There had been periods when Fox would not have suffered such casuistry in the profession to pass uncensured:--what was the part he now took?--It was not, in truth, an age to expect that a Regulus should exhort his country to pursue measures which would advance his own destruction. Few men would devote themselves, when other victims were marked for sacrifice. We will suppose, that Mr. Fox, implicated in the miscarriages of the last year, might not be sorry to see the busy timidity of Newcastle, or the dark councils of Hardwicke, transferring his, their own, and Anson’s neglects and mismanagements to Mr. Byng, and sweeping Court, Navy, Parliament, and Law, into a combination to cut off a man whom they had made obnoxious to the nation, because he was so to themselves--but what more crooked policy was that, which, not content with sheltering itself behind Mr. Byng, sought to ruin Mr. Pitt too, by painting him to the multitude as the champion of the condemned Admiral? It is irksome to me to tell what whispers, what open speeches, what libels, Mr. Fox and his emissaries vented to blacken Mr. Pitt and Lord Temple, for feeling symptoms of humanity towards a traduced, a condemned, a friendless man! Hardwicke moved steadily towards his point, the death of the criminal:--Fox sported with the life of that criminal, and turned mercy itself into an engine of faction to annoy his antagonist. Had Mr. Pitt effectually interposed, had the seal been set by his influence to Mr. Byng’s pardon, (however generous morality would scorn the office,) policy might have excused Mr. Fox for traducing such humanity:--but previously to make mercy impossible, by making it dangerous, by making it odious!--I know not where ambition would stop, if it could leap over such sacred sensations! February 16th.--The day after the Judges had given their opinion on the sentence, the King in Council referred that opinion to the Admiralty. The King signs no sentence himself: where he does not interpose his prerogative of pardon, execution follows of course. In naval affairs, the Lords of the Admiralty sign the warrant. Lord Temple had dropped hints to the King in favour of Byng, but with more reserve with regard to the prisoner, than towards the majesty of the sovereign, to whom at one time he said in his closet, with a contemptuous sneer, “And if he dies well, what will _you_ say then?” It was applied so _ad hominem_, that the King interpreted it as a reflection on his own courage. The Admiralty thus pushed, and weighing on one hand the unpopularity of a direct refusal to sign, and on the other the authority of the Judges, which had been given at their request, determined to comply. That very night Lord Temple, Dr. Hay, and Elliot, signed the sentence, and sent it to Portsmouth, ordering execution on the 28th. Admiral Forbes, in every part of his conduct uniformly amiable and upright, refused peremptorily to sign it.