Nelson (46 page)

Doubtless because of their father, both the Pemble girls married naval officers. Catherine took a relative, Lieutenant Gerard Selby, and was widowed in 1779. On 2 September 1771, when Mary was about twenty-one, she stood before members of her family in Berwick-on-Tweed to marry John Moutray, a man nearly thirty years her senior. They moved to London, where the intelligent and immensely personable young woman mixed easily in genteel society. Relatives of the Marquess of Lothian and the Duke of Richmond would one day speak for her, and in 1773 Admiral Hood acted as godfather to her son James. To the end of her life Mary attracted. The novelist Maria Edgeworth, who lived close by during Mary’s later years in Ireland, was impressed by her positive attitude and ‘usual amiable temper and good sense’, and so charmed by her wit and spontaneity that she described her as ‘our Irish Madame de Sévigné’. Looking at her in 1784, Nelson beheld the mother of engaging eleven-year-old twins, James and Kate, and a woman of considerable personality and beauty. Mrs Moutray was slender, with a high, open forehead, straight nose, delicate face and light hair and eyes. Before long she had captivated both Collingwood and Nelson, the one a fellow Northumbrian two or three years her senior and the other seven or eight years her junior.
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Collingwood weakened first, for it was he who had brought out the Moutrays with their servants and baggage in the
Mediator
the previous year. In the course of the long passage between Portsmouth and Antigua, Mary had penetrated the captain’s natural northern reserve and dissipated his annoyance at the inconvenience of carrying passengers. Thereafter, especially in May 1784 when the
Mediator
was being overhauled in English Harbour, Collingwood became what Mary called ‘a beloved brother in our house’ and enjoyed rare moments of domesticity. He would correspond with Mary until his death, remembering how she had allowed him ‘to frizzle your head for a ball dress at Antigua’.
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The Nelsons too, Horatio and William, soon attended her, though she must have marvelled at the contrasts between the thin and taciturn naval officer and his garrulous, robust and grasping brother. Mary chided the parson about his friendship for an heiress he knew, Dorothea Scrivener, and soothed the distraught Horatio. As early as 24 September she had the captain writing that ‘was it not for Mrs Moutray, who is
very very
good to me, I should almost hang myself at this infernal
hole’. Later he movingly spoke of the times he had shared with ‘a treasure of a woman’ on the hill, where the close leaves and profuse branches of a beloved tamarind tree had screened them from the burning sun as they surveyed the magnificent blue harbour below. It was a place, he said, ‘where I spent more happy days than in any one spot in the world.’
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Nelson was probably motivated by psychological dependency more than lust. Throughout his life he needed attention, and to feel valued and important. He resented indifference or neglect, but soared mightily upon recognition and praise, a drive that influenced both his professional and private relations. It drove him to become a public hero, made him susceptible to the grossest flatteries and deepened his vulnerability to women. Their interest and attentions, however innocent, encouraged his sense of self-importance, and assuaged his insecurities. At any time he would have been vulnerable to Mary, but at this time, in friendless Antigua, his isolation made her devastating. Mary became a lifeline. Where several others learned to avoid him, burned by his fiery interpretation of duty, she liked him, talked to him about his life and opinions, and proved that he mattered. In an ocean of indifference and some hostility she was an island of consideration, and he was drawn irresistibly back to her.

Commissioner Moutray was by no means ignorant of the goingson between his wife and the two naval officers, and like many an elderly man thus placed sensed his own insecurity. Compared with Collingwood and Nelson, Moutray lacked talent, prospect and youth. He must have understood the attractions they possessed for someone of his wife’s age, attractions that he had lost long before. After all, all three belonged to the same generation and he could have been their father. But whatever flirting that went on remained within bounds, and Commissioner Moutray seems to have kept his suspicions to himself.

Perhaps the most attractive story of the strange situation at Windsor tells how Collingwood and Nelson painted each other’s portraits under Mary’s approving eye. Nelson was suffering from one his fevers and had lost much of his hair. Turning to the less than expert services of the local perruquier, he secured an ill-fitting wig that occasioned much merriment among associates. ‘I must draw you, Nelson – in that wig!’ Collingwood declared one day, and with evident heavy-handedness eventually produced a miniature profile. It was a primitive composition, but at least preserved some of its subject’s obvious physical
characteristics. Surveying the unflattering result with good-humoured dissatisfaction, Nelson replied, ‘And now, Collingwood, in revenge I will draw you in that queue of yours!’ Taking watercolours and a small piece of paper the captain of the
Boreas
proved himself a rather more proficient amateur, and supplied a pleasing monochrome portrait – his only known sortie into art, but one that suggested undeveloped skills. Mary kept both pictures, but at the end of her life searched for a safe haven and gave them to Sarah Collingwood, the admiral’s daughter. These remarkable mementos of English Harbour may still be seen in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
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When the hurricane season of 1784 was finally spent the ships prepared for sea. Sir Richard planned to take the squadron to Barbados, where bread might be had, and then to direct the captains to their different stations. Before leaving Antigua he hosted a ‘grand dinner’ on the last day of October, though Nelson thought it a great nuisance. The Moutrays made it bearable, but Nelson’s hunger for activity probably raised his spirits when he sailed with the squadron the following day.
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Out at sea Hughes exercised his ships in ‘different manoeuvres and evolutions’ before reaching Barbados on 6 November and reuniting with the
Mediator
and
Rattler
. The admiral lodged at Constitution Hill, and amidst preparations for a personal inspection of his station issued orders for the men-of-war under his command. Nelson was to patrol the northern islands with Wilfred Collingwood’s
Rattler
, and to call at the island of St John in the Virgins to see whether it offered wood, water and shelter.
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While the
Boreas
was being fitted out an altercation between two of Nelson’s young officers resulted in a pistol ball cutting through the stomach of George Andrews and lodging in his back. Nelson was distressed by the tragic dispute between two of his ‘children’. Andrews had joined the ship late, arriving from England in the
Unicorn
in July, but he had been making good progress. Perhaps he created tensions among youths who had already bonded or formed some kind of pecking order. Whatever the case, without telling any superiors four of them went ashore and Andrews and Thomas Stansbury exchanged shots. Close to death, Andrews was confined to a hospital bed in Barbados while Stansbury and his second, William Oliver, were
confined in the
Boreas
, dismally reflecting on how their own lives now also hung by a thread. Fortunately Andrews returned to duty in April, and Stansbury and Oliver were transferred to other ships to preserve harmony.
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It was while he was in Barbados that Nelson also first turned his mind to one of the most vexing questions of the day, the navigation laws. They had been the props of the mercantilist system since the seventeenth century, and endeavoured to create economic self-sufficiency within the empire by regulating trade between Britain and its overseas dependencies and shutting out rivals. Foreign trade was excluded from the colonies, and the empire bound into an interdependent network, with each territory producing only specifically enumerated goods to be purchased by the others. In that way competition could be reduced and markets ensured. Moreover, the navigation laws recognised the mutual dependence of trade and naval power. The navy protected Britain, her colonies and their trade, but equally relied upon that trade for the prosperity to maintain itself. The navigation laws went further, decreeing that all trade commodities be carried in ships built in Britain or her dependencies (in ‘British bottoms’ rather than ‘foreign bottoms’), and predominantly manned by their citizens. Thus the acts encouraged two of the crucial foundations of naval power, a thriving shipbuilding industry and the maintenance of a pool of experienced seamen. Given the fundamental way in which the acts linked trade and the wellbeing of the navy, it was perhaps natural that patriotic sea officers would be fiercely protective of them.

Acts of 1660 and 1696 enjoined naval officers to enforce the navigation acts, but the job was difficult and the American War of Independence introduced a new problem. Before the war the American colonies had enjoyed a profitable trade with the British West Indian islands, a legal trade protected by the navigation laws. The islands particularly relied upon the mainland colonies for inexpensive lumber and food, and in their turn supplied sugar and rum. But the rebellion threatened to end that traffic, for it made the Americans foreigners and liable to exclusion. In London the matter became clear. The navigation laws now excluded American merchants from the British islands, which now needed to turn for their timber and grain to the developing colonies of Nova Scotia and the Canadas. It was the duty of the navy to expel or seize any American vessels engaging in contraband trade.

But the West Indian communities saw it differently. Recovering from
the disruption and expense of the American war, and plagued by a succession of appalling harvests, they were only interested in restoring prosperity. The essential goods supplied by the Americans were not readily available elsewhere, since the Canadian colonies, even fortified by an influx of American Loyalists, were sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped. Moreover, the established bonds between former trade partners could not be easily broken. Not all of the American traders who continued to fraternise with the British West Indian islands after the war were the out-and-out ‘rebels’ described by Nelson and his associates. Some, whose livelihoods depended upon maintaining commercial links with the British possessions, had sympathised with the crown during the revolution, or at least broken away with less than wholehearted enthusiasm. When the war ended they wanted to resume a relationship of patently mutual benefit. Some resented the way politics had intruded upon, and threatened, their economic security and peace.

The British government was not entirely unaware of these sentiments or the difficulties of a strict enforcement of the navigation laws. In 1784 a commission considered restoring relationships between the former American colonies and the islands, but the hard line was reaffirmed. That intransigence did nothing to endear the mandarins of Whitehall to the islanders. In fact, it stimulated disaffection, and in 1789 the Jamaican assembly denied that Parliament was ‘competent to destroy’ or ‘partially to mutilate private properties’. Ultimately, it also failed. Jamaica unilaterally authorised a free trade with the United States, and in 1787 Britain had to declare Jamaica, Dominica, Grenada and New Providence to be free ports open to necessities from Spanish vessels, although even then there was no relaxation of the laws in respect to American commerce.
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Nelson and the Collingwoods saw few complications. Wise leaders understand that those who would rule effectively need to protect the interests of the governed in order to gain their consent, and are aware of the considerations and compromises that are needed to secure loyalty and affection. But junior naval officers were not required to be statesmen; theirs was simply to obey political masters. Nelson imposed the navigation laws without distinction, as if a square peg could always be sledge-hammered into a round hole, and without understanding. As far as he and the Collingwoods were concerned, any trade with the Americans was treasonable and beyond contempt. The Americans were rebels, guilty of an ungrateful uprising against the British crown,
and had disqualified themselves from the benefits of the intercolonial trade. In fact, lacking abler direction, Nelson and the Collingwoods exhibited the same dogmatism, inflexibility and aggression that had contributed to their country’s loss of the American colonies, and their language often reflected the strength of their ill-considered opinions. When Wilfred Collingwood of the
Rattler
came upon an American ship at the British island of St Kitts in the spring of 1784 he reportedly called the master ‘a damned Yankee rascal’, and swore, ‘by God, you shall not lie in this bay!’
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In Barbados the issue began to crackle ominously. Nelson had a sharp eye for the enforcement of the navigation laws, partly because it relieved the tedium of his commission, but overwhelmingly from a sense of duty. In Antigua he had seen foreigners unloading their cargoes, and on the voyage to Barbados boarded a Boston vessel and apparently told its master that he had no business sailing for the British island of St Kitts. At Barbados officers familiar with the station fuelled Nelson’s concern by telling him that while an illicit American trade was flourishing, no orders to check it had been received. Admiral Hughes, it seemed, believed the matter best left to civil governors and revenue officers.

Too often Nelson’s attack on the navigation laws and his looming dispute with the admiral about Commissioner Moutray’s distinguishing pendant have been seen in isolation. It is as though a young and principled officer, perhaps an overzealous one, almost single-handedly inspired a revolt against his commander-in-chief and the civil authorities. The Collingwoods, though his coadjutors, are generally represented to be followers rather than instigators. It is certainly true that Nelson became the most outspoken and least compromising of the rebel captains, but the papers of Cuthbert Collingwood show him to have been a full partner in the affair. On both issues of the navigation laws and Moutray’s pendant he independently reached the same conclusions as Nelson, and acted firmly if occasionally more tactfully. Indeed, it was Collingwood, not Nelson, who first stirred the controversy about the navigation laws. In August he had alerted Sir Richard to the illicit trade being conducted at Grenada.
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