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 sailing for England in March 1785, he mourned her departure as that of his only valuable friend in the islands, and presently sought comfort in the conversation of Mrs. Nisbet, a young widow residing at Nevis, to whom he shortly became engaged, and whom two years later he married at Nevis, on 12 March 1787 (, i. 217, but the date is often given as 11 March;, Baronage, and Mrs. Gamlin in Notes and Queries, 8th ser. iv. 413); Prince William, then captain of the Pegasus frigate, gave the bride away [see ].

Towards the end of May the Boreas was ordered home, and on her arrival at Spithead was sent round to the Nore, where, in expectation of a war with France, she lay for several months as a receiving ship. In December she was paid off, and after some months at Bath, Nelson, with his wife, went to live with his father at Burnham-Thorpe, where he remained, with little interruption, for upwards of four years, employing himself, it is said, in reading and drawing, or out of doors in gardening. During this time, too, several actions against him were brought or threatened on account of his conduct in the West Indies; and though assured that his defence should be at the charge of the crown, and though eventually the ships he had seized were condemned as prizes to the Boreas, the proceedings were a continual source of irritation and annoyance. He seems to have thought that his zealous service and the worries it had brought on him gave him a just claim for further employment; and when his repeated applications met with no success, he conceived that Lord Hood, then at the admiralty, had some pique against him. On the imminence of war with France, however, his prospects brightened. On 6 Jan. 1793 he was summoned to London, when Lord Chatham offered him the command of a 64-gun ship, if he would accept it till a 74 was ready. ‘The admiralty so smile upon me,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘that really I am as much surprised as when they frowned.’ A few days later it was settled that he was to have the Agamemnon, to which he was actually appointed on 30 Jan. He joined the ship on 7 Feb., and, in his joy at the prospect of active service, wrote that ‘the ship was without exception the finest 64 in the service;’ and a couple of months later, just as they were ready for sea: ‘I not only like the ship, but think I am well appointed in officers, and we are manned exceedingly well.’ ‘We are all well,’ he wrote to his wife from Spithead on 29 April; ‘nobody can be ill with my ship's company, they are so fine a set.’

In May the Agamemnon sailed for the Mediterranean with the fleet, under Lord Hood, and after touching at Cadiz and Gibraltar, arrived off Toulon in the middle of July. On 23 Aug. Toulon was occupied by the allies; and on the 25th, Nelson, in the Agamemnon, was sent to Naples to bring up a convoy of Neapolitan troops. It was at this time that he first made the acquaintance of the English minister, Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803) [q. v.], and of his wife Emma, lady Hamilton [q. v.]; but the details of their meeting, and the conversations as afterwards related by her, are demonstrably apocryphal (, i. 108; Memoirs of Lady Hamilton, p. 137). It was arranged that the Agamemnon was to escort six thousand troops to Toulon; but the news of a French man-of-war on the coast of Sardinia sent her to sea at two hours' notice. The Frenchman, however, a 40-gun frigate, got into Leghorn, and was there blockaded for a few days by Nelson, till he was obliged to rejoin the admiral at Toulon in the early days of October. On the 9th he was sent to join Commodore Linzee at Cagliari, and on the way, on the 22nd, fell in with a squadron of four French frigates, one of which, the Melpomene, of 40 guns, being separated from the others, was handled very roughly. The Agamemnon's rigging was so much cut that she was not able to follow up her advantage, and the Melpomene's consorts coming up carried her off. Eventually, in an almost sinking state, she got into Calvi. Nelson joined Linzee on the 24th, and accompanied him on a mission to Tunis, the object being to persuade the bey to let them take possession of a French 80-gun ship which had sought the shelter of the neutral port. Nelson thought that they should have seized her at once, and quieted the bey's scruples with a present of 50,000l.; but Linzee preferred to negotiate, and, when the bey refused to yield her, did not consider himself authorised to use force. The squadron therefore returned without effecting anything. But Nelson, much to his satisfaction, was sent with a few small frigates to look for the French ships he had met on 22 Oct. Two of them were at San Fiorenzo; one was at Bastia. The Melpomene remained at Calvi, and he could do nothing more than keep so close a watch on them that they could not put to sea without being brought to action.

After being driven out of Toulon, Hood resolved on capturing Corsica as a base of operations. On landing the troops, San Fiorenzo was taken with little difficulty on 17 Feb. 1794, but one of the imprisoned frigates was burnt; the other, the Minerve,