Lord St. Vincent and the Mutiny on the Marlborough – May 1798
Upon receiving a mutinous addition to his Mediterranean Fleet in May 1798, Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent immediately enforced his iron discipline on the disaffected crew of the Marlborough 74.
During the Spithead Mutiny in the spring of 1797, the Marlborough 74 had been one of the most rebellious vessels, not least due to the unhappiness of the men with their captain, the brutal Henry Nicholls. That officer had been one of those obliged to resign his command as a condition of the men’s return to duty, and in his stead the commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet, Admiral Lord Bridport, had installed 30-year-old Commander John Eaton as the Marlborough’s acting captain. Shortly afterwards, the ship had unexpectedly left the Channel Fleet to enter Plymouth, causing Eaton to rush up to London where the deranged and exhausted man took his own life in the Admiralty building, claiming that there was ‘treachery and villainy’ afoot aboard the Marlborough.
The Marlborough’s next commanding officer, the 44-year-old one-armed Captain Joseph Ellison, was nevertheless well received, and he soon gained the confidence of the crew to such an extent that when he allowed sixty men permission to go ashore on leave, not a single one overstayed his time away from the ship. Yet there were still a number of disaffected Irishmen aboard, and Ireland was just days away from a bloody uprising against British rule. Thus, when the Admiralty despatched a detachment of the Channel Fleet under Rear-Admiral Sir Roger Curtis to reinforce the Mediterranean fleet under the rigid disciplinarian Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent, the unhappy Marlborough was deliberately included.
The Admiralty’s concerns about the Marlborough were well-founded, for not only were there signs of disaffection whilst the ship was waiting to sail from Berehaven Bay in Ireland, but a more serious incident was planned when she was in passage to the Mediterranean Fleet. Overhearing plans to murder the officers and carry the ship into Brest, a loyal seaman managed to scramble through Captain’s Ellison’s quarter-galley window at midnight and warn him in his cot. The alarm was given and upon being confronted, some fifty mutineers who had gathered on the poop quickly fled below decks. Ellison and his officers stayed on deck to control the situation until morning; later that day the two ringleaders of the planned mutiny were identified and placed in irons to be court-martialled upon the Marlborough’s arrival in the Mediterranean fleet.
Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent had acted with his customary speed and firmness when the first signs of mutiny had appeared in his ships during the previous summer, so he was just the man to bring the Marlborough to order. There was little doubt that he knew what was expected of him. ‘What do they mean by invariably sending me the mutinous ships?’ he declared. ‘Do they think I will be hangman to the fleet’. In fact, the men of the Marlborough had already seen the consequences of mutiny, for in the previous December two men from another ship, who had been found guilty of mutiny, had been sent aboard, and hanged from the fore yardarm.
The Marlborough reached the fleet on 24 May; on being informed of the events aboard, St. Vincent instructed her to anchor between two columns of ships with their guns run out. The mutineers were court-martialled immediately, and having been found guilty of planning to seize the ship one of the men was condemned to death. As the commander-in-chief on a foreign station, St. Vincent did not have to refer the warrant of execution to the Admiralty to be confirmed – he briskly ordered the execution to take place at 8 o’clock the following morning. As was the admiral’s invariable order (but contrary to normal naval custom), the guilty man’s own shipmates were to carry out the task of hanging him.
An anxious Captain Ellison soon hurried aboard the Ville de Paris to advise St. Vincent that he did not believe his men would execute one of their own messmates. His discomfort in doing so was increased by being forced to address the admiral in front of the whole of the flagship’s company, whilst St. Vincent (holding his hat above his head as was his custom when addressing anyone) listened without word. After hearing the captain out, St. Vincent (who had previously unkindly labelled Ellison a ‘driveller’), stated that as an old officer of long service who had lost his arm in action, he had had no wish to see Ellison’s advanced years taken advantage of, but that if he were unable to carry out his duty as commander of the Marlborough, then he would be replaced by an officer who could. The chastised Ellison was ordered to repair to the Marlborough, seal all her gunports, and make preparations for the next morning’s execution.
The admiral ordered Captain Robert Campbell of the Blenheim 90 to organize two boats from every ship of the fleet, each to be commanded by a lieutenant and to carry marines and a small cannon, to encircle the ‘mutinous’ ship. The next morning, the Marlborough’s men opened their ports to find themselves staring down the barrels of a battery of carronades. The sight left them in no doubt that if the sentence on the mutineer was not carried out, they would be fired upon at point blank range.
After being ferried from the flagship (where he had been held) to the Marlborough, the prisoner was brought up on deck at 8 a.m. amid great tension. After the briefest of reprieves when the men accidentally let the yard-rope slip, he was quickly run up to the yardarm. His body was left to dangle there for an hour before it was cut down, sewn up in his hammock with a shot at the feet, and thrown overboard from a boat that had rowed a half mile away. Only then did Captain Campbell withdraw the launches.
Aboard the flagship the Earl of St. Vincent snapped ‘discipline is preserved’ and marched below.