He is best remembered as the one-armed hero who defeated Napoleon, rewrote the rules of naval warfare and died at sea, in battle, onboard HMS Victory.
Now, the “chance discovery” of a 220-year-old love letter from Admiral Horatio Nelson to Lady Emma Hamilton, his mistress, reveals how open-minded and ahead of his time the formidable captain was about a radical new scientific breakthrough: the smallpox vaccine. In the letter, dated July 1801, Nelson appears to advocate the use of the brand new vaccine on his own baby daughter.
Edward Jenner had only published his trailblazing paper proving that people infected with cowpox were protected from the deadly disease of smallpox three years earlier, in 1798.
Nelson, who had already lost his right arm and the sight in his right eye in battle, was about to depart England on another dangerous mission to France, but avoided any mention of this in his letter. Instead, he wrote adoringly to Hamilton – the mother of his daughter Horatia – telling her to give “ten thousand kisses” to their six-month-old baby.
Next, his priority is to extol the virtues of the new vaccine: “Yesterday, the subject turned on the cow-pox. A gentleman declared that his child was inoculated with the cow-pox; and afterwards remained in a house where a child has the small-pox the natural way, and did not catch it. Therefore, here was a full trial with the cow-pox.”
At the time, vaccinations were extremely dangerous and rarely successful, and smallpox vaccines in particular were often viewed with suspicion. Previous attempts to inoculate children against the disease had unfortunately involved deliberately infecting them, using tiny amounts of pus from a “live” smallpox sore – and resulting in the high-profile death of King George III’s son Octavius, when he was just four years old.
Nelson, however, appears relaxed and convinced by the merits of Jenner’s vaccine – which, unlike even the so-called “inoculating” doses of smallpox, did not cause any worrying symptoms like a rash. “The child is only feverish for two days; and only a slight inflammation of the arm takes place, instead of being all over scabs.”
He emphasises the word “scabs” to Hamilton, underlining it, then adds, casually: “But do what you please.”
Rob Blyth is a senior curator at the National Maritime Museum, which unearthed the letter in its archives last week. He says Nelson wanted to convey he was in favour of vaccinating Horatia, but aware that while he was at sea his illegitimate daughter was in her mother’s care, “what he’s not doing is burdening Emma with an order.”
It is clear from the correspondence that the embattled 42-year-old admiral worshipped his 36-year-old lover, a married woman whose other admirers included the Prince of Wales: “I will die by torture, sooner than do any thing which could offend you,” he writes, describing her letters to him as “my comfort, joy and delight” and revealing that he thought of her the previous night – while in bed.
“You’re never out of my thoughts,” he confesses, signing the letter “ever, forever, yours, only your Nelson.”
“We often get a slightly staid, Victorian sense of Nelson as being a somewhat cold character,” said Blyth. “But he is actually a passionate Georgian man and that’s coming through in the letter.” Nelson is someone who craves human contact, Blyth says. “If you think of his dying moments, he says, ‘Kiss me Hardy.’ He wants at least one final human contact before he dies. So I think this letter is quite typical.”
A transcript of Nelson’s correspondence was published in 1814, but archivists at the National Maritime Museum had no idea that this “remarkable” letter had survived and was part of the museum’s archive.
It was found last week in a collection of more than 2,000 letters acquired by the museum in 1946. Blyth said the discovery sheds new light on how deftly the admiral was able to calculate risk: “Nelson is a man who acutely understands what risks mean. He is dealing with risk every day at sea, whether it’s life or death or injury from shots, cannonballs, splinters… I think he can probably, as a naval man, make a risk assessment about the vaccination better than others could at the time.”
What’s more, as an enlightened Georgian, he did not fear new scientific inventions. “Nelson’s ships will have had the latest sextant telescopes and marine chronometers. He’d have been well aware of how science and technology can assist him in his day-to-day life afloat.
“So that probably made him more open to innovation that some people might be. He can see the benefits of further technological and scientific advancement, because as a sailor he has benefited from a century of those developments.”
Nelson is likely to have heard about the vaccine at the captain’s table. “Doubtless the ship’s physician would have been kept relatively up-to-date with the latest medical developments, and when the conversation lagged into another retelling of the Battle of the Nile, the ship’s physician may well have said, ‘Have you heard about inoculation?’ just to try to move everyone on to a different subject.”
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Following such a discussion, Nelson – who would certainly have known children who had died or been disfigured by smallpox — would probably have become “wholly convinced” that taking the cowpox vaccine was worth the risk.
Blyth adds that Horatia, who was taken in by Nelson’s family after her parents died and – despite her illegitimacy – went on to marry a curate, was “immensely precious” to Nelson. “He’s head over heels about her, as he hasn’t had a child with his wife, Frances.”
Hamilton, he says, felt the same. “She didn’t have a child with her husband, then fell pregnant in her mid- 30s. This is emphatically a love child, and Nelson is a doting father.”
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