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 of recall.

During King’s period of office there were, besides the Irish rebels, many prisoners whose names are famous, or infamous, in story.  Pickpocket George Barrington, who came out in Governor Phillip’s time, once the Beau Brummel of his branch of rascality, had settled down into a respectable settler, and was in King’s government, superintendent of convicts, at L50 a year wages.  Sir Henry Browne Hayes, at one time sheriff of Cork city, was sent out for life in King’s time for abducting a rich Quaker girl; he was pardoned, and returned to England in 1812, leaving behind him a fine residence which he had built for himself, and which [Sidenote:  1808] is still one of the beauty spots at the entrance of Sydney harbour.