Nelson (41 page)

He even had a travelling companion. Captain James Macnamara, who had just returned from Jamaica, had shared the lieutenants’ mess with Nelson aboard the
Bristol
and many another West Indian memory. ‘Mac’, as Nelson called him, was an older but junior officer, of about forty-six years. He had been a lieutenant since June 1761, when Horatio was an infant under three, but, lacking ‘interest’ and displaying too independent a mind, he had been overtaken by more favoured officers, including Nelson. Sir Peter Parker had marked his worth
though, and made him a commander in 1779 and post-captain in February 1781, when he was appointed to the
Hound
sloop. More experienced than Nelson, Mac had even been to France before and was probably the least incompetent of the two when it came to the language. He was an ideal partner for the enterprise.
⁹

Nelson loved the company of friends, and squeezed in a visit to the Parkers in Essex before starting his journey with Mac outside 3 Salisbury Street on Tuesday 21 October. Their way led them to Malling, where they dined with Locker and stayed overnight, and the next day to Canterbury. Sandys lived there, and they called upon him hoping for a bed, but as he was not home the duo continued to Dover to spend the night. At seven on the morning of 23 October the two captains caught the packet boat, and a fresh northwesterly wind had them in Calais in three and a half hours. There they breakfasted where newly arrived Britons always breakfasted. Nelson informed Locker that Monsieur Grandsire’s house just within the city gate had been depicted by Hogarth in
The Gate of Calais
. They marvelled at what seemed to them the bizarre manners, houses and food, but overall Nelson’s opinion of the French was every bit as sceptical as Hogarth’s had been thirty-five years before.

At this point the two captains disagreed. Mac was all for going straight to St-Omer, where a considerable English community could give them support, but Nelson decided to ‘fix’ at Montreuil, sixty miles along the coast road to Paris. The younger man, in whom obstinacy was becoming a trait, unfortunately prevailed, and they caught the coach. As Nelson reported it:

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 with 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 [are] 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. Here we [were] shown into an inn – they called it – I should have called it a pigsty. 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! But we laughed at the repast, and went to bed with the determination that nothing should ruffle our tempers.
¹⁰

The next day’s journey began at daylight, and the travellers were able to take breakfast in Boulogne and reach Montreuil the same evening. Nelson’s estimation of France rose as he jogged along, peering out at the countryside. It was, he confessed, ‘the finest country my eyes ever beheld’, with flourishing fields, ‘stately’ woods, splendid trees skirting the roads as if they were avenues, and game ‘in the greatest abundance: partridges, pheasant, woodcocks, snipes, hare, &c. &c., as cheap as you can possibly imagine’. Nonetheless, he added shrewdly, ‘amidst such plenty they are poor indeed’.
¹¹

At Montreuil, which Nelson found situated on a hill in a fine plain, they camped at the inn with ‘the same jolly landlord’ described by Laurence Sterne in his
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
(1768). There was no sign, however, of what Sterne had regarded as the most interesting feature of the inn when he had passed that way twenty years before – the bold and versatile Janatone. ‘There is one thing . . . in it very handsome, and that is the inn-keeper’s daughter,’ Sterne had written in another account,
Tristram Shandy
. ‘She has been eighteen months at Amiens, and six at Paris, in going through her classes; so knits, and sews, and dances, and does the little coquetries very well.’ In the absence of Janatone, Nelson was left to admire the resources of the country and shudder at the divisions between rich and poor. ‘Here we wished much to have fixed,’ he told Locker, ‘but neither good lodgings, or [language] masters could be had here, for there are no middling class of people. Sixty noblemen’s families lived in the town, who owned the vast plain round it, and the rest very poor indeed.’ This was a country only half a dozen years from a revolution.
¹²

On Saturday 25 October Nelson and his companion proceeded to Abbeville, a large fortified town on the Somme. Momentarily, Nelson wondered whether this might be a good place to ‘fix’ but ‘unluckily for us’, Horatio told Locker, ‘two Englishmen, one of whom called himself “Lord Kingsland” (I can hardly suppose it to be him) and a Mr Bullock, decamped at three o’clock that afternoon in debt to every shopkeeper in the place . . . We found the town in an uproar.’ After being hoodwinked by a couple of English sharks, the locals were not disposed to offer the new arrivals an enthusiastic welcome, and to make matters worse Nelson could not a find a single tutor who ‘could speak a word of English’. At last Horatio confessed that Mac had been right all along, and without further ado they ought to take the north road to St-Omer, where numerous English families had gathered
after the peace to take advantage of the cheap living and warmer weather. And so on Tuesday 28 October, the friends reached St-Omer after what they estimated had been a round trip of 150 miles.

Nelson was pleasantly surprised by St-Omer. ‘Instead of a dirty, nasty town, which I had always heard it represented [to be],’ he wrote to Locker, he found ‘a large city, well paved, good streets, and well lighted.’ It had powerful fortifications and housed a large garrison, but there was a cathedral and a considerable number of English were to be encountered about the streets. This, Nelson admitted, was the place to ‘fix’ and a few days after his arrival he confidently purchased a copy of Chambaud’s
Grammar of the French Tongue
and proudly inscribed it with the date of 1 November. His campaign to conquer the language had officially begun.
¹³

They found rooms at the house of Madame Bertine Lamoury, as Nelson explained to Locker. ‘We lodge in a pleasant French family, and have our dinners sent from a
traiteur’s
[caterer]. There are two very agreeable young ladies, daughters, who honour us with their company pretty often. One always makes our breakfast, and the other our tea, and play a game at cards in an evening. There, I must learn French if ’tis only for the pleasure of talking to them, for they do not speak a word of English.’ The husband, Jacques Lamoury, was a master potter in his sixties, who had accumulated several properties in the town, one a fine old house at 136 rue de Dunkerque, and another three in nearby rue Hendricq. The English officers obviously found equitable accommodation in whichever Lamoury used as his personal home, for they were diverted by the eligible daughters, twenty-eight-year-old Marie-Alexis-Hennette Isabelle and Marie-Françoise Bertine, who was two years younger. Neither was married, although the following year both attached themselves to older men, the one to a captain of dragoons and the other to a pharmacist. Given their attentions, Nelson found no space in his letters for the fifth member of the Lamoury family, a younger brother named Omer.
¹⁴

From Madame Lamoury’s the friends explored the town and soon ran into a number of fellow countrymen and women. Some were even naval officers. There were dinners with Captain William Young, but Nelson studiously avoided two other captains, Alexander Ball and James Keith Shepard, who, he observed with distaste, had adopted the French practice of wearing epaulettes upon their uniformed shoulders. ‘They wear fine epaulettes,’ Horatio informed Locker, ‘for which I think them great coxcombs. They have not visited me, and I shall
not, be assured, court their acquaintance.’ The distrust was mutual. Many years later Ball would recall it for the poet Coleridge, and ascribe the coolness to uncertainty about which officer owed the first visit.
¹⁵

As Nelson struggled indifferently with the French language he realised that it was only by mixing with French, rather than English people, that he would improve, but some of the many invitations he received still proved irresistible. Visits to two or three English families began as welcome breaks from toil. Among his new friends he found Henry Massingberd, a brother of a shipmate on the
Lowestoffe
, to be ‘very polite’ and his lady, Elizabeth, ‘a very complete gentlewoman’. Another household made an even stronger claim upon his time, as Horatio hinted in a letter scribbled to his brother on Monday 10 November. ‘Today I dine with an English clergyman, a Mr Andrews, who has two very beautiful young ladies, daughters. I must take care of my heart, I assure you.’
¹⁶

Visiting the Andrews household, Nelson saw a family very much like his own. Like Edmund Nelson, the Reverend Robert Andrews had married into a more distinguished lineage than that from which he came. In 1783 he was about fifty years old, evidently a Londoner by birth, and a graduate of Christ Church, Oxford. After obtaining his Master of Arts the year Horatio was born he was inducted into the adjacent vicarages of Wartling and Hooe in Sussex, just across the Straits of Dover from the Artois coast and nearby St-Omer. However, for the most part he seems to have been one of a common breed of absentee clergyman who paid curates to perform their clerical duties while residing elsewhere. It was this arrangement, no doubt, which allowed him to visit St-Omer. He was probably the ‘English gentleman’ of the same name who took a three-year lease on 4 rue Wissocq in 1776. It was a well-furnished house, for which notary M. Delamer received the substantial rent of 1,440 livres, but war intervened. Now, with peace between Britain and France restored, the good reverend returned with his large family.
¹⁷

When Andrews married Sarah Hawkins, probably in London, on 25 April 1758, he attached himself to a prestigious brood. For Sarah was one of six surviving children of Sir Caesar Hawkins and his wife Sarah Coxe. Sir Caesar was in his seventies in 1783, but he had enjoyed a most eminent career as a surgeon at St George’s Hospital, and
attended both George II and the current monarch in his professional capacity. He was a baronet and owned a manor in Kelston, Somerset. The Hawkins family was full of divines, surgeons and physicians, and possessed considerable means, and Sarah, to judge from her sisters, may have brought a dowry of £4,000 to her marriage.
¹⁸

Chatting amiably to Andrews and his wife, Horatio quickly learned that the family also had naval connections. Sir Caesar had some influence with Admiral Lord Howe, and it was through him that young George Andrews, the eldest of the reverend’s four sons, got a place in the navy. The boy was eighteen and had been in the service since March 1778 when he had joined the
Greyhound
. Eighteen months had raised him to midshipman, and in 1780 he had joined Captain James Ferguson on the
Terrible
. Like Nelson he had served in America and the West Indies during the late war, but unlike him had seen fleet action under Rodney and Hood. Unfortunately, his principal protector and uncle, Captain John Nott of the
Centaur
, had been fatally shot in the chest during a scrap with the French in 1781, and since July of that year, when his term as able seaman of the
Carcass
had ended, George had been unemployed. Nelson probably met George in St-Omer. Certainly he responded to his friendless predicament with his normal generosity, promising that as soon as he got another ship he would find a place in it for the young man.
¹⁹

But it was neither George nor passing pleasantries with his parents that particularly drew Nelson to the Andrews household. Among the bevy of youngsters there were three budding daughters. One, Charlotte, was only sixteen, but two older sisters were of marriageable age. In describing the visits he and Mac made to the ‘very large’ Andrews family, Nelson spoke gingerly to Captain Locker of the ‘two very agreeable daughters, grown up, about twenty years of age, who play and sing to us whenever we go’, and again intimated that his ‘heart’ was endangered. One of the girls in particular, young Elizabeth Andrews, aged about twenty-one, was beginning to captivate him. He knew she was not rich, and gathered that her fortune was only some £1,000 or so, but she was well connected, and in any case Horatio’s heart cared little for money. She was kind, accomplished and attentive, and he found her invading his thoughts. Just as Quebec had grown upon him during his infatuation with Mary, so now he admitted that St-Omer ‘increases much upon me, and I am as happy as I can be separated from my native country’.
²⁰

However, at about the beginning of the last week of November a
letter from Uncle William Suckling pushed even Elizabeth to the back of Nelson’s mind. It was dated 20 November and notified Horatio of the sudden death of his sister, Ann, and the extreme grief of his father. Ann’s life had been tragically short – she had just reached her twenty-third birthday – but with £2,000 invested in 3 per cent consols to her name her future had not been without prospect. Since leaving London she had attended her ageing father, dividing her time between Burnham Thorpe and Bath. The two places were a contrast. Ann’s native village was rural and lonely, and scarcely attractive to a woman of her age, class and intelligence, even one as modest, neat and taciturn as Ann is said to have been. But the winters in Bath put gaiety into her life, and opened the door to a world of theatre, balls, and exciting, like-minded society. Sadly, that very liberation was Ann’s undoing. She left a ballroom one cold November evening and caught a severe chill. Her constitution, like that of other Nelsons, was delicate, and pneumonia set in.