Tho' a rope I deserved, which is justly my due,
I shall actually die in a ditch,
And be damned."

By way of reply, Lord Hobart, then at the Home Office, informed King, that
although the Government had the fullest appreciation of the good service
he had done, yet the unfortunate differences between himself and the
officers would best be ended by relieving him of his [Sidenote: 1805]
command as soon as a successor could be chosen. The successor, in the
person of Bligh, was chosen in July, 1805, and King a few months later
returned to England.

In Hobart's letter to King informing him of the decision to recall him,
the former refers not only to the unfortunate difference "between you and
the military officers," but to the fact that these disputes "have extended
to the commander of H.M.S. _Glatton_." Highly indignant, King replied to
this in the following paragraph of a despatch dated August 14th, 1804:--

"In what relates to the commander of His Majesty's ship _Glatton_,
had I, on his repeated demands, committed myself, by the most
flagrant abuse of the authority delegated to me, by giving him a
free pardon for a female convict for life, who had never landed
from the _Glatton_, to enable her to cohabit with him on his
passage home, I might, in that case, have avoided much of his
insults here and his calumnious invective in England; but after
refusing, as my bounden duty required, to comply to his
unwarrantable demands, which, if granted, must have very justly
drawn on me your lordship's censure and displeasure, with the
merited reproach of those deserving objects to whom that last mark
of His Majesty's mercy is so cautiously extended, from that
period, my lord, the correspondence will evidently show no
artifice or means on his part were unused to insult not only
myself as governor of this colony, but the military and almost
every other officer of the colony."

There is, of course, another side to this. Captain Colnett, of the
_Glatton_, asked for the woman's pardon on the ground that she had
supplied him with information which enabled him to anticipate a mutiny of
the convicts on the passage out. On the return of the _Glatton_ to
England, the _St. James Chronicle_ informs its readers that at a dinner at
Walmer Castle Colnett dined with William Pitt. Perhaps over their wine the
two discussed Governor King, and hence perhaps Hobart's letter o