VISCOUNT HORATIO

See also:

• NELSON
• VISCOUNT HORATIO NELSON NELSON (1758-1805)
• NELSON, ROBERT (s656-1715)

NELSON NELSON (1758-1805)  , duke of Bronte in Sicily, British naval hero, was born at the parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe, in Norfolk, on the 29th of September 1758 . His father, Edmund Nelson (1722-1802), who came of a clerical family, was rector of the parish . His mother, whose maiden name was Catherine Suckling (1725-1767), was a grand-niece of Sir Robert Walpole (1st earl of Orford) . This connexion proved of little or no value to the future admiral, who, in a letter to his brother, the Rev . William Nelson, written in 1784, speaks of the Walpoles as " the merest set of cyphers that ever existed—in public affairs I mean." His introduction to the navy came from his maternal uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling (1725-1778), an officer of some reputation who at his death held the important post of comptroller of the navy . Horatio, who had received a summary, and broken, education at Norwich, Downham and North Walsham, was entered on the " Raisonable " when captain Suckling was appointed to her in 1770 on an alarm Mahommed Ibn Rashid at Hail, and Abdallah Ibn Sa'ud at Riad, ruled in western and eastern Nejd respectively, until 1892, when the former by his victory at `Aneza became emir of all Nejd . His successor, Abdul Aziz Ibn Rashid, was, however, unable to maintain his position, and in spite of Turkish support, sustained a severe defeat in 1905 at the hands of Ibn Sa'ud which for the time, at any rate, restored the supremacy to Riad . No data exist for an accurate estimate of the population; it probably exceeds 1,000,000, of which two-thirds may be settled, and one-third nomad or Bedouin . Palgrave in 1863, perhaps unduly exaggerating the importance of the town population, placed it at nearly double this figure . The revenue of the emir Mahommed Ibn Rashid of Hail, who died in 1897, was estimated by Blunt in 1879 at £80,000, and his expenditure at little more than half that amount . Nolde who visited Hail in 1893 after the emir's conquest of the Wahhabi state, believed that his surplus income then amounted to £60,000 a year, and his accumulated treasure to £1,5oo,000 . AuTH0RrrIEs.—W .

G . Palgrave, Central and Eastern

Arabia (London . 1865) ; Lady Anne Blunt, Pilgrimage to Nejd (London, 1881) ; C . M . Doughty, Arabia Deserta (Cambridge, 1885); C . Huber, Journal d'un voyage en Arabie (Paris, 1891); J . Euting, Reise in inner Arabien (Leyden, 1896) ; E . Nolde, Reise nach inner Arabien (Brunswick, 1895) . (R . A .