Nelson (54 page)

The island itself was not unattractive. Merely six miles by eight, it was the tip of a submerged and dormant volcano, rising from the sea to some three and a half thousand feet and a peak so often wreathed in white clouds that distant voyagers were reminded of the snowcapped mountains in Europe. What settlements there were hugged the lower reaches. Sugar plantations were cut into the green slopes, a collection of picturesque, red-roofed houses formed the capital, Charlestown, on the west coast, and a little to the south, where an
imposing three-storey stone house provided accommodation, the afflicted eased rheumatic limbs in famous thermal springs. In all fewer than ten thousand people lived on the island, 1,500 of them whites and the rest coloured slaves. Montpelier, to which Nelson’s feet kept taking him, was one of the largest of the plantation houses, but it was Mrs Frances Nisbet who attracted him.

Everyone called her Fanny. She was baptised Frances Herbert Woolward in St George’s Church, Nevis, in May 1761, and belonged by birth to the colonial elite of the islands. Her mother, Mary Herbert, was one of three sisters of John Richardson Herbert. The Herberts were descended from a younger son of the fourth Earl of Pembroke, and Mary and John’s uncle had himself been president of the council until his death in 1768. William Woolward, Fanny’s father, had been a senior judge on Nevis, and a partner in the firm of Herbert, Morton and Woolward. She grew up close to plenty, and owned a black manservant named Cato. Given these circumstances Fanny might have expected a comfortable and privileged life.
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It was not to be so. Fanny was little more than a child when she lost her mother, but she was old enough to witness the sufferings of her sick father, who reportedly died of tetanus in February 1779 before she was eighteen. Woolward was only fifty-three. He left £100 to his brother, Thomas, and the rest of his property to his only child, but most of the assets seem to have been devoured by creditors. Orphaned three years short of her majority, Fanny commemorated her lost parents by placing a tablet in the local church of St John’s, but only months after her father’s death she married, on 28 June 1779. The groom, Josiah Nisbet, MD, was a physician, qualified in Edinburgh in 1768, and approaching his thirty-second birthday.

Whether Fanny went hastily into marriage to fill the vacuum left by the loss of her family will never be known, but she was loyal to her husband and the match was a fair one on the face of it. The Nisbets were a Scottish family. Josiah’s father was Walter Nisbet (a junior grandson of the fourth Earl of Moray), who had migrated to Nevis, established the estate of Mount Pleasant and connected himself to a prestigious local family through his marriage to Mary Webbe in 1743. He had died a member of the island council in 1765, leaving his eldest boy, Walter, to inherit Mount Pleasant and four other children to share his legacy. Josiah may not have been wealthy, but he had received £1,000 from his father, practised as a doctor, and was probably a man of some means.

Unfortunately, Fanny’s marriage had been brief. The couple had gone to England, where they lived in Cathedral Close, Salisbury, where property may have been inherited from the Webbes. Perhaps Nisbet hoped to get well, for he was seriously ill soon after reaching England and died on 5 October 1781, supposedly insane. Certainly, he made no provision for his wife and young Josiah, her seventeen-month-old son, and many of their possessions, including Fanny’s beloved harpsichord, were auctioned. For the second time in her short life she found herself testifying to her love for the lost. A pathetic plaque recording the regard an ‘affectionate widow’ held for a dead husband was placed in the church of Stratford-sub-Castle.
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Widowed at twenty and in a strange land, Fanny’s position was hardly enviable. Her husband’s money had disappeared, along with, it seems, some £2,000 promised by her uncle, John Richardson Herbert, on her marriage. But though a fragile and understated little creature, Fanny possessed unexpected reserves of resilience, courage and discipline, and she was not entirely alone. A few old Nevis friends were at hand, and for a while Fanny appears to have acted as a guardian to three offspring of the Nevis planter John Pinney. Indeed, when John Pinney returned to England in 1783 and Fanny presented his children to him he did not recognise them. ‘Good God! Don’t you know them?’ exclaimed Fanny. ‘They are your children!’ Pinney’s wife was so surprised she set her headdress alight on a nearby candle.
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Eventually, Fanny returned to Nevis, where her uncle opened his home to her, and when Nelson used to call she was sharing the house with the widowed president, his ailing, unmarried sister, various other nieces, the infant Josiah and a babbling stream of guests. Herbert had lost his wife and was on poor terms with his only child, Martha, who was about to marry into the same Hamilton family that spawned the famous American federalist. It was, therefore, upon Mrs Nisbet that the old man bestowed the most affection.

Providentially, therefore, Fanny had become, at least to outward appearances, the belle of the island – young, reasonably pretty, single and what was more an heir of the richest and most powerful man in Nevis. President Herbert had lost track of how much he owned. Jointly with Magnus Morton, a brother-in-law, he held a lease to the large estate of upper Gingerland, and many houses on the island were mortgaged to him. He had slaves and livestock in abundance, exported five hundred casks of sugar a year, and was described by Governor Shirley as the ‘senior councillor’ of Nevis and ‘a gentleman of the first
fortune in this country’. Nelson not only recognised ‘a man who must have his own way in everything’ but also one who was ‘very rich and very proud’.
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Captain Nelson and President Herbert should not have been friends. In his attack upon trade abuses the former was tilting dangerously at the planting class Herbert exemplified. Yet the two men liked each other, and Herbert did not object when Nelson began spending more time with his niece. He offered to stand bail for Nelson if he was arrested on account of irate merchants, and spoke well of him to important island officials. There is an attractive but entirely uncorroborated story that it was five-year-old Josiah who first forged the bond between Fanny Nisbet and Horatio Nelson. The captain certainly loved children. One he played with remembered in adult life that Nelson ‘was kind in the extreme, and we all loved him’. We are told that on one occasion President Herbert emerged from his dressing room at Montpelier to find Nelson under a table playing with his niece’s child.
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Truthfully, however, no one can say exactly what drew Herbert or Fanny to the embattled young captain of the
Boreas
. Fanny herself was capable of attracting him, lonely, frustrated and far from home as he was. She was a woman of some accomplishments. She painted with watercolours and produced fine embroidery, to judge from relics carefully preserved by the family. More impressive, she spoke excellent French and served her uncle as an interpreter when diplomats visited Nevis, a skill that mystified Horatio to the end of his days. Her penmanship in her own tongue was comparable to Nelson’s, though less vigorous and informed, and narrow in scope, extending little beyond the doings in her social circle.

People thought Fanny pleasant looking rather than beautiful. To Prince William Henry she seemed ‘pretty and sensible’, while Midshipman Hotham of the
Solebay
, who saw her test Nelson’s limited social skills by joining him in the minuet on Nevis, remembered her as ‘pretty and attractive, and a general favourite’. A less gallant midshipman, while admitting that Fanny had ‘some beauty, and a freshness of countenance not common in that climate’, considered her intellect unremarkable. Fanny’s portraits suggest a slim, delicate and dainty woman, but Sir Gilbert Elliot, who met her a dozen years after she met Horatio, thought her ‘a buxom widow, and
just
the
sort
of wife he would like. She is a much better one than . . . Lord Malmsbury will be able to make for some time.’ Beyond question the Nevis belle
was kind, well-intentioned, courteous and steadfastly loyal, though perhaps she lacked the sparkle that had been so attractive in Mrs Moutray.
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Nonetheless, before the end of June 1785 Nelson had decided to ask for her hand in marriage. In an oblique reference to the Shakespearean hero of
Much Ado About Nothing
, he told his brother on the 28th, ‘Do not be surprised to hear I am a Benedict, for if at all, it will be before a month. Do not tell.’
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Before returning to Antigua to sit out hurricanes in August, Nelson had proposed and been accepted, at least provisionally. The couple needed Herbert’s blessing, and Horatio put his intentions in a letter to him and left it in Nevis. He waited anxiously for a reply.

On 19 August, when the first of his gossipy letters to Fanny was produced, he was still waiting, but trusted her uncle would not stand in their way. ‘Most sincerely do I love you,’ he pledged somewhat stiffly, ‘and I trust that my affection is not only founded upon the principle of reason but also upon the basis of mutual attachment. Indeed, my charming Fanny, did [I] possess a million [pounds] my greatest pride and pleasure would be to share it with you; and, as I am, to live in a cottage with you I should esteem superior to living in a place with any other I have yet met with.’

Despite his temper (‘I possess not the art of concealing it’) and situation, which he confessed told against him, he felt sufficiently secure in her affections to unload a farrago of news, chatter (‘Kelly I could and would tell you a long history of was I sure this would come safe to your hands’), and trivial tales (‘Captain Acres’ and ‘your shoe friend, Captain S., a gentleman well versed in the business of carrying off young ladies’, had conspired to help an unidentified ‘Miss’ to elope from Antigua). Among good news was word from his brother William that the death of their uncle Robert Rolfe had given him the living of Hilborough, worth £700 a year, and that a long letter from Mrs Moutray had arrived. ‘A more amiable woman can hardly exist,’ Nelson told Fanny. ‘I wish you knew her. Your minds and manners are so congenial that you must have pleasure in the acquaintance.’
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When it came the awaited letter from Herbert was ‘deferring’ on the main question, but promised a discussion when they met and left Nelson’s expectations undiminished. He was painfully conscious of his
comparative poverty, though he turned it into a virtue, since ‘the world knows I am superior to pecuniary considerations in both my public and private life, as in both instances I might have been rich’. He convinced himself he would not be penalised for putting duty before money, and that the president would respect the wishes of his niece. Some explanation for the delay in communications from Nevis was also afforded by news that Fanny’s aunt had died after a long illness. He consoled her with the thought that her aunt was released from pain, and that ‘religion’ should ‘convince you that her conduct in this world was such as will ensure everlasting happiness in that which is to come’.
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The hurricanes gone, Nelson hurried to Nevis for a reunion with Fanny and that man-to-man talk with Herbert. As he later recounted the conversation, Nelson ‘told him [Herbert] I am as poor as Job, but he tells me he likes me, and I am descended from a good family, which his pride likes. But he also says, “Nelson, I am proud, and I must live like myself. Therefore, I can’t do much in my lifetime. When I die she [Fanny] shall have twenty thousand pounds; and if my daughter dies before me, she shall possess the major part of my property. I intend going to England in 1787, and remaining there my life. Therefore, if you two can live happily together till that event takes place, you have my consent.”’
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In other words, Fanny could expect much in due course, but little short-term financial aid, although Horatio understood Herbert to say he would allow her an interim annuity of two or three hundred pounds, with something for her child. The discussion had secured a blessing, but left the immediate situation difficult, and Nelson turned to his own uncle, William Suckling of Kentish Town, to whom he had successfully unburdened his passion for Bess Andrews.

In another tremulous letter he allowed that Uncle William ‘will smile . . . and say, “This Horatio is for ever in love!”’ But he needed money, and solicited either a lump sum of £1,000 or an annual allowance of £100, promising to do his utmost to redeem the debt by being of eventual service to Suckling’s family. ‘Don’t disappoint me,’ he entreated, ‘or my heart will break; trust to my honour to do a good turn for some other person if it is in my power.’ He coupled his plea with a highly inaccurate account of Fanny’s career, and an affirmation of the love he bore her. ‘Her personal accomplishments you will suppose
I think
equal to any person’s I ever saw, but, without vanity, her mental accomplishments are superior to most people’s of either
sex; and we shall come together as two persons most sincerely attached to each other from friendship.’
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Nelson’s finances were precarious. During times of peace he had no assurance that his command of the
Boreas
would be succeeded by another appointment. He had earned a little prize money from the American seizures, but it was hardly excessive – the
Fairview
yielded him less than £200 – and there was still the possibility that some lawsuit would be pressed against him. Furthermore, his income was constantly suffering from the attrition of everyday living, the maintenance of a hospitable table and a compulsive generosity. Surviving notes of his expenses record occasional hand-outs to needy mariners. ‘Sailor, 1s.’, he wrote, or ‘gave a seaman 2s. 6d.’, or even ‘for a seaman (too much) 3s. 6d.’. A more unlikely example lay in the large assortment of letters from home that periodically accumulated in the post offices of Bridgetown or St John’s, letters addressed to the men of the
Boreas
and other ships on the station. Nelson was distressed to find that the costs of postage, payable upon collection, were so high that some of his ‘people’ were unable to retrieve their mail. He appealed to the postmaster general for cheaper postage, and in the meantime paid for many of the unaffordable letters himself.
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