Free Nelson: The Essential Hero by Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford Page A

seem to have been that simple one which, until recent times, was held by many Englishmen of his type and class. There were two categories of women : superior beings who were placed on a pedestal, of a more sensitive order than men, and destined to be wives and mothers; and whores, strumpets, drabs and doxies, with whom officers and men took their sexual pleasure when ashore. It was not for many years that he was to find out that there was, as it were, a kind of ‘halfway house’, women who could grace an assembly or a dinner party and also be sensual and active lovers. His first love was almost inevitably of the romantic kind. Nelson was indeed a great romantic, although not in the sense that Lord Byron was to show himself - whose outward trappings of romanticism cloaked an inherent cynicism that reflected the attitudes of the eighteenth century rather than those of the nineteenth. Nelson was at no time in his life capable of cynicism.
    The object of his affection was Mary Simpson, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a gentleman named ‘Sandy’ Simpson, of Scottish descent and a great friend of a man who was to play a large part in Nelson’s life, Alexander Davison, another northcountryman. When ordered to escort a convoy of troops to New York, Nelson, with all the passionate enthusiasm of an ingenuous young man very much in love for the first time, was prepared to leave his ship, resign his commission and lay his heart at the feet of this ‘fair Diana’. Fortunately for him, the practical Davison convinced him of the total folly of such an action and sent a chastened young captain back to his ship and his convoy. The violence of Nelson’s affections, within six years to be submerged in marriage, would not be in evidence again for a long time. For a brief moment one has glimpsed the tip of a berg that may wreck a ship, then it vanishes beneath the ice-smoke of a northern sea. But the hidden acres remain, one day to emerge under the influence of a warm and indolent climate.
    On 11 November 1782, the Albemarle and her convoy came to anchor just off Sandy Hook lighthouse. Nelson, who earlier at Quebec had bemoaned the duty (‘a very pretty job at this late season of the year, for our sails are at this moment frozen to the yards’), could congratulate himself on one of those routine, thankless tasks which comprise ninety per cent of war, brought to a successful conclusion. At the same time, he eyed with envy a squadron from the West Indies fleet that lay at anchor inside New York harbour. It had taken part in Rodney’s successful action - the Battle of the Saints - on 12 April that year, and was under the command of the awe-inspiring Lord Hood. It was among them that he longed to be, not on this station which his own commander-in-chief recommended to him as ‘a good station for prize money’ - a remark which elicited from Nelson, ‘Yes, but the West Indies is the station for honour.’ Although in later years Nelson was careful about his rights over prize money, meticulous, some might even say on occasions grasping, yet it was always a secondary concern with him. That ‘radiant orb’ had beckoned him on to honour, not necessarily to fortune. As ever, he was not one to let an opportunity slip by, and on a cold November day, not long after Nelson had come to anchor, the midshipman on watch aboard Hood’s flagship the Barfleur saw a ship’s barge with a captain aboard drawing towards him. The side was manned, and he awaited with all the natural unease of an ordinary midshipman the presence on deck of one of those gods who could make you or break you. But this was no ordinary midshipman, though he was treated with only a little more consideration than the others, but Prince William Henry, son of George III, the future Duke of Clarence, ultimately to become William IV, ‘The Sailor King’.
    Years later, when Trafalgar had been fought, and when Clarke and M‘Arthur were compiling Nelson’s life, William IV vividly