References
- According to later information the fate of this ship is doubtful
- Should therefore be omitted from the number of ships in the fleet which went into action
- I By ‘enemy ships’ French and Spanish are meant
- Political Magazine 219 Eight of their fellow mutineers were acquitted ‘on which they immediately entered the King's service’. (Vol. III, p.) This procedure was usual, as stressed by Mrs Anderson
- Political Magazine 215 But was it normally as humane as Mrs Anderson implies? I see no reason to doubt the circumstantial account in the usually reliable of the hanging on 4 December 1781 at Execution Dock of William Payne, James Sweetman and Matthew Knight. Their bodies were, as was customary, ordered to be hung in chains and that of Payne, a Norfolk man, who had skippered a small French privateer, the Cerf Volant, was applied for by the mayor, corporation and merchants of Yarmouth and hung on Yarmouth beach. Sweetman and Knight, who had been respectively lieutenant and pilot in the French privateer Comte de Guichen, were from Rush like Ryan and witnesses brought from Ireland for Ryan's first trial were used against them. (See Political Magazine, Vol. in, pp.—17, and P.R.O. H.C.A. 1/23.) I have the perhaps mistaken impression that after Yorktown sentences became more severe and were more often carried out
- Letters of George III It is plain from the King's letter to Lord Shelburne who presided over the Cabinet Meeting in question (see Fortescue, Vol. VI, No. 3741) that he gave his consent to the reprieves with extreme reluctance. Had Lord North still been in office and Sandwich instead of Keppel First Lord it is unlikely that reprieves would have been asked for