16

‘THE MACHINATIONS OF EVIL INCENDIARIES’

1797

A CAPTAIN named William Bligh knew something about mutiny but he too missed what was in the wind whispering up the Thames estuary that last week in April. Nine years had passed, almost to the day, since his expulsion from the Bounty, but Captain Bligh’s logbook in his new ship, the 64-gun Director, recorded merely that weather at the Nore had turned decidedly wet. The flogging of two men for insolence on 2 May may have been a sign of incipient trouble, but nine days then passed before a stark entry pointed the way ahead:

The first appearance of mutiny. The ship’s company ordered that Lts Ireland and Church and Mr Birch the Master be dismissed [for] ill-usage to them as they alledged.1

At 9 a.m. the next day Bligh observed turmoil on the 90-gun Sandwich anchored nearby: ‘The people assembled on the Focsle in a great body.’² They then raised a red flag. This was a prearranged signal to Bligh’s ship, as the horrified captain wrote: ‘Instantly our men rushed aft on the poop and seized the arms.’ Both ships were now ‘in a complete state of mutiny’.³

What may be called the east coast mutinies started at the Nore, a sheltered anchorage at the Thames mouth, and initially matched events at Spithead. Once more a flagship – in this case Sandwich – was the focus of activity, as if seamen, like their officers, took their cue from the command vessel even when in rebellion. Once more men had been rowing back and forth, exchanging views and plans of action. At that point, as we have seen, four men were nominated to travel to Spithead – to express support and report back. Seamen clubbed together to fund the journey by Charles McCarthy and Thomas Atkinson of the Sandwich, Matthew Hollister of the Director, and Edward Hines of the Clyde.

There similarities end. Events at Spithead and what followed on the east coast differed in order and nature. Facile though comparisons may be, the mutinies were almost defined by the two men identified as their leaders: Valentine Joyce – steady, authoritative and in command; and Richard Parker – troubled, vacillating and swept away by elements he could not control. And whereas the Spithead leaders’ identities and objectives were clear, some key figures at the Nore did have other agendas and remained unknown to the end.

The Nore was the anchorage of the North Sea Fleet, but for operational reasons most of the ships were based at Great Yarmouth. At the time, vessels at the Nore numbered twelve, of which only three were ships of the line. Dispersed as it was, the North Sea Fleet lacked the unity seen at Spithead. Moreover, Sandwich was a sickly vessel in more ways than one, her timbers rotting with age, her company a miserable blend of old hands and transient supernumeraries – mainly new-signed Landsmen awaiting a ship – all packed into a space utterly insufficient for their number of between 1,100 and 1,300 and susceptible to an alarmingly contagious fever. These conditions had bred seething discontent.4

But two other ships were to play an even more bellicose and incendiary role as events unfolded. They were a pair of 64s, Captain Bligh’s Director and the aptly named Inflexible.

Initially, this second revolt, on 12 May, did not cause undue alarm at the Admiralty. That same day news of the Spithead pact was being celebrated and the Nore outbreak was seen as a gesture of solidarity. It followed that normality would return once the agreed terms were read to the ships there. Seamen at the Nore numbered only 3,500 compared with 30,000 at Spithead.

How events then took the turn they did will never be absolutely clear. The final judicial process was grotesquely flawed and evidence by the few men to testify is often contradictory, tainted as it was by an instinct for self-preservation. What follows, an interpretation of that evidence, is necessarily subjective but is offered as an addition to previous studies.5

Of the four hands sent as observers to Spithead, only two returned to the Nore. Thomas Atkinson drank himself penniless in Portsmouth’s taverns while Edward Hines very wisely seized the moment to desert. That left Charles McCarthy and Matthew Hollister to report back to their shipmates. They returned on 19 May, expecting the pact secured at Spithead to be embraced. Instead, according to McCarthy, they found the situation at the Nore much changed. A previously unknown individual was now notionally in overall charge. But real authority rested with a hard core of troublemakers who had no interest in accepting the Spithead terms and were resorting to bullying and intimidation.⁶

The Sandwich’s most active leader had been William Gregory, often seen at the head of meetings and ‘in boats haranguing other crews’.⁷ Other identified hardliners were a core of Irish hands on the Inflexible led by John Blake and John Patmore. Another intractable cabal was to be found on Bligh’s Director, though its leadership remains mysteriously obscure even now. All these men were still vociferously vocal and on a ruling committee made up of two delegates from each ship. But McCarthy returned to find that ships had in turn elected their own committees, each with a ‘captain’. The new figurehead of this clumsy and unruly mechanism, the ‘president’, was one Richard Parker of the Sandwich.

Parker was a curious choice to lead a mass mutiny. He had not been to sea for years, was virtually unknown on the ship he had joined just two weeks earlier, and claimed to have been a reluctant candidate, presenting himself only after observing ‘a most fatal spirit creeping into the breast of the seamen’.⁸ But then Parker could be wilfully disingenuous. It was widely noted that he posed a striking – even theatrical – figure, with vanity to match, and was seen ‘parading about on shore with a vast number of people and a red flag’.9 He had been made ‘president’ on 17 May, just two days before the delegates’ return from Spithead.¹⁰

Educated and eloquent, Richard Parker had a commanding appearance but was manipulated by less visible militants at the Nore.

According to McCarthy, the committee’s reaction to his report was initially favourable. Quickly, however, objections were raised by two ships, Inflexible and Director. At the next committee meeting, McCarthy claimed, Parker turned hostile, accusing him of never having gone to Spithead and saying he ‘had forged Lord Howe’s name’ on the documents he produced.¹¹ McCarthy perhaps exaggerated when he testified that Parker had wanted to hang him for advocating a settlement, but another witness agreed there had been an angry exchange with the committee that ended with McCarthy being placed in irons.¹² A few days later he was turned out of the ship. Parker announced from the focsle that McCarthy had ‘been enflaming the minds of the people against the committee’.13

The upshot was that papers explaining the Spithead pact were, in McCarthy’s words, ‘concealed from the crew’ – and from the other ships’ companies as well.

He was not alone among the Nore activists alarmed at the direction affairs were taking. William Thomas Jones, a Sandwich delegate, declared it ‘contrary to everything right’ to make demands beyond those granted at Spithead. Jones could have been speaking for many other hands when he fulminated:

There are a set of damned rascals in this place against the good of their King and country and they are converting everything to the use of their own private resentments.¹⁴

One he had in mind was William Gregory, who, though notionally junior to Parker, still played the dominant role at the committee table. Gregory, a thirty-one-year-old Scot from Montrose, one of the carpenter’s crew, cherished visions of America as a land of the free and Ireland as a potential source of further revolution against the Crown, which he detested. Gregory it was who ordered the show of hands in votes, testing and challenging Parker’s authority. His speeches were more belligerent, bordering on the treasonous. He once told the Sandwich’s company: ‘You are as fit to be our sovereign as George Rex. He has power and we have the force of gun powder.’¹⁵

What then of Richard Parker and his role as leader?

Parker had some common history with Valentine Joyce, his Spithead counterpart. Born in Devon, he went to sea at fifteen and served on naval and merchant ships, voyaging to India. There similarities ended. Parker’s service had been interrupted by ill health and bouts of what he termed ‘misfortune’, which translated as mental illness. He was once earmarked for promotion to officer rank before disobedience saw him court martialled, so he became a schoolmaster. His domestic life had been unsettled too, notable for debt and illegitimate children, and he only went back to sea to avoid debtors’ gaol: Parker was a quota man, one of those fellows – usually disdained by their shipmates – recruited by local authorities; he had signed on for a bounty of 20 guineas to avoid his creditors, but having some experience was rated Able on joining Sandwich.16

The key question, however, is why, as a complete unknown, Parker was made president, particularly as he was in the midst of another personal crisis. The day after arriving he wrote to an officer in hope of a discharge: ‘I am at present a most unhappy young man.’¹⁷ For a cohort of leading mutineers, however, keen to conceal their own identities and present a spokesman and negotiator, he was ideal for the part – confident in manner and with an education matched by few sailors: ‘In handwriting and grammar as accomplished as some admirals.’¹⁸ It was when things became challenging that he went to pieces.

Later, in giving his own version, Parker avoided blaming individuals such as Gregory, if only because it went against the grain for seamen to accuse a shipmate. But Parker did lament the influence of the Inflexible and Director. The Inflexible’s committee was particularly militant, the dominant force of the mutiny.¹⁹ ‘There is not a man in custody,’ Parker said later, ‘who does not attribute to the conduct of the Inflexible the melancholy consequences that have happened.’²⁰ It is reasonable to conclude that this vain and tormented man had seized what he saw as his moment – only to discover that he was the tool of those he saw as ‘the lower classes’, with their ‘ignorance and duplicity’.²¹

The Nore mutiny was a week old before it became clear that this was no copycat protest. Officers were sent ashore, most notably Captain Bligh whose entry in the Director’s logbook on 19 May reads: ‘I left the ship per order of the delegates.’²²

The following day Vice-Admiral Charles Buckner, commander-in-chief at the Nore, went onto Sandwich with a copy of the king’s pardon in the hope of resolving matters. He was met by Parker who, in a brazen gesture of disrespect to an admiral on his flagship, declined to doff his hat. Parker then presented Buckner with a letter demanding ‘every indulgence granted to the Fleet at Portsmouth’ – plus seven further concessions.

The issue of shore leave was revived: ‘Every man, upon a ship coming into harbour shall have liberty (a certain number at a time, so as not to injure the ship’s duty) to go and see their friends and family.’ This was an entirely reasonable claim, as it was to insist that pay arrears be cleared before a ship put to sea. But to demand that prize money be more equally distributed was perhaps pushing the boat out. Three further demands were an invitation to battle. These were: that the Articles of War – the Ten Commandments of life at sea – be redefined, with some unspecified articles being moderated and several others ‘expunged’; that officers turned out of a ship could not return without the crew’s consent; and that all deserters be indemnified, in effect, pardoned.23

Whatever the rights and wrongs, at this point the Admiralty drew a line.

A week later Captain Bligh was in a coach bound for Norfolk with a secret despatch for Admiral Adam Duncan, commander-in-chief of the North Sea Fleet, with the main body of ships anchored at Great Yarmouth. In the convoluted prose of the day, their Lordships were asking Duncan a simple question: Could the ships’ companies of his fleet be depended upon if necessary in ‘reducing the crews in the Nore to a state of submission’?²⁴ Two regiments had been moved to the garrison at Sheerness and the mutineers forbidden to land. Now it was a matter of how to get them to surrender and bring them to book. When it came to it, would British seamen obey Admiralty orders to fire on their fellows?

The answer came smartly enough. The North Sea Fleet had suffered gross neglect in respect of two real grievances – overdue pay and shore leave. When Duncan gave the order for his thirteen ships of the line, two frigates and two sloops, to sail, only two ships and a frigate obeyed. The rest came under the command of delegate committees and sailed for the Nore, 90 miles to the south. They arrived just in time to save that mutiny from collapsing.

What passed for a flagship had been reduced to a hellish state. While bravado ruled in Sandwich’s great cabin where Parker and Gregory held sway, pure misery prevailed in the foul air below. Demoralized hands besieged the surgeon, John Snipe, desperate to leave and not just because of sickness. ‘Many good men in the ship had applied to me and been sent [ashore] to sick quarters for the purpose of getting out of the way,’ he recalled.25

Two voices among those present reflect the contrasting perspectives. George Gainer, just twenty-one but a senior mutineer, wrote full of braggadocio to ‘Dear Jenny’, a fellow seaman’s wife he had set his eye upon, of how he had gone from ship to ship ‘to give them their orders’ and being piped up the side with ‘as much respect as if I was the Admiral’:

We are all determined not to return to our duty until all our Greavances are redrest, the articles are too tedious to mention at present, but one of them are that all prize money are to be equally sheared between every Man.²⁶

Thomas Hewson, on the other hand, was among those mightily fearful about where it would all end. Divisions were emerging and Hewson had been appalled to see a boat of Inflexibles come alongside Sandwich, threatening to fire on her if any mark of respect was paid to Admiral Buckner. At this point one of his messmates remarked gloomily how ‘English sailors were once the ornament of their country but he was afraid they were about to do something which would clap a stamp on their character which would never be recovered’.²⁷

The question is who was driving the mutiny? Who were the Inflexibles and Directors?

The ‘captain’ of the Inflexible’s committee was John Blake, a twenty-four-year-old Irishman from County Clare. Here was another instance of a young firebrand taking the lead, but what makes Blake’s captaincy notable is that, unlike most of those elected by their fellows, he was not an experienced man, being rated Ordinary. At least five other of the most prominent Inflexibles were Irish, all young, aged between twenty and twenty-eight. Overall, fifty-two of the crew were Irish.

Of the Director’s ringleaders even less is known, thanks to an intervention that, as we shall see, preserved them from identification or retribution. The senior delegate, Matthew Hollister, was a most improbable agitator – a fifty-six-year-old yeoman from Bristol who had been on the mission to Spithead. Once again, though, the ship had a significant proportion of Irish hands, including their ‘captain’, Joseph Mitchell.

Radicalism, the spread of egalitarian thought, clearly had an influence. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man had been published six years earlier and some of the Nore activists appear to have drunk of his cup. William Gregory, the Scot with a loathing of the monarchy, was one. Thomas Jephson, an Irishman also of the Sandwich, was of the same mind. He refused to fiddle during ‘God Save the King’, adding: ‘I care nothing for kings and queens. Bad luck to the whole of them.’ Jephson thought the mutiny ‘glorious’ and said ‘he would be damned if it ended till the head was off King George and Billy Pitt’.28

Small wonder then that notions of plots involving incendiaries arose. An authoritative early study of the crisis claimed: ‘Many of the Irishmen whose sedition had filled the prisons of their country to overflowing enlisted with more subtle motives than the desire for a bounty or for the comparative freedom of the navy.’²⁹ Whether or not they were real revolutionaries, inspired by the United Irishmen preparing an uprising, is not possible to say, though the trend in recent works to dismiss the idea as mere conspiracy theory should be questioned. The prominence of young Irishmen in the Culloden mutiny and at the Nore suggests nationalist sentiment was indeed at work. It seems unlikely, however, that these were cabals who came aboard with an agenda for insurgency and it may be relevant that Inflexible had been a profoundly unhappy ship for months. While she was at Chatham between January and April men had deserted almost daily – fifty-nine in all.³⁰ On balance it may be concluded that Blake, Jephson and others were tough, patriotic fellows who found themselves caught up in a moment of nationalist possibility.*

That manipulation was going on is evident – and in some cases for political reasons. More often, though, activity at the Nore appears to have been driven by the exhilaration of men discovering their power. As time went by desperation crept in. Dangerous situations evolved not because of any clear revolutionary objective, but because those notionally in charge began to see how far they had overstepped the mark and, knowing there was no way out, were driven deeper.

There was, of course, danger for any seaman who accepted a role in challenging power. When it was asked how delegates in the east coast mutinies had been elected, it would be said that ‘the hands agreed he was a proper person for it and they asked him’. The truth was, anyone who spoke up stuck his neck out and few wanted the responsibility. William Welch of the Standard was far from alone. ‘I told [the crew] I would rather not,’ he testified. ‘Some were surprised and some angry with me.’³¹ John Taylor of the Grampus avowed he had only become a delegate ‘by force of the ship’s company’.³²

Officers too observed the pressures at work. In the opinion of Captain John Knight of Montagu, ‘the greatest promoters [of mutiny] were generally the least conspicuous’.³³

Another captain, Thomas Parr, asked to describe those who had seized his ship, the Standard, replied: ‘All very good men. They were the best of the ship’s company.’³⁴

If one thing is evident it is that there was no clear pattern, no single chain of command, defining the increasingly chaotic developments at the Nore.

Time was running out and so was food. The mutineers were no longer free to land at Sheerness and march through the streets with a brass band. The ships at anchor were isolated. Troops held the town and provisions had been cut off. That was enough to sway some who had been reluctant participants from the start.

On the evening of 31 May the frigates Clyde and San Fiorenzo slipped their cables to drift down the estuary. For this act of desertion they came under fire from Inflexible and another militant vessel, the 16-gun sloop Swan. Here brother was at war with brother, for Abraham Renshaw was on the Swan, his sibling John on San Fiorenzo. Days later John wrote to Abraham from Spithead, reporting that despite severe damage to the rigging they had escaped without any casualties:

I have heard talk of father against son, brother against brother, but I have now experienced it, I little thought when I left you that ever that would happen, but I forgive even you, supposing you was the foremost of the whole . . . Pray write and answer directly and I remain your loving brother until death, John Renshaw.35

It was at this point, just as the mutiny was fragmenting, that eleven ships of the line, a frigate and two sloops from the North Sea Fleet, arrived to revive it. They included the 64-gun two-deckers Belliqueux, Lion, Repulse, Nassau, Standard and Agamemnon, captained until recently by Nelson, and they were to show varying degrees of commitment. The real diehards were always the three original leaders, Sandwich, Inflexible and Director.

Briefly revitalized, the ruling committee ordered a blockade of the Thames. By stopping all shipping bound upriver to London, so the plan went, they would establish a stranglehold on the capital. But while Parker was once more seen ‘with a red flag and a band, rowing from ship to ship and speaking to the crews’, the mood remained sombre.36 Letters to relatives, intercepted by the authorities, sound a uniformly subdued tone. Robert Dobson wrote to his wife from the Nassau:

What the consequences will be I cannot tell. We have all Yard Ropes riv’d for hanging any Man that refuses the proposals they’ve sworn to . . . if it is not a Peace there will be very bad Work.³⁷

Joseph Devonish of the Belliqueux was full of regret as he wrote to his wife Jane in Clerkenwell:

I long to see you and to be free’d from such an unhappy piece of business. And yet my dearest Life I would not wish you to come to me, when I have not anything to nourish or comfort you . . . I wish that every method may be try’d to bring about this long wished for Peace, that I may once more hug you to my longing breast, and if it was possible never to part any more I would most certainly come to you.³⁸

John Cox, also writing to his spouse, was plainly and simply fearful:

I should be more hapear to be at [h]ome than to be hear with 1000 Pound in my Pockit for whe are under the Men of Wars Juri[s]diction to do as they please . . . whe are afraid of our Lives.³⁹

Ashore, attitudes had shifted as well. Nelson, a supporter of the Spithead petitions, saw the east coast uprisings in an entirely different light: ‘For the Nore scoundrels, I should be quite happy to command a ship against them.’⁴⁰ In the nation as a whole there had been sympathy with the seamen’s complaints – if not their actions – until the restraint of Spithead gave way to the Nore chaos. Disquiet was being felt even by the mutineers’ families.

Joseph Pritchett, a delegate on Serapis, was informed severely by his brother Samuel that he was involved in ‘the machinations of evil incendiaries’. The mutiny ‘bears so different a complexion [to Spithead]’ that it was universally condemned:

Shocked indeed we are for the dreadful consequences which this ever lamentable disaster may bring upon you and our Country. You say in your letter of the 26th Ulto that you and another man was forced to be Delegates, we shall say nothing on that detestable subject until we are more informed how irresistibly you came to be enforced . . .

In the name of all goodness pray do let us beg you will take the first oppertunity to extricate yourself . . . Consider your Country weeping, remember her Songs in praise of the Sons of the Waves which you have often delighted in; think of the exultation of her inveterate enemies; feel for your relations and friends and for God’s sake, begin to feel for yourself.41

An equally impassioned note was struck by John Cudlip writing from Deptford to his brother Peter on Belliqueux:

Let me beg of you, if you respect a Brother who is anxious for your welfare, to be true and loyal to your King and Country . . . Every brave and true Briton ought to come forward as one man to resist every attempt of the enemy. If my advice is not taken never expect for me to countenance you any more as a Brother.⁴²

Pitt’s government sensed the time for decisive action. On 5 June, the day Cudlip wrote his exhortation, Parliament passed a law making it a capital felony to be on a ship in mutiny, or to communicate with one. The mutineers had been reduced to common criminals.

Parker appeared oblivious of the approaching fire and brimstone. A lieutenant with whom he spent an evening and who gave him drink, ‘knowing his propensity that way’, wrote how a drunken Parker was roused ‘to display his powers of oratory’:

Whenever the subject [of mutiny] was broached his brain took fire; he seemed intoxicated with a sense of his own consequence and uttered nothing but incoherent nonsense.43

Vanity notwithstanding, Parker’s gift with prose is indicated by two statements. The first was intended to revive public sympathy. It purported to come from the ruling committee but if a single hand can be discerned it is surely that of the former schoolmaster. Addressed to ‘Countrymen’ and with references to despotism and Tom Paine, it mixed radical polemic with a thinly veiled threat:

Shall we who have endured the toils of a long and disgraceful war bear the tyranny and oppression which vile pampered knaves wallowing in the lap of luxury choose to load us with? Shall we who in the midst of tempests undaunted climb the unsteady bondage and totter on the topmasts in dreadful nights suffer ourselves to be treated worse than the filthiest dregs of London streets? . . .

No – the Age of Reason is at length arrived, we have been endeavouring to find ourselves men. We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such . . .

The British seaman has justly been compared to the Lion, gentle, generous and humane. No one would certainly wish to provoke such an animal . . .⁴⁴

A second appeal, almost simultaneous, was to ‘the King’s Most Excellent Majesty’ from his ‘faithful and loyal subjects’, and while adopting a mantle of humility it bordered on lèse-majesté. Seamen’s grievances, it stated, had ‘never [been] properly stated to you’ and:

. . . we are sorry to have reason to remark the Conduct of your present ministers seems to be directed to the ruin & overthrow of your Kingdom.⁴⁵

It went on to deliver an ultimatum, setting 9 June as a deadline ‘to know your Majesty’s final answer’ to the demands made two weeks earlier. The answer was a flat rejection.

Parker was desperate. With the gallows looming, talk among the delegates turned to escape – to America, the Caribbean, even the enemy, France. On 8 June he and the committee toured the fleet, with the aim of persuading all ships to leave England. At the last, oratory failed him. On the Ardent, he was jeered as ‘a precious admiral’.46

The real test came the following day, on 9 June, when Sandwich gave the signal to sail. It was ignored. Not a single vessel responded.

Within days each ship became a battleground. On the Leopard, which since arriving had seemed to associate with the hardline Inflexible and Sandwich, factions took up arms against one another. A newspaper reported, ‘a very severe conflict ensued . . . at length the loyal party got the better and twenty-five of the most violent mutineers were laid in irons’.⁴⁷

The Leopard was first to quit, lowering the red flag and raising a blue. As she made for Sheerness to surrender, Repulse also slipped her cables and followed. Now the disarray of the mutineers’ regime was exposed. Militants on Standard took it upon themselves to fire on Leopard. Command had collapsed. Men used to carrying out orders from others, dependent on a structured hierarchy, were adrift without them.

Parker was as lost as any. He went on Director, and seeing guns being brought to bear on Repulse shouted ‘how dreadful it was for one brother to be firing on another’. He was ignored. As firing began, he changed his mind and ‘ordered the broadside to be brought to bear’.⁴⁸ On crossing to Monmouth, he adopted a positively warlike persona. As one sailor related, he became frenzied and gave orders to fire on Repulse ‘and send her to hell where she belongs and show her no quarter’:

He then said he would go on [another] ship and despatch her after the Leopard to send [her] to hell likewise.⁴⁹

In the event, Repulse escaped without injury, probably because the guns were deliberately fired wide; even fervent mutineers were reluctant to aim at their fellows. Parker returned to Sandwich knowing all was lost.

That night the Ardent followed Repulse. Over the next two days storms blew up on the remaining twenty ships at anchor, but the wind was all in one direction. From dawn on 12 June they started to surrender – Agamemnon, Nassau, Vestal, followed the next day by thirteen more, including Sandwich. When the Standard slipped her cable, delegate William Wallace raised a pistol and fired it into his head.

Others took a different form of avoidance. Hundreds of supposed leading activists were rounded up but, amid the ensuing pandemonium ashore, dozens of others managed to slip away. Among them were the ‘captain’ of Montagu, a stout-bodied Able hand, Michael Harrison from Liverpool, and his two enforcers, James Brock from Bristol and Dennis Corbett from Limerick. They were not seen again.50

The most spectacular escape was staged by the group who in all likelihood were the most accountable, and best placed to explain the whole disaster – the Irish hands of the Inflexible. Captain Ferris, who had kept his head down throughout, came up to take command on 14 June to find that the twelve leading Inflexibles, including their ‘captain’, John Blake, had left in boats.⁵¹ Descriptions of Blake – ‘dark complexion, long brown hair tied up, blue eyes, small mouth’ – and the likes of Thomas Ryley of Dublin – ‘ruddy, carroty hair, freckles’ – were circulated but, unsurprisingly, produced no return. They had already escaped down the estuary, seized a sloop in the fishing village of Faversham, and crossed to France.⁵²

The execution of justice was prolonged, confused and utterly arbitrary. The Admiralty’s priority was a show trial to make an example of figureheads while an investigation was set in train. It did not help that some key activists had escaped, but that does not account for the whimsical nature of punishment. An initial wave of executions gave way to comparative restraint and a resort to pardons. This is not to impute compassion to the authorities: the instinct for vengeance that marked uprisings was partly tempered by an Admiralty grappling with its need for manpower; but there were other factors too, and the flaws were grotesque.

A magistrate, Aaron Graham, was sent to investigate connections between delegates and ‘any private person or society on shore’, a clear reference to the London Corresponding Society. He started with zeal, confident of ferreting out ‘incendiaries’ at Spithead, but after interrogating Valentine Joyce and his family concluded that Joyce had actually maintained ‘good order’.*

As for the Nore, the magistrate found that although ‘wicked designing men’ had been active, no link with Jacobin groups could be established.⁵³ That, he concluded, was down to the escape of the Inflexibles, because ‘if any proceedings of a Political nature were introduced into the fleet, they originated on board that ship’.⁵⁴

Richard Parker was the first to be tried, a week after the surrender, and his fate was never in doubt. He did not help himself. Presented with evidence that he had ordered Director to open fire on Leopard, he said: ‘I was obliged to give way to the general storm and pretend to sanction a thing I utterly abominated.’⁵⁵ After the formality of a guilty verdict, the court urged that Parker be ‘hung in chains in some conspicuous place as an example’. The king thoroughly approved of the idea but the Admiralty decided it would be unduly provocative.

Two days before his execution Parker wrote to an unnamed friend, taking comfort ‘that I am to die a Martyr in the cause of Humanity’. Yet he was still full of contradictions, having belatedly realized that he had been a useful fool:

Remember never to make yourself the busy body of the lower classes, for they are cowardly, selfish and ungrateful; the least trifle will intimidate them, and him whom they have exalted one moment as their Demagogue, the next they will not scruple to exalt upon the gallows . . . Now my dear Friend, I take my leave of you and may Providence return every kindness that I have received from your hands. Oh pray for me, that in the last scene I may act my part like a man.56

That, by all accounts, he did. Brought up onto Sandwich’s quarterdeck on 30 June, Parker acknowledged the justice of his sentence and asked for a moment to collect himself, then said: ‘I am ready.’

Among those observing these events from a boat was a woman. Parker’s wife, Ann, had done everything in her power to save the man to whom, for all his faults, she was plainly devoted. Ten days earlier she testified to magistrates in Edinburgh that Parker had been ‘in a state of insanity’ at times during their marriage, and that his navy discharge in 1794 was specifically due to being ‘deranged in his intellect’.⁵⁷ She then hastened to London and had a scribe draw up a petition for mercy which she delivered to the Queen’s residence. There she called daily without receiving a reply. On the morning of the execution she was rowed out to Sandwich but despite pleas that she be permitted to see her husband for the last time, the boat was turned away. It was still off to one side as the death gun boomed and some of those lately under Parker’s command hauled his body up to the yardarm.^*

Another twenty-three Sandwich mutineers were tried next. The flagship had been the focus of attention and it followed that salutary punishment should be directed here first. All but six of the accused were sentenced to death, including William Gregory, the would-be revolutionary, and Charles McCarthy, who had opposed him and spoken up for the Spithead terms.

Crucially, however, they were not consigned straight to the yardarm. Belatedly, the Admiralty was considering the lessons of those weeks – eight terrifying and transformative weeks – in the spring of 1797. How decisions were taken that defined the fate of particular ships and individuals is not entirely apparent. But two strands emerge: their Lordships’ desire to be seen as merciful; and the role of certain captains in saving their men from the yardarm.

Of 414 men ordered for trial, only eighty-four were brought to courts martial. They came from six ships – Sandwich, Leopard, Monmouth, Grampus, Montagu and Standard. Fourteen were jailed or flogged, eleven acquitted. Of the fifty-nine sentenced to death, thirty were spared and jailed or transported to New South Wales. The bodies of the twenty-nine men hanged were left for an hour, placed in coffins with 32-pound shot at their feet, taken out to sea and dropped over the side.58 McCarthy may have been considered unlucky to be among them.

Contemporary reports emphasize the contrition of those on the brink of oblivion. Richard Brown of the Monmouth shared a glass of wine with his captain – who, at his request, ‘forgave him from the bottom of his heart’ – before turning to urge his shipmates ‘to beware of very bad and designing men if they had any regard for their own character, or love for their wives and families’. Such accounts may be dismissed as flummery, the validation of a return to order, but it is feasible that remorse on the scaffold was heartfelt. These were men diminished by separation from their known world, lost like solitary vessels in a storm.

The lucky ones included John Blake and his fellow Inflexibles who, having escaped across the Channel, were embraced by the enemy and went on to serve in French privateers. They were far from alone in evading justice. Some 330 of the men detained in the initial roundup of those identified as suspects were pardoned and released. Among them were forty-one more Inflexibles and thirty-one Monmouths – another group identified as activists. Thomas Jephson of the Sandwich, who had been all for beheading the king and Pitt, received 100 lashes.⁵⁹

More fortunate still were the men of no fewer than fourteen ships who were not brought to trial at all and received blanket pardons. Some companies had indeed been reluctant rebels. It would still be interesting to know how such a conclusion was applied to the sloop Swan, which fired on San Fiorenzo, or Nassau, where nooses were set up to threaten dissidents, or Lion, which had forty-six suspects taken ashore in the initial round-up.

Most curious of all, not a single man from Director was tried, though her company bore a responsibility matched only by the Inflexible. As to why, it may be noted that Captain Bligh, his reputation tainted once by mutiny, was desperate to avoid further stigma. On returning to his ship he assured the crew ‘there would be a pardon’. He then informed an admiral that he was ‘apprehensive the confinement of a further number would cause very serious dissatisfaction in the crew’.60 Whether or not as a direct upshot, all twelve of Director’s leading mutineers were pardoned without trial. A note in the muster stating ‘wages forfeited for Mutiny & Rebellion’ is scratched out, so they appear to have been paid as well.⁶¹

On 10 July the Director was at anchor. Beside her lay the Leopard. All hands were on deck of both ships when, at 9.40 a.m., six men were brought up on Leopard into brilliant sunshine. By 9.55 the bodies of Dennis Sullivan, Alexander Lawson, William Welch, Joseph Fearon, George Shove and Thomas Starling had ceased their writhing.

An hour later Captain Bligh performed divine service for his grateful penitents.⁶² Still subject to whimsical fortune, from shipwreck to battle, impressment to captivity, they had endured. Small wonder theirs was a superstitious tribe.

* Overt conspiracy did emerge the following year, during the uprising by United Irishmen, when concerted plans for mutiny were hatched by Irish hands on four ships of the Channel Fleet: Glory, Caesar, Defiance and Captain. (Both Glory and Defiance had been at Spithead.) The details vary, but in each case the mutineers’ intention was to seize their ship, kill anyone who opposed them and sail to France or Ireland. The plots were discovered before they could be carried out, having been reported by other seamen – mainly Irish hands who had declined to join. Evidence against seventy would-be mutineers was that they had taken oaths of allegiance to the United Irishmen. Twenty men from the Defiance were hanged, eight from Glory, six from Caesar and two from Captain.

* Joyce resumed his life as a seafarer, won promotion to midshipman, and appeared set to become an officer when his sloop, the Brazen, was wrecked off Newhaven in 1800. All but one of the crew were lost, Joyce among them.

* Parker’s body was interred in the naval graveyard at Sheerness, but Ann – determined that he should be buried ‘like a gentleman as he had been bred’ – had the coffin dug up and transported to a Tower Hill tavern where crowds gathered to inspect it. Fearing that Parker might be turned into a martyr, magistrates ordered the coffin to be laid in a Whitechapel church vault. Ann Parker was soon overtaken by the poverty known to many seamen’s widows but received charitable donations from – it was said – William IV, the last Hanoverian King.