When Monday morning came to the House of Lords, many members of the house rose to give their memories of Viscount Lipton. He had made many friends among the Lords and was fond enough of games and drink and conversation that he had proven to be a witty conversation partner to those who had not known him very well or had not ever spent that much time listening to the same stories over and over again or been subject to his intensely critical and intensely hypocritical judgments. These people stood and shared their memories to the general praise of the rest of the house. Vice Admiral Maxwell was not particularly pleased all of this praise. He sat beside his stone-faced barrister, and fumed that these praises for the deceased Viscount Lipton would leave the House of Lords to be in the mind to be equally favorable to the younger and yet unknown Viscount who was imprisoned thanks to him. While this was not a course who could confine him to prison, the loss of his titles and extensive fines to pay to the estate of Mr. Woods would be less than ideal.

After a morning full of lords giving praise to Viscount Lipton, it was time to adjourn for lunch. Vice Admiral Maxwell went to his naval club and found that other officers were not inclined to want to eat with him or talk to him. He had hoped that his fellow naval officers would be inclined to be more favorable to him than lords who were defending one whom they viewed, incredibly, as one of their own. Yet the officers were familiar that Vice Admiral Maxwell was under an intense cloud of scrutiny. Some of the admirals of the fleet had even engaged in a bit of a betting pool among themselves as to what the verdict of his court martial would be and when he would depart the world of the living via capital punishment on account of his cowardice. Even the most sanguine among them did not view his odds of survival at better than even odds. Given such odds, and the fact that everyone knew him to be a disagreeable man as well as a man lacking in the full courage that was expected of admirals, no one wanted to socialize with them if they could possibly avoid it, and they could avoid it.

When the lords returned to the House, it was time for Viscount Montgomery to continue his discussion with Vice Admiral Maxwell. “Do you have any defense for the infamous conduct by which you put Mr. Robert Woods, now Viscount Lipton, in irons?”

“I can only plead ignorance of who he was. Surely I would have regarded him better had I known his status,” the admiral admitted.

“Why was his not being an Englishman not enough?” Montgomery asked. There was no answer to this.

“Do you offer no defense then?” Montgomery asked.

“I have no defense that you would accept, it would seem,” Maxwell conceded.

“Very well then,” Montgomery replied. “This court moves to strip Vice Admiral Maxwell of his title of Baronet and to fine him 10,000 pounds for the unlawful imprisonment of a peer of the realm and subjecting him to further imprisonment by the Spaniards.” There was a hum in the House. “Does anyone second?”

“I second,” several voices could be heard.

“How does the court vote?” Montgomery asked. The votes were counted and it soon became obvious that the ayes would carry. “This court’s verdict has been decided.”

Vice Admiral Maxwell got up sourly and spoke to his barrister. “Why didn’t you speak up?”

“You didn’t call any witnesses on your behalf,” the barrister said.

“There were no witnesses who could speak on my behalf,” Maxwell stated.

“What point would there be in trying to cross swords with the House of Lords when they were already upset with you?” the barrister asked.

“I want a vigorous defense in my court of inquiry,” Maxwell said.

“We will have to deal with that soon enough,” the barrister conceded.

“In the meantime, how am I supposed to pay ten thousand pounds to the estate of a man in prison?” Maxwell asked.

“There are different options, but it would largely depend on how your court martial goes,” the barrister replies. “Either way, there is not going to be any difficulty in paying to the Lipton estate. They have well-established accounts with the Bank of England, and a large estate. You certainly have enough property to pay it, but much depends on how well you fare, and how long your life is expected to be, as if you have to live on the four percents you are going to have to keep your life very plain.”

“I don’t want to be reminded,” Maxwell said. “You would think that I would be able to work on half pay at the very least.”

“Given what you are being charged for, I do not think that you can rely on half-salary, and I would hope that you would be able to invest in the four percents,” the barrister said. “Let us not talk about the worst case scenario.”

They did not speak of the worst case scenario that day. As it happened, Baronet Maxwell had an estate that was worth about a hundred thousand pounds that he had inherited and that he had increased as a result of his own investments. Given his legal struggles, other people sought to obtain parts of his estate on the cheap, seeking to profit from his distress, but he remained resistant to their attempts to cheat him out of his estate. As discreet as he sought to be, it was impossible to keep everyone unaware that he was in considerable trouble. His debt problems were immense, and as someone who had never been a gamester, he thought it was shocking that he should owe a year’s salary for the simple act of putting an ordinary-seeming Englishman in chains. Some mistakes were certainly expensive.

Given the fact that his salary was suspended as a result of his legal troubles, he had to live off of his savings for a bit of time, and he sought to live pretty cheaply. He was hoping that there would be people willing to pay for his bills, but his fellow officers continued to avoid him, and no one from the House of Lords wanted anything to do with him. It got so bad that he was turned away from some of the clubs because he was known and also known to be under a cloud of hostility and scrutiny. He was considered to be almost a persona non grata, receiving no invitations to eat at anyone’s house, or to dance or party anywhere, or anything else. How one could be an admiral in London but not even have any opposition figures desire one’s company because one was viewed as being such a figure of infamy was something that Vice Admiral Maxwell could not fathom or understand.

Before too long it was time for his court of inquiry, which had been held off to make sure that the House of Lords got to have their say, to continue their inquiry of his behavior. The court of inquiry read over the articles of surrender, noted that there had been no attempt to defend the fortress, and were particularly intrigued by the fact that someone else, the noted Mr. Robert Woods, had urged at least a token defense to preserve the honor of the British forces in the Bahamas, which they had agreed would have substantially answered their concerns. The barrister earned his keep here by questioning witnesses and preparing his own client to answer the court’s questions, ensuring that even if the Vice Admiral was a cussed sort of person, he was at least not as rude as he could have been, and was at least putting the right foot forward when it came to talking to the admirals on the board.

At noon and evening every day during the court of inquiry the naval club in Portsmouth–keeping its London branch informed as well–had the live odds on various punishments. It was considered to be certain, at least by everyone else other than Vice Admiral Maxwell himself, that even his mere imprisonment of Robert Woods, to say nothing of his surrender without having made any effort to defend Nassau, would be considered to be conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman. This would be sufficient to lead him to be cashiered from the service and to lose his half-pay pension. The only question that any of the gambling officers had was what punishments in addition to this would be undertaken. Some people thought that there would be some time in some jail, and many people thought that he would be hung to death off of the yardarm of some ship.

Whatever the barrister thought about his client’s fate, he kept tight-lipped and made sure that he was paid promptly, and well. It was not easy to defend a man as foolish as the Vice Admiral, or as prone to insult his help, but the pay was enough for the barrister to swallow his pride for the moment and make sure that his forbearance was well compensated. Before too long, the court of inquiry communicated that it was time to make a decision, and when they made their decision they started from the lowest punishments and went up. Conduct unbecoming of an officer and gentleman with a dishonorable discharge and the forfeiture of any half-pay was mentioned first. This was to be expected, though the Vice Admiral looked sour at this, as if he had expected to be treated more generously than this. He was also given one day in jail for every day that Robert Woods ended up in prison. This was a bit of a surprise, and certainly an unpleasant one, for the Vice Admiral. It was then that the court paused before stating that when the prison term was ended to match the time that Mr. Woods ended up spending in prison, that the admiral would be subject to hanging for cowardice, and that once the Admiral’s debts were cleared, the rest of his estate would be forfeit to the crown for his dereliction of duty in failing to defend the crown colony of the Bahamas.

The verdict struck Vice Admiral Maxwell dumb. He had, up to this moment, maintained hope that he would be able to walk free from this trial. He thought at worst that he might be cashiered from the service and then would have to live a simple and austere sort of life. He did not imagine that the court of inquiry would put him in prison to an equal term that he had inflicted upon a mere nobody, and certainly he did not think that he was worthy of the death penalty or for his estate to be seized. Around this time the navy received word, indirectly, that Robert Woods had freedom of the fortress but was still under house arrest. The court decided to make sure that this time was considered to be imprisonment as well. The gamblers were themselves far more amused than most at the verdict, although as is often the case when gambling is involved, there was a high degree of conflict about who was to be counted the winner. No one had guessed the exact sentence or the exact length of time of the trial, and so there was a question as to who would get the prize for getting closest. Eventually, the gamblers, as a sign of honor, could not distinguish between the closest bets, and so the people who organized the bets simply returned everyone’s money to them and everyone was more less content.

Vice Admiral Maxwell was miserable at this, but no one particularly cared. It did not even matter that the crown was able to receive back the Bahamas as a result of the Treaty of Paris that was being negotiated while the trials were going on. Despite fighting by itself, aside from Hessian mercenaries, against the American rebels, French, Spaniards, and Dutch, the British had largely managed to hold their own. They lost Tobago, Minorca, and East and West Florida, along with the American colonies. Everything else they managed to hold on to, and they had managed to supplant Amsterdam as the leading economic center in the world because of the Dutch losses in places like St. Eustasius as well as their civil conflict between the statists and the Orangeists. Yet they had only maintained their hold over most of their empire because of the incredible intrepidity of their soldiers and sailors. By being willing to fight in unequal contests and trust to providence to provide something that would overcome what they lacked in numbers. Since Sir John Maxwell was not cut from that cloth, he would be removed from his positions of authority and his life would be taken from him. In the meantime, he would be in irons in prison thinking about the folly of having chained a man without bothering to figure out who he was. No one but the Admiral was surprised that no one came to visit him to make the experience of imprisonment less lonesome.