Nelson (32 page)

Glory was one thing guaranteed to spur him on, to recharge his spirit and help keep him alive. It mattered to him more than money. Like most naval officers, Nelson enjoyed the thought of building a fortune on prize money. The Duke of Clarence, who later became one of his friends, would hugely exaggerate when he claimed that Nelson ‘never [had] a thought’ for prize money. Nelson was not rich enough to entertain such indifference, for money was essential to anyone wishing to cut a credible figure in ‘gentle’ society. Never more so than in generations experiencing a revolution in taste and pursuing increasingly extravagant lifestyles. For Captain Nelson the prospects of maintaining his own establishment, marrying well and supporting a family and social standing may have been distant, at least for the moment, but money underpinned all those natural ambitions.
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But for all that, wealth seldom excited him. He said so, and those who knew him said so. ‘Riches are not his first object,’ wrote his admiring father. ‘Corsica in the prize way produces nothing but
honour
, [but this is] far above the consideration of wealth,’ Nelson would write from the Mediterranean years later. ‘Not that I dislike riches; quite the contrary, but [I] would not sacrifice a good name to obtain them.’ Indeed, he was inclined to regard the pursuit of money as a dirty business, and to contrast ‘justice’ and ‘honour’ on the one hand with ‘power, money and rascality’ on the other.
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Nelson’s emphasis upon ‘honour’ reflected a desire to be known for integrity, principle, public service and doing right, whether he actually realised these aspirations or not. But he wanted more than simple honour. He craved that transcendent form called ‘glory’, the exalted honour that linked service to the state with martial achievement, exhibited extreme physical courage and brought fame and applause. Thus, Nelson was apt to console himself with the thought that, while money might elude him, the bigger prize of immense acclaim would not. ‘Had I attended to the service of my country less than I
have I might have made some [money] too,’ he once famously wrote. ‘However, I trust my name will stand on record when the money makers will be forgot.’
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Horatio’s glory-mongering seems stranger now than it would have done then. Britain’s roll of victories had grown during the century, and included Blenheim, Quebec and Quiberon Bay. She had wrested control of Canada and India from the French, extended her claims to empire into the South Seas and expanded her wealth and international trade. A rising national pride and confidence rode on the back of military and naval endeavour, and pointed the road to immortality. As the historian Linda Colley has written, Nelson ‘only practised to a remarkable degree what the cult of heroic individualism fostered very broadly among the class he aspired to’.
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Nelson had known that cult all his life. He had met those same ideals of patriotism, honour and martial heroism in the Classics drummed into him at school, and greatly admired Benjamin West’s famous painting,
The Death of Wolfe
, depicting the hero dying at the moment of victory. Even more, he had been influenced by his role models, Captain Suckling and William Locker, and by the patriotic plays of Shakespeare, with their frequent allusions to national triumphs over Gallic rivals. Nelson was particularly fond of the stirring close to
King John
, with its proud boast:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror . . .
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

Most lovingly of all did Nelson misquote the words Shakespeare gave his hero Henry V before the battle of Agincourt:

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost . . .
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.

As several of Nelson’s biographers have remarked, the admiral made a significant substitution in his version of the speech. In 1801, for example, he wrote, ‘I feel myself . . . as anxious [now] to get a medal
or a step in the peerage as if I never had got either, for “if it be a sin to covet
glory
, I am the most offending soul alive”.’
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Why Nelson needed this public acclaim no one can now say. Psychologists might probe his childhood, and ponder the mark those lonely Norfolk years made upon a boy who lost his mother before he was ten and whose father spent long months from home; perhaps also the transition into adolescence and manhood spent at sea in a man’s world of hard work and danger. It is entirely possible that Horatio’s lifelong need for attention and affection was in some way rooted in that turbulent and deficient upbringing, but while these speculations must trouble the novelist, historians are unable to enlarge upon them. What we do know is that from an early age Nelson fought for every scrap of glory he could get, and fiercely resented any denial of his just deserts.

Back in 1780, while fighting for life against a diseased body, Nelson found his deep-seated drive for recognition a powerful weapon of survival, and acknowledged its importance in one of the most revealing of all his early letters. It was addressed to Hercules Ross, who had so often put his house, carriages and purse at Nelson’s disposal in those difficult days in Jamaica. On 1 September, as the enfeebled captain stirred himself for the passage home, he talked about riding to Ross’s house. ‘Now assured I return to England, hope revives within me,’ he confessed. ‘I shall recover, and my dream of glory be fulfilled. Nelson will yet be an admiral. It is the climate that has destroyed my health and crushed my spirits. Home, and dear friends, will restore me.’
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Captain William Cornwallis took Nelson home in the
Lion
. Horatio was entered on the ship’s books from 16 August, the day after his discharge from the
Janus
. He was a supernumerary, entered for victuals only, and took with him only two or three followers, including Frank Lepee and William Irwin as servants. Nelson was not the only invalid aboard. Thirty others were brought from the hospital on 2 September, but Nelson probably received the most attention. He already knew some of the ship’s officers, including the third lieutenant Joseph Bullen, formerly of the
Hinchinbroke
, the surgeon, James Melling, who had signed his sick certificate, and Cornwallis himself. The captain of the
Lion
was the son of an earl and belonged to a distinguished military family, but a modest man compared to Nelson,
yet they nonetheless gelled. In fact Nelson credited the senior man’s ‘care and attention’ with saving his life.
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The
Lion
left Jamaica at four-thirty on the morning of 4 September. There was convoy work to be done and for several days other contingents joined up. From his ship Nelson saw a sea studded with white sails, some 127 merchantmen shepherded by warships he knew – the
Magnificent
,
Niger
,
Thunderer
,
Sultan
,
Elizabeth
,
Conqueror
,
Bristol
,
Sterling Castle
,
Berwick
,
Hector
,
Trident
and
Ruby
, all controlled by Rear Admiral Joshua Rowley from the
Grafton
. They went west before steering east, by way of the Grand Caymans and the Strait of Florida, but on 24 September Cornwallis parted with the convoy and pushed northwards into the cold Atlantic. At the end of October, east of Newfoundland, Nelson would have been interested in the warship that stood towards them masquerading under French colours. She turned out to be the old
Raisonable
, now under Sir Digby Dent, and the eighteen days she accompanied the
Lion
on the homeward leg must have reawakened memories in Horatio of his first lonely days at sea. Other than that there was little of interest, though Nelson witnessed a novel penalty when Cornwallis had an incorrigible thief ‘punished by all the boys in the ship’ and compelled to wear an onerous collar.

The ship reached Spithead on 25 November, finding the
Diligent
flying the flag of Admiral Sir Thomas Pye and other ships, some of them from among the escorts that had left Jamaica with the
Lion
. Nelson and his servants were discharged the same day, and the captain made his way to London, where he temporarily lodged at the home of Sir Peter Parker. He also made an inevitable visit to Captain Locker’s rooms at Gray’s Inn before taking a coach out of town in search of that ‘most precious jewel’, his health. Like many sick people, he was beginning to appreciate what the fit take for granted.
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In Nelson’s day health meant one place above all others: the town of Bath, close to the border of Wiltshire and Somerset, the last word in resorts for ailing men and women of fashion. It was an eighteenth-century health farm with a clientele that included almost every layer of the ‘gentler’ classes, from royalty to parsons. Horatio had known about it most of his life. His father regularly wintered there, and his sister Susanna had served her apprenticeship at Watson’s, a local milliners, before working as a shop assistant in the town until she married in 1780. Almost everyone had heard of the famous but mythical healing properties of Bath’s thermal spring waters, and Nelson believed the stories implicitly. Accordingly, the
Bath Journal
of 22
January 1781 proclaimed his arrival in the town in its customary roll call of visiting dignitaries.

The town had numerous attractions. It was packed with apothecaries and physicians, a few of them respectable, but many peddling cure-all cordials and pills to the sick, old and lame. The waters, they said, relieved everything from gout and jaundice to deafness and infertility, whether imbibed in the Pump Room or taken immersed to the neck in one of the five baths. The streets were full of puffing sedan chairmen, hauling patients to and from the baths. Once there, admission fees included the loan of linen waistcoats, shorts or smocks, all yellowed by the sulphur in the water, and towels. That winter of 1781 Nelson must have shivered as he padded barefoot over the cold stone passages that led from the dressing rooms to the steaming open-air ponds in which he was supposed to wallow to the musical accompaniment of bathside bands.

It was certainty a novelty for one who had spent years at sea, and in addition to the bathing there was the chance of making useful contacts among the well-to-do who gathered in the town. They sat and talked in coffee houses and tea rooms, danced in their best finery in the new assembly rooms, and turned the town into a maelstrom of gossip, spiced not only by local newspapers but also the London dailies that arrived in Bath within hours of publication. Aesthetes patronised the circulating library, the bookshops and a floundering philosophical society, or watched Sarah Siddons perform at the Theatre Royal on Orchard Street. More frivolous souls defied the gambling laws and entertained themselves with such games of chance as Evens and Odds, a forbidden form of roulette. Nor was sexual titillation very far away in Bath. The streets were haunted by prostitutes, some mere children of fourteen or fifteen, and though attendants at the popular Cross Bath were supposed to preserve propriety the place was said to be ‘more famed for pleasure than cures’. In it were ‘performed all the wanton dalliances imaginable; celebrated beauties, panting breasts, and curious shapes, almost exposed to public view; languishing eyes, darting killing glances, tempting amorous postures, attended by soft music, enough to provoke a vestal to forbidden pleasure, captivate a saint, and charm a Jove’. In some Bath circles a man of modest sexual appetite was considered an ‘unfashioned fellow of no life or spirit’.
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Horatio boarded in the house of an apothecary, Joseph Spry, at no. 2 Pierrepont Street. It was a mid-terrace property with attic windows in the pitched roof and a basement for the servants, but Nelson
probably occupied the ground floor to the left of the front door because his legs were still extremely weak. A physician and a surgeon attended him, the former Dr Francis Woodward, a man of almost sixty, who practised from no. 8 Gay Street. Yet notwithstanding their services, Nelson told Locker that he was ‘so ill’ that he ‘was obliged to be carried to and from bed with the most excruciating tortures’. He was ‘physicked’ thrice a day with pills and cordials, drank the waters at the Pump Room near the abbey as often, and in the evenings, when the crowds had dispersed, bathed, probably either in the Cross or the King’s Bath. ‘Worst of all,’ he said, he abstained from drinking wine with his meals. Nelson was generally a rebellious patient, but on this occasion he was eager to command a ship again. While scrutinising the Navy Lists to gauge his standing among post-captains, this time he stuck to his regime.
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For a while Horatio remained debilitated, ‘scarcely able to hold my pen’, but gradually felt himself ‘a new man’. On 15 February he was able to declare that ‘my health, thank God, is very near perfectly restored, and I have the perfect use of all my limbs, except my left arm, which I can hardly tell what is the matter with it. From the shoulder to my fingers’ ends are as if half dead, but the surgeon and doctors give me hopes it will all go off.’ His ailment was probably polyneuritis, a legacy of the illnesses that had floored him in Nicaragua. The immediate cause was the degeneration of the nerve fibres in the small nerves, and recovery was slow because of the need to grow replacement nerve fibres.
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During this extensive rehabilitation Locker was his favourite correspondent. He sent Nelson news from London, and acted as a kind of referee for him. Whenever Horatio met sea officers he introduced the name of Locker as a talking point, and was forever passing their compliments back to his old mentor. In short, he was using Locker to introduce himself to professional colleagues, and to gain credibility by the relationship. Locker would have wished it no differently, and though many years Nelson’s senior was unrelentingly enthusiastic about their friendship. He happily referred old comrades to his young protégé. One such was Captain James Kirke, under whom Locker had gone to the West Indies when himself a youngster in 1747. Kirke and his sick wife arrived in Bath at the end of February 1781 with Locker’s advice to call upon Captain Nelson at an early opportunity. The Kirkes took different lodgings, but Nelson recommended his own doctor and surgeon, and was sure the bathing would be of ‘infinite
service’ to Mrs Kirke. Sadly, her condition proved incurable: ‘I am very sorry for her, poor woman,’ wrote Nelson, ‘it must be a most lamentable situation to remain in her state for the number of years she may live.’
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