This reasoning, I presume, is the best defence that could be made for these expounders of naval law. An anecdote, much asserted at the time, belongs to this part of the proceeding. When the severer part of the Court (the steady part of Admiral Boscawen’s foretold majority) found great difficulty to wring from their associates acquiescence in condemnation, they are said to have seduced the latter by promising on their part, if Mr. Byng was condemned, to sign so favourable a representation of his case, that it should be impossible but he must be pardoned. If anything could excuse men for condemning a person whom they thought innocent, it would be this, because there is nothing more uncommon, I might almost say, more unheard of, than the execution of a criminal, when his Judge strongly recommends him to mercy. If this bargain for blood was suggested by the return of the Courier who was dispatched by the Court-Martial for illumination—but I will not make surmises—the late Ministers had sufficiently barricaded the gates of mercy when they engaged the King in that promise to the city of London; and whoever will read the inhuman letters of their tool, Cleland, the Secretary of the Admiralty, will be a competent judge of what mercy Mr. Byng had to expect after condemnation.
The first flame lighted by this extraordinary sentence was the dissatisfaction it occasioned in the Navy, when they found such a construction of the twelfth Article, as made it capital for an officer to want, what he could not command, judgment. Admiral West threatened to resign if it was not altered. But they who had power to enforce execution on such an interpretation, took care not to consent to any correction. With what face could they put the Admiral to death, if they owned that the Article on which he was condemned wanted amendment?
Before I proceed to the consequences of this affair, I will say a few words, as I promised, on the engagement itself; though with regard to the fate of Mr. Byng, I think it ceased from this moment to be any part of the question. If he was guilty of any fault, his most conscientious Judges thought it so small an one, that they did not hesitate to censure the law itself for blending it with capital crimes: and it will appear as fully that the duration of it was as short, as the nature of it was light; not extending beyond very few minutes. Had he been guilty of all that cowardice which had first been charged on him, and of which he was so honourably acquitted, it would still have been a notorious violation of the custom of England, (and the common law itself is scarce more than custom,) to put him to death after such earnest recommendation of his Judges—Judges under no influence of the favourable sort!
The quintessence of the engagement, as shortly as I can state it, I take to have been this:—After the signal for charging was made, the Captain of the Intrepid bore down in a wrong direction, by which she was exposed to be raked by the enemy. Admiral West, who commanded that division, followed the same direction, rather than decline the engagement. This was brave: he was not the Commander-in-Chief. Mr. Byng, who was, perceived the disadvantage of this manœuvre; yet he, too, bore down, but more slowly. In his course, the Princess Louisa and the Trident lay in his way, and he was obliged to disengage himself from them first, and then crowded all the sail he could. As the French had engaged in earnest, and had not suffered, he could not have the least suspicion that they would give over so abruptly; but while he was involved with his own ships, they had prepared to retreat, and had already left him at such a distance, that he thought it in vain to follow them that night. Afterwards, on a review of his fleet, he found so much damage done to what was before deplorable, expected so little to be able to raise the siege, and what in my opinion he dreaded with most reason, and which was equally the object of his orders, feared so much for Gibraltar, that he determined to retire thither, and had the concurrence of Admiral West.
I have said that one part of the Admiral’s defence does not appear to be well reasoned; I mean, his belief that though he had beaten the French, he should not have saved the island. General Blakeney, too, deposed at the trial, that if the whole detachment ordered from Gibraltar had been landed at the time the Fleet appeared off Mahon, it would have been insignificant: an opinion, in my judgment, as wrong as the Admiral’s. At last the fortress fell from want of hands—what had they suffered? a reinforcement would have prolonged the siege, as the defeat of the French Fleet might have starved the besiegers, if in either case a new squadron had been sent from England. To conclude all their efforts insufficient, both the Admiral and General must have believed that the English Ministry would have continued as remiss and culpable as they had been.
With regard to the sentence, the essence of it turns on the very few minutes in which the Admiral neglected to make all possible sail—and for that he died! I, however, shocked at the severity of his fate, am still impartial; and with the truth that becomes an historian, from the most respectable down to so trifling a writer as myself, shall fairly declare all I know and observed: and difficult it would be for any man to have watched with more industry of attention even the most minute circumstance of this dark affair from the instant the sentence was made public. From that unremitted observation I formed this opinion:—Mr. Byng, by nature a vain man, by birth the son of a hero, was full of his own glory, and apprehensive of forfeiting any portion of what had descended on him. He went, conscious of the bad condition of his ships and men, to dispute that theatre with the French, on which his father had shone over the Spaniards; and he went persuaded that he should find a superior enemy. He dreaded forfeiting the reputation of forty years of brave service; he looked on Minorca as lost, and thought it could not be imputed to him. He had sagacity enough (without his strict orders) to comprehend, that if Gibraltar followed St. Philip’s, which he knew would be the case if he was defeated, that loss would be charged on him: and after all, to mislead him, he had the addition of believing that he had satisfied his duty by obliging the French to retire. This seems to have been the man:—He was, if I may be allowed the expression, a coward of his glory, not of his life; with regard to that, poor man! he had an opportunity of showing he was a hero.
It is not to boast any sagacity, and yet perhaps it required some extent of it to exceed Mr. Byng’s enemies in discovering a fault which escaped their acuteness—but I did remark an instance that was never observed nor charged on him, in which he was undoubtedly guilty. In the course of the inquiry into the loss of Minorca, (to be mentioned hereafter,) a letter from the Admiral was read carelessly in a very thin Committee, which confirmed what the Ministry did charge him with—delay; and fully explanatory of that vain-glory which I have described as characteristic of the man. In that letter he told the Admiralty, that though their orders were so pressing, and the wind was fair, he did presume to stay for final orders—slightly he hinted, and seemingly without connecting it with his delay, that he thought he should have the rank of Commander-in-Chief.
When this letter was produced, the Admiral was dead; new objects had engaged the minds of men; and this is not a nation where any impressions engrave themselves deeply. If I have mentioned it now, it was to demonstrate my own impartial veracity: and yet, though the delay was blameable, no consequences flowed from it. If he had lingered, it had been but for a day or two: he had arrived in time to fight the French, and could but have fought them, arriving a day or two sooner. Dispatched so late as he was, he never could have reached Minorca early enough to disturb their landing. This reasoning, therefore, is mere speculation, and not intended to absolve or condemn the Admiral, the justice of whose fate, I again declare, in my opinion by no means depended on the innocence or criminality of his behaviour: the iniquity of his suffering on such a sentence, and after such a recommendation of his Judges, gave the tone to his catastrophe.
I must interrupt the sequel of his story to relate a few preceding and intervening passages.
Two battalions, each composed of a thousand Highlanders, were raised for the service of America; the command given to the brother of Lord Eglinton, and to the Master of Lovat, the son of the famous old chieftain, who had suffered on Tower-hill after the late Rebellion. The young man had been forced into the same cause by his father, had been attainted and pardoned, but was never permitted to go into the Highlands; and though he received a pension from the Crown, he was allowed nothing from his paternal estate. His jurisdiction too had been abolished with the rest. This man was now selected by the Duke of Argyle, who told the Government, that under no other person the clan of Frazers would enlist. Stanley, formerly connected with Pitt, now attached to the Duke of Newcastle, under whose Ministry he was a candidate for the Admiralty, took severe notice of this measure in a very good speech, and roundly charged it on Pitt’s flattery to the Duke of Argyle. He expressed great dissatisfaction on the admission of disaffected Highlanders into the Army, said if Frazer had any experience, he had learned it in Rebellion; spared not the Scotch, and yet said, his was not prejudice, nor did he contract notions of any country by walking through the streets of it. This glanced at Pitt’s former declamation against Oxford. Stanley was ungracious in his manner, but had sense and knowledge, heightened with much oddness, and supported by great personal courage. Lord George Sackville defended the measure, and asked why rank should not be allowed to these extemporaneous officers, as it had been to the Colonels of the new regiments in the late Rebellion? This slip was taken up by Lord Granby, who said he was sorry to hear Rebels compared to Lords who had taken up arms to crush the Rebellion. Fox, not to be outstriped in homage to Argyle, justified the measure on the necessity of it.