Robert Mostyn

c1759- 1784.

Mostyn was commissioned lieutenant on 23 September 1778 and was aboard the Crescent 28, Captain Hon. Thomas Pakenham, at the second relief of Gibraltar on 12 April 1781. Shortly afterwards, being in company with the Flora 36, Captain William Williams-Freeman, the two frigates engaged the Dutch frigates Castor 36 and Briel 36, and the Crescent was forced to surrender to the latter before being recaptured by the Flora, which by then had successfully defeated the Castor. On 19 June the three ships fell in with two French frigates which in turn easily captured the disabled Crescent and Castor.

As a reward for what was reported as his gallant conduct whilst serving aboard the Crescent, Mostyn was promoted commander of the fireship Spitfire 8 on 9 March 1782, which vessel was launched later that month at the Nova Scotia Shipyard in Ipswich. By the beginning of April she was at Harwich, and thereafter she was attached to the Channel Fleet at Spithead, with which force she sailed for the third relief of Gibraltar on 18 October.

Mostyn was posted captain on 15 November 1782, having joined the Union 90 in place of the sickly Captain John Dalrymple upon that vessel detaching from the Channel Fleet to sail for the Leeward Islands with Rear-Admiral Sir Richard Hughes squadron. Once in the West Indies, he handed the Union over to Captain Thomas Shirley on 5 January 1783, and on the same day he was appointed to the much-admired French prize Solitaire 64, which had been captured on the previous 6 December by the Ruby 64, Captain John Collins. Over the next few weeks she was refitted at Antigua, and following the end of the American Revolutionary War she sailed for New York to embark part of the British garrison. She eventually she arrived in the Downs on 23 August, having put into Halifax on route after springing a leak, and shortly afterwards she was paid off and laid up in the ordinary at Sheerness.

Taking up patronage at the New Exchange Coffee House in London with an apparently rowdy crowd, Mostyn lost his life in a duel with Captain John Montague Clark from the Africa Independent Regiment at Little Chelsea near London on 13 February 1784, the dispute having arisen through his boorish behaviour at the coffee house. At the time of his death, he was described as being about twenty-five years of age.

Newspapers reporting Mostyn’s death described him as possessing ‘rather impetuous manners’, and that he had been involved in several disputes at Antigua whilst commissioning the Solitaire.