Captain Eaton commits suicide at the Admiralty – 3 July 1797
Worn down by anxiety over a prospective promotion and days without sleep, Commander John Eaton tragically took his own life at the Admiralty in early July 1797.
Eaton was born in 1767 in America to an English merchant who, during the American Revolutionary War, returned his family to his home county of Devon. He joined the Navy as a boy in that conflict and was commissioned lieutenant a dozen years later in November 1790 (at the end of the Spanish Armament). During the remaining three years of the peace he served under Commander Graham Moore aboard the sloop Bonetta 14 at Newfoundland and in the West Indies. With the beginning of the French Revolutionary War in 1793, he enjoyed stints as first lieutenant of the frigates Arethusa 38, Captain Hon Seymour Finch, and Aquilon 32, Captain Hon. Robert Stopford. The Aquilon was present at the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794, and Eaton (along with all the other first lieutenants) was promoted commander on 4 July, being appointed to the Racehorse 16 for purposes of rank only. This promotion meant that he had to leave the Aquilon and accept half-pay whilst awaiting an opportunity for employment in his new rank
When Eaton did eventually obtain a ship, it offered no opportunity for active service – he was appointed to command the Glory 98 while she was briefly in dock in the early autumn of 1795. After another period of unemployment, he was assigned to the Medusa 50 in March 1796, fitting out at Plymouth as a hospital ship attached to the Channel Fleet. Just over a year later, the opportunity for promotion to the coveted rank of post captain beckoned. During the mutiny in the Channel Fleet in mid-May 1797, Captain Henry Nicholls of the Marlborough 74 was turned out of his ship at the insistence of the mutineers. The commander-in-chief, Admiral Lord Bridport, appointed the 32-year-old Eaton to take his place as acting captain. Now all that was needed was the confirmation of Eaton’s promotion by the Lords of the Admiralty in London.
But clearly all was not well aboard the Marlborough, whose crew had taken a prominent role in the Spithead mutiny, and continued to be discontented. Having sailed to Plymouth from Spithead with the Channel Fleet (now back to duty), on 30 June she unexpectedly came to anchor in Cawsand Bay, while most of Bridport’s ships carried on down the Channel. What had happened aboard the ship remains unclear, but at about 5 a.m. on the morning of Monday 3 July, Eaton suddenly arrived in London, having taken a post-chaise all the way from Plymouth. Obtaining a room at the New Exchange Coffee House in the Strand, he did not go to bed as might have been expected after such a long journey, but instead he began marching up and down the street in the pouring rain. An hour later he returned, dripping wet, and summoned a hairdresser who was known to him, one James Sullivan. Arriving at 7 a.m., Sullivan prepared to shave and dress the naval officer, but he soon realised that Eaton was far from himself. ‘I hope you are well, Captain?’ he enquired solicitously, to which Eaton replied that he was very tired from spending two nights in the mail coach. (Although he was styled ‘captain’ this was merely a courtesy title for a commander.) Throughout the process of lathering and shaving, Eaton continued to demonstrate signs of agitation, at one moment urging Sullivan to hurry up as he was in a rush to visit the Admiralty, but then sitting down when the shaving and dressing was completed as if he had forgotten the reason for the haste. When Sullivan finished with Eaton, he commented to the staff at the coffee house that the captain seemed nearly out of his mind.
Eventually leaving his room, Eaton surprised the staff by suddenly returning. Tearing up two letters in the wash basin, he then asked the landlady to keep his room for him and ordered a hackney coach. At about 10 a.m. he arrived at the Admiralty, where he presented his card and requested a meeting with the first lord, Earl Spencer. A messenger soon returned with the news that Spencer was engaged until midday, and Eaton was directed to the lieutenants’ waiting room (which also accommodated commanders).
At about 11:15 Commander James Oughton entered the waiting room to find his fellow officer furiously pacing up and down. Oughton knew of Eaton, having seen him at Margate where Eaton’s mother owned a respectable boarding house, but he had not previously met the Marlborough’s acting captain. A conversation followed regarding the state of the fleet and Eaton’s reasons for being in London, and it rapidly became clear to Oughton that the other officer was in a distressed, even tormented state. Eaton spoke wildly of treachery and villainy as the reason the Marlborough had entered Cawsand Bay. He indicated that he feared being called to account for his conduct, and that he expected to be superseded by another officer. He also said that he had not slept for five days.
Patiently Oughton attempted to mollify the distressed officer, observing that any charges raised against him would surely be proven false. When he mentioned that Lord Spencer generally received captains between 2 and 3 o’clock, Eaton responded: ‘Lord Spencer will never see me!’ Oughton put an arm on the other man’s shoulder and begged him to compose himself before the meeting -‘For God’s sake, endeavour to recollect yourself: do not see Lord Spencer in the state you are in’. Oughton then left Eaton alone in order to pay a visit to the Navy Office, but on returning an hour later, he noticed through the glass door of the waiting room that Eaton was pacing frantically up and down. Anxious for his brother officer’s welfare, Oughton made for the post-captains’ waiting room to see if anyone there knew Eaton; when that room proved empty, he sought out a messenger, Thomas Withy, and expressed his concern at Eaton’s state of mind.
By now it was approaching noon. Together, Withy and Oughton made for the lieutenants’ waiting room, and upon peering in the messenger exclaimed ‘Good God! He has stabbed himself!’. Oughton burst into the room; Withy dashed off to find a surgeon. Eaton was lying stretched out on the floor with what appeared to be a dirk embedded up to the hilt in his stomach. Blood was oozing over his shirt, but he was still alive. ‘Captain Oughton, I will have justice!’ he cried – seizing the handle of the dirk he stabbed himself again in the throat. Desperately, Oughton grabbed his wrists, and in attempting to take the weapon away he hauled Eaton to his feet. Withy then rushed back into the room and seized Eaton’s hands, allowing Oughton, after a struggle, to wrestle the dirk free. Foaming at the mouth the distressed captain garbled ‘I always did right – I always did right’ and then fell to the ground apparently in his death throes. By now others were hastening into the room, including Rear-Admiral Lord Hugh Seymour, and a young gentleman who vainly tried to push the captain’s entrails back into his stomach.
Oughton rushed upstairs to break the news of the incident to Lord Spencer, returning about ten minutes later to the lieutenants’ waiting room. Here the desperately injured Eaton was still alive but was refusing to talk to anyone but his fellow commander. Kneeling by Eaton, Oughton heard the words ‘Captain Oughton, I told you there was treachery’ to which he replied, ‘You did, but you did not say by whom.’ The dying man mumbled the names of two officers from the Marlborough, before becoming unable to speak. Although his other wounds were superficial, the one in the stomach was mortal. Within twenty minutes of stabbing himself, Eaton died.
The day after the suicide an inquest was held at the Duke of Clarence public house in Whitehall. Here the dirk was exhibited – it had an ivory handle, and the blood covered nearly seven inches of the blade, indicating the depth of the wound Eaton had inflicted on himself. Captain Oughton was the primary witness, and he speculated that Eaton’s derangement was most likely down to a lack of sleep, a misunderstanding that his officers were conspiring against him, and apprehension about his meeting with Lord Spencer. The hairdresser, James Sullivan, confirmed Oughton’s evidence that the captain had been demonstrating signs of insanity, as did other witnesses, including a waiter from the coffee house, and a publican who had noticed him pacing up and down outside the Adelphi buildings in an agitated state after getting off the mail coach. Within thirty minutes the inquest came to the verdict that Eaton’s death was due to ‘lunacy’.
Reporting on Eaton’s unfortunate demise, the newspapers sadly revealed that his much-coveted commission as a post-captain was still lying on a desk at the Admiralty, ready to be signed. The command of the Marlborough at Plymouth passed to Captain Joseph Ellison. Shortly afterwards, Commander Eaton was interred in a vault under St. Anne’s Church, Soho, attended by four friends in a mourning coach. He was survived by his widow, Ann, (née Walton) the niece of a Plymouth banker, whom he had married just six months earlier. She was to be widowed again in violent circumstances, since her second husband, Royal Marine Captain Charles William Adair, died gallantly on the Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.