Nelson: The Essential Hero (8 page)

The object of his affection was Mary Simpson, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a gentleman named ‘Sandy’ Simpson, of Scottish descent and a great friend of a man who was to play a large part in Nelson’s life, Alexander Davison, another northcountryman. When ordered to escort a convoy of troops to New York, Nelson, with all the passionate enthusiasm of an ingenuous young man very much in love for the first time, was prepared to leave his ship, resign his commission and lay his heart at the feet of this ‘fair Diana’. Fortunately for him, the practical Davison convinced him of the total folly of such an action and sent a chastened young captain back to his ship and his convoy. The violence of Nelson’s affections, within six years to be submerged in marriage, would not be in evidence again for a long time. For a brief moment one has glimpsed the tip of a berg that may wreck a ship, then it vanishes beneath the ice-smoke of a northern sea. But the hidden acres remain, one day to emerge under the influence of a warm and indolent climate.

On 11 November 1782, the
Albemarle
and her convoy came to anchor just off Sandy Hook lighthouse. Nelson, who earlier at Quebec had bemoaned the duty (‘a very
pretty job
at this late season of the year, for our sails are at this moment frozen to the yards’), could congratulate himself on one of those routine, thankless tasks which comprise ninety per cent of war, brought to a successful conclusion. At the same time, he eyed with envy a squadron from the West Indies fleet that lay at anchor inside New York harbour. It had taken part in Rodney’s successful action - the Battle of the Saints - on 12 April that year, and was under the command of the awe-inspiring Lord Hood. It was among them that he longed to be, not on this station which his own commander-in-chief recommended to him as ‘a good station for prize money’ - a remark which elicited from Nelson, ‘Yes, but the West Indies is the station for honour.’ Although in later years Nelson was careful about his rights over prize money, meticulous, some might even say on occasions grasping, yet it was always a secondary concern with him. That ‘radiant orb’ had beckoned him on to honour, not necessarily to fortune. As ever, he was not one to let an opportunity slip by, and on a cold November day, not long after Nelson had come to anchor, the midshipman on watch aboard Hood’s flagship the
Barfleur
saw a ship’s barge with a captain aboard drawing towards him. The side was manned, and he awaited with all the natural unease of an ordinary midshipman the presence on deck of one of those gods who could make you or break you. But this was no ordinary midshipman, though he was treated with only a little more consideration than the others, but Prince William Henry, son of George III, the future Duke of Clarence, ultimately to become William IV, ‘The Sailor King’.

Years later, when Trafalgar had been fought, and when Clarke and M‘Arthur were compiling Nelson’s life, William IV vividly recalled that first meeting. Even allowing in some respects for the benefit of hindsight, his recollection of young Captain Nelson is signed with a visual authenticity:

I was then a midshipman aboard the
Barfleur
, lying in the narrows off Staten Island, and had the watch on deck, when Captain Nelson of the
Albemarle
, came in his barge alongside, who appeared to be the merest boy of a captain I ever beheld; and his dress was worthy of attention. He had on a full-laced uniform; his lank unpowdered hair was tied in a stiff Hessian tail, of an extraordinary length; the old-fashioned flaps of his waistcoat added to the general quaintness of his figure, and produced an appearance which particularly attracted my notice; for I had never seen anything like it before, nor could I imagine who he was, nor what he came about. My doubts were, however, removed when Lord Hood introduced me to him. There was something irresistibly pleasing in his address and conversation; and an enthusiasm, when speaking on professional subjects, that showed he was no common being.

Nelson, for his part, was careful to express his warm attachment to his king and to the honour of the Navy. This was far from being the natural lip-service that might be expected from an ambitious officer. Throughout his life Nelson time and again showed that his devotion was wholeheartedly given to his monarch as well as to the naval service and his country. The key that unlocks him is his genuine simplicity. Now, aboard the
Barfleur
, he saw in the Prince a fine youngster and - as did many at the time - one who might well prove a useful, as well as powerful, addition to the Navy. He was to comment approvingly that the Prince would prove to be a ‘disciplinarian and a strong one’, little knowing that authority and the exercise of discipline would go to his head and that he would become a singularly unattractive officer, whose later career was marked by a niggling attention to detail and a punctilious regard for his own importance. But that was in the future and, while Nelson approved the midshipman, the latter saw in the young, unfashionably dressed captain something of that strange combination of fire and charm which was always to surround Nelson with a halo of friends and admirers. Prince William’s regard for him remained unaltered over the years and he was to keep all the letters that Nelson wrote to him. But the Prince’s friendship was not always the happiest thing to have bestowed on one, once his true character had been revealed by that infallible assessor of men and ships - the sea.

Transferred
from Admiral Digby’s fleet, the
Albemarle
under her young captain (whose appearance certainly suggested that he needed the prize money which he had spurned by asking to serve under Hood’s flag) sailed for the West Indies on 22 November. But Nelson’s hopes of participating in some striking action - and it must be remembered that up to date he had had no experience of a real naval engagement - were thwarted. While Hood and his squadron cruised back and forth off Cape Francois at the western end of Haiti, hoping to catch the French fleet which was bound from Boston for the Caribbean, the latter escaped them by sliding through the Mona Passage to the east of the island and making for Curasao. It was an uneventful and frustrating period in Nelson’s life, and even an attempt to recapture Turk’s Island from the French proved abortive. Peace was on the horizon, and in 1783 the treaty was signed which stripped Great Britain of the United States as well as of far-off Minorca, a Balearic Island that was to figure later in Nelson’s Mediterranean years.

Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, writing at the turn of the century, in the full flower of the British Empire, commented on the events of 1783 : ‘The nation had lost no honour. It had fought with stubborn tenacity a hopeless fight. The Navy, though mismanaged and without great leaders, had held its own.’ This was true enough in its way, but it had lost a great deal of national pride and had been humbled not only by its former colonists but by those ancient enemies, the French. It was this that rankled and, though Nelson makes no mention of it in his correspondence of the time, his hatred of the French - largely, it is true, reinforced by their later Revolutionary excesses - very probably stemmed from his awareness that it was they who had contributed so greatly to the loss of Britain’s American empire. He could hardly have been aware that the industrial revolution was to make good all this and more; that Pitt’s star was rising on the horizon; that India which had been saved by Warren Hastings was to become the jewel in the imperial crown; and that, far to the south, the onetime
terra incognita
of Australia was receiving its first settlement in New South Wales. But for the moment, contemplating an uncertain future, it must have looked to any aspiring sea-officer that a career in the Navy no longer held out much promise. Peace on half-pay,, even with a command, was something that a postcaptain without private means could hardly afford.

Once more he put the West Indies behind him but, though low in spirit, he was vigorous in health. Ordered home, as was the rest of the fleet under Lord Hood, Nelson saw the familiar outline of Portsmouth harbour rise before him, but this time bristling with the masts and spars of inactive ships. His own was to join them, and on 26 June 1783 he learned that the
Albemarle
was to be paid off within a week. It was not a happy moment to be an officer, particularly one as conscientious as he was. He showed now, as he was always to do, that the welfare of the men who had served under him was near to his heart. This was the gentleness, the
rapport
with his seamen, which, so rare in his age, was to make him that most exceptional of beings -a commander who was not only respected by the rank and file, but also truly loved. The reason for it comes over clearly in a letter which he wrote to Captain Locker from London on 12 July:

My time, ever since I arrived in Town, has been taken up in attempting to get the wages due to my
good fellows
, for various Ships they have served in the war. The disgust of the Seamen to the Navy is all owing to the infernal plan of turning them over from Ship to Ship, so that Men cannot be attached to their officers, or the Officers care two-pence about them.

My ship was paid off last week; and in such a manner that must flatter any Officer, in particular in these turbulent times. The whole Ship’s company offered, if I could get a Ship, to enter for her immediately.

This was indeed a remarkable tribute to her captain, for the rapidity of paying off ships, coupled with the inefficiency in calculating for how long and in what ships the men had served, had already led to near-mutiny in a number of vessels at Spithead. What Nelson knew by sympathy and instinct, what indeed Drake had known centuries before - that the man before the mast had his rights every whit as much as the gentlemen aft - was not to be understood by the Admiralty until serious trouble had forced their unwilling eyes to contemplate the reality of the sailor’s life. Something else which must have pleased Nelson was that Lord Hood, far from forgetting a junior officer who had shown at Sandy Hook a desire to follow the call of action and honour rather than cruise and prize money, took him to Court and presented him to the King. The latter was delighted to meet a friend of Prince William’s and invited Nelson down to Windsor Castle to take leave of the prince, who was about to set out on a Continental tour. There were many captains in the Navy, few though as young as Nelson, and Lord Hood’s approbation coupled with his king’s seal of approval meant much not only to Nelson himself but to others who judged a man’s star by his appearance at Court. George III, a moralising family man and staunch upholder of the old ways, was somehow equated in Nelson’s heart with his own father. It was with genuine satisfaction that he wrote to his friend Hercules Ross, a merchant from Jamaica: 'I have closed the war without a fortune : but I trust, and, from the attention that has been paid to me, believe there is not a speck on my character. True honour,

I hope, predominates in my mind far above riches.’ Coming from another pen the words might sound sanctimonious, but in Nelson’s case they ring true.

In October 1783 he applied to the Admiralty for six months’ leave of absence in order that he might visit France ‘on my private occasions’. The desire to see the country of his recent enemies was natural enough; important too was the acquisition of the French language, still that of refined society, and very useful to a naval officer who might one day be required to interrogate prisoners, or to read the papers and documents found aboard captured ships. One suspects that the latter was of more interest to Nelson than the beauties of the language (which he never did acquire). His first letter to William Locker, written from St Omer, presents a familiar picture of an insular naval officer whose standards of shore life had largely been set by Augustan London or parochial Burnham. Nelson could not agree with Sterne that ‘they order things better in France’, although he was familiar with
Sentimental Journey
and with Hogarth’s engravings, as his letter makes clear : ‘
₀
. . At half-past ten we were in Monsieur Grandsire’s house at Calais. His mother kept it when Hogarth wrote [sic] his
Gate of Calais.
Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey
is the best description I can give of our tour.’ He travelled with an old shipmate from the
Lowestoffe
, James Macnamara, who could speak some French and who was to be his mentor on their tour. Nelson remained resolutely unimpressed by France, and was equally disapproving of most of the English whom he met there. Although he was to comment favourably on the food, ‘partridges two-pence halfpenny a couple, pheasants and woodcock in proportion’, most other things including the travelling arrangements compared unfavourably with England.

They told us we travelled
en poste
, but I am sure we did not get on more than four miles an hour. I was highly diverted looking what a curious figure the postillions in their jack boots, and their rats of horses made together. Their chaises have no springs, and the roads generally paved like London streets; therefore you will naturally suppose we were pretty well shook-together by the time we had travelled two posts and a-half, which is fifteen miles, to Marquise.

The inns were no better: ‘We were shown into a room with two straw beds, and, with great difficulty, they mustered up clean sheets; and gave us two pigeons for supper, upon a dirty cloth, and wooden-handled knives -
O what a transition from happy England
.’

Arrived at St Omer, which ‘Mac’ had suggested as a suitable base for the prosecution of their studies, Nelson was happier not only because they lodged with a pleasant family but because there were two attractive young daughters present. He remained disapproving, however, of the way in which so many of his countrymen adopted French manners and even sartorial habits. ‘Two noble Captains are here - Ball and Shepard, you do not know, I believe, either of them; they wear fine epaulettes, for which I think them great coxcombs: they have not visited me. I shall not, be assured, court their acquaintance.’ The voice of the provincial is unmistakable, and no doubt Ball and Shepard hardly considered the drably dressed captain worthy of their attention. It is amusing to reflect that only two years later epaulettes were ordered to be worn as part of British naval uniform, while Alexander Ball was later to become a rear-admiral, a baronet, one of Nelson’s closest friends, and first Governor of Malta. His equally over-dressed friend James Shepard became a vice-admiral. But by that time Nelson himself would have come to other conclusions about the pleasures of decorations and fine clothing.