Nelson: The Essential Hero (12 page)

In many respects, newly married though he was, it was natural that he should long above all else for sea service. Ambition drove him, a very deep love of his profession - far in excess of anything he seems to have felt for his wife - but in addition to this there was the overriding matter of money. To support Fanny and his stepson was hardly going to be easy on half-pay. As a post-captain, he drew only a little more than one hundred pounds a year, and if it had not been for the help of William Suckling and Mr Herbert the Nelson family could have done nothing but exist in genteel poverty in the Burnham parsonage. As it was, Fanny received £100 a year from her uncle -who had retired to England as he had intended - while Nelson had a similar amount from William Suckling. It is indicative of monetary values in the England of that time that on this amount the Nelsons did in fact manage to live quite comfortably. Indeed, during the first months of their stay they managed to spend Christmas in London with Mr Herbert - as well as travelling to Exmouth and Bath. Nelson also visited Plymouth while he was in the West Country, on an invitation from Prince William. But this ability to travel and maintain a respectable appearance must be seen in the context with which, as will be seen, Nelson in due course made himself very familiar: the earnings of an East Anglian farm labourer were little more than £20 a year.

One letter, written from Bath on 27 January 1788 to William Locker, gives some indication of why he retired to the parsonage in Norfolk : ‘Your kind letter I received yesterday, and am much obliged by your kind inquiries about a house. I fear we must at present give [up] all thoughts of living so near London, for Mrs Nelson’s lungs are so much affected by the smoke of London, that I cannot think of placing her in that situation, however desirable. For the next summer I shall be down in Norfolk, from whence I must look forward.’ The fact was that, although she was to outlive him and indeed practically all the other participants in the saga of his life by many years, Fanny seems never to have been well in England. The cold and the damp (which affected Nelson as well, ‘The rain and the cold at first gave me a sore throat’) proved almost intolerable to a woman who had spent most of her life in the West Indies. She suffered from rheumatism or arthritis, or both (medical records are non-existent).

Fanny appears to have become barren after bearing her one son, and seems also to have been constantly prone to what were known in those days as ‘the vapours’, but which would nowadays be diagnosed as some form of hysteria or psychosomatic illness. It is most unlikely that any evidence will ever come to light as to the real nature of her nervous complaints, and it is pointless at this time to speculate in Freudian or other psychoanalytical terms about Fanny Nelson’s problems. All the records, including his many letters to her, show that she had in Nelson a loving and very thoughtful husband. If passion was absent, perhaps it was rejected? His earlier feelings and responses to attractive young women show him to have been a perfectly healthy normal man, capable of such an ardent response as even to consider abandoning his career for a woman he had known for only a short time. Such had never been the case with Fanny, and his responses, if warm and genuine indeed, had always been safeguarded by material considerations, and observations about those excellences of her character that would make her a good wife. As to Nelson’s own sexuality and fertility, of these there can be no doubt, for his physical passion for Emma Hamilton was unbounded, and she was to bear him two children.

The final decision to stay at Burnham Thorpe with his father was prompted not only by financial considerations, by a belief (mistaken as it turned out) that the Norfolk air would suit Fanny, but by the old rector’s desire to have his son and his new daughter-in-law at home with him. Now that all the other birds had flown the nest, the Reverend Edmund was lonely. As he grew older, so his health deteriorated, and the visits to Bath in the winter became more of a necessity than a mild self-indulgence. But a worse place for poor Fanny than Burnham could hardly have been chosen. It was not that there was no social life, for there was constant family visiting - to the Matchams and Horatio’s favourite sister Kitty, to the William Nelsons, and to his sister Susannah and her husband Thomas Bolton. It was all perhaps somewhat parochial after the splendours of the President’s house on Nevis, but whatever Fanny felt about the limited company to be found in such Norfolk rounds it was nothing compared with the effect on her of the weather. As the local guide accurately comments: ‘We stand and look right across the North Sea to the North Pole, There is nothing to break the sweep of tumbling waters, save the fields and cliffs of ice which ring it round. And well do we know all this when the Nor’Easters whistle in off our steel-grey sea every day from January to June; stiffening our backs and shutting tight our mouths.’ Then the snow came - ‘Hush, at High Noon as at Midnight,’ commented Nelson’s father - and the frail exile from the tropics was often forced to take to her bed, sometimes for days on end. She had not even the companionship of her son, Josiah, except during his holidays, for he had been sent away to boarding-school.

The rector conceived a great affection for his daughter-in-law, worried that she had so little company, observed how good a wife she made Horatio, and looked after her as she in her turn looked after him. It was a strange quiet life in winter, Nelson brooding over charts or reading Dampier’s
Voyages
, which he considered the most interesting book he had ever read, or writing constantly to their Lordships to remind them of his existence, and in the hope that he would be looked on in the future with some favour. The fact of the matter was that his tour in the West Indies had not served him in good stead. It was not only that he had incurred the enmity of a number of powerful individuals through his insistence on carrying out the Navigation Act, but he had quarrelled with and disobeyed his Admiral, and had stirred up even more trouble by his action over the peculations of Crown Officials in the Leeward Islands. A further fact, which did not exactly place him in the good books of George III, was his friendship with Prince William. This, which might at one time have seemed to serve him in good stead, did him nothing but disservice with a father who was almost daily further infuriated by the scandals, scrapes and peccadillos that surrounded the Prince.

When the slow spring returned, the early green flickering on branches for so long bare, and the birds once more active on lawns or in the renewing hedgerows, Nelson became once more a Norfolk boy. It was almost as if nothing had happened during the intervening years - no visits to Indies East and West, no brilliant long Atlantic crossings, and no sweltering under tropic suns. His first biographers paint the picture:

It is extremely interesting to contemplate this great man, when thus removed from the busy scenes in which he had borne so distinguished a part, to the remote village of Burnham Thorpe. His mind, though so entirely taken from its proper element, and sphere of action, could not remain unoccupied. He was soon, therefore, engaged, and with considerable zeal, in cultivating his father’s garden, and in learning to farm the adjoining glebe; but the former was his principal station : he would there often spend the greater part of the day, and dig, as it were, for the sake of being wearied. At others, he would renew the early pastime of his childhood, and with a simplicity that was peculiar to him, when his mind was not employed on the great objects of professional duty, would spend the greater part of the day amidst the woods, in taking the eggs of various birds, which, as he obtained, he gave to Mrs Nelson, who at his express desire always attended him. He sometimes also employed his time,
when his eyes would admit of it
[my italics], in reading; and particularly such periodical works of the day as he could procure; but oftener in studying a variety of charts, and in writing, or drawing plans.

The most interesting point here is the reference to his eyesight, for the general belief that the wound which he later received during the siege of Calvi was all that was wrong with his eyes is quite incorrect. The fact was that, even by the age of thirty, he was beginning to exhibit the sign of a pterygium growing at the inner corner of either eye. This is a diseased condition of the conjunctiva of the eye: the mucous membrane, which lines the inner surface of the eyeballs, being gradually obscured by a pterygium, or ‘little wing’. Eleven years later, when the condition was far more advanced, Lord Elgin was to comment that he ‘appeared to have a film growing over both eyes’, and Thomas Trotter in 1801 remarked on ‘a membranous substance seemingly spreading fast over the pupil’.

A fact that emerges from these years is that Nelson, though happy in the country, and often hankering after its simplicities in later life, was never a countryman in the sense that the yeoman farmer was, let alone the squirearchy or landed gentry. In Norfolk, for instance, that county devoted since time immemorial to shooting and coursing, he cut a singularly poor figure - something which he did not attempt to disguise. It is reported that he once shot a partridge, but it would have been difficult in those days not to have shot many partridges. . . . ‘Shoot I cannot’, he admitted, ‘therefore I have not taken out a license; but notwithstanding the neglect I have met with I am happy’ - the neglect, one can only assume, referred here to his country neighbours who clearly found this naval officer a poor shot and a rather dangerous one to have around. This, at any rate, can be judged from the fact that it was his habit to carry his gun fully cocked and to open fire the instant a bird rose - without even troubling to bring his gun to his shoulder. Such guests are rarely, if ever, welcome on shooting parties.

He knew of course the famous Coke family of Holkham Hall, and once a year in the company of his wife visited Lord Walpole in his residence at Wolterton. But the fact was that Nelson could in no respect be called ‘county’, to use that nuance by which the English indicate those who really belong to the top echelons of the land. It is very doubtful whether he had any ambitions to be accepted as such, even if his means had permitted, but he was - and remained to the end of his life - a true ‘countryman’, and he genuinely cared about the condition of the labouring people among whom he lived. Although he was a conservative, a true-blue Tory, with a complete distrust of the reformers of the time (such as the celebrated Dr Joseph Priestley, who campaigned for better rights and pay for labourers, and advised them not to pay their taxes), yet he wished desperately for an improvement in the condition of the working man - provided always that it could come legally and from the top.

It was in this vein that he wrote to Prince William, now the Duke of Clarence, in December 1792 :

That the poor labourer should have been seduced by promises and hopes of better times, your Royal Highness will not wonder at, when I assure you that they are really in want of everything to make life comfortable. Part of their wants, perhaps, were unavoidable from the dearness of every article of life; but much has arose from the neglect of the Country Gentlemen in not making the farmers raise their wages in some small proportion as the prices of necessaries increased. The enclosed paper will give your Royal Highness an idea of their situation. ... I have been careful that no Country Gentleman should have it in his power to say, I had pointed out the wants of the poor greater than they really are.

The ‘enclosed paper’, over which Nelson must have taken a great deal of trouble, shows that ‘A Labourer in Norfolk with a wife and three children, supposing that he is not to be one day kept from labour in the whole year’ might earn a grand total of twenty-three pounds and one shilling per annum. Nelson carefully itemised all the necessary expenses, compared them against the maximum earnings that could be expected, and added this conclusion: ‘Not quite twopence a day for each person; and to drink nothing but water, for beer our poor labourers never taste, unless they are tempted, which is too often the case, to go to the Alehouse.

His care and concern were what set him apart from the ‘Country Gentlemen’, and it was the combination of these same qualities that was to make him a rare commanding officer in a brutal century. A very accurate comment, which may explain something about Nelson in the context of these country years, is made in Ronald Blythe's
A ken field,
which deals largely with the same area of England - but as late as the twentieth century: ‘East Anglia is a nation which makes it different. They talk their heads off in the West Country and Wales but the only kind of East Anglians who will talk freely are the fishermen. You will always notice that when a village boy joins the navy he begins to talk easily. It is because the sea is free and people catch the freedom. The inland country people do not have this sense of freedom.’ If Nelson had never gone to sea he might, like his neighbours, have seen nothing unusual in the poverty that surrounded him.

Digging, gardening, enduring the cold winters, aware by now that his fragile and nervous wife was unlikely ever to bear him any children, passed over from active service when it seemed that war was yet again imminent, Nelson's situation might have induced despair. He knew that in high places his name was disliked. Had not Lord Hood, when he had called on him, remarked that ‘The King was impressed with an unfavourable opinion of me’ ? It was a remark that Nelson never forgot, for it was the ultimate wound that his king, whom he thought he had served so honourably in preserving the country's interests in the West Indies, had turned against him. Indeed, as late as December 1792, when (though he could little know it) his long exile was drawing to a close, he had written to the Duke of Clarence, who had asked what was his relationship with Lord Hood :

Since the winter of 1791, Horatio and Fanny had been the sole occupants of the Parsonage House, for the Reverend Edmund, whose eyesight was failing as well as his general health, had leased a cottage in the nearby village of Burnham Ulph which was more convenient for him in the performance of his duties. Every spring Nelson went to London to attend a
levee
for, even if out of favour, he must not be forgotten; nor could he endure that the years should go by and that he should never again meet and talk with his fellow sea-officers. Unbelievably tranquil by modem standards, the life of the childless couple at Burnham pursued a routine pattern that was perfectly normal in rural England. Such it had been for centuries, and such it was believed it would always be. No letters or diaries in English give so perfect a picture of this life as the diary of James Woodforde, from 1776-1803 the Parson at Weston Longeville, yet another sleepy village in Norfolk. But even here, after such entries in the winter of 1792 as ‘Dinner today boiled Tongue and Turnips and a fine couple of Ducks roasted’, the outside world gradually begins to intrude. The storm that was about to burst over the Continent, heralded by the French occupation in November that year of the Austrian Netherlands, and the spread of revolutionary ideas, was felt even in distant East Anglia: ‘. . . Much talking about Mobs rising in many parts of the Kingdom especially in Norfolk and in Norwich, a great Number of Clubs about the County and the City, who stile themselves Resolution-Men alias Revolution-Men.’ But on 8 December, the quiet routine of Parson Woodforde, no doubt like that of the Nelsons at Burnham Thorpe, was broken by the newspapers: ‘Alarming Accounts in the Papers, Riots daily expected in many parts of the Kingdom, London &c. A fresh proclamation from the King on the present affairs. . . . Every appearance at present of troublesome times being at hand, and which chiefly are set on foot by the troubles in France.’ Five days later, the King, in a speech which' almost everyone thought admirable, and which bears all the hallmarks of Pitt’s style, sounded the grim note of warning. The days of peace would soon be over, the pattern of life as it had been lived for centuries in Europe would be shattered, and among the innumerable thousands who would soon be employed in the armies and navies of the warring powers was a comparatively obscure naval captain in Norfolk. Referring to the current wave of unrest, the King said :