Richelieu landed with 14,000 men at Ciudadela on the 19th April. After many delays and much confusion, the Ministry had at last been brought to see that Minorca was in danger, and a squadron of ten ships had sailed to relieve it on the 6th April. The command of the squadron was given to an officer whose name has a tragic interest unique in the long list of British admirals. John Byng was the fourth son of that George Byng, Viscount Torrington, whose active subordinate share in the Revolution of 1688, and command in the Mediterranean in 1718, have been already mentioned. The son was born in 1704, and had gone to sea at the age of thirteen. He served under his father at the battle of Cape Passaro, and became post-captain at the age of twenty-three. He had gained no distinction, nor had he sought any, on those remote unhealthy stations where the most arduous work of the navy was being done. His portrait is that of a handsome, refined, but plump and easy-going young man, and compares ill with his father’s. George Byng has the lean, eager face of one who though of gentle birth had to climb by his own efforts. John Byng has the air of one whose father was born before him, and who did not rise, but was carried up with no effort of his own by the fortune another had made. He had sat in Parliament, and had not escaped the corrupting influence of the factious, selfish, jobbing spirit of the political world of his generation. Byng was selected to carry the reliefs to Minorca on the 11th March, but nearly a month passed before he sailed. Though we had a great fleet commissioned and commissioning, much difficulty was found in manning the ten ships assigned him for the service. The Admiralty refused to draft men from well-manned vessels on the ground that they were needed at home. Some part of the blame for this must be put on Anson and Boscawen, who were on the Board. The great responsibility lay on the mere politicians and borough-mongers whose folly was paralysing the strength of England, but it must be confessed that Anson in dealing with political chiefs and colleagues did not show the courage he had never failed to display in fighting the storm or the broadsides of the enemy. As Byng was to reinforce the garrison of Minorca, he carried with him both the officers who were at home on leave and Lord Robert Bertie’s regiment of foot. By a piece of blundering, for which Anson cannot be held blameless, the marines were landed to make room for the soldiers. If now they were landed in Minorca, the squadron, already ill manned, would have been dangerously weakened. As the French were known to have a fleet at sea, Byng was thus put at a serious disadvantage, and an angry sense of ill-treatment rankled in his mind, not unnaturally, but fatally, for it had a share in causing him to adopt a line of conduct which brought discredit to his country and a shameful death to himself. It never occurred to him that if he beat the enemy’s