When danger looms close at hand, the best men, if known, are not left in the cold shade of official disfavor.  “Post nubila Phoebus,” was the expression of Nelson, astonished for a rarity into Latin by the suddenness with which the sun now burst upon him through the clouds.  “The Admiralty so smile upon me, that really I am as much surprised as when they frowned.”  On the 6th of January, 1793, the First Lord, with many apologies for previous neglect, promised to give him a seventy-four-gun ship as soon as it was in his power to do so, and that meanwhile, if he chose to take a sixty-four, he could have one as soon as she was ready.  On the 30th he was appointed to the “Agamemnon,” of the latter rate.  Within the preceding fortnight Louis XVI. had been beheaded, and the French ambassador ordered to leave England.  On February 1, 1793, two days after Nelson’s orders were issued, the Republic declared war against Great Britain and Holland.

FOOTNOTES: 

[8] Nicolas, vol. v. p. 356.

[9] Thus Collingwood, rarely other than sober and restrained in his language, wrote to Hughes:  “It is from the idea that the greatness and superiority of the British navy very much depends upon preserving inviolate the Act of Navigation, excluding foreigners from access to the colonies, that I am induced to make this representation to you.”  Nicolas, vol. i. p. 172.

[10] Nelson’s letters are contradictory on this point.  In a letter to Locker of March 3, 1786, he says, “Before the first vessel was tried I had seized four others;” whereas in the formal and detailed narrative drawn up—­without date, but later than the letter to Locker—­he says the first vessel was tried and condemned May 17, the other four seized May 23.  (Nicolas, vol. i. pp. 177, 178.) The author has followed the latter, because from the particularity of dates it seems to have been compiled from memoranda, that of Locker written from memory,—­both nearly a year after the events.

[11] This word is used by Nelson, apparently, as equivalent to “season,”—­the cruising period in the West Indies.  “The admiral wishes to remain another station,” he writes elsewhere.

[12] Lady Nelson’s tombstone in Littleham Churchyard, Exmouth, reads that she died May 6, 1831, “aged 73.”  She would then have been born before May 6, 1758.  Nicolas (vol. i. p. 217) says that she died May 4, 1831, aged 68, but does not mention his authority.

[13] Prior to May, 1785, the only stops of the “Boreas” at Nevis were January 6-8, February 1-4, and March 11-15. (Boreas’s Log in Nicolas’s Letters and Despatches of Lord Nelson, vol. vii.  Addenda, pp. viii, ix.)

[14] The author is satisfied, from casual expressions in Nelson’s letters to Lady Hamilton, that his famous two years’ confinement to the ship, 1803-1805, and, to a less extent, the similar seclusion practised in the Baltic and the Downs, proceeded, in large part at least, from a romantic and chivalrous resolve to leave no room for doubt, in the mind of Lady Hamilton or of the world, that he was entirely faithful to her.