the disabled English ships, fired their broadsides into them, then wore in succession and reformed on the other tack. When Byng extricated his rear from the confusion into which he had himself thrown it, he found his van so shattered as to be incapable of forming line and renewing the action. The French, on their side, remained as before on the defensive, and as they were not attacked, there was no further fighting. During the night the fleets separated; and after waiting four days to refit, Byng summoned a council of war, the resolutions of which seemed to him to warrant his leaving Minorca to its fate, and he accordingly returned with the fleet to Gibraltar. When the news of the defeat reached England the wrath of the ministry and the fury of the populace were excessive. Hawke was at once sent out to supersede Byng, and send him home under arrest. He arrived at Spithead on 26 July. He was forthwith conveyed to Greenwich, and kept there, in a room in the hospital, under close and ignominious arrest. He was ordered to be tried by court-martial, and the court accordingly met at Portsmouth on 28 Dec. After continuous sitting till 27 Jan. 1757 this court pronounced that Admiral Byng had not done his utmost to relieve St. Philip's Castle, which it was his duty to relieve; had not done his utmost to take, seize, and destroy the enemy's ships which it was his duty to engage, or to assist those of his majesty's ships which it was his duty to assist. For this neglect of duty the court adjudged him to fall under part of the 12th article of war, and according to the stress of that article sentenced him to death. To this sentence they added an earnest recommendation to mercy, on the grounds that they did not believe the admiral's misconduct arose either from cowardice or disaffection, and that they had passed the sentence only because the law, in prescribing death, left no alternative to the court. The king refused to entertain this recommendation, and the sentence was carried out. Byng was shot on the quarter-deck of the Monarque, in Portsmouth Harbour, 14 March 1757. He was M.P. for Rochester from 1751 till death.
The strife of parties was at the time exceedingly bitter, and it suited the opponents of the ministry, past and present, to urge that Byng was being executed as a cloak to ministerial neglect. They thus made common cause with the personal friends of Byng, and a furious outcry was raised, not so much against the sentence as against the execution, which was roundly denounced as ‘a judicial murder.’ And this phrase, having caught the popular fancy, has been repeated over and over again with parrot-like accuracy. Another statement, less sweeping but wholly incorrect, has also been often repeated, and has been accepted by even serious historians: it is said that Admiral Byng was shot for ‘an error in judgment,’ a fault which, as Lord Macaulay has properly shown, may be a very good reason for not employing a man again, but does not amount to a crime. It is right, therefore, to point out that neither in the charge against Admiral Byng, nor in the article of war under which he was found guilty, nor in the sentence pronounced on him, is there a single word about ‘error in judgment.’ The language of the article is perfectly clear and explicit, limiting its scope to those persons who shall commit the offences detailed ‘through cowardice, negligence, or disaffection.’ When, therefore, the court found Byng guilty under this article, and at the same time acquitted him of cowardice and disaffection, it did really, and with all the plainness of which the English language is capable, find him guilty of negligence—of negligence so gross as to be in the highest degree criminal. This being the decision of the court, the only question is, Should the sentence have been carried out? But the fact is that the court did not and could not give any reason for its recommendation except the severity of the law; and to this point the most rational of Byng's friends applied themselves. Admiral West, urging it on his cousin, Lord Temple, the first lord of the admiralty, wrote: ‘The court have convicted him, not for cowardice nor for treachery, but for misconduct, an offence never till now thought capital, and now, it seems, only made so because no alternative of punishment was found in that article they bring him under.’ On this it may be remarked that West, and all Byng's supporters, insisting on the novelty, the unheard-of nature of the sentence, and the severity of the law which permitted no alternative, or the absurdity of the law which took all discretionary power from the court, lost sight of the fact that it was the gross abuse of this discretionary power in a score of instances during the last war which had forced the parliament to abolish it; that absolute necessity had led to the passing of this stringent act only eight years before, and that, as these had been years of peace, it was still in effect new. It was unfortunate for Byng that he should be the first to feel its severity and its stringency: it was unfortunate for the country that it should have been goaded to an act so severe and stringent: but having passed that act, to have shrunk from the first occasion of giving it effect would have been imbecile.
