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.
[Illustration: THE EXECUTION OF ADMIRAL BYNG
Beyond the _St. George_ lies another “Mediterranean ship,” just returned home—the _Revenge_, one of the ships in Byng’s battle. It was the damning evidence of the _Revenge’s_ captain—Frederick Cornwall, now at home on half-pay—as they all say in the fleet, that settled Byng’s fate. “If I cannot disprove what you have said, Captain Cornwall,” exclaimed Byng, as the one-armed captain of the _Revenge_ turned to leave the cabin, after a futile attempt at cross-examination on the part of the Admiral, “may the Lord have mercy on me.” There is no need to go further.
If you could look round to Spithead from the Hard, you would see the old _Royal Sovereign_ on duty as the port flagship. On board her it was that, on the morning of the execution, Admiral Boscawen put his signature to Byng’s death warrant, and the order for the firing party. She is the oldest ship in the King’s Navy, in which connection the _Sovereign_ has other memories of her own. The great Duke of Marlborough named her at her launch in the year that William the Third died, and it was in her great-cabin, during the _Sovereign’s_ first cruise, that Rooke’s council of war planned the swoop on the Vigo treasure galleons, which Vigo Street, in London, serves to commemorate. Some of the old ship’s timbers, it is the fact, formed part of the frame of Charles the First’s world-renowned _Sovereign of the Seas_, and were salved, by special Admiralty order, out of the _débris_ when the _Sovereign of the Seas_ was burned at Chatham in January, 1696, by the carelessness of a sleepy bos’un’s mate.