The Great Mutiny

THE time is 1797. The armies of the French Revolution have swept over Europe, leaving Britain’s eight million people to stand alone against populations totaling more than fifty million. On the Continent an enormous invasion force is massing; while in England the country is nearly bankrupt and popular discontent is so widespread that the monarchy itself is in danger and the possibility of a British Republic looms.

At the height of the crisis, the British fleet mutinies in protest against poor pay, impossible living conditions, short and inedible rations, brutality and impressment, leaving England completely vulnerable to her enemies. Over 50,000 men serving in 113 ships refuse orders, expel their officers and set up ship democracy in the longest and largest naval insurrection in history. Their revolt becomes both a symptom and a cause of the internal dissension that wracks their country and in THE GREAT MUTINY, provides the focus for a panoramic view of Georgian England.

Here are the great names of the time: mad George III, gobbling his breakfast oatmeal and embarking on a twenty-mile stag chase while half his fleet was lowering the royal standard: his Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger; the opposition leader in Parliament, Charles James Fox; Captain William Bligh of Bounty fame; the young Bonaparte; and Winston Churchill’s great-great-grandfather, the Second Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty.