Professionally, the year 1801 started promisingly for Nelson. On 1 January he was promoted to the ship he himself had captured from the Spanish at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797. In his new position Nelson was again to be subordinate to Admiral St Vincent, then commander-in-chief of the Channel fleet. This answered his wishes, as he had already asked the Admiralty in November 1800 to be sent on ‘active service’ again and he had shown a preference to serve under St Vincent. The new posting also allowed him to evade his current situation in England: he had just been coldly received at a royal levee on 7 January and his private situation at the time was awkward, to say the least. While Lady Hamilton was now in her ninth month of pregnancy, Nelson was apparently not yet able to separate from his wife. Part of the problem may have been the difficulty at this time of securing a formal separation; a divorce was even more difficult. On 9 January, the day on which he received his orders to join the Channel fleet, he and his wife signed the document which sold the house at Roundwood that she had chosen for them. Nelson settled a generous pension on his wife, the first instalment of which was paid on the day on which Nelson left London, 13 January 1801. While these technicalities about the state of the marriage are documented, the state of their emotional relations remains elusive.

Authors of the mid- and late-nineteenth century have tried to prove that it was really Lady Nelson who decided to end the marriage. For their arguments they use biased or untraceable sources. The biased source is a letter from Nelson's solicitor, William Haslewood, written 45 years after the event to the editor of The Dispatches and Letters of Lord Nelson, Nicholas H. Nicolas: