by party ties with Fox and his coterie of friends, Jervis was
always opposed to the abolition of the slave trade and to the education
of the lower orders. Liberty was to him an inherited worship, associated
with certain stock beliefs and phrases, but subordination was the true
idol of his soul.

In 1775 Captain Jervis commissioned the _Foudroyant_, of eighty-four
guns, a ship captured in 1758 from the French, and thereafter thought to
be the finest vessel in the British fleet. To this, her natural
superiority, Jervis added a degree of order, discipline, and drill which
made her the pride and admiration of the navy. He was forty when his
pennant first flew from her masthead, and he held the command for eight
years, a period covering the full prime of his own maturity, as well as
the entire course of the American Revolution. It was also a period
marked for him, professionally, less by distinguished service than by
that perfection of military organization, that combination of dignified
yet not empty pomp with thorough and constant readiness, which was so
eminently characteristic of all the phases of Jervis's career, and
which, when the rare moments came, was promptly transformed into
unhesitating, decisive, and efficient action. The _Foudroyant_, in her
state and discipline, was the type in miniature of Jervis's
Mediterranean fleet, declared by Nelson to be the finest body of ships
he had ever known; nay, she was the precursor of that regenerate British
navy in which Nelson found the instruments of his triumphs. Sixty years
later, old officers recalled the feelings of mingled curiosity and awe
with which, when sent to her on duty from their own ships, they climbed
on board the _Foudroyant_, and from the larboard side of her
quarter-deck gazed upon the stern captain, whose qualities were
embodied in his vessel and constituted her chief excellences.

During Jervis's command, the _Foudroyant_ was continuously attached to
the Channel Fleet, whose duty, as the name implies, was to protect the
English Channel and its approaches; a function which often carried the
ships far into the Bay of Biscay. Thus he took a prominent part in
Keppel's battle off Ushant in 1778, in the movements occasioned by the
entrance into the Channel of an overpowering Franco-Spanish fleet in
1779 and 1781, and in the brilliant relief of Gibraltar by Admiral Howe
towards the end of 1782. His most distinguished service, however, was
taking, single-handed