Apart from having the use of the Chatham yacht and a longboat with a crew of oarsmen to take him up and down the river, the biggest perk of the job was undoubtedly the house. This was a handsome Queen Anne building with an impressive staircase and entrance hall dominated by a spectacular painted ceiling. From the front of the house the grey waters of the Medway could be glimpsed between the towering hulls of ships under construction. The back of the house looked out onto a charming walled garden with terraces, a kitchen garden and an orchard. It was an ideal house in which to bring up a large family. Proby had married Sarah Pownoll in 1758 when she was a pretty seventeen-year-old and he was a 33-year-old captain. During the space of ten years Sarah and Charles Proby had seven children. When Sarah died after a short illness in 1785 Commissioner Proby was devastated. He asked the Admiralty to grant him six weeks leave of absence because 'The recent loss I have sustained by the death of Mrs Proby has had such an effect upon my mind, as to make it impractical for me to give the necessary attention to the public business at this port.'
Proby's four daughters were aged between nine and sixteen when their mother died. Unlike the boys, who were sent away to boarding school, the girls were educated by private tutors but Proby does not seem to have stinted on this and was determined they should have the best teachers available. He was, however, extremely strict about their attending dances. Their visits to the assembly rooms in Rochester were limited to three visits before Christmas and two after. 'The going more frequently and all times during the season would have been, in my opinion, not only totally unnecessary but also calculated to have introduced them into the mania of Dissipation, so destructive of all Domestic Cares and Duties, Virtue in all its species.'
While Commissioner Proby worried about his daughters' upbringing, events were taking place across the English Channel which would shake the foundations of social order in Europe. The French Revolution began with a few local riots but gathered pace with alarming speed. The winter of 1788-9 had been unusually hard: the Seine and many other French rivers had frozen, trade had been disrupted, and cattle and sheep had died in large numbers. The price of bread and meat rose sharply and led to violent protests in a number of towns and villages. The sharp difference between the wealth of the aristocracy and the abject poverty of the working classes fuelled the mood of unrest. But it was the imposition of new taxes which started the chain reaction leading to the summer of revolution. The French intervention in the American Revolutionary war had been successful in political terms but extremely costly in financial terms and it became necessary to impose additional taxes to replenish the depleted French Treasury. In May 1789 the Estates General was summoned for the first time for 150 years in order to obtain nationwide support for the taxes. The bourgeois Third Estate used the opportunity to establish a National Assembly that was more representative of the people. This move towards a more democratic government seemed admirable to many observers in Britain until violence on an unprecedented scale broke out in Paris.
On the morning of Monday 14 July 1789 the soldiers encamped on the Champ de Mars were persuaded to join a large group of Parisians who were intent on protest. Together they marched on the Hôtel des Invalides, seized the guns and ammunition and then stormed the Bastille and released all the political prisoners. The governor of the Bastille and the commandant of the garrison were led through the streets to the place of public executions where they were beheaded. Their heads were stuck on tent-poles and paraded in triumph to the Palais Royal. The mob then attacked the Hôtel de Ville, stabbed and beheaded the mayor of Paris, and hanged the lieutenant of police from a lamp post. During the next few days the revolution spread across the city and into the countryside. Several prominent noblemen were imprisoned and their houses looted. Government grain stores were plundered, and the roads became unsafe because travellers were attacked by thieves and deserters who had been freed from the public prisons.
English observers were divided in their opinions on the gathering revolution. Charles James Fox, a former Foreign Secretary, and an outspoken champion of liberal causes, considered the storming of the Bastille to be the greatest and best event in the history of the world. Edmund Burke, a politician noted for his oratory and his uncompromising views, warned of the terrible consequences. Speaking in the House of Commons, he said that the French people 'had erected a bloody democracy in the room of order, tranquillity and peace', and in 1790 he published his Reflections on the French Revolution, an eloquent treatise in which he argued that the events in Paris would lead to war, tyranny and the destruction of human rights. For many months his was a minority opinion. The immediate reaction of many British people was actually one of relief because they believed that the turmoil in France must reduce the ever-present threat which France posed to Britain. In 1790 France had a population of more than 25 million and the largest army in Christendom, while Britain had a population of barely 8 million and a relatively small army. Only the English Channel separated the two old enemies and on a fine day the cliffs of Dover were clearly visible from Calais.
The navy was Britain's only effective defence against invasion and this largely determined British naval strategy in the eighteenth century. It was to guard against invasion that the bulk of Britain's fleet was kept in home waters, and the Channel Squadron was established to patrol the western approaches of the English Channel. Neither France nor Spain had a naval base in the Channel. The principal French naval ports were at Brest, Rochefort and Toulon, and the Spanish fleet was divided between the bases at Cadiz, Ferrol and Cartagena. So even if an invasion force was assembled in the Netherlands, or in one of the French ports in Normandy, the fleet of warships to protect the crossing must sail up the Channel from the west, just as the Spanish Armada had done in 1588. Since most of Britain's trade also came up the Channel, the patrolling warships of the Channel Squadron could also protect the incoming and outgoing convoys of merchant ships.
In peacetime most of the fleet was kept in reserve in anchorages at Plymouth, Portsmouth and the Medway, ready to be mobilised if the need should arise. In 1790 a minor incident on the other side of the world led to just such a mobilisation. This meant that when the French Revolution spawned the war which Edmund Burke had foretold, Britain was in an unusual state of readiness. The minor incident was the Nootka Sound crisis. It scarcely appears in the history books but it was directly responsible for the Bellerophon being fitted out and sent to sea. In 1788 the British East India Company had established a trading post in Nootka Sound, a sheltered anchorage on the western coast of Vancouver Island. Captain Cook had charted this stretch of the Canadian coast ten years years before during the third of his great voyages of exploration and had repaired his ships in Nootka Sound, making use of the pine trees along the shore for much-needed masts and spars. When Spain got news of the British trading settlement she invoked the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas under which the Spanish Crown laid claim to the entire Pacific coast of the American continent. She backed this up by sending two warships from Mexico. They seized the crews of the three British merchant ships anchored in the Sound and sent the men to Mexico as prisoners in irons.