All this stress of preparation was presided over by mere infirmity of will. In July the Ministry, still guided by Newcastle, sent Sir Edward Hawke to sea with twenty-one sail of the line, but with no definite orders to begin hostilities. He was told to intercept a French squadron from the West Indies and to capture French merchant ships. The squadron put into Cadiz, got warning which enabled it to avoid the English fleet, and reached Brest safely. But 300 merchant ships manned by 8000 men were taken, and carried into our ports. This seizure of trading ships in a time of nominal peace gave the French Government an opportunity to denounce us to Europe as pirates. Many Englishmen thought it would have been more for our honour to make war openly, since we were about making it at all. Yet the French had little right to complain after the example they had set in India and America. The vessels were not condemned as prize, and as they were largely loaded with fish their cargoes rotted, so that it was necessary to tow them out to sea and sink them. Hawke returned to port, ill pleased with the work he had been set to do, and was replaced in the Channel command by Admiral Byng. Then Byng was sent out to convince the country that something was being done. He took a French line-of-battle ship, the _Esperance_, but still war was not proclaimed. The French Government professed a wish to keep the peace. Yet at the end of 1755 and the beginning of 1756 it marched troops down to the Channel. As the Duke of Newcastle had succeeded for a time in infecting the nation with his own cowardice, we were thrown into an unutterably shameful panic by fear of invasion, though we had a powerful fleet in commission at home, and the French had not the means of fitting out a dozen ships at Brest. Under cover of this diversion the French invaded Minorca in April. Then at last the Government was brought to confess that war was war. Our proclamation appeared on the 17th May, and was answered by the French on the 9th of June.