FOOTNOTES:
[37] These suggestive italics are in the letter as printed by Clarke and M'Arthur, and reproduced by Nicolas.
[38] Hollesley Bay.
CHAPTER XVIII.
RELEASE FROM ACTIVE SERVICE DURING THE PEACE OF AMIENS.—HOME LIFE AT MERTON.—PUBLIC INCIDENTS.
OCTOBER, 1801—MAY, 1803. AGE, 43-44.
During the brief interval between his return from the Baltic, July I,1801, and his taking command of the Squadron on a Particular Service, on the 27th of the same month, Nelson had made his home in England with the Hamiltons, to whose house in Piccadilly he went immediately upon his arrival in London. Whatever doubt may have remained in his wife's mind, as to the finality of their parting in the previous January, or whatever trace of hesitation may then have existed in his own, had been definitively removed by letters during his absence. To her he wrote on the 4th of March, immediately before the expedition sailed from Yarmouth: "Josiah[39] is to have another ship and to go abroad, if the Thalia cannot soon be got ready. I have done all for him, and he may again, as he has often done before, wish me to break my neck, and be abetted in it by his friends, who are likewise my enemies; but I have done my duty as an honest, generous man, and I neither want or wish for anybody to care what becomes of me, whether I return, or am left in the Baltic. Living, I have done all in my power for you, and if dead, you will find I have done the same; therefore my only wish is, to be left to myself: and wishing you every happiness, believe that I am, your affectionate Nelson and Bronté." Upon this letter Lady Nelson endorsed: "This is My Lord Nelson's Letter of dismissal, which so astonished me that I immediately sent it to Mr. Maurice Nelson,[40] who was sincerely attached to me, for his advice. He desired me not to take the least notice of it, as his brother seemed to have forgot himself."
A separation preceded and caused by such circumstances as this was, could not fail to be attended with bitterness on both sides; yet one could have wished to see in a letter which is believed, and probably was intended, to be the last ever addressed by him to her, some recollection, not only of what he himself had done for his stepson, but that once, to use his own expression, "the boy" had "saved his life;" and that, after all, if he was under obligations to Nelson, he would have been more than youth, had no intemperance of expression mingled with the resentment he felt for the slights offered his mother in the face of the world. With Nelson's natural temperament and previous habits of thought, however, it was imperative, for his peace of mind, to justify his course of action to himself; and this he could do only by dwelling upon the wrong done him by those who, in the eyes of men generally, seemed, and must still seem, the wronged. Of what passed between himself and Lady Nelson, we know too little to apportion the blame of a transaction in which she appears chiefly as the sufferer. Nisbet, except in the gallantry and coolness shown by him at Teneriffe, has not the same claim to consideration, and his career had undoubtedly occasioned great and legitimate anxiety to Nelson, whose urgency with St. Vincent was primarily the cause of a premature promotion, which spoiled the future of an officer, otherwise fairly promising.[41] If the relations between the two had not been so soon strained by Nelson's attentions to Lady Hamilton, things might have turned out better, through the influence of one who rarely failed to make the most of those under his command.
The annual allowance made to Lady Nelson by her husband, after their separation, was £1,800; which, by a statement he gave to the Prime Minister, two years later, when asking an increase of pension, appears to have been about half of his total income. On the 23d of April, 1801, when daily expecting to leave the Baltic for England, he sent her a message through their mutual friend Davison: "You will, at a proper time, and before my arrival in England, signify to Lady N. that I expect, and for which I have made such a very liberal allowance to her, to be left to myself, and without any inquiries from her; for sooner than live the unhappy life I did when last I came to England, I would stay abroad for ever. My mind is fixed as fate: therefore you will send my determination in any way you may judge proper."[42] To Lady Hamilton he wrote about the same time, assuring her, under the assumption of mystery with which he sought to guard their relations against discovery through the postal uncertainties of the day, that he had no communication with his wife: "Thomson[43] desires me to say he has never wrote his aunt[44] since he sailed, and all the parade about a house is nonsense. He has wrote to his father, but not a word or message to her. He does not, nor cannot, care about her; he believes she has a most unfeeling heart."[45]