BOOK ONE
THE PRELUDE, 1758–92
II
THE SMALL WORLD OF BURNHAM THORPE
What day more fit the birth to solemnize
Of the greatest hero you can surmise?
‘Tis that consecrated to the Prince of Hosts
Of whose strong protection each Christian boasts.
That noble Nelson on this day was born
Most clearly showed he would the world adorn,
The warrior of Heaven, hurl’d headlong from the sky.
Anon., On the Birth Day of . . . Admiral Nelson.
1
EDMUND Nelson, the father of Horatio, was a country parson, born into a family of modest but gentrified farmers accustomed to slotting sons dislodged from the land or unsuited to its cultivation into the Church. His paternal grandfather and two Nelson uncles lived off the rich Norfolk soil; two of Edmund’s cousins, offspring of the aforementioned uncles, became clergymen, and his father, Edmund Nelson senior, was himself an ecclesiastic, educated at Eton and Cambridge.
Edmund senior enjoyed a number of Norfolk preferments in his day, including the rectory of East Bradenham (where Edmund junior was born on 19 March 1722); the vicarage of Sporle and rectory of Little Palgrave, presented by Eton College in 1729; and the rectory of Hilborough, acquired five years later. For the last he was indebted to his father-in-law, a prosperous baker named John Bland, who had purchased the benefice from the Hare family in 1718. Edmund senior had married Mary Bland in London in 1717, and when her father made him rector of Hilborough he surrendered his position at East Bradenham to live out his remaining years in the small village southeast of King’s Lynn. Having attained the uncommon age of eightythree, he was laid to rest in 1747, in the fourteenth-century church he had served for more than a dozen years.
Mary (Bland) Nelson, his wife, lived even longer. Inheriting the patronage of the parish, she remained at Hilborough till her death on 4 July 1789 at the reputed age of ninety-one. Her grandson, Horatio Nelson, would remember her as small and frail, but she was said to have read small print and executed fine needlework into her final years.
Edmund junior was one of eight children of Edmund and Mary Nelson. Despite the durability of their parents, the brood does not seem to have been a particularly strong one. Three died in infancy, not unremarkable at a time of high death rates, and Edmund junior himself was afflicted with ‘a weak and sickly constitution’ throughout life, something he duly passed to his son Horatio. Nevertheless, three sisters and a brother survived to become Horatio Nelson’s paternal aunts and uncle. Mary remained single. Alice saluted the family tradition by marrying the Reverend Robert Rolfe, and Thomasine became the wife of a Norfolk shoemaker. The brother, John Nelson, did not amount to much. According to Edmund he ‘enlisted as a soldier [and] after various unlucky circumstances and misconduct embarked for some foreign service about the year 1760’ and was never heard from again.
The younger Edmund Nelson may have been physically fragile but his mind was sharp enough and he passed through schools at Scarning, Northwold and Swaffham to reach Caius College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. With the aid of a college bursary he collected a bachelor’s degree the year Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland and a Master of Arts three years later, and he followed his father into the clerical profession. He worked as a curate, first for his father at Sporle, and then in 1747 for the Reverend Thomas Page at Beccles in Suffolk. When the elder Edmund Nelson died that year, his son succeeded to the livings of both Hilborough and Sporle. The positions were not lucrative, however. ‘The whole profit of Hilborough I gave up for the purpose of paying my father’s debts and the maintenance of my mother and her family,’ Edmund recalled. ‘Sporle’s living is about eighty pounds per annum. I resided with my mother at Hilboro’.’
Still, in one respect the young parson was lucky, for at Beccles he married a good wife.
2
Horatio Nelson’s parents were married on 11 May 1749, under the benevolent supervision of Edmund’s old friend Thomas Page.
Like her husband’s Catherine Suckling’s father was a clergyman. She was the oldest child and only daughter of the Reverend Dr Maurice Suckling, rector of Barsham and Woodton and prebendary of Westminster. She had been born on 9 May 1725, in the rectory of Barsham, where the River Waveney wound through the green rolling hills of Suffolk. Dr Suckling had died when Catherine was only five and was buried in Barsham. His grieving widow, Ann, had then taken the family to nearby Beccles, where Catherine had met and been courted by her young Norfolk curate.
Catherine was twenty-four when she became Mrs Edmund Nelson. She was pleasantly featured, though hardly beautiful if we may believe a portrait that showed her at eighteen, rather austere of countenance, with dark hair and blue eyes. Little that is reliable about her has come down to us, but the marriage was a successful one, and Edmund always spoke of his wife with unusual devotion. There is no doubt that he married for love, but providentially it was Catherine who supplied the family with what eighteenth-century people called ‘interest’.
Everyone knew what ‘interest’ meant: the ability to call upon influential people to improve one’s life chances and prospects. After marrying Catherine, Edmund could milk the patronage of a powerful fraternity. Her father, Dr Suckling, came from a line of gentlemen, military men many of them, including the Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling. But it was Catherine’s mother, Ann, who who could boast by far the more impressive lineage. She was a daughter of Sir Charles Turner, a wealthy merchant of Lynn, and Mary Walpole of Houghton Hall, Norfolk – and the Walpoles were among the first families of the realm.
Ann’s maternal aunts and uncles were indeed a formidable tribe. Dorothy was married to a powerful politician, Charles, second Viscount Townshend of Rainham, sometime secretary of state, but familiar to today’s school children as ‘Turnip Townshend’ the agricultural improver. Galfridus Walpole had risen in the navy, and his brother Horatio became the first Baron Walpole of Wolterton Hall. Greater than even these distinguished siblings, however, was Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford, a Whig grandee who became the first minister of George I and George II. The ‘interest’ possessed by the Walpoles was awesome and labyrinthine, and their power to reward successively elevated their brother-in-law, Sir Charles Turner, to the boards of Trade, Admiralty and Treasury between 1707 and 1730. Time had moved on since then, and Sir Charles and Mary had both died before their granddaughter Catherine Suckling reached her fourteenth birthday. But, though less powerful than hitherto, the long arm of the Walpoles continued to exercise a benign influence upon her fortunes.
Catherine and her brothers, Maurice and William, owed their livelihoods to it. Before his death in 1745 Sir Robert Walpole had launched Maurice upon a successful naval career, while William was placed in the customs service as a boy. In 1772 he was appointed Deputy Collector of Customs in London, a post he held throughout his remaining years. There were dividends for Catherine too, bestowed upon her husband, the Reverend Edmund Nelson of Norfolk.
Soon after marrying, Edmund had taken his young bride to Swaffham, leaving his mother and aunts at Hilborough, and it was at Swaffham that the first of the couple’s eleven children were born. Two boys died in infancy and were buried at Hilborough, the second of them Horatio, named for Lord Walpole, his godfather. Another son, born on 24 May 1753 and christened Maurice for his uncle, survived. After Maurice’s birth the Nelsons moved to a rented house in Sporle, where Edmund still held a living, and had their first daughter, Susanna, on 12 June 1755. It was at this point that the Walpole arm reached out again.
Among the many properties at the disposal of the Walpoles were several in the village of Burnham Thorpe in west Norfolk. Indeed, the family held more land thereabouts than anyone else, and as late as 1796 land tax records assigned them no less than five dwellings within the tiny confines of the village itself. When Thomas Smithson, the rector of Burnham Thorpe, died in 1755 the Honourable Horace Walpole, Lord Walpole’s heir, presented Edmund Nelson with the rectories of Burnham Thorpe and Burnham Sutton and the livings of Burnham Ulph and Burnham Norton. Thus equipped, Edmund was able to resign his positions at Hilborough and Sporle and allow his mother to bestow them upon her son-in-law, Robert Rolfe. Packing his belongings he made his way towards the cluster of hamlets that graced the River Burn as it flowed briskly northwards into the wild marshes of the Norfolk coast.
And so the Nelsons came to Burnham Thorpe – an unassuming parson, his well-connected wife and their son and daughter.
3
They occupied the rectory, situated less than a mile south of the village on a narrow road that ran to North Creake. A hill dominated it to the west, while, in the opposite direction, through a small gatehouse and across the road the Burn babbled between reedy banks, only some thirty yards away. Beyond, the land was open, with flat, wide fields stretching towards the horizon.
From above, the new home of the Nelsons appeared L-shaped. The longer wing was the original building, a two-storey cottage with three square windows above and two flanking the door below. An attractive pitched roof of red tiles with two chimneys enclosed an attic room with its window peeping through the foliage scaling the gable end. In the smaller wing the rooms on the upper floor were lit by dormer windows. Outside there was a pump and a sixty-foot barn, built by Edmund’s predecessor, as well as thirty acres of glebe land with a selection of climbable trees that gave ample space for children to play and Edmund to indulge his love of gardening.
With a growing household Edmund may have been glad of the sanctuary, of the church, reached by a mile-long amble north, past hedgerows which the seasons adorned with snowdrops, cow parsley and poppies. It was primarily a thirteenth-century edifice, though a picturesque eastern façade in stone and black and white flint chequers may have reflected the influence of the fifteenth-century knight, Sir William Calthorpe, who lay beneath a sombre effigy in the chancel. Walking to and from his workplace, the rector passed through the village, where he might have exchanged pleasantries with his flock. Burnham Thorpe was tranquillity itself, perhaps oppressively so. Even at the end of the century a mere 396 villagers, most of them illiterate, shared the seventy-three dwellings. Only four freeholds, one the rectory, were sufficient to warrant a vote in the county elections. There was a tavern, the Plough, and a cluster of flint cottages sandwiched between two long streets, but apart from the River Burn skirting the eastern flank of the village little stirred. Admiral Nelson remembered it as ‘lonesome’, and his father unquestionably agreed. ‘All is hush at high noon as at midnight,’ he remarked.
Here in the rectory the younger Nelsons squalled into the world. William arrived on 20 April 1757, named for a paternal uncle and godparent, and on 29 September 1758 Horatio, the future admiral. Horatio was a weak child, and, fearing that he would not reach the public christening scheduled for 15 November, his parents had him privately baptised when he was ten days old. His sponsors, to whom he might look for ‘interest’ and protection, were the Reverend Dr Horace Hammond, who had married one of Catherine’s cousins; Joyce Pyle, a connection of the Rolfes; and the thirty-five-year-old Horace, the newly installed second Lord Walpole, to whom this new Horatio owed his name.
The last of the Nelson children were Ann, born on 20 September 1760, whose name honoured her maternal grandmother; Edmund, who arrived on 4 June 1762; Suckling, a boy, born 5 January 1764; and Catherine, the baby of the family, who appeared on 19 March 1767. Another son died in infancy.
The sponsors Edmund and Catherine found for these youngsters reflect the range of their acquaintances. They included members of both families. From Catherine’s side came her mother and brothers, her mother’s brother-in-law (John Fowle) and relatives such as the Lords Walpole, John Berney and Sir John Turner. Edmund supplied his uncles, mother and brother-in-law, Robert Rolfe. Local gentry were also recruited for the service, among them Dr Charles Poyntz, after 1760 the incumbent of North Creake but also a canon of Windsor and prebendary of Durham; a Dr Taylor; and Sir Mordaunt Martin, a baronet of Burnham Westgate. With what he eked from his glebeland and preferments, Edmund knew his offspring would have little money to ease their passage, and that connections such as these would be necessary if they were to make ‘a way to get through life in a middle station’.
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