On the 12th of May, 1804, there was a change of administration in England.  Earl St. Vincent left the Admiralty, as First Lord, and was succeeded by Lord Melville.  A few days before this Nelson, by a general promotion, had become Vice-Admiral of the White, the rank in which he died eighteen months later.

The return of summer had improved his health from the low condition into which it had fallen during the winter, but he did not flatter himself as to the future.  The combination of colorless monotony with constant racking anxiety slackened the springs of moral energy, which, and which alone, responding joyously to a call to action, afforded the stimulus capable of triumphing over his bodily weakness, and causing it for the moment to disappear.  “This is an odd war,” he said, “not a battle!” Tying himself to the ship, in profound sympathy with the crews, he never went ashore from the time he left Malta in June, 1803, until he reached Gibraltar in July, 1805; nor was he ever outside of the “Victory” from July 30, 1803, the day he went on board her from the “Amphion.”  “Always shut up in the Victory’s cabin,” as he himself wrote, “cannot be very good for the constitution.  I think you will find me grown thin, but never mind.”  Other officers, especially of the frigates, got their occasional runs ashore; but his slight figure was continually in view, walking the front of the poop, to the unconscious contentment of the men, thus reminded ever that their admiral shared their deprivations.  This profound seclusion to the narrow circle of the flagship, although often broken by the presence of officers from the other vessels, who, whether cruising in company with the fleet, or arriving with tidings from different ports, were daily partakers of the admiral’s hospitable table, could not but depress him; and there was with him the constant sense of loss, by absence from those he held most dear.  “I have not a thought except on you and the French fleet,” he tells Lady Hamilton; “all my thoughts, plans, and toils tend to those two objects.  Don’t laugh at my putting you and the French fleet together, but you cannot be separated.”

Yet even towards her his mind is fixed as of old, that she must take a place second to duty.  She had, it appears, insisted upon her wish to come out to the station to be near him.  Malta and Italy were both, he said, out of the question.  His place was off Toulon, as long as the French fleet was there; therefore he could not go into harbor; nay, “I might absolutely miss you, by leaving the Mediterranean without warning.  The other day we had a report the French were out, and seen steering to the westward.  We were as far as Minorca when the alarm proved false.”  As for coming on board the “Victory” to live, which she seems to have suggested, “Imagine what a cruize off Toulon is; even in summer time we have a hard gale every week, and two days’ heavy swell.  It would kill you; and myself to see you.  Much less possible to have Charlotte, Horatia, &c.,