Influences in Nelson's early career

"Forgive me; but my mother hated the French."

Horatio Nelson was born lucky. 

Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, where his father was the Rector, is three miles from the sea, an hour’s walk. The land lies flat and low and the wind from the North Sea comes racing through. He must have watched the sailing ships go past, to adventures, trading routes, battles, or to the harbour at Great Yarmouth. He must have seen the long horizon flecked with sail, busy with trade. More important than the stories told later about his young sense of honour and adventure, he grew up used to the smell of sea and the sound of waves, day-dreaming about where the ships were passing to, what they were like on-board. And so, aged twelve, he went to find out. “I went to sea with my uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling”.¹

His father was a poetic man. When one of his daughters turned twenty-one, Edmund Nelson said to her that time was “a subtle, nimble thief” who has “stolen away your one and twentieth year”, a clear echo of Milton’s sonnet, which begins, “How soon hath Time the subtle thief of youth/ Stoln on his wing my three and twentieth year!” That sonnet is quite apposite to the life of Nelson. “My hasting days fly on with full career,” Milton writes, in a line that fits perfectly the rapid fullness of Nelson’s life: to sea at twelve, to the arctic at 15, made lieutenant at 18, full Captain at 21. Despite his prodigious rise, he always looked ahead. He knew that time was running out.

Milton’s sonnet begins in despair: “my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.” Nelson was capable of depression. But he shared Milton’s ambitious nature. Writing aged twenty-one, when debilitating illness had him sent home from his service, he said, “I shall recover my dream of glory and be fulfilled.” That dream had come not just from living by the sea, but from his family.

Nelson’s mother Catherine died when he was nine, followed by his grandmother a few days later. He was strongly influenced by his mother for the rest of his life. Writing in 1803, two years before his death, he said,

I assure your Excellency, that I would not, upon any consideration, have a Frenchman in the Fleet, except as a prisoner. I put no confidence in them… I believe they are all alike… not a Frenchman comes here. Forgive me; but my mother hated the French.²