Winchester College Publication Formidable | Page 5

The Prisoners of Formidable
I
mmediately after the battle, Formidable was brought
back to Britain. She served in the Royal Navy before
being broken up in 1768. The crew of Formidable
would have consisted of up to 600 men. Nearly 200
were killed in the battle, and it seems that most of about
250 wounded were allowed to remain in France. The
remainder, perhaps 200 men, were taken prisoner and
kept in Winchester, having landed at Plymouth after
a difficult voyage. Some of the prisoners were quickly
paroled and had returned to France by December 1760.
The remainder were released on the cessation of
hostilities in 1763.
This plan of Formidable was made shortly after her capture by the British in 1759
(National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
Among the prisoners was Jean-François de Galup, comte de
Lapérouse (1741-1788), a young midshipman who later led
the first French voyage of exploration to the Pacific. After
three years mapping the coasts of California, Alaska and
Siberia, Lapérouse and his ships disappeared without trace
in 1788. It took almost forty decades to discover what had
happened to the expedition, whose story inspired a chapter
of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It
was not until 2005 that the wreck of Lapérouse’s ship
La Boussole was conclusively identified in a remote part of
the Solomon Islands.
Dr John Burton (1690-1774)
T
he model of Formidable was given to the College
by John Burton, Headmaster from 1724 until 1766.
He was born near Coventry in 1690 and became a
Scholar of Winchester College at the age of 14. He went
on to study at New College, Oxford and was rector of
several parishes in Hampshire, Gloucestershire and
Oxfordshire. Few documents relating to Burton’s
headmastership survive, but it was clearly a successful
period in the school’s history. He oversaw a large increase
in the number of Commoners, who were fee-paying
students additional to the seventy Scholars. Ten
Commoners lodged in College with Burton, while
the others were newly provided with accommodation
on the site of a medieval convent hospital next to the
school. Burton encouraged his pupils to write poetry and
plays, and several later became significant literary figures.
Among them were the poet laureate William Whitehead
(1715-1785), William Collins (1721-1759) and Joseph
Warton (17222-1800).
The books bequeathed by Burton to the College Library
give an indication of his scholarly interests. Besides many
editions of classical authors there were works on church
history (in particular the monastic orders and ceremonies
of the Roman Catholic Church), numismatics and
Roman archaeology. Burton was also interested in the
fine arts. In 1729 he gave François Lemoyne’s
Annunciation (1727) as an altarpiece for the College
chapel. It remains one of the finest eighteenth-century
French paintings in Britain. Burton must also have been
responsible for commissioning portraits of thirteen of his
pupils. Known as the ‘Gentlemen Commoners’ they were
painted by Isaac Whood (1688/89-1752), and twelve
remain at the College today.
Isaac Whood, Sir Robert Burdett 4th bt. (above); Charles Bennet,
Lord Ossulton (below), both oil on canvas, c. 1731 (Winchester College)
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