Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey. Richard Holmes
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reward for a faithful discharge of my duty, I shall be careful, and never stand forward again. But I have done my duty, and have nothing to accuse myself of.’
The anxiety which he had suffered from the harassing uncertainties of law, is apparent from these expressions. He had, however, something to console him, for he was at this time wooing the niece of his friend the president, then in her eigh-teenth year, the widow of Dr Nisbet, a physician. She had one child, a son, by name Josiah, who was three years old. One day Mr Herbert, who had hastened, half-dressed, to receive Nelson, exclaimed, on returning to his dressing-room, ‘Good God! if I did not find that great little man, of whom everybody is so afraid, playing in the next room, under the dining-table, with Mrs Nisbet’s child!’ A few days afterwards Mrs Nisbet herself was first introduced to him, and thanked him for the partiality which he had shown to her little boy. Her manners were mild and winning; and the captain, whose heart was easily susceptible of attachment, found no such imperious necessity for subduing his inclinations as had twice before withheld him from marrying. They were married on March n, 1787; Prince William Henry, who had come out to the West Indies the preceding winter, being present, by his own desire, to give away the bride. Mr Herbert, her uncle, was at this time so much displeased with his only daughter, that he had resolved to disinherit her, and leave his whole fortune, which was very great, to his niece. But Nelson, whose nature was too noble to let him profit by an act of injustice, interfered, and succeeded in reconciling the president to his child.
‘Yesterday,’ said one of his naval friends, the day after the wedding, ‘the navy lost one of its greatest ornaments by Nelson’s marriage. It is a national loss that such an officer should marry: had it not been for this, Nelson would have become the greatest man in the service.’ The man was rightly estimated; but he who delivered this opinion did not understand the effect of domestic love and duty upon a mind of the true heroic stamp. ‘We are often separate,’ said Nelson, in a letter to Mrs Nisbet, a few months before their marriage; ‘but our affections are not by any means on that account diminished. Our country has the first demand for our services; and private convenience or happiness must ever give way to the public good. Duty is the great business of a sea officer: all private considerations must give way to it, however painful.’ ‘Have you not often heard,’ says he, in another letter, ‘that salt water and absence always wash away love? Now I am such a heretic as not to believe that faith; for, behold, every morning I have had six pails of salt water poured upon my head, and instead of finding what seamen say to be true, it goes on so contrary to the prescription, that you must, perhaps, see me before the fixed time.’ More frequently his correspondence breathed a deeper strain. To write letters to you,’ says he, ‘is the next greatest pleasure I feel to receiving them from you. What I experience when I read such as I am sure are the pure sentiments of your heart, my poor pen cannot express; nor, indeed, would I give much for any pen or head which could express feelings of that kind. Absent from you, I feel no pleasure: it is you who are everything to me. Without you, I care not for this world; for I have found, lately, nothing in it but vexation and trouble. These are my present sentiments. God Almighty grant they may never change! Nor do I think they will. Indeed there is, as far as human knowledge can judge, a moral certainty that they cannot, for it must be real affection that brings us together, not interest or compulsion.’ Such were the feelings, and such the sense of duty, with which Nelson became a husband.
During his stay upon this station he had ample opportunity of observing the scandalous practices of the contractors, prizeagents, and other persons in the West Indies connected with the naval service. When he was first left with the command, and bills were brought him to sign for money which was owing for goods purchased for the navy, he required the original voucher, that he might examine whether those goods had been really purchased at the market price; but to produce vouchers would not have been convenient, and therefore was not the custom. Upon this Nelson wrote to Sir Charles Middleton, then Comptroller of the Navy, representing the abuses which were likely to be practised in this manner. The answer which he received seemed to imply that the old forms were thought sufficient: and thus having no alternative, he was compelled, with his eyes open, to submit to a practice originating in fraudulent intentions. Soon afterwards two Antigua merchants informed him that they were privy to great frauds which had been committed upon Government in various departments–at Antigua, to the amount of nearly £500,000; at Lucie, £300,000; at Barbadoes, £250,000; at Jamaica, upwards of a million. The informers were both shrewd, sensible men of business: they did not affect to be actuated by a sense of justice, but required a percentage upon so much as Government should actually recover through their means. Nelson examined the books and papers which they produced, and was convinced that Government had been most infamously plundered. Vouchers, he found, in that country were no check whatever: the principle was, that ‘a thing was always worth what it would bring;’ and the merchants were in the habit of signing vouchers for each other, without even the appearance of looking at the articles. These accounts he sent home to the different departments which had been defrauded; but the peculators were too powerful, and they succeeded not merely in impeding inquiry, but even in raising prejudices against Nelson at the Board of Admiralty, which it was many years before he could subdue.
Owing, probably, to these prejudices, and the influence of the peculators, he was treated, on his return to England, in a manner which had nearly driven him from the service. During the three years that the Boreas had remained upon a station which is usually so fatal, not a single officer or man of her whole complement had died. This almost unexampled instance of good health, though mostly, no doubt, imputable to a healthy season, must, in some measure, also be ascribed to the wise conduct of the captain. He never suffered the ships to remain more than three or four weeks at a time at any of the islands; and when the hurricane months confined him to English Harbour, he encouraged all kinds of useful amusements: music, dancing, and cudgelling among the men; theatricals among the officers—anything which could employ their attention and keep their spirits cheerful. The Boreas arrived in England in June. Nelson, who had many times been supposed to be consumptive when in the West Indies, and perhaps was saved from consumption by that climate, was still in a precarious state of health; and the raw wet weather of one of our ungenial summers brought on cold and sore throat and fever; yet his vessel was kept at the Nore from the end of June till the end of November, serving as a sloop and receiving ship. This unworthy treatment, which more probably proceeded from intention than from neglect, excited in Nelson the strongest indignation. During the whole five months he seldom or never quitted the ship, but carried on the duty with strict and sullen attention. On the morning when orders were received to prepare the Boreas for being paid off, he expressed his joy to the senior officer in the Medway, saying, ‘It will release me for ever from an ungrateful service, for it is my firm and unalterable determination never again to set my foot on board a king’s ship. Immediately after my arrival in town I shall wait on the First Lord of the Admiralty, and resign my commission.’ The officer to whom he thus communicated his intentions behaved in the wisest and most friendly manner; for, finding it in vain to dissuade him in his present state of feeling, he secretly interfered with the First Lord to save him from a step so injurious to himself, little foreseeing how deeply the welfare and honour of England were at that moment at stake. This interference produced a letter from Lord Howe, the day before the ship was paid off, intimating a wish to see Captain Nelson as soon as he arrived in town; when, being pleased with his conversation, and perfectly convinced, by what was then explained to him, of the propriety of his conduct, he desired that he might present him to the king on the first levee day; and the gracious manner in which Nelson was then received, effectually removed his resentment.
Prejudices had been, in like manner, excited against his friend, Prince William Henry. ‘Nothing is wanting, sir,’ said Nelson in one of his letters, ‘to make you the darling of the English nation, but truth. Sorry I am to say, much to the contrary has been dispersed.’ This was not flattery; for Nelson was no flatterer. The letter in which this passage occurs shows in how wise and noble a manner he dealt with the prince. One of his royal highness’s officers had applied for a court-martial upon a point in which he was unquestionably wrong. His royal highness, however, while he supported his own character and authority, prevented the trial, which must have been injurious to a brave and deserving man. ‘Now that you are parted,’ said Nelson, ‘pardon me, my prince, when I presume to recommend that he may stand in your royal favour as if he had never