Nelson, Horatio

Nelson, Horatio (1758–1805). Emphasis should always be placed on Nelson's East Anglian background. Through both his parents (via his mother Catherine née Suckling he was a great‐great‐nephew of Sir Robert Walpole) his roots were tenaciously regional, and his father's pastoral duties in his living at Burnham Thorpe, where Nelson was born on 29 September 1758, brought Edmund Nelson's eight surviving children into daily contact with parishioners whose livelihood was wrung from field, marsh, and coast.

His entry to the navy in 1770 was through patronage, that of his uncle Maurice Suckling, comptroller of the navy 1775–8. Through ‘pull’ in the right quarters Nelson made early voyages to the West Indies and the Arctic, followed by a spell in the East Indies during which he escaped death by malaria only through the care of Captain James Pigot. Examined for lieutenant in April 1777, Nelson immediately returned to the West Indies, and his years there formed him as a naval officer.

Before Maurice Suckling died he had predicted admiralship for his nephew (attained February 1797), while Hood, a friend of Suckling's, noted the young captain's exceptional dedication. His grasp of the essentials in commanding men was allied to administrative exactitude; and the latter quality prompted him to take issue with illicit American trade in the West Indies which, though a justifiable policy, placed his professional future at risk. The attraction he felt towards women suggests strong emotional cravings. Perhaps it was some self‐knowledge which brought him to a marriage, grounded only in ‘esteem’, with Frances Nisbet (née Woolward) in March 1787. The match involved a serious misjudgement of Frances's likely capacities as a naval officer's wife.

If Frances Nelson could not comprehend her husband's professional zeal, neither could she share in his attachment to north Norfolk during his years of unemployment until, in January 1793, he was at length appointed to the 64-gun Agamemnon. Nelson assured his wife he would ‘come laughing back one day’, and although no finality was intended, a marriage which had proved childless was unlikely to bring him back voluntarily. The seven years which ensued in the Mediterranean, broken only by sick leave September 1797 to March 1798, under Hood, Hotham, Jervis, and, least happily, Keith, saw Nelson become a surpassing commander for those who served under him, and a hero to his countrymen and ‐women. But they were costly, his wounds, as he drily commented, being ‘tolerable for one war’: a right eye lost at Calvi (Corsica) July 1794, an internal rupture at St Vincent February 1797, loss of his right arm at Tenerife the following July, a head wound at the Nile in August 1798, which almost certainly affected his mental balance and increased his fear of blindness. This may be a charitable explanation, but it is not unconvincing for the intensity of his passion for Emma Hamilton, his intoxication with the honours which fell to him from George III, Naples, Constantinople, Malta, and his flagrant disregard of a superior's orders at Copenhagen. A national hero, yet a flawed one, the last three years 1803–5, which included a further spell in the Mediterranean and the frustrating chase after Villeneuve to the West Indies and back in the summer before Trafalgar, confirmed Nelson's renown as a leader of men with an almost spiritual power to articulate the national will to resist Napoleon. He was given a barony after his victory of the Nile and advanced to viscount after the battle of Copenhagen.