Nelson (92 page)

Nelson had been eighteen months at sea when he evidently struck up with her in Leghorn towards the end of 1794. The relationship begins inconsequentially in Fremantle’s pages. ‘Dined at Nelson’s and his dolly,’ he wrote on Wednesday 3 December 1794. The use of the phrase ‘Nelson’s and his dolly’ suggests that the captain of the
Agamemnon
was already established in a property ashore and sharing it with his paramour. A letter Nelson wrote to Thomas Pollard the following February appears to confirm this conclusion. In it Nelson notified Pollard, an English merchant who acted as his Leghorn prize agent, that his ‘female friend’ should be paid ten echus as well as the rent for her house.
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There are so few facts about Adelaide that any speculation as to her identity and relationship to Nelson is perilous. Her name, age, appearance, occupation and circumstances remain mysterious. She appears to have been a Ligurian, for her mother still lived in Genoa, and one supposes that she had the petite, dark-haired and dark-eyed looks prevalent in that region. At least that impression is encouraged by one who knew her, Captain George Cockburn, who wrote to Nelson of ‘your little Adelaide’ in 1797. Apparently she was or had been married: both Nelson and John Udny, the British consul at Leghorn who also knew her, addressed Adelaide as ‘Signora’ rather than ‘Signorina’. It is possible to guess, but again with more than a little uncertainty, that Adelaide had left Genoa to live with her husband in
Leghorn and was widowed or separated soon after. There are no references whatsoever to children.
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At the end of 1794 Horatio Nelson was thirty-six, but he looked younger, and despite his quiet, introverted manner quite capable of attracting women. It was in December that he succumbed to Fanny’s requests for a likeness and sat to an unknown Leghorn miniaturist for his second official portrait. Compared to the magnificent Rigaud canvas the result was modest, painted in oils upon a tiny card, and Nelson and Josiah were not the only ones who thought the likeness a bad one. But most people disagreed, and saw much in the portrait that was true – the slim figure, contemplative features, sensitive, mobile mouth, long nose and physical fragility. Most notably, although the miniaturist included the small scars above Nelson’s right eye and below his left, and shaded the grey into his long hair, he successfully captured the almost perennial youthfulness of the sitter’s appearance. He suggested the body and face of an innocent midshipman rather than an experienced, war-hardened post-captain. Certainly Fanny loved the portrait, and within two years was wearing it proudly around her neck. She continued to wear it long after suffering her husband’s final and irreparable betrayal, and treasured it to her dying day. It was perhaps ironic that even as Nelson sat for that priceless memento he was living with a mistress of whom Fanny never knew.
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If the portrait shows a not unattractive man, it is likely that Nelson’s relationship with Adelaide Correglia arose out of prostitution rather than a fortuitous attachment. There are grounds for believing that she was, in fact, a superior call girl serving officers and gentlemen, and that the consul, John Udny, facilitated the introduction. Like most ports, Leghorn had its prostitutes. Anchoring ships were beset with boats loaded with musicians and sweetly singing women, and ashore ‘dollies’ could be found for secret liaisons, among them ladies who regarded the officer class as their clientele. According to Fremantle, Captains Wells and Rowley ‘had doleys [sic] to dinner with them daily’. The more select women used the theatre or opera house and other sophisticated places to meet their customers, and Udny may have acted as a procurer. To all appearances a homely old English gentleman down to the harpsichord, his services to countrymen far from home seem to have gone beyond the realms of postmaster, prize agent, victualler and consul. ‘Called on old Udney,’ Fremantle entered in his diary in December 1794. ‘Went to the opera with him. He introduced me to a very handsome Greek woman.’ Certainly Udny knew Adelaide,
and almost certainly she offered casual sexual services, so it is entirely possible that some similar episode marked the beginning of her more enduring relationship with Nelson.
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Adelaide was discreet, though she went aboard the
Agamemnon
when invited and met Nelson’s friends. Her poor English inhibited her in such gatherings, for her native tongue was Italian and Nelson wrote and possibly spoke to her in bad French. He had secured a French master for his stepson and William Hoste, and conveniently benefited from the lessons himself. The likelihood is that most of the papers that passed between the pair were destroyed in 1797, when Nelson burned sensitive documents before launching a dangerous attack upon Teneriffe, and only one survives today. It is undated and written in painful French deficient both in syntax and grammar. ‘My dear Adelaide,’ he wrote, ‘I am setting out to sea this very moment. A Neapolitan ship is sailing with me to Livorno [Leghorn]. Believe me always to be your dear friend, Horatio Nelson. Be a great success.’
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This, like most other pieces of evidence about Adelaide, scarcely lifts the veil of secrecy surrounding her. She kept a home for Nelson in Leghorn for perhaps eighteen months or more, and was on hand to help him entertain, but always mysteriously. ‘Dined with Nelson and Dolly,’ Fremantle wrote on 27 September 1795, just after both host and mistress had returned from Vado Bay. ‘Very bad dinner indeed.’ But the next day he was back and wrote, ‘Dined at Nelson’s. Went to see at the theatre a man who was blind play upon a flute well enough.’ On such occasions we can imagine Adelaide hovering in the background while the English officers talked a language she barely understood, fondly returning the occasional remark and filling the wineglasses.
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She no doubt consoled Nelson during his depression, and diverted him from the wearisome duties of an inactive command. For much of the time the captain of the
Agamemnon
had nothing more stimulating to attend than courts martial in Leghorn roads or St Fiorenzo. His ship was ready for sea in December, but Hotham put into Leghorn at about the same time and had the whole fleet lingering there for ten days.
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Then and afterwards Nelson’s close associates met and accepted Adelaide, and through him paid their respects to her. ‘Make my compliments to la belle Adelaide,’ Admiral Jervis wrote to him in July 1796. But they never spoke of her back home, not even young Josiah, who was doubtless misled about Adelaide’s function but was unquestionably
aware of her existence. Many naval officers serving far afield had relationships with local women, but they learned to remain silent about them on home ground, screening one world from the other.
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Nelson would enjoy a far more notorious mistress in time, but Adelaide was the one about whom Fanny never knew.

He told Fanny he loved her, collecting ‘many little things’ for her on his travels, and she had no reason to believe otherwise. ‘Indeed, my dear Fanny,’ he wrote, ‘my love, regard and esteem for you cannot, I think, be exceeded by any man whatever.’
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Yet she was undeniably lonely, deprived of her ‘dearest husband’ and child, and living in what was still something of a foreign land. He was always talking about coming home but never did. In the autumn of 1794 his plan to return with Hood raised her hopes. After toasting his second birthday away from home at Kentish Town, she wrote, ‘I . . . look every day for one telling me you are coming.’ The news that he was, after all, to remain at sea devastated her. ‘My disappointment in not seeing you and my child as soon as you gave me some hope that I should is very great,’ she admitted. ‘The thoughts of soon seeing my affectionate husband had made me quite well, but still I flatter myself it will not be very long before you will come home. This winter will be another anxious one. What did I not suffer in my mind the last?’
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It was unfair on both of them, imprisoned as they were in situations beyond their control. Nelson tried to reassure his wife that the war could not last long, and that if there was peace in the spring ‘we must look out for some little cottage’ where he would ‘return to the plough with redoubled glee’, but he was hardly telling the truth. Even Fanny, reading newspapers and talking to her few friends, doubted the war was reaching its end, though she and her father-in-law encouraged each other to think that Nelson might in some way soon return to the suffocating domesticity he hated. They both needed him, and wanted him to enliven their small, quiet world, barely comprehending the fire that fed his soul. While he thirsted for glory, they worried that the battle he longed for might cheat them of a beloved husband and son. ‘I hope the French will not get out so as to give you an opportunity of engaging them,’ Fanny wrote to him. ‘Could I hope for this, I should endeavour to make myself easy. My mind and poor heart are
always on the rack.’ So too wrote the good reverend, eager to spend his last days with his favourite human being. ‘Let others hear a little of the roaring cannon,’ he urged. ‘I trust the fatigue of life is over with you. In days of peace you will enjoy your cottage.’
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Month after month, year after year, those hopes were crushed, and Fanny’s grass-widowhood continued. At the beginning of December 1794, Hood wrote to Nelson that he expected to return to the Mediterranean in the spring, and that the
Agamemnon
was due for recall. Nelson formed the idea of taking some leave in England, and then transferring his company to a seventy-four and going out again with Hood in the spring. The plan, attractive because it combined seeing his wife with a return to duty under his hero, was shipwrecked by the growth of French naval power in the Mediterranean and British delays in reinforcing Hotham’s fleet. In those circumstances the acting commander-in-chief clung to every ship he had. Nelson was genuinely disappointed but tried to console. The war might not last long. Perhaps this year, or the next. And at least remaining in the Mediterranean would furnish more money for the Norfolk cottage he wanted. ‘Much as I shall regret being so long parted from you,’ he told Fanny, ‘still we must look beyond the present day, and two or three months may make the difference of every comfort or otherwise in our income.’
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For Nelson, depressing as the lull in the fighting had become, the Mediterranean was still a fascinating honey pot that might at any time produce a life-changing opportunity. Battles at sea were rare at any time, but now the competing fleets seemed to be bracing themselves for just such an encounter. If it happened Nelson wanted to be there. As he explained to Drake, the ‘object’ of a sea officer was ‘to embrace the happy moment which now and then offers – it may be this day, not for a month, and perhaps never’. If Hood resumed command of the fleet, as everyone expected, that tantalising prospect would brighten, but whether he came or not it possessed Nelson night and day, and kept him at his post.
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Like many sailors’ wives Fanny was lonely, but she was also rootless. After Nelson’s departure she had considered living at Swaffham in Norfolk, where the Nelsons had relatives and associates and the social amenities boasted assembly rooms, but she felt cold, sick and isolated there, and her father-in-law invited her to winter with him in Bath. The summer and autumn of 1794 were spent at Shepherd’s Spring in Ringwood with the Matchams, but Kate was pregnant and ill and left for London so Fanny gratefully accepted an invitation to
Kentish Town. She liked the Sucklings, especially Miss Elizabeth, then pursuing Captain Henry Wigley of the Scots Greys (Nelson would send her a diamond ring for their wedding in November 1796), and stayed with them until November, when she removed to Bath with Nelson’s father. Some references to occasional sallies further afield, for example to Plymouth in 1794 and Lyme Regis two years later, may reflect attempts to repair broken health. Fanny appears to have been a rather frail individual, commonly troubled by aches and anxieties.

The Reverend Edmund Nelson had left his parsonage in the hands of a younger son, the newly ordained and habitually ‘reclaimed’ Suckling, who acted as curate and worked the glebe land. With his daughter-in-law and such domestics as the Thurlow girls of Burnham, he eventually rented a terraced house at 17 New King Street in Bath. Considering how apprehensive Edmund had once been at the thought of meeting Fanny, the strange pair formed an exceptionally close friendship, each supporting the other ‘in mutuall comfort’, and sharing their ambitions for the return of ‘our precious treasure’. At first Edmund stood as the guardian. ‘If you can put yourself under my protection, a poor substitute [for Horatio], all shall be done that can be. Don’t . . . consider the expense; it can, it shall be made easy,’ he wrote to her. But as he grew older and weaker he became more dependent upon his daughter-in-law. He was still able to ride, once falling from a pony near his church in 1793, but tired easily and recoiled from travelling afar, where ‘bad roads, dirty inns and insolent post boys’ seemed the order of the day. Bath became Edmund’s favourite ‘place of warmth, ease and quietude’. He could make gentle pilgrimages to Ann’s grave, bathe in the waters and linger at home, where Fanny fulfilled his need to ‘chat’ and supplied his ‘news-reading eyes’ by reading aloud to him from the newspapers. The bonds the two forged in those years were never broken, and held strong during the difficult years ahead. ‘Mrs Nelson,’ admitted the old man, ‘truly supplies a kind and watchful child over the infirmities and whimsies of age.’
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As for Fanny, in between ‘cheerful’ visits to the theatre, concerts and friends, and occasional rides into the countryside, she too tended to remain indoors. Her father-in-law absorbed some of her energies, and she explored a new pianoforte, but was in a continual ‘hurry and fret’ about her husband, imparting her ‘little news’ to him in modestly penned letters she barely felt capable of writing. They told of the doings of her relatives, such as the Hamiltons, Herberts and Mortons, and of chance meetings with mutual acquaintances. Sir Thomas Shirley
had visited, effusive about the captain he had once decried; a Miss Hawkins had said that two of the Andrews girls, one of them probably Elizabeth, as well as a younger brother had gone to the East Indies; and the Scriveners had fallen on hard times, the wife dead and the husband odder than ever. The Hoods were attentive to Fanny in Bath, and invited her to join them on Christmas Day, but she found the admiral a rather dour companion. ‘Of all the silent men, surely he is the most so,’ she wrote to her husband, but ‘I was determined to make him smile.’
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