French
Lion64Capt.de Saint-Aignan.
Triton64Capt.de Mercier.
Redoutable (flagship of Commodore de Glandèvez)74Capt.de Vilarzel.
Orphée64Capt.de Raymondis.
Fier50Capt.d’Herville.
Guerrier74Capt.Villars de Labrosse.
Foudroyant (flagship of La Galissonière)80Capt.Froger de l’Eguille.
Téméraire74Capt.de Beaumont Lemaître.
Hippopotame50Capt.Rochemore.
Content64Capt.de Sabran Grammont.
Couronne (flagship of Commodore La Clue)74Capt.Gabanous.
Sage64Capt.Durevest.

When the order to engage was given, the fleets were not parallel, but on lines converging to form an acute angle ahead of them. Thus the leading English ship was nearer the leading ship of the French than the rear was to their rear. So if each bore down on the Frenchman opposite to it at the time, the vessels in the van would come into action first, and would be exposed to a converging fire, while it would depend on the enemy’s decision to stay still and be attacked, whether the centre and rear of the English fleet ever got into action at all.

Admiral West came down on the Frenchmen briskly, and then hauled up with the heads of his ships in the same direction as theirs. Meanwhile the other English vessels were steering to come into action while carefully preserving their relative positions to the vessels in the van. In the French line vessels here and there stood out, and ran to leeward. Our men cheered, thinking they had forced the enemy to flee, but the movement was the result of design. As these vessels ran to leeward, those astern “let all draw” and shot ahead. Thus a movement in advance was given to the whole French line, and the distance which the English ships of the centre and rear had to cover before reaching their proper opponents was constantly increased. In any case, the French admiral would almost certainly have succeeded in filing past the leading English vessels, crippling their rigging, and then running down to form a new line to leeward. But he was helped by a piece of bungling in our squadron. The Intrepid, the sixth ship, lost her foretop-mast. As she was before the wind, this ought to have been no great disaster, but she was so badly steered that she came right round and lay across the path of the following ship—the Revenge. According to all rule, tradition, and honour, the Revenge ought to have passed between the crippled Intrepid and the enemy—that is to leeward. But she tried to pass to windward, could not do so, and then backed her topsail to stop her way and prevent a collision. The vessels behind did the same thing, and thus our fleet broke in two. The five ships ahead of the Intrepid followed the enemy with Admiral West, while the others remained behind. It was about this time that the flag-captain, Gardiner, pointed out to Byng that if he stood out of his line he could bring the Frenchman then running past him to closer action. The admiral answered that Mathews had been broken for not taking his fleet down in a body, and that he would not incur the same fate. Rather than offend against the superstition of the line of battle, he would let the enemy get off unhurt. La Galissonière did get off with little damage, leaving us with three ships badly crippled in their rigging, and the whole fleet in scandalous disorder.

So ended the battle of the 20th May. It was first and foremost an example of what must happen so long as our navy continued to be bound by the stupid pattern set up in the Fighting Instructions for all actions against an enemy of equal, or approximately equal, force—so long, in fact, as we continued to engage to windward, ship to ship, leaving the enemy his line of retreat open, and depriving ourselves of the power to push the attack home, by making it a rule to adhere to the formation in which we began the fight. In these conditions decisive results were not to be achieved. But Byng did ill even according to this stupid model. He ought to have arranged his fleet parallel to the enemy before he bore down, and he ought not to have begun firing, as he did, when at such a distance that he could do no harm. Yet the lame and impotent conclusion of the battle and his own bungling might both have been forgiven, or even passed unnoticed, but for what followed. The fleet was satisfied that it had made the enemy run, and the nation would have been satisfied too, if there had been any effort to help Fort St. Philip in the days following the battle. There was none. For four days Byng loitered near the scene of the action, repairing the vessels crippled on the 20th. He said it was not easy to do, and indeed, from first to last, showed a marked disinclination to attempt anything that was not “easy.” Then a council of war came to the conclusion, which is always so welcome to weak men weakly led, that nothing more could be done. The fleet returned to “cover” Gibraltar, leaving Minorca to its fate. Before the complacent dispatch in which Byng announced his decision could reach home, the news of the failure had been given by La Galissonière’s boastful letter to his own king. It was published in Paris, and sent on from thence. In truth the French admiral was very nervous, constantly expecting the reappearance of the English in superior force, and was only kept from retiring to Toulon by the incessant driving of Richelieu. The honour both of the defence and of the attack in this campaign belongs wholly to the soldiers. When the result of the meeting of the two fleets was known, there burst out a storm of rage of which the echoes can be heard to this day. It is not pleasant to hear a people howling for the life of a man, whether he be the great and terrible Strafford or poor, weak, self-satisfied John Byng. The manifestations, too, were vulgar. The mob hanged the admiral in effigy, the City of London sent deputations asking for his life, the Prime Minister gabbled promises that he should be punished. Meanwhile Byng had returned to Gibraltar on the 19th June. He found there a reinforcement of five line-of-battle ships under Commodore Brodrick, who had arrived on the 15th from England. Preparations were being made to return to Mahon when Hawke came into Gibraltar to take command and also to send Byng home for trial together with the witnesses. Fowke was also recalled. The admiral heard of his supersession with unaffected, or at any rate with remarkably well-simulated, indignation. He wrote a furious self-laudatory letter on the 4th July, all but claiming a statue for his exertions. On the 9th July he sailed a prisoner in the Antelope, and reached England on the 19th August.

He was first imprisoned at Greenwich, and then sent to Portsmouth for trial. In the sentimental reaction of coming years, it was said that he could not expect fair treatment in the prevailing rage of the nation, and that he was made a sacrifice by base-minded politicians. But nobody can read the minutes of the court martial without seeing that the admiral had a perfectly fair trial, and was condemned on his merits, while the politicians who had an interest in securing his condemnation had left office before the court martial began, and remained out till after his execution. Newcastle had been replaced by the first short administration of Pitt. The court martial began to sit on the 17th December 1756, and sentence was given on the 28th February 1757. The court found that the admiral had offended against the 12th Article in that he had not done his utmost against the enemy. Therefore, though it acquitted him of cowardice or disaffection, it found him guilty of negligence, and condemned him to the only punishment it was authorised to inflict, which was death. Attempts were made to save his life. The House of Commons even passed a Bill to relieve the officers forming the court martial from the obligation to preserve secrecy as to what had passed in their private decision on the sentence. It was hoped that they might have something to say which would avail the prisoner, but when questioned by the House of Lords they could answer nothing to the purpose. The Upper House rejected the Bill, and the admiral was shot to death on the deck of the Monarque on the 14th March 1757. He died with dignity, and protesting to the last he had been made a victim.

In the changes of things and in the usual reaction by which Englishmen habitually atone for the fury of their rage, he came indeed to be thought of as a victim, yet the sentence was just. Coward, in the sense that he suffered from the pitiable cowardice which makes a man sick and giddy at the approach of personal danger, he was not. Neither was he disaffected, in the sense that he was scheming to upset the Government he served. As these were the forms of cowardice and disaffection contemplated by the Act, the court very properly acquitted him under these heads. But he was a coward in the intellectual sense. Having a dangerous piece of work to do, and one in which the very errors of the Government rendered it only the more incumbent on him to make all wants good by his own exertions, he thought chiefly of doing it at the least risk, and was resigned to failure. The excuses he made were pitiable. All through he insisted on the inferiority of his fleet. Yet he had thirteen ships to twelve. It is true that the French were better vessels, the Foudroyant with her 80 guns, for instance, being superior in real strength to the Ramillies with her 90. Yet the Foudroyant afterwards surrendered to a much smaller ship than the Ramillies. He harped on the lesser weight of his guns, and it is true that the 42-pounders carried on the lower deck of some French ships were heavier than any of ours. Yet he had 834 guns to the Frenchman’s 806, and the 42-pounder was afterwards rejected from our navy as too lumbering for ship-work. All through he kept insisting on the risk of doing this or that, till he brought upon himself the scathing answer of Blakeney: “I have served these sixty-three years, and I never knew any enterprise undertaken without some danger; and this might have been effected with as little danger as any I ever knew.” It was monstrous that men should think they could make war without hazard. Therefore the court justly found Byng guilty of “negligence,”—that is to say, all that deficiency to do enough, all that hanging back from strenuous effort, which are due to want of spirit, to a selfish regard of what the soft-minded man thinks are the interests of his safety, to the moral cowardice which falls short of mere physical poltroonery, and the disaffection which stops on this side of deliberate treason. The law had been made stern after the experience of the last war. Byng knew the conditions of his servitude. They were in the Act by which he exercised his own authority, and he sinned against the light.

Brutal as the wrath of the nation was, it was founded on a sound sentiment. If England was to take her place in the world, there had to be an end of Mathews and Lestock, of Peyton, Griffin, and Cornelius Mitchell. Voltaire’s famous jest that the English shot an admiral to encourage the others suffers from the worst defect a scoff can have. He meant it for a reductio ad absurdum. It was a perfectly accurate statement of fact. The shooting of Byng did encourage the others. Henceforward there might be errors and stupidities, and failures here and there. So there always will be while men remain men, but a service is to be judged by its general spirit, and by the view it takes of errors and failures. Nobody who looks critically at the history of the British Navy in the eighteenth century can fail to note a vast difference between the years before and those after 1757. And we insult the memory of the seamen of the eighteenth century if we suppose that this is so only because the wrath of the nation drove them to greater exertion, or that they did not think the execution of Byng just. Some did not. His second in command, Temple West, resigned rather than continue to serve if he was to be liable to punishment for “an error of judgment.” West by the use of that phrase gave currency to a sophism which has often been used to obscure the real significance of this great sacrifice. But the navy had not protested against the change in the Naval Discipline Act of 1749. The officers who tried Byng did not shrink from applying the law though it cut them to the heart to send a brother in arms to a shameful death. If they had been dishonest men, they might have acquitted him of negligence, but they saw the truth and they did their terrible duty. There is nothing to show that the seamen, whether on the quarter-deck or before the mast, did, as a body, think the sentence unjust. Indeed, the whole navy was now burning with a spirit which asked for nothing better than to be relieved of such leadership as Byng’s.

Three months after the admiral met his fate, the great administration of the elder Pitt was formed. At last the power of England was about to be directed, not by pettifogging and parliamentary intrigue, but by genius and passion. Yet the full effect of the change could not be felt for a space, and until 1758 was well advanced the work of Newcastle may be said to overlap that of Pitt. We may look for a moment at the interval before the power of the navy was fully free to act.

When Hawke superseded Byng in July 1756 it was too late to save Minorca, and no means were at hand for its recovery. He cruised unopposed by the French till December, and then returned home, leaving the command to Admiral Saunders. The interest on both sides was centred now in North America. The French had to reinforce and support their colonies. Our aim was to intercept their succours, and to make ourselves masters of the French port at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, as preparatory to the conquest of Canada. At home our Channel fleet was to watch Brest, and our Mediterranean fleet to keep a check on Toulon; while in America preparations were making to attack Cape Breton upon the arrival of a naval force from England. The work of watching the French ports was not uniformly well done. In April a squadron of four sail under the command of M. Durevest escaped Saunders in the Straits of Gibraltar after a slight brush, and held on to America. In May, Vice-Admiral Henry Osborn came out with reinforcements, and took over the command. The total force was thirteen of the line and two 50-gun ships, a much larger force than the French ships at Toulon could hope to face in open battle. Osborn was a good representative of that large body of naval officers whose names are associated with no single action of great renown, but who did much and varied service, and who contributed to the glory of more fortunate rivals by weary cruising and vigilant watch far away from the scene where more brilliant reputations were being earned. He was also a very typical officer of his time, when the life of the chief was one of stern solitude, and his exercise of authority was harsh. By nature Osborn was of a cold, saturnine disposition. He made no friends, and if he did not actively make enemies his hand weighed on all under his command with oppressive severity. But his vigilance, his strenuous discharge of duty, and his severe exaction of their utmost from his subordinates fitted him admirably for the work he had to do in the Mediterranean, in 1757 and the early months of 1758.

The loss of Minorca imposed a heavy disadvantage on the British admiral who had to watch Toulon. The nearest port at which vessels could be docked was Gibraltar, and this was a serious consideration before the use of copper sheathing had been introduced, and when ships grew rapidly foul. In December, when Osborn was at the Rock, M. de la Clue left Toulon with five sail of the line and one 50-gun ship, in the hope that he might elude his opponent and follow Durevest to America. But Osborn was on the watch in the Straits, and La Clue put into the Spanish port of Carthagena. Here he was watched rather than blockaded. Two more liners and a frigate succeeded in slipping in and joining him. On the 5th February 1758 he put out to meet reinforcements promised him from Toulon, and went as far as Palos; but his friends did not appear, and fearing to have the whole British squadron on his hands, he returned to Carthagena. On the 25th February a reinforcement did appear off the port. It consisted of the Foudroyant, 80, commanded by Captain Duquesne, who had with him the Orphée, 64, and the Oriflamme, 50. Duquesne declined to come within the island of Escombrera, which lies at the mouth of Carthagena harbour, and waited outside to be joined by La Clue. A squall drove him to sea, where his little squadron was sighted, scattered, and chased by Osborn. The Orphée struck to the Revenge and the Berwick. The Oriflamme was driven on shore, but succeeded in getting off and joining La Clue in Carthagena. A noble story is connected with the fortunes of the Foudroyant.