Nelson (8 page)

If a little strict, Edmund Nelson was a kind, modest and generous man, willing to reach into his pockets for those in need and to stand and be counted in times of trouble. He had a dry sense of humour. In 1790 he described himself as ‘an odd whimsicall old man, who knows nothing of the present time and very little of any other’. His education had left him with a painfully convoluted writing style, poor spelling and a love of personification. Winter was a ‘blooming Dowager’ from which Nature emerged reluctantly. ‘She is ashamed to come forth, half-naked in tattered clothes, exposed to the ridicule of every dirty boy.’ Flowers such as primroses and violets, however, were ‘forward lasses and regard not who pluck them’. Time, he told one daughter, was ‘a subtle nimble thief’ who ‘has stolen away your one and twentieth year.’
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Their father may have been the senior figure in the lives of the Nelson boys, but there can be no doubt that an uncle seemed the most dramatic. Captain Maurice Suckling was by no means the first in the family to distinguish himself at sea. In March 1711 his grand-uncle, Captain Galfridus Walpole of the
Lion
, had lost his right arm in a battle with the French in Vado Bay. It brought his active career to an end, but relatives secured him a post as treasurer of Greenwich Hospital. Maurice was a year younger than his sister, Catherine Nelson, but he inherited what glamour her sons saw in their ancestry. Unemployed on half-pay after the Seven Years War ended in 1763, he was striking nonetheless. He could show his nephews uniforms and swords, and tell them stirring tales of faraway places, and – if exhorted – describe the daring scrap he had had with the French in the West Indies back in 1757. Listening to Uncle Maurice gave Horace his first taste for action at sea.

The importance of the captain greatly increased in the severe winter of 1767 and 1768. Cold east winds from the Continent bit through
the walls of the old rectory, and the snow lay deep in the lanes. Tragedy struck the Nelson household that Christmas. On 26 December 1767 Catherine died, leaving her husband with eight children, the youngest a mere nine months old. Four days later Edmund buried her in the chancel of his church, placing above the grave an armorial stone bearing a Latin inscription and the grief-stricken words ‘Let these alone – let no man touch these bones.’

More followed. Catherine’s mother, Ann, had been staying near her daughter at Burnham Thorpe, either in the rectory or a cottage in the village, and she, too, was ill. In fact, only six days before Catherine’s death she had dated her own will, beseeching the family to bury her in ‘as plain a manner’ as decency permitted but at Barsham, in the same grave as her husband. She had some £300 in the hands of her youngest son, William, and desired what her funeral left of it to be passed to her daughter, along with her household furniture, plate, china and clothes. There were also some keepsakes for four of her Nelson grandchildren – Maurice, Susanna, Ann and baby Katy. Ann, for example, received ‘my old purse containing some gold medals’. The clause dividing her daughter’s legacy between the three grand-daughters if Catherine predeceased her was eerily prophetic. Perhaps it was the death of Catherine Nelson that pushed the old woman into the abyss, for barely had the former been laid to rest than the mother died also, at Burnham Thorpe on 5 January 1768, in her seventy-seventh year.
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Stricken by these deaths Captain Maurice Suckling arrived at Burnham Thorpe, burdened with the sad duties of burying his only sister and removing the body of his mother back to Barsham. He found the Reverend Edmund heartbroken and fearful for the future of his children. The death of his wife had somehow put a little spare money into his hands, which he invested in South Sea annuities for a usable interest, but as late as 1801 it only amounted to £908. Nevertheless, he intended to educate all the children, boys and girls, and find positions for them. The boys, deemed to be future bread-winners, were a particular worry but members of the family rallied round. John Fowle undertook to place the eldest boy, his godson Maurice, in the Excise Office in London, and Captain Suckling told Edmund that he would provide for one of the others when an opportunity arose.
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The job of launching the children in life bore upon Edmund heavily, and even with the aid of nannies and maids he doubted he was equal
to it. ‘As it has fallen to my lott to take upon me the care and affection of double parent, they [the children] will hereafter excuse where I have fallen short and the task has been too hard,’ he wrote. To the end of his days he fretted about his performance, and Christmas 1797 found the old man spending ‘many a useless hour at the fire in an easy chair, reflecting on the various events of a long life. It is this day twenty-nine years since your poor mother was laid in the peacefull grave. How I have acquitted myself in the important charge which then fell upon me, posterity must be my judge. In many instances I fear I shall not be acquitted.’
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Horace was nine years old when he lost his mother, but he remembered her, and when he did he recalled a line in
Henry V
and said it could be seen in the tears in his eyes. In fact Catherine had so often been confined child-bearing that it is unlikely her son ever got as much attention from her as he wanted. He said that she ‘hated the French’, a common enough English sentiment of the time. His father, too, became increasingly remote, spending long winter months in Bath to recover his health. The first of the fledglings also flew the nest. After turning fifteen in May 1768, Maurice went to London, where Mr Fowle put him to work as an auditing clerk in the Excise Office, off the Old Jury. Later a Mr Stonehewer facilitated the boy’s progress in the office, but for the moment the younger siblings remained at Burnham Thorpe. Their priority, Edmund decided, was schooling. The girls too, for he had no means of supplying them with attractive wedding dowries, and like their brothers they would have to pass through school to paying trades.
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Accordingly William and Horace, an inseparable pair, were soon exchanging the isolation of Burnham Thorpe for the rigours of the boarding school.

They went to two schools, first to King Edward VI’s grammar school in Norwich and then to Sir William Paston’s grammar school in North Walsham. We do not know when the boys made their way to Norwich; perhaps in 1768, when Edmund was wrestling with the problems left by his wife’s death. But James Harrison correctly places Nelson’s attendance at Norwich during the period of Edward Simmons’s headship.
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Edmund probably decided to send William and Horace to Norwich because he had a sister in the town, with whom they could board.
The boys would have found Aunt Thomasine and her husband, John Goulty, a shoemaker and free cordwainer of Norwich, in their late thirties. In 1768 they had been married eleven years, but only one of their children up till then, William, born in 1763, appears to have survived infancy, and so there was room for nephews in the Goulty household. They lived in the parish of St Andrew, where John also seems to have based his business at 18 London Lane.
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After Burnham Thorpe, Norwich must have seemed a veritable metropolis to a small boy. It was then the second largest town in England, and home to thirty thousand people. The dwellings clustering around the cathedral alone swallowed as many inhabitants as Burnham Thorpe, while the coaches and horses clattering to and from the nearby Maid’s Head Inn made the main street of the village seem a mere farm track. Never had Horace seen a grander place than Norwich Cathedral, though he was more likely to have been impressed by the skeleton on its macabre memorial to Thomas Gooding than the magnificent vaults and arches.

The bulk of King Edward’s occupied buildings that had once been a chapel dedicated to St John the Evangelist, adjacent to the majestic cathedral. There were then probably fewer than a hundred boys in the school. Some were free scholars from the town, but others like the Nelson brothers had been recruited as fee payers from further afield and boarded in lodgings. Horace’s teacher was probably Thomas Nichols, the ‘usher’, or assistant master, who inculcated Latin grammar into the reluctant lower forms. The Reverend Edward Simmons reserved for himself the privilege of harassing the older pupils with equally colourless fare.

At home Horace had read the Bible and perhaps even some Shakespeare, but he probably found the largely incomprehensible curriculum and the long, uncomfortable wooden benches at Norwich less than adequate compensation for his rambles across the fields near Burnham Thorpe. Frustration was at least relieved by admonitions to Christian virtue, an annual production staged for the mayor, and the ‘Guild Day’ rituals commemorating the inauguration of each new dignitary elevated to that office. On Guild Days the pupils assembled at the school porch to hear one of their fellows speechify in return for a ride to a Guildhall banquet and ball in the mayor’s carriage. Nonetheless, boredom and bad behaviour still went hand in hand, surviving the occasional wielding of the rod, and so many windows were broken that Simmons was told to pay for repairs from his own pocket.
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Nelson was not long at Norwich, for by 1769 he and his brother transferred to the Paston School in the small market town of North Walsham. A Tudor foundation established close to the market place, which could be reached through a gateway at the rear of the school, the Paston had a new three-storey schoolhouse of red brick and a fresh constitution. The master, the Reverend John Price Jones, was as Welsh as his name suggests though he had formerly been a curate at Yateley in Hampshire. He delivered the inevitable Classics and a little English and Mathematics with the assistance of his good wife (Mrs G. M. Jones), an usher, James North, who managed the lower forms, and a French master known to the boys as ‘old Jemmy Moisson’.

By no means all the faces who passed beneath the coat of arms engraved above the school entrance were new ones. A number of the boys were, like the Nelsons, former pupils of Norwich Grammar, including John Ashmul of Worstead, William Booty of Walsingham, Thomas Taylor of Norwich and Richard Ellis of Repps. The surviving names of the other youngsters also demonstrate a huge preponderance of Norfolk lads, among them Paul Johnson of Runcton, Gunton Postle of Hoveton, Nathaniel Gooding Clarke of Attleborough, Thomas Decker of North Walsham, Charles Mann of Norwich, William Earle Bulwer (whom Nelson remembered ‘perfectly well’ thirty years later), and probably also Horace’s relative, Horatio Hammond.
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Horace was a fee-paying boarder at the Paston until 1771, when the annual charge of £21 12s. 0d. covered lodgings, tuition, laundry and an entrance fee. The boys went home for holidays, and the forty-mile pony ride along the leafy lanes between North Walsham and Burnham Thorpe was the subject of one of two stories William used to tell of his brother’s schooldays. The Christmas holidays had ended, and in January 1770 the Reverend Nelson saw his boys disappear along the snowy track that passed the rectory gate. The brothers had not gone far before they were halted by the drifts and turned back. William, the elder, was their spokesman, and presented their story to a stern parent, who insisted they try again. ‘If the road should be found dangerous, you may return,’ he told them. ‘Yet remember boys! I leave it to your honour!’ On the second attempt William was again ready to retreat, but Horace urged him on. ‘Remember, brother,’ he cried. ‘It was left to our honour!’

William’s second story concerned a certain pear tree that flourished in the grounds before the schoolhouse. One night (probably in 1770) the boys lowered Horace from the dormitory window by some knotted
sheets, and he rifled the tree, scaling the sheets to return with his plunder. This he distributed among his fellows, reserving not a single pear for himself. ‘I only took them because every other boy was afraid!’ he explained. Five guineas were offered for information about the theft, but no one betrayed the culprit.
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William’s stories were probably embellished, but even if they are taken at face value they misrepresent the young Nelson. Looking back upon a misty past in the distorting glare of hindsight, William paid homage to his brother’s subsequent reputation for courage and integrity, abstracting what was commendable and suppressing anything that detracted from the desired image. Horatio Nelson may have been a daring child, but he was also a boy much like any other, and it is that broader, and no doubt more colourful and ambiguous, portrait that we have lost. William’s depiction of the unshakeably fearless, disinterested and upright boy was part of familiar selective processes that turn real men and women into myths.

Two others who remembered Nelson as a schoolboy were Elizabeth Gaze and Levett Hanson. Elizabeth was a local girl, the third of seven surviving daughters of Robert and Jane Gaze, farmers who had moved to North Walsham after losing their stock in a ‘cattle plague’. Born in January 1752, she was literate and eighteen or nineteen when young Nelson saw her working as a nurse at the Paston. Elizabeth’s story that Horace went down with measles at the school – set down by one of her great-grandchildren – rings true. The disease ran rife in such establishments and Horace was a weak child, ‘much impaired by an aguish complaint’ according to his brother. Moreover, the school minutes for 9 August 1770 show that the ‘stable chamber’ and ‘space over the muck bin’ were earmarked as quarters for sick children, an entry that suggests several infectious pupils needed isolating. The following January the school governors, all of them members of the local gentry, allowed the Reverend Jones five guineas to maintain the room he had hired for that purpose.
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Levett Hanson of Yorkshire was a fellow pupil. Many years later, on 29 September 1802, he wrote to the famous admiral, ‘Your Lordship, though in the second class when I was in the first, was five years my junior, or four at least, and at that period of life such a difference in point of age is considerable. I well remember where you sat in the school room. Your station was against the wall, between the parlour door and the chimney. The latter to your right. From 1769 to 1771 we were opposites . . .’ Born in December 1754, Hanson was
in fact almost four years Horace’s senior. His remark about the different classes indicates either that Nelson was already a pupil at the Paston when Hanson arrived from Bury St Edmunds in 1769 or that he was more academically advanced.
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