paid more attention to another sovereign than my own; therefore the King of Naples’ gift of Bronte to me, if it is not now settled to my advantage, and to be permanent, has cost me a fortune, and a great deal of favour which I might have enjoyed, and jealousy which I should have avoided.  I repine not on those accounts.  I did my duty, to the Sicilifying my own conscience, and I am easy."[89] “As I have often before risked my life for the good cause,” he told his old friend the Duke of Clarence, “so I with cheerfulness did my commission:  for although a military tribunal may think me criminal, the world will approve my conduct.”  With such convictions, he might, if condemned, as he almost inevitably must have been, have met his fate with the cheerfulness of a clear conscience; but no military tribunal can possibly accept a man’s conscience as the test of obedience.

The Admiralty, who had sent Keith out knowing that St. Vincent, after three arduous years, meant soon to retire, could not of course acquiesce in Nelson’s thus overriding the man they had chosen to be his commander-in-chief.  “Their Lordships do not, from any information now before them, see sufficient reason to justify your having disobeyed the orders you had received from your Commanding Officer, or having left Minorca exposed to the risk of being attacked, without having any naval force to protect it.”  To this measured rebuke was added some common-sense counsel upon the pernicious practice of jeopardizing the personnel of a fleet, the peculiar trained force so vitally necessary, and so hard to replace, in petty operations on shore.  “Although in operations on the sea-coast, it may frequently be highly expedient to land a part of the seamen of the squadron, to co-operate with and to assist the army, when the situation will admit of their being immediately re-embarked, if the squadron should be called away to act elsewhere [as Keith had called it], or if information of the approach of an enemy’s fleet should be received,—­yet their Lordships by no means approve of the seamen being landed to form a part of an army to be employed in operations at a distance from the coast, where, if they should have the misfortune to be defeated, they might be prevented from returning to the ships, and the squadron be thereby rendered so defective, as to be no longer capable of performing the services required of it; and I have their Lordships’ commands to signify their directions to your Lordship not to employ the seamen in like manner in future.”

It was evident that the Admiralty did not fully share Nelson’s attachment to the royal house of Naples, nor consider the service of the King of the Two Sicilies the same as that of the King of Great Britain.  Earl Spencer’s private letter, while careful of Nelson’s feelings, left no room to doubt that he was entirely at one with his colleagues in their official opinion.  Nelson winced and chafed under the double rebuke, but he was not in a condition