Footnotes

Nelson's sixteen-year-old daughter by Lady Hamilton contemplates marriage. This letter forms the basis of much of Carola Oman's description of Horatia's adolescence: "Horatia spent two years in this setting [with the Matchams at Ashford], growing tall and fair, slight and lively. When the Matchams fulfilled their long-meditated plan of taking their family abroad, she passed on to the Boltons in Norfolk. She was sixteen, and engaged to be married. She wrote to her self-appointed guardian, George Rose, explaining that Mr Blake's friends refused their consent unless some modest preferment could be found for him, and Rose, who was dying, but had never forgotten that she had been 'recommended to my best attention by the Hero in parting from him, when he last sailed from Spithead, and strongly recommended to his Country in his last moments', did what he could. He enclosed her note in one to the Prime Minister, asking if either the Chancellor might be approached on behalf of Mr Blake ('He is now a Curate'), or, preferably, a pension of £200 per annum be granted to Miss Nelson. Eighteen months later the Matchams heard, in Paris, that the engagement was broken off...two years elapsed before The Times recorded the marriage, at Burnham, on February 19, 1822, of Miss Nelson Nelson to the Rev Philip Ward, MA" (Nelson, 1947, p.669). The peculiar doubling of Horatia's surname springs from a provision made by her father in the so-called Last Codicil, made on the morning of Trafalgar: "I also leave to the beneficence of my Country my adopted daughter, Horatia Nelson Thompson; and desire she will use in future the name of Nelson only". For further details of George Rose, see Nelson's letter to Emma of 15 September 1805 in the present sale (describing the interview with Rose to which Rose alludes in his letter to Lord Liverpool) as well as Captain Hardy's letter of 9 December 1805, also in the present sale.