between the French officers frittered away much valuable time; and when just ready to sail the titular king of England was incapacitated by a sharp attack of measles. All these delays were in Byng's favour, and when the expedition put to sea in the midst of a gale of wind on 10 March the English fleet was collected and intercepted it off the entrance of the Firth on 13 March, captured one ship, the Salisbury, and scattered the rest, which eventually got back to Dunkirk some three weeks afterwards (Mémoires du Comte de Forbin, 1729, ii. 289 et seq.) In England the question was at once raised whether Byng had done all that he might. A parliamentary inquiry was demanded. It was said that he could have captured the whole French fleet as easily as he had captured the one ship, by some that his ships were foul, and by others the fault lay with the lord high admiral. Finally the discontent subsided, and the house passed a vote of thanks to Prince George for his promptitude; Edinburgh presented Byng with the freedom of the city; and the queen offered to appoint him as one of the prince's council, which, however, he declined. In October he carried the Queen of Portugal to Lisbon, and during the following year, 1709, commanded in chief in the Mediterranean. In November he was appointed one of the lords commissioners of the admiralty under his old chief Russell, now Earl of Orford. Orford's term of office at that time was short, but Byng continued at the admiralty till early in 1714, and returned to it in the following October, after the accession of George I. In 1715 he was appointed to command the fleet for the defence of the coast, and succeeded so well in stopping and preventing all supplies to the adherents of the Pretender, that the collapse of the insurrection was considered to be mainly due to his efforts, in acknowledgment of which the king created him a baronet, and gave him a diamond ring of considerable value. In 1717, on information that a new movement in support of the exiled Stuarts was meditated by Charles XII of Sweden, Sir George Byng was sent into the Baltic with a strong squadron.
On 14 March 1717–18 he was advanced to the rank of admiral of the fleet, and was, in pursuance of the objects of the pending Quadruple Alliance, sent to the Mediterranean in command of a fleet to prevent a Spanish invasion of Italy or Sicily. He sailed from Spithead 15 June 1718, and 21 July anchored before Naples. He conferred with the viceroy, and received more exact intelligence of the movements of the Spaniards, at that time besieging the citadel of Messina by sea and land, and sailed from Naples on the 26th, and on the 29th arrived off the entrance of the Straits. From this position he wrote to the Spanish general, proposing ‘a cessation of arms in Sicily for two months, in order to give time to the several courts to conclude on such resolutions as might restore a lasting peace,’ adding that if he failed in this desirable work ‘he should then hope to merit his excellency's esteem in the execution of the other part of his orders, which were to use all his force to prevent farther attempts to disturb the dominions his master stood engaged to defend,’ to which the general replied that ‘he could not agree to any suspension of arms,’ and ‘should follow his orders, which directed him to seize on Sicily for his master the king of Spain.’ Historically, this correspondence is important, for it was afterwards asserted ‘that the English fleet surprised that of Spain without any warning, and even contrary to declarations in which Spain confided with security’ (Corbett, 5).
Early on the morning of 30 July the English fleet entered the Straits; before noon their advanced ships had made out the Spaniards far to the southward; the English followed; the chase continued through the night, the Spaniards retiring in long, straggling line, the English in no order, but according to their rates of sailing. About ten o'clock the next morning (31 July 1718), being then some three leagues to the east of Cape Passaro, the leading English ships came up with the sternmost of the Spaniards. They would have passed, for Byng's orders were to push on to the van; but the Spaniards opening fire, they were compelled to engage, and the action thus took the form necessarily most disastrous to the Spaniards; for, as successive ships came up, the Spaniards were one by one overpowered by an enormous superiority of force, and almost the whole fleet was captured without a possibility of making any effective resistance. So little doubt was there of the result from beginning to end, that—in the words of Corbett, the historian of the campaign—‘the English might be rather said to have made a seizure than to have gotten a victory.’ The English had indeed a considerable superiority of numbers, but not to an extent commensurate with the decisive nature of their success; this was solely due to the measures adopted by the Spaniards, which rendered their defeat inevitable. There was little room for any display of genius on the part of Byng, though he was deservedly commended for the advantage he had taken of the enemy's incapacity; and to the world at large the issue appeared, as broadly stated, that the English fleet of twenty-one sail had
