who loved office only less than he loved his own
neck. A Prime Minister like Newcastle made possible an admiral like
Byng. Horace Walpole tells the story of how, when the much-enduring
British public broke into one of its rare but terrible fits of passion
after the disgrace of Minorca, and Newcastle was trembling for his own
head, a deputation from the city of London waited upon him, demanding
that Byng should be put upon his trial. "Oh, indeed," replied
Newcastle, with fawning gestures, "he shall be tried immediately. He
shall be hanged directly!" It was an age of base men, and the
navy--neglected, starved, dishonoured--had lost the great traditions of
the past, and did not yet feel the thrill of the nobler spirit soon to
sweep over it.

But in 1759 the dazzling intellect and masterful will of the first Pitt
controlled the fortunes of England, and the spirit of the nation was
beginning to awake. Burns and Wilberforce and the younger Pitt were
born that year; Minden was fought; Wolfe saw with dying eyes the French
battalions broken on the plains of Abraham and Canada won. But the
great event of the year is Hawke's defeat of Conflans off Quiberon.
Hawke was the son of a barrister; he entered the navy at fourteen years
of age as a volunteer, obtained the rating of an able seaman at
nineteen years of age, was a third lieutenant at twenty-four, and
became captain at thirty. He knew the details of his profession as
well as any sea-dog of the forecastle, was quite modern in the keen and
humane interest he took in his men, had something of Wellington's
high-minded allegiance to duty, while his fighting had a stern but
sober thoroughness worthy of Cromwell's Ironsides. The British people
came to realise that he was a sailor with the strain of a bulldog in
him; an indomitable fighter, who, ordered to blockade a hostile port,
would hang on, in spite of storms and scurvy, while he had a man left
who could pull a rope or fire a gun; a fighter, too, of the type dear
to the British imagination, who took the shortest course to the enemy's
line, and would exchange broadsides at pistol-shot distance while his
ship floated.

In 1759 a great French army threatened the shores of England. At Havre
and Dunkirk huge flotillas of flat-bottomed boats lay at their
moorings; 18,000 French veterans were ready to embark. A great fleet
under the command of Conflans--one of the ablest seamen France has ever
produced--was gathered at Bres