justice, in spite of Pitt, who had the fine courage to support him, in deference to the nation and the King who were bent on his death. Voltaire, who had tried with real humanity to save him, sardonically described the execution in Candide, 'Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres,' a phrase which he appears to have borrowed from the Knights of Malta.[325] Something less, much less than Nelson, might have saved Minorca. The truth seems to be that Byng, who was personally brave, sailed from Gibraltar with the preconceived impression that Minorca was lost, and acted throughout under this conviction, without energy or resource. So far as his countrymen, or rather, their rulers, were concerned, they had long done their best to lose it. They had, in spite of constant appeals, starved and neglected it. But there was worse than this. On one side of the mouth of the harbour of Mahon is a site easily rendered impregnable, on the other a plain which nothing can secure. John Duke of Argyle had begun a fort on the first site, but Lord Cadogan out of hatred to him, it was said, destroyed it and built Fort St. Philip at a vast expense on the second. The thing is incredible to the traveller who sees the place. If the story be true (Horace Walpole is the authority), it is on the head of Cadogan and not of Byng that should be laid the loss of Minorca, a loss which can neither be forgotten nor forgiven. This tragic incident only touches Pitt's life in so far as it precipitated the disgrace of Newcastle. The Duke was indeed getting deeper and deeper. In May he declared that no one blamed him, for every one knew that the sea was not his province, and Fox had replied that as to public censure, his information was exactly the reverse. In September he could scarcely conceal from himself that he was being mobbed and pelted in his coach, and that his coachman was urged by the shouting crowd to drive his Grace straight to the Tower. Ballads swarmed of which the burden was, 'To the block with Newcastle and to the yard-arm with Byng.' Even the docile allegiance of the House of Commons can scarcely have allayed the veteran's rising anxiety. 'This was the year of the worst administration that I have seen in England,' says Walpole, though he was the close friend of Fox, 'for now Newcastle's incapacity was allowed full play.' Fox indeed found that he was not admitted to real confidence or to the counsels of Newcastle and Hardwicke. He was therefore in a state of swelling discontent, ready to break away at the first opportunity. He declared that he had urged that a strong squadron should be sent for the relief of the fortress during the first week of March, but was overruled. The fall of Minorca and the storm of national fury which followed increased his anxiety to be out of this disastrous Ministry. He was, we suspect, already determined not to meet Parliament again as Newcastle's talking puppet, possibly his scapegoat.