Battle of Minorca, 1756: the battle that cost Admiral Byng his life

Minorca, with its harbor at Port Mahon, had been an important British outpost in the Mediterranean since its capture in 1708, during the War of the Spanish Succession. When war with France broke out again in 1756, the French struck first. An expedition under the Duc de Richelieu sailed from Toulon and landed on the island; the French prints of the sea battle that followed name the Marquis de La Galissonière as admiral of its fleet. The French took all of Minorca except the fortress and castle of St. Philip, where the British commander, General William Blakeney, held out with a small force.²

An admiral who expected to fail

Admiral John Byng had almost 40 years at sea and 12 at flag rank. He had been a capable administrator, John Haymond writes in MHQ, but had seen relatively little combat. The Admiralty ordered him to Gibraltar with ten ships to land reinforcements, and then to relieve Minorca. His instructions said that if he found the island under attack he was "to use all possible means in your power for its relief".³

Byng was gloomy from the start. From Gibraltar he wrote to the Admiralty about the wretched condition of his ships and the neglected state of the stores there, the Royal Museums Greenwich notes. He also refused to take soldiers from the Gibraltar garrison for Fort St. Philip, arguing that the 700 men he had been told to carry were too few to change the outcome and that Gibraltar mattered more.⁴

The fight on 20 May

Off Minorca Byng made a half-hearted attempt to reach Blakeney, then recalled his ships before they reached the island. On 20 May he engaged the French fleet. The two fleets were almost evenly matched in numbers, though the French had a slight advantage in guns. Byng's approach went wrong. His leading ships closed with the French line and were badly battered, but others, including his own flagship, never came within effective range. The action was short and inconclusive.⁵

The casualties were small for a fleet battle. Haymond gives 38 French killed and 184 wounded, against 45 British killed and 162 wounded. The Royal Museums Greenwich calls the action indecisive, as many such engagements were in that age for quite ordinary reasons.⁶

Back to Gibraltar

The real failure came after the battle. Byng called a council of war of his senior officers, which agreed that nothing more could be attempted with the fleet in the state it was in, and he sailed back to Gibraltar. Without support, Blakeney's garrison held Fort St. Philip for about another month and then surrendered, and Minorca was lost. In Britain the news caused fury. Haymond quotes the prime minister, the Duke of Newcastle, telling Parliament that Byng "shall be tried immediately; he shall be hanged directly".⁷

Court-martial

Byng was brought home under arrest and held at Greenwich Hospital. His court-martial, of four admirals and nine captains in Haymond's account, met in December 1756 on board the St George at Portsmouth. He was tried under the 12th Article of War, which since a revision a decade earlier had allowed only one penalty for an officer who did not do his utmost to take or destroy the enemy: death. The court acquitted him of cowardice and disaffection, but on 27 January 1757 found him guilty of neglect of duty and pronounced the sentence, with a strong recommendation of mercy on account of his personal courage.⁸

The Royal Museums Greenwich sees Byng as in effect a scapegoat for the government's failure to send an adequate force. Newcastle's government had already fallen in November 1756. His successor, William Pitt, asked King George II for clemency, but the king refused.⁹

Shot on his own quarterdeck

On 14 March 1757 Byng was taken on deck of HMS Monarch at Spithead. Boats from every warship in the anchorage were ordered to attend. He wanted to face the firing party with his eyes uncovered, but was persuaded to wear a blindfold so as not to unnerve the marines. He knelt on a cushion, tied the handkerchief himself, and dropped a second one as the signal to fire. The size of the firing party differs in the sources: the museum's catalogue describes nine marines in the painting of the scene, Haymond six.¹⁰

Byng was the last British admiral executed by sentence of a court-martial. Two years later Voltaire made him immortal in Candide, with the line that in England it is thought good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others. Haymond argues that the shadow of Byng's fate made later British admirals more willing to take risks, as Hawke did at Quiberon Bay in 1759. The Articles of War were softened again in 1779, restoring lesser punishments.¹¹