Admiral John Byngthe VaultISTJ

On 14 March 1757, Admiral John Byng was shot by a squad of marines on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch, in the Solent off Portsmouth. He was 52. By the account told ever since, he knelt on a cushion and gave the signal himself, by dropping his handkerchief.

He had served in the navy since he was 13 and risen to Admiral of the Blue. His own country was shooting him for failing to do his utmost.

The trouble had begun a year earlier. On 11 March 1756 he was ordered to raise a fleet and relieve Minorca, where the French were closing on the British garrison at Fort St Philip. Of the ten ships he was meant to have, six were ready. When he sailed in early April, he was still more than 800 men short.

Vaults will recognize the position. The task is fixed. The ships and men are not what was promised. When the numbers would not add up, he wrote it down and sent it up the chain. From Gibraltar he told the Admiralty how bad things were. In London, many took the warning for defeatism.

On 20 May 1756 he met the French fleet off Minorca and fought it as the navy's Fighting Instructions required, in a line of battle. The action settled nothing. Four days later a council of war voted unanimously to take the fleet back to Gibraltar. Fort St Philip surrendered on 29 June.

The country was furious. At his court martial aboard HMS St George, the court acquitted him of cowardice. It convicted him under the 12th Article of War of not doing his utmost, and a recent change in the law had left death as the only sentence. In the same verdict, on 27 January 1757, the court unanimously asked the king for mercy. George II refused.

He is still often said to have been shot for cowardice. He was not.

For Vaults, a rule is a promise made in advance. You keep your side, and you expect the institution that wrote it to stand behind the people who obeyed. Byng kept his side to the letter. He may have been too cautious, and a court could fairly have said so. The law left it no way to say so short of a firing squad.

He met the end calm and in good order. His family did the rest. On the Byng memorial at Southill in Bedfordshire, where he had been baptized in 1704, they set down the verdict they believed in, for anyone to read.

Two years later Voltaire put the episode into Candide. In England, he wrote, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, “pour encourager les autres”, to encourage the others. In 2007 Byng's descendants were still asking for a pardon. It was refused.

His warning had been on file the whole time. It could not save him. It is the reason the argument has never stopped.