The admiral shot on his own quarterdeck

Byng knelt on a cushion and dropped a handkerchief

John Byng was born in 1704, the son of an admiral. He grew up expecting the sea to make him. By 1756 he commanded a fleet sent to relieve the British garrison on Minorca. The French were besieging it. He fought an indecisive action off the island. He judged the risk too great. He sailed his ships back to Gibraltar instead of pressing the attack. Minorca fell. London wanted someone to answer for it.

Byng was brought home and court-martialled. He was convicted under the Articles of War for failing to do his utmost against the enemy. The court found no cowardice and no disloyalty. It found only misjudgment. But the law gave the judges no lesser sentence than death. Byng was executed on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch. The ship was anchored in Portsmouth harbor. The date was 14 March 1757. A firing squad of his own marines carried it out. He knelt on a cushion. He dropped a handkerchief as the signal. He was shot at his own command. Voltaire later wrote that the English shoot an admiral now and then "to encourage the others." He was writing about this exact killing.

A man was hanged for burning the rope house

Twenty years later, a laborer set fire to the dockyard's rope house. He was known as John the Painter. He hoped to cripple the fleet that had shot Byng for failing it. He was caught and tried. He was hanged at Portsmouth in 1777. His body was later gibbeted as a warning to others who might try the same. The dockyard that punished an admiral for losing an island had hanged a man for trying to burn it down. This happened within a generation.

Victory rotted for a century before rescue

The dockyard did not only judge men. It judged ships. HMS Victory was floated out here in 1765, too late for the war that named her. She fought at Trafalgar in 1805. She carried Nelson to his death and to victory in the same afternoon. Then the judging began again. For a century Victory sat as a harbor ship, then a training hulk. She was stripped of the glory that had made her. Only in 1922 did the Navy decide she was worth saving. She went into dry dock 174 meters from where you stand. She has never left it. The same authority that shot an admiral for one bad decision let his flagship rot for a hundred years. Only then did it call her worthy.

Warrior became surplus before becoming a warship again

Nine decades after Byng died, the Navy built a ship to answer a fear. France had launched an ironclad called Gloire. Britain panicked. HMS Warrior (1860) went up fast. She was the first iron-hulled armored warship in the fleet. She was meant to outclass anything France could put to sea. She never fired a shot in anger. Within fifteen years a newer, mastless ship made her obsolete. Warrior was paid off in 1883. Then she was reduced to a storeship, then a torpedo training hulk, then an oil jetty. She spent more of her working life being judged surplus than being judged a warship. Rescue came in 1979. She was towed away for an eight-year restoration. She returned to Portsmouth in 1987. She lay a quarter mile from Victory. Both are kept now for what they were. The Navy once decided they were worth far less.

Cholera killed 800 with no court to answer

The Navy reserved its firing squads for its own officers. It offered no such reckoning to the town around them. In 1848 and 1849, cholera swept through Portsmouth. It killed 800 people. There was no court-martial for this. No one stood trial for the water that carried it. The fleet lay in harbor throughout. Its ships and stores were judged and re-judged by admiralty boards. The streets beyond the dockyard wall buried their dead without ceremony. No one assigned blame.

A duke was stabbed to death near the dockyard

More than a century before Byng knelt on his cushion, another commander met a violent end on this same ground. This time the Navy did not do the killing. George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham was a royal favorite. He had led a disastrous naval expedition to relieve French Protestants at the Île de Ré. An army officer named John Felton stabbed Buckingham to death at Portsmouth in 1628. Felton believed he had been passed over and wronged by the chain of command. No court-martial judged Buckingham. A single aggrieved man did it with a knife. It happened in a house near the dockyard. This was more than a hundred years before the Navy would formalize its own executions on a quarterdeck a few hundred feet from here.