for tea one day with the obvious intention of learning about the lieutenant’s prospects. Horatio happily encouraged the match with the information that Lieutenant Suckling stood to inherit £1,500 a year.
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Blessings are usually mixed, and one advantage of Nelson’s return to Norfolk was his reconnection to a family to which he had become almost a stranger. Apart from the precious, irreplaceable years it gave him with an ageing but beloved parent, Nelson reoccupied the hub of an enlarged family circle. Of its new members Thomas Bolton dealt with him the most. Bolton was strategically placed near Norwich, and although Nelson often visited the town, he relied upon his brother-in-law to handle his business there when he remained isolated in Burnham Thorpe. Bolton was on hand for specialist shopping and attentive to Horatio’s meticulous instructions. He supplied bottles of port, ‘a cake’ for ‘Master [Josiah] Nesbitt’, loose coverings for the parsonage furniture (‘a handsome, rich blue, but not dark’), Norfolk turkeys and sausage meat for Captain Locker to use as Christmas presents, ‘a good old Gloucester cheese’, and in 1792 a horse to replace Nelson’s black mare. It had to be ‘sound in every respect’, Nelson said, at least fourteen hands, and not a ‘starter’ with any ‘vicious tricks’. Riding was essential in rural Norfolk, and Nelson stabled his animals at the parsonage and consigned their welfare to Peter Black.
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Sadly, family obligations involved exits as well as entrances, and bereavements were commoner then than now, especially with the high rate of infant mortality. As Nelson said, commiserating with Kate after one such loss, there were ‘so many complaints which the poor little things are subject to’ it was surprising that so many survived to maturity.
Two deaths in 1789 struck the family particularly hard. On 4 July Horatio lost his remaining grandmother, Mary Bland, who died at her house in Hilborough at the venerable age of ninety-one. Her will, which the Reverend Edmund had witnessed in 1769, made provision for her three daughters (Horatio’s paternal aunts), with the principal beneficiary being the older and still unmarried Mary, who received first claim upon her mother’s house and property.
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