All that is notable in these crumbs of debate is the strategy of Pitt; to hammer at the enemy without ceasing, not to allow him a moment to breathe or recover, but to display him to the country day and night pummelled, bewildered and helpless, until he should succumb from exhaustion; when the country should insist on the removal of the defeated combatant, and the substitution of his conqueror. Pitt was openly set on the destruction of the Newcastle Government for more reasons than one. He was vindictive and had been slighted; he was profoundly anxious about the position of the country, and convinced of the incapacity of Newcastle to govern; he wished to try his own hand at the game, believing that he could do better, convinced that he could do no worse, than the Ministers whom he had seen at work. CHAPTER XXI. But national calamity was now to lend irresistible force to his attacks. It had been known for some time that France was meditating an attack on Gibraltar or Minorca, and in the beginning of March it became certain that Minorca was to be the object.[323] During the first week of May the Government received the news that the French had actually landed on the island. War was formally and not prematurely declared on May 18. Six weeks earlier the ill-fated Byng had sailed with a fleet to relieve the fortress. The country waited for news with bated breath. The King declared that he could neither eat nor sleep. Saunders, afterwards to be Pitt's First Lord of the Admiralty, reassured his Sovereign by saying that they should screw his heart out if Byng were not at that moment (June 7) in the harbour of Mahon.[324] Then came the news that Byng, after an indecisive engagement with the French fleet, had sailed back to Gibraltar and left Minorca to its fate. Still the nation, though raging against Byng, hoped against hope, till on July 14 the news came that Fort St. Philip, the British fort, had surrendered after a gallant defence on June 28, and that Minorca was in the hands of the French. The long-compressed anxiety exploded in a terrible outburst of wrath against Byng. Addresses poured in from every part of England demanding vengeance upon him. The unhappy Admiral was brought back to Greenwich Hospital as a prisoner to await a court-martial. But, the nation had already turned its thumb downwards. Perhaps the best idea of the popular sentiment is conveyed by the fact that Byng's brother, who went to meet the Admiral, was stricken to death by the popular fury wherever he passed; so that he fell ill at the first sight of the prisoner, and died next day in convulsions. There was no chance of a fair trial for the unhappy man. To the merchants of London bringing one of the addresses for his exemplary punishment Newcastle, not sorry to have a scapegoat, had blurted out, 'Oh! indeed he shall be tried immediately: he shall be hanged directly.' And executed he was, after an agony of eight months, in spite of