Episode 7 - To Encourage the Others...

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Britain thought it could glide through 1756 on sea power and habit. Minorca proved otherwise. We follow the doomed relief of Fort St. Philip from the Admiralty’s hedged orders to John Byng’s compromised squadron, then into a battle where geometry, hesitation, and a ten‑minute delay cost Britain the initiative. The French didn’t need a glorious victory; they needed a functioning plan. They had one. The result was a tactical draw that became a strategic collapse—and a fortress left to face arithmetic alone.

Inside those walls, William Blakeney managed a shrinking perimeter as French engineers advanced with quiet precision. Beyond the guns, the louder story unfolded in London. The Articles of War demanded death for failure to do one’s utmost, and Byng’s court—officers who knew the truth of his situation—convicted and begged for mercy in the same breath. None came. Voltaire’s bitter line about killing an admiral to encourage the others lands here not as satire but diagnosis: punishment stood in for reform, spectacle for accountability.

We dig into the system that made this outcome feel inevitable under the Duke of Newcastle: delayed decisions, ambiguous orders, and a Navy drilled to preserve formation at the expense of initiative. Then we track how William Pitt the Elder seized the narrative, arguing for coordinated, global action and the courage to spend for victory rather than manage decline. Minorca’s fall becomes more than a lost base; it’s the moment Britain learns that procedure is not strategy and that naval supremacy must be earned, not assumed. As the war’s tempo shifts to North America and Montcalm gathers momentum, the cost of hesitation becomes brutally clear.

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