Nelson (68 page)

Even closer to Horatio was his younger brother, Edmund. ‘Mun’ had been in business with his brother-in-law, Thomas Bolton, but was wasted by consumption. At the age of twenty-seven he returned to his birthplace to die. Fanny, Horatio and the rector did what they could at the parsonage, but although the patient ate well he declined rapidly and slipped into occasional delirium. ‘Dame’ Smith was brought in from the village as a regular nurse, but the end came thirteen days before Christmas. ‘Poor fellow,’ Nelson wrote to Bolton, ‘thank God he went off perfectly in his senses, which for the last week were more collected than at any other period since his being here. He sent for my father on the day before his death to ask where he was to be buried, and on my father telling him somewhere near where he [himself] should one day be laid he answered he hoped so, and then told my father two or three things which he wished you to do, and which he had omitted to tell you.’

Nelson organised the funeral for 15 December. A hearse was brought from Fakenham, and Mr Crowe, who met it at the church, was rewarded with a scarf, hatband and gloves, while the six veteran parishioners who carried the plain oak coffin each received a crown and a handkerchief. Edmund was lowered seven feet into a grave within the communion rails of the village church. There appears to have been no will, but Mun’s property went to his father, who insisted upon meeting the expenses of the funeral, and the Boltons, as he had wished. Horatio sadly noted the usual creditors. Among the ‘demands’ coming in were some from their brother Maurice of which Nelson was ‘ashamed’.
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It is not surprising that as the Reverend Edmund Nelson cast fading eyes over his surviving children he fixed upon Horatio as the rock upon which their hopes would most likely rest.

There may have been compensations but working the land and shackled to the small world of Burnham Thorpe remained deeply
demoralising to Horatio Nelson. His ‘dream of glory’ remained unfulfilled, far, far away in this quiet corner of agriculture and parochial gossip. He had turned thirty with nothing but a purposeless life before him, and little to stimulate his tremendous energy and talent. Sometimes he affected to revel in rural retreat, but the truth was that he resented it and longed for a new command.

A child of his own might have filled the void, but as the years passed it became obvious that Fanny was not going to conceive. Nelson must have been disappointed, for he regarded children as the natural consummation of love and marriage and probably felt incomplete. Josiah’s presence must have suggested that the infertility was his, rather than Fanny’s, though this was not in fact the case. It is impossible to say how their relationship was affected, but in the long run a child might have saved their marriage.

For one as widely travelled as Nelson, who had explored the fringes of international history, Burnham Thorpe was excruciatingly dull. He rambled in the woods with his wife, revisiting the haunts of his bird-nesting childhood, and listened amiably to the village small talk with a distant look in his eyes. Sometimes a remark touching one of his prejudices would elicit fiercely expressed opinions, but for much of the time disinterest and a natural reserve left the roomier reaches of his mind unlit. Most of the chatter washed over his head. ‘Our news here is but little,’ he told his brother William in February 1792. ‘Mr Christian of Brancaster is presented to the living of Workington, called £700 a year. The Martins in the same state of uncertainty as when you were here. Dr Poyntz [the parson of North Creake] told me a long story a little time past about walnut trees and red filberts, but really, I can hardly tell you what he said.’
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There were some lifelines. He spent long dark evenings reading and writing beneath wavering candlelight, poring over naval charts, rediscovering the Americas through William Dampier’s published
Voyages
, and corresponding with favourite sea officers. He devoured what news penetrated from the outside world, running up bills for papers with those for wine and groceries. The
Norfolk Chronicle
, published in Norwich every Saturday, was compulsive reading. Most of all he hungered for employment.

Frankly, his naval career had hitherto been more routine than distinguished, and his experience as a fighting seaman particularly narrow. Nelson had served with ability in the Central American jungle and led a campaign against illegal traders in the West Indies, but those
achievements hardly made him a master of naval warfare. True, he had captured or destroyed thirty-odd ships as a commander, but the number was not a remarkable one, and at best his adversaries had been armed merchantmen or privateers. He had never been in a fleet action, nor ever fought a regular warship, not even a naval brig or sloop. Not only that, but there is little evidence that at this time he had any extensive or original views about fighting at sea. Later, long after he had become famous, friends alluded to the embryonic admiral they professed to have seen in those early days, but such reminiscences had probably gained from hindsight.

We search Nelson’s contemporary correspondence in vain for discussions of or allusions to the great questions that exercised the conscientious late eighteenth-century admiral. There is nothing about that formidable naval defence, the line of battle, and the difficulty of breaking or doubling it to achieve a significant victory; no references to naval theorists such as Paul l’Hoste and John Clerk, or to the limitations the signal books imposed upon developing flexible fleet tactics. Nor, for that matter, do we find any clearly stated recognition of the means by which the Royal Navy was increasingly achieving ship-for-ship battle superiority over opponents of similar strength. That superiority rested upon the exceptional gunnery and seamanship of many British crews, but Nelson’s letters show none of the preoccupation with rates of fire that would distinguish Cochrane and Broke. That he had learned much from Locker and Hood is not to be doubted, and he had exercised his crews in the manner of the time, but for the most part his views remained dormant, submerged beneath the business of the moment.
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Nelson’s career had hardly flourished, but close observers would have seen outstanding qualities in him, primitive indications of a future leader. Most notably, even the young Nelson possessed the personality to surpass. He was more than brave, conscientious and competent, the hallmarks of every good officer. He was driven. This is a quality every teacher recognises as decisive. The
need
to achieve matters as much, if not more, than mere ability, because it galvanises and focuses that ability towards specific goals. It imbues ability with terrific energy and purpose. Nelson brimmed with it. He desperately wanted the admiration, applause and affection of fellow creatures, and his thirst for it sharpened his aggression, energy and enterprise. It alerted him to opportunities complacent officers missed, and drove him further than others cared or thought to go. In 1780, for example, it led him
not only to convoy Polson’s troops to the San Juan River but also to usurp the role of the army and lead the expedition upstream to bombard the Spanish castle.

Nelson’s zeal was also marked by a self-confident political courage that was perhaps even rarer. Rightly or wrongly, he held firm views about what the navy ought to be doing, and a readiness to discard and disobey orders he considered to be misconceived or inappropriate. In the way he had wrenched policy from the hands of his commander-in-chief and civil officials in the West Indies he had fearlessly, indeed almost recklessly, endangered his career in pursuit of a principle. No one who had witnessed those acts of a man in his twenties could have doubted that a force was in the making.

Compare Nelson for a moment with his estimable colleague, Captain Cuthbert Collingwood. Collingwood was the more experienced seaman. His crews were equal, if not superior, at their guns, and Collingwood’s courage and public spirit were unquestionable. He was every bit as intelligent and articulate as the younger man. Yet Nelson consistently outperformed Collingwood. The dour northerner was no hungry fighter. Money for its own sake he deemed an ignoble aim, and the foolish clamour of human beings a transient illusion. To him ‘contentment’ was ‘wealth’ and a satisfaction that he had done his duty was enough to allow him happiness at home. Nelson’s drive for distinction, therefore, gave him an important advantage over Collingwood. His opportunism, initiative and eagerness to take personal responsibility for actions unlicensed by others made him the leader and Collingwood the follower. We have already seen the younger man seizing control of their campaign to enforce the navigation laws in the West Indies, and in 1797 we will encounter an even more dramatic illustration of the differences between them. In the famous battle of Cape St Vincent, Nelson would pursue an independent and significant course of action that Collingwood may not have seen and, if he did, certainly hesitated to follow.
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Regrettably, Nelson’s talents had not yet found a satisfactory stage, and in the eyes of some superior officers they had been dimmed by his inability to control Prince William Henry. Not all the criticisms thrown at him on that score were justified, but some exposed the vulnerable underbelly of Nelson’s hunt for fame. It gave early notice of his susceptibility to anyone or anything that fed his insatiable ego. Good friends noticed it, even those who loved him anyway. ‘He liked fame,’ recalled Collingwood, ‘and was open to flattery, so that people
sometimes got about him who were unworthy of him.’ William Henry had flattered Nelson by his friendship, and subverted his judgement in the process. There would be more and graver examples ahead.
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Doubts about Nelson seem to have damaged his standing at the Admiralty, though at that time there were more senior captains than ships in commission and few excuses were needed to leave a junior officer unemployed. Nevertheless, even in the relatively supine years of peace the name of the little officer from Norfolk had a habit of forcing its way forward. His campaign against fraud, the threat of civil suits over his actions against illegal traders and applications for a ship kept Nelson before the organs of government during this barren period.

The fraud issue was beginning to bubble, and not before time for its unfortunate instigators, Wilkinson and Higgins. January 1789 brought Nelson the sad news that the West Indian merchant Wilkinson had been jailed in Antigua the previous September. Despite being elected a member of the assembly for St John’s, his threats to expose frauds had brought enemies upon his back. On 4 June 1788 a report of both houses of the assembly of Antigua, establishing that William Whitehead – the arch conspirator at the heart of the abuses reported by Wilkinson and Higgins – had in one instance defrauded the public of £1,213, was passed by fifteen votes to two. The offender was compelled to refund his ill-gotten profits. But the island’s solicitor general, one of the dissenting voters, stimulated Wilkinson’s creditors to counterattack. The luckless merchant was thrown into prison. The situation of Messrs Wilkinson and Higgins grew increasingly invidious. While Wilkinson languished in jail, their resources evaporated and Higgins hoarded their cache of incriminating papers in his house in St John’s, jumping at shadows in fear of the building being burgled or burned down. Nelson was furious. In his view Wilkinson and Higgins were performing a public service, and if they suffered now he could not, as their ally, hold himself blameless.
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Hidden away in the Norfolk countryside and devoid of powerful friends in government, Nelson felt his weakness but flailed about with considerable spirit and effect. He had not relaxed his grip. In October he had written to the Sick and Hurt and Victualling boards, and two months later dispatched more papers to the Ordnance Board. Now he renewed his fire, trusting that ‘the good work begun under my auspices’ would be completed and the frauds investigated.
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Suddenly the cumbersome machinery of the state groaned into
action. In January 1789 the Ordnance Board assured Nelson that they had fully embraced the proposals of Wilkinson and Higgins, and were writing to them ‘by the next packet’. Its head, the Duke of Richmond, had sometime enjoyed a reputation as a reformer, and was keen on reducing the ordnance budget, so there were hopes for progress on that front. The Victualling Board also promised an investigation. Eventually they posted statements of their entire dealings with the West Indian islands to Wilkinson and Higgins. In June the board seemed eager to act before any misappropriated funds could be dispersed, and summoned Nelson to London for an opinion. Unlike most of the other boards, they even paid his expenses. Most weighty of all, perhaps, was the Navy Board. In February, Sir Charles Middleton called Wilkinson and Higgins to London, accepting their proposal to expose abuses for a percentage of the sums saved, and in May he framed a preliminary charge against Whitehead and Anthony Munton, the naval storekeeper at English Harbour, for frauds committed in 1782. For a while it seemed that wholesale corruption was about to be exposed.
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The assault did not proceed smoothly, however. Although the Navy and Sick and Hurt boards undertook to cover the cost of Wilkinson and Higgins’s passages to England and their legal expenses, the finances of both men were exhausted. The latter argued for an on-the-spot trial in Antigua, where records were to hand, and also for a broad-based enquiry, rather than board-by-board investigations. By the end of 1789 some officials in London were tiring of what they considered to be prevarication, and predicted it would all ‘end in smoke’. Nelson urged them to stand firm, and though the issue is unclear it seems that some satisfaction was eventually achieved. Wilkinson later congratulated himself upon having been ‘serviceable’ to various ‘departments’ of the Admiralty, while long afterwards George Rose, then secretary to the Treasury, admitted that several frauds were detected through the instrumentality of Wilkinson, Higgins and Nelson, and their perpetrators punished. One of these was evidently Munton, the naval storekeeper, who was fined and imprisoned.
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