Two famous Admirals of the Seven Years’ War time, Anson and Boscawen, were the Lords of the Admiralty who signed the order to lay the Victory’s keel. The names themselves take us back into history well over a century and a half. And the difference between things then and now is wider than the gap of years. It is difficult indeed, as we nowadays see the Victory in Portsmouth Harbour, amidst the stir and activity of a modern naval port, to realize how wide a space her lifetime really covers.
Imagine yourself as a visitor at Portsmouth on any afternoon almost of the present year of grace, and observing what takes place in the harbour round the Victory. Here comes along, sliding swiftly past between ship and shore, a long, low-built black torpedo-boat; or a yet more grim-looking sleuthhound of the sea, a thirty-knot destroyer, with squat funnels and high-raised forecastle, from which peers forward the long barrel of a twelve-pounder, shearing its way ahead on business of its own. Now a snub-nosed gunnery-school gunboat passes, returning from a day’s target-practice out beyond the Warner lightship, with a weapon that can fire from twelve to twenty aimed shots in a minute. Then, it may be, a brand new twenty-three-knot cruiser passes, coming back from a trial run, or a huge high-sided four to five hundred feet long battleship of from fifteen to eighteen thousand tons, stern and resolute of appearance, her giant barbette guns of massive bulk and enormous length, weighing each from fifty to sixty tons, and able to send an eight hundredweight twelve-inch shell from fifteen to twenty miles, and with the certainty of being able to hit the mark with each shot at half that range—the horizon limit from on board. It was not so long ago that one of our battleships (the Commonwealth), firing at eight thousand yards at a target representing an enemy’s battleship, dropped successive twelve-inch shells into a space the size of a lawn-tennis court, and, at the same distance at the third round, shot away a boat’s flagstaff that topped the target. At all times, too, there is a passing and repassing of Navy steam-launches and pinnaces, and now and again the busy forging to and fro of puffing harbour tugs and yard craft of all sorts. Such are every-day sights in Portsmouth Harbour in these times of ours.
Then carry your mind back to the year in which the Victory first figured on the Estimates of the Navy—1758. Imagine yourself standing on the Hard as a sightseer in the Portsmouth of the Seven Years’ War time—on, say, a day in October of the year when my Lords at Whitehall were making their final decision about the ship’s dimensions.
At this same moment, by the way, there is lying in a far-off parsonage, in an out-of-the-world locality on the Norfolk coast, a puny baby boy, a fortnight or three weeks old, so sickly that he is not thought likely to live. So weakly, indeed, is the child that his baptism—at which the name Horatio was given to the small babe—has taken place privately, just six days after his birth.
You would, in Portsmouth Harbour on that October afternoon of 1758, have seen something very much like this.
First of all, almost opposite the Hard, and just where the Victory herself now lies, there is moored a big yellow-sided two-decker of foreign build flying the British flag. Just now, perhaps, there is no man-of-war name all the world over of more unpleasant notoriety than hers. She is the Monarque, a seventy-four, taken from the French, and it was on her quarter-deck, some eighteen months ago, on a dull and cloudy March day, that they shot Admiral Byng. The Monarque has now just returned from “Straits” service, and if you went on board her you would see, still there, and part of the ship’s company, the men of the platoon of marines who formed Byng’s firing party.
Near the Monarque lies a big ninety-gun three-decker—a yellow-sided vessel also, for all men-of-war are so painted. It is the St. George. In her cabin Byng’s court martial sat some twenty months ago. The court, by a grim coincidence, was held in the very cabin that had been Byng’s own thirteen years before that, when Byng was captain of this same St. George. There, on a snowy January day, as plenty of people at Portsmouth can tell you, for they were looking on, Byng stood to hear his sentence in his own old cabin, crowded almost to suffocation with spectators, stuffy and close, and the walls “sweating down” with trickling beads of water; the hapless, doomed British Admiral, standing there, firm and erect, with squared shoulders, calmly facing his judges, with his own sword lying on the table, its point turned towards himself.
To the very last, they say, Byng expected an acquittal. He had not anticipated, at the worst, a sentence more severe than a reprimand. So he himself said in the cabin of the Monarque, on the very morning of the 27th January, when the Admiralty Marshal came to accompany him on board the St. George to hear the finding of the court. He learnt the dread reality first as he came up the side of the St. George. At the entering port a personal friend, instructed privately by the President of the Court to do so, stood waiting to give the Admiral a word of warning. As he met his friend, Byng saw instantly from his downcast countenance and embarrassed manner that things had gone adversely and that the sentence was a hard one. “What is the matter,” asked the Admiral, “have they broke me?” The bearer of the news, convinced that Byng had no idea of what was coming, hesitated and stammered. Byng stopped short. He gazed fixedly at his friend for a few seconds, and then changed colour as he seemed to take in the situation. A moment later he had recovered himself. Exclaiming in a calm tone, “Well, well, I understand: if nothing but my blood will satisfy them, let them take it,” he passed with set countenance into the presence of the Court.
THE EXECUTION OF ADMIRAL BYNG
