As is not uncommonly the case, the end of the old life overlapped the beginning of the new. Indeed, the old cannot have consciously come to an end with Marryat for some years. The evidence as to his wishes and hopes is scanty--extraordinarily scanty considering his prominence and that he lived almost into this generation; but what has been made known about him shows that he did not cease to think and work for “the service,” or quite gave up for a long time expecting that he might again hold a command. As an active naval officer, however, his career ended when he resigned the command of the _Ariadne_. Before that date he had written and published “Frank Mildmay,” and had written the “King’s Own.” What the private affairs may have been which induced him to resign his ship does not appear very clearly. Mrs. Ross Church supposes that he wished to devote himself to his duties as equerry to the Duke of Sussex, which hardly appears a sufficient explanation. Perhaps, like many other sailors, he may have had a period of revolt against the routine work, and long absence from friends and family imposed by naval life, and for which there is little compensation in peace time. With a growing family to look after he had a strong attraction to the shore. Then service in peace time cannot have had many temptations to a man who enjoyed excitement as Marryat did. To be sent on “diplomatic duties,” which in practice would mean visits, in the company of His Majesty’s Consuls, to foreign governors, or to be ordered off in winter to look for reefs in the Atlantic, which never existed except in the bemused brains of some merchant skipper, must have been very trying. An experience or two of this kind, coinciding with the success of his first book and the equerryship, would be enough to decide him to try his fortune on shore--all the more as he had private means. Whatever the exact motives may have been, in 1830 he was on shore for good, and established in Sussex House, Hammersmith.
His equerryship seems to have led him to no particular good. “The smiles of princes,” says Mrs. Church, “are by nature evanescent.” The favour of princes at least, like that of other men, requires to be cultivated with due skill and attention. Possibly Marryat may have been wanting in the will or the capacity to practise the art. Certain it is that neither from the Duke of Sussex, nor from the duke’s royal brother, William IV., did he ever obtain any visible good beyond invitations to festivities which appear to have been of a somewhat dreary character. According to a story given in the preface to Bone’s edition of the “Pirate and Three Cutters,” and quoted on that authority by Mrs. Ross Church, the King, who all through his life seems to have been moved to do something silly whenever he remembered that he was a naval officer, was offended by Marryat’s condemnation of the press-gang. He not only refused to consent to the conferring of some mark of distinction on Marryat in addition to the C.B. given for the Burmah campaign, but would not even allow him to wear the Legion of Honour sent him by Louis Philippe as a reward for the code of signals. The story is credible enough of William IV., who, saving the reverence of the Crown, was very little better than a fool, and a spiteful fool, too, at times. The Admiralty of its own motion, or the Admiralty and the King together, seem to have decided that Marryat need not be employed again. In the enjoyment of literary success and liberty, he probably reconciled himself to the want of employment readily enough. He must have been prepared to do without it when he threw up his command. The Admiralty does not love captains who resign their ships.