Nelson’s Bath love-child?

BECAUSE of Nelson’s popularity there were also cases where some women went a stage further and claimed Nelson was the father of their child!

Horatio Nelson Rhees (1802– 1847) was born in Widcombe, Bath, “the base-born son” of 25-year-old Harriet Rhees (1777-1856); family tradition maintains Lord Nelson was the father. Harriet grew up in Widcombe, Bath, where her two illegitimate sons, Horatio Nelson and his elder brother Henry Edward Rhees (1800– 1888), were christened at St Thomas a Becket church in 1809, four years after Nelson’s death.

In the 1841 census, she was living in Queens Street, Bath, and in 1851 she was at 5 Chapel Court, where she was described as a “pauper”. Horatio became a stonemason and married Sarah Ann Green in 1822 at St Swithin’s, Walcot, and they had seven children. At his death in 1847, he was living in Claverton Buildings, Widcombe. Sarah died in 1869 in Bath Union Workhouse, Odd Down.

Family letters state that

Horatio resembled Nelson “the Great Sea Captain” and many people seem to have perpetuated the story of his parentage, but there seems to be no actual proof, plus Harriet would have conceived the baby in about November 1801 when Nelson was at home at Merton Place, Wimbledon. The following autumn, however, after the Treaty of Amiens and a shortlived peace with France, Nelson, together with Emma and Sir William Hamilton, did make a tour of Sir William’s estates in England and Wales, where Nelson was the centre of celebrations held in his honour and generally received as a national hero.

Between July 20 and September 21, 1802, they visited nearly 50 towns but did not come to Bath or the surrounding area. So did Harriet Rhees get pregnant by someone telling her he was Nelson? Did she just have a vivid imagination? We shall never know, but at the time if you wished for a celebrity father for your illegitimate child, who better than Lord Nelson – the hero of the hour!

‘The Ball’ from a series of prints by Thomas Rowlandson titled ‘The Comforts of Bath’, looking at the busy social life of the city in Nelson’s time. The admiral visited a number of times and it’s claimed he fathered a love-child there!