Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Admiral's Sacrifice: John Byng and the Making of an Example

The Admiral's Sacrifice: John Byng and the Making of an Example

Lacy, Cathal

Paperback

British History

ISBN13: 9798235921382
Publisher: Silverback Books
Published: Jul 7 2026
Pages: 520
Weight: 1.31
Height: 1.16 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

The Admiral's Sacrifice: John Byng and the Making of an Example

On a gale-swept March morning in 1757, six Royal Marines shot dead a British admiral whose own court-martial had just acquitted him of cowardice. John Byng's crime was negligence, a failure to keep his fleet together off Minorca against a French force his own government had sent him to fight with rotten ships and hundreds of missing men. This is the story of how an admiral's son, raised on a single effortless naval triumph, spent four decades never once tested in battle before the one afternoon that would define and destroy him, and how a ministry desperate to survive a summer of bread riots and national humiliation manufactured his guilt through an edited dispatch, a manipulated press, and a law drafted seven years earlier for an entirely different injustice. The court that condemned him petitioned for his life. A Lord Commissioner refused to sign his death warrant. William Pitt appealed directly to the King. The French commander who defeated him sent a letter in his defence that British ministers intercepted and buried. Drawing on court-martial records, parliamentary debates, and the dispatches themselves, this is a gripping reconstruction of institutional cowardice dressed as justice, and the sacrifice of one man to save a government.

Also in

British History

View All