Byng is not actually a “source”, just the one who has been killed: “He was sentenced to death and, after pleas for clemency were denied, was shot dead by a fir

Byng is not actually a “source”, just the one who has been killed: “He was sentenced to death and, after pleas for clemency were denied, was shot dead by a firing squad on 14 March 1757.” That’s what apparently got Voltaire to write “in this country it is good to kill an Admiral from time to time to encourage the others.” As the article shows, this was known to Lord William Pitt Lennox in 1863, who referred to that while describing another even in his memoir: "Later in the day he had to . . . run messages, and do his little marketings . . . with the risk, if caught out of bounds, of having a flogging, to encourage the others, as a Frenchman said of the execution of Admiral Byng."