William writes word that his height is 5 ft. 4 in., very fair for a Stanhope of his age. What an affectionate creature he is, and how I should delight in seeing him. I do not like the account he gives of Lord Collingwood's health. If the French fleet would but come out and he beat them, I doubt not he would then return immediately.
And on the 6th December she mentions an event which served to accentuate the sadness of that protracted absence:—
Lord Collingwood has actually a daughter grown up. She has made her
appearance in Newcastle, very shy and distressed.
February 27th, 1810.
We came to Town, Sunday Se'nnight. Since then Captain Waldegrave, who was eleven months in the ship with William, and Dr Gray who was his shipmate two years and like a Father to him, have both dined with us and agree in their favourable accounts. He is quite well and breakfasts every day with Lord Collingwood, with whom he also dines three times a week, and he teaches William himself. Your father said— "I fear he is a Pet!" To which Waldegrave answered—"It can never do anyone harm to be Pet to Lord Collingwood!" As soon as the weather is warm I suppose Lord C. will come back, in his last letter he said he should leave William in a Frigate, but Dr Gray is inclined to think he would bring him home. All the reports respecting the Toulon Fleet being out, will, I hear, prove false.
On March 20th Mrs Stanhope wrote—"It is said that Sir C. Cotton is going out immediately to take Lord Collingwood's command, for that he wrote word if they did not supersede him quickly he should supersede himself. I fear his health is very bad." Not till April, however, did this intelligence receive confirmation—"At last Sir C. Cotton has sailed, so that, by the end of June, Lord Collingwood may be back, having given up the command to Sir C. Cotton. He was better the last account. Captain Waldegrave dines here to-day, you would be exceedingly pleased with him, for his manners are agreeable and his intelligence great."
Little did Mrs Stanhope, as she penned the reference to her dinner-party, foresee the conditions under which this was destined to take place. Still less did the authorities who were sending out that belated relief to the wearied Admiral, or the family who now so joyously pictured his return, dream how that service had been already superseded or in what guise that return would take place. Weeks before, at Cadiz, the last act of a prolonged tragedy had been performed. Still firmly refusing to forsake his post till a competent successor had been appointed, Collingwood did not surrender his command to Rear Admiral Martin till March 3rd, when a complete collapse of strength made this imperative. Two days subsequently were lost in the vain endeavour to leave port in the teeth of a contrary wind, but on March 6th, the Ville de Paris succeeded in setting sail for England.
The day of days in Collingwood's life had at last arrived—that day to which he had looked forward throughout the weary years, when, his task honourably concluded, he could know that every beat of the waves was bearing him towards home and his loved ones. Yet as, prostrated with weakness, he lay in his cabin, listening to the familiar fret of the waters, he understood that the burden had been borne too long, the promised relief had come too late.
With the same dauntless courage with which he had faced existence he now accepted the knowledge that this day—the thought of which had sustained him through loneliness and battle and tempest—was to prove the day of his death. History indeed presents few events of an irony more profound. At sunset on March 6th, Collingwood set sail for England; at sunset on the 7th, he lay dead, and that fortitude with which he met a fate, the harshness of which must have cruelly enhanced his bodily anguish, presents to all time a sublime ending to a sublime career.
Meanwhile in England those whom he had loved continued to count the lessening days to his return and to plan with tender solicitude every means for cherishing and restoring the enfeebled frame which they fondly believed needed but care and happiness to endow it with renewed health. Little as they recked of the burden which the waves were, in truth, bringing them, the knowledge, when it arrived, came with a blow which stunned. In the first announcement of the news, the very terseness of the communication seems to recreate more vividly the intense feeling which the writer knew required no insistence.