There now remained nothing to be done but to try Admiral Mathews. He appeared before a court martial in June 1746—and was sentenced to be cashiered. That he was a stupid man, and was equally unfit to be a minister plenipotentiary or an admiral, is true. In giving up the pursuit of the allies, and so losing his chance to renew the battle, he showed extreme dulness and even want of spirit. But in the action he had fought manfully, and if his example had been well followed the Spanish squadron would in all probability have been cut to pieces. His great sin in the opinion of the court was that he engaged in such a way as to make the maintenance of the line impossible while the signal to preserve it was flying. Again we have to arrive at the conclusion that, from the point of view of the court martial, it was better that the enemy should not be brought to action than that the line should be disordered. Such a result could only have been reached by men who had never spent an hour in thinking out the methods of fighting a battle to the best purpose, but had simply accepted the sixteenth article of the Fighting Orders with the docility of pedants. The consequence of their finding was to rivet the tyranny of a pedantic rule so firmly that it required forty years of war, and an extraordinary combination of happy circumstances at the end of them, to free the navy from its bonds. In the course of these trials an incident took place which is of interest, because it settled the question of the subordination of the military to the civil courts. The President of the court martial formed to try Admiral Mathews was Perry Mayne, Rear-Admiral of the Blue. It happened that Admiral Mayne had sat on a court martial in the West Indies to try a lieutenant of marines named Frye, and had sentenced him to dismissal and imprisonment. Lieutenant Frye took proceedings against the members of the court in England for acting beyond their powers and for imprisoning him illegally. He gained his case, and £800 damages. In the course of these proceedings a writ was issued by Sir John Willes, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, against Perry Mayne and Captain Rentoul, another of Mathews’ judges, who also had sat on the court martial. The other members of the court were extremely angry at this interference with their President, and recorded a violent protest against the action of Sir John Willes, in which they were encouraged not only by the king, who was a German prince, and very ignorant of English ways to the end of his life, but by the Lords of the Admiralty and Corbet the Secretary, who ought to have known better. Sir John Willes at once asserted his authority by attaching all the members of the court for contempt. They were compelled to present a very humble and public apology.