The incessant energy displayed by Nelson, and the agitations through which he passed during the three years of this stay upon the West Indian station, again produced distressing symptoms in his general health.  To use his own words, the activity of the mind was “too much for my puny constitution.”  “I am worn to a skeleton,” he writes to Mr. Suckling in July, 1786; and three months later to Locker, “I have been since June so very ill that I have only a faint recollection of anything which I did.  My complaint was in my breast, such a one as I had going out to Jamaica [in 1777].  The Doctor thought I was in a consumption, and quite gave me up.”  This fear, however, proved unfounded; nor does there appear at any time to have been any serious trouble with his lungs.

On the 11th[16] of March, 1787, the marriage of Captain Nelson to Mrs. Nisbet took place at Nevis.  Prince William Henry, whose rule it was never to visit in any private house, made an exception on this occasion, having exacted from Nelson a promise that the wedding should wait until he could be present; and he gave away the bride.  Three months later, on the 7th of June, the “Boreas” sailed for England, and on the 4th of July anchored at Spithead.  Whether Mrs. Nelson accompanied him in the ship does not appear certainly; but from several expressions in his letters it seems most probable that she did.  Five days after his arrival he sent a message from her to Locker, in terms which indicate that she was with him.

A newly married man, who had just concluded a full cruise of such arduous and unremitting exertions, might reasonably have wished and expected a period of relaxation; but the return of the “Boreas” coincided with a very disturbed state of European politics.  In the neighboring republic of Holland two parties were striving for the mastery; one of which was closely attached to France, the other, that of the Stadtholder, to Great Britain.  In 1785 the former had gained the upper hand; and, by a treaty signed on Christmas Day of that year, a decided preponderance in the councils of the United Provinces had been given to France.  The enfeebled condition of the latter country, however, had allowed little prospect of permanence to this arrangement; and, in the summer of 1787, an insult offered by the French party to the wife of the Stadtholder led to a forcible intervention by the King of Prussia, whose sister she was.  Louis XVI. prepared to support his partisans, and notified his purpose to Great Britain; whereupon the latter, whose traditional policy for over a century had been to resist the progress of French influence in the Low Countries, replied that she could not remain a quiet spectator, and at once began to arm.  “The Dutch business,” wrote Nelson, “is becoming every day more serious; and I hardly think we can keep from a war, without giving forever the weight of the Dutch to the French, and allowing the Stadtholdership to be abolished,—­things which I should suppose hardly possible.”  Already his eager spirit was panting for the fray.  “If we are to have a bustle, I do not want to come on shore; I begin to think I am fonder of the sea than ever.”  Only five months married!