Living, I have done all in my power for you, and if dead, you will find I have done the same; therefore my only wish is, to be left to myself: and wishing you every happiness, believe that I am, your affectionate Nelson and Bronte." Upon this letter Lady Nelson endorsed: "This is My Lord Nelson's Letter of dismissal, which so astonished me that I immediately sent it to Mr.Maurice Nelson,[40] who was sincerely attached to me, for his advice.

He desired me not to take the least notice of it, as his brother seemed to have forgot himself." A separation preceded and caused by such circumstances as this was, could not fail to be attended with bitterness on both sides; yet one could have wished to see in a letter which is believed, and probably was intended, to be the last ever addressed by him to her, some recollection, not only of what he himself had done for his stepson, but that once, to use his own expression, "the boy" had "saved his life;" and that, after all, if he was under obligations to Nelson, he would have been more than youth, had no intemperance of expression mingled with the resentment he felt for the slights offered his mother in the face of the world.

With Nelson's natural temperament and previous habits of thought, however, it was imperative, for his peace of mind, to justify his course of action to himself; and this he could do only by dwelling upon the wrong done him by those who, in the eyes of men generally, seemed, and must still seem, the wronged.

Of what passed between himself and Lady Nelson, we know too little to apportion the blame of a transaction in which she appears chiefly as the sufferer.

Nisbet, except in the gallantry and coolness shown by him at Teneriffe, has not the same claim to consideration, and his career had undoubtedly occasioned great and legitimate anxiety to Nelson, whose urgency with St.Vincent was primarily the cause of a premature promotion, which spoiled the future of an officer, otherwise fairly promising.[41] If the relations between the two had not been so soon strained by Nelson's attentions to Lady Hamilton, things might have turned out better, through the influence of one who rarely failed to make the most of those under his command.
The annual allowance made to Lady Nelson by her husband, after their separation, was L1,800; which, by a statement he gave to the Prime Minister, two years later, when asking an increase of pension, appears to have been about half of his total income.