In March, Lord Harrington told Deane that the king had given him permission to investigate Gould and the ecclesiastics.
The postmaster complained about Deane. He took issue with Deane’s ‘power to dispatch extraordinary packets’, and his practice of receiving his letters ‘directly from the vessels on arrival’ – a practice that the postmaster found ‘new and unprecedented’. In turn, Deane elevated the postmaster to an exalted place alongside Christopher Langman and Thomas Saunders as one of the most hated enemies and chief persecutors of his entire existence. Deane’s verdict on his neighbour was that he had, ‘born more ill treatment from this man, within these five months past than ever I bore from any private man in my life’.
Harrington and the king backed the postmaster. John Deane was ordered to send his mail through the proper channels and stop the ‘dispatching of extraordinary packet boats’. Harrington ordered Deane to let the ‘post master at Ostend have timely notice of your intentions’. Deane felt betrayed. He agreed to Harrington’s first point but virtually refused to obey the second. He insisted that, ‘I must, for very good reason, desire to be excused putting any letters of importance into this post office’. He launched into a rant in ink that dripped with self pity and hovered on the edge of instability. ‘This evil strikes at my reputation,’ Deane wrote. Deane’s enemies were not just his enemies but ‘the enemies of our country and religion, raging and laying schemes for my destruction’. He ended the letter by offering to fall on his sword if he had proved to be an unfaithful servant. And should Harrington accept his resignation there was, in Deane, the sweet prospect of release from his present sufferings: ‘And as I, by this malicious representation must be rendered odious to my sovereign in whose cause I have long been a great sufferer, and am still daily […] I shall be happy to be relieved from Irish confederates and English smugglers.’
Harrington ignored Deane’s offer to resign. There was very little censure or anger in Harrington’s reply. He gently reiterated his instructions to Deane to obey him in matters regarding the postal service.
In March, John Deane was advised to act in defence of the English postal service when a packet boat was boarded by soldiers serving the Austrian emperor. The incursion was carried out on the pretext of looking for arms. The port master went straight to the Governor of Ostend and complained. The Marquis De Campo was no longer governor. Deane had little confidence in his replacement, dismissing him as a near imbecile. ‘Nothing can be said to the present governor that one would not say to a child,’ Deane wrote. The governor laughed at the port master. Deane was personally incensed at the search. It was a direct challenge to his own authority as only he was authorised to board British packet boats and search them. Harrington agreed and supported Deane in his complaint.
In April, the governor fell ill and looked as if he might die. John Deane was apprehensive. He feared that the space left by the idiot governor would be occupied by a shrewd and ruthless Irishman joined at the hip to the hated local magistrates.
There were further abuses of English vessels. John Deane was an eyewitness to an incident in which a customs house officer tried to seize an English captain’s expensive hat. The captain slashed his hat with a knife rather than let the customs officer take it. Deane reported the incident to Harrington.
Deane would always act in favour of the English postal service when interfered with by a foreign power. But he still hated and mistrusted them and would seldom pass up an opportunity to belittle them to Harrington. Robert Daniels gave Deane a letter for safe keeping, prompting Deane to comment to Harrington on the irony of being entrusted with a letter when he was obstructed from ‘corresponding with safety’. Deane made reference to seamen actually being searched for letters he might have passed on to them. Deane corresponded with Harrington via the wife of a shipmaster in Dover, completely circumventing the Ostend postal service in direct defiance of Harrington’s wishes. Deane even admitted it to Harrington, his rationale being, ‘were it not for this it would be impossible to send it’. If Harrington was displeased then so be it. ‘Let the consequences be what it would,’ Deane wrote.
The Irishman that John Deane feared would take the post of governor was Commandant Call O’Connor. The actual governor was still alive but by August, Call O’Connor was acting as the de facto governor in his stead. Deane disliked O’Connor for all the obvious reasons. He was a Catholic. He was a Jacobite. He was a drunk. But Deane particularly disliked O’Connor for an unnecessarily brutal streak he possessed. A point of dispute between the two men exposed a softer side to John Deane than the one that was normally on display during his time in Ostend. Deane had interceded in the case of two young men who had been arrested and sentenced to death. Deane did not believe that what they had done merited the gallows. He talked to O’Connor and was left with the impression that he had convinced the commandant to spare their lives. O’Connor hanged them both.
Later that month, John Deane tried to send mail on the packet boat at the last minute, just before the packet boat sailed. The master of the boat refused to accept Deane’s mail, even when shown written orders. Deane gave the mail to an associate named Mr Hall for a second attempt to get the letters aboard with instructions to proceed to Calais if refused. Mr Hall was allowed to conduct his business with the postal service.
In May, John Deane suffered further mail delays and excessive postage charges, the blame of which he laid at the feet of the postmaster.
In September, Britain was held up to public ridicule in the streets of Ostend. The king had fallen out with the prince of Wales and had banished the prince and his family from St James’s Palace. The nature of the fallout was salacious ammunition to the enemies of the crown in Ostend. A manuscript arrived from England containing all the details of the humiliating rift in the royal family. Deane reported that the manuscript was read out ‘publically upon the market places between the hours of eleven and twelve o’clock […] to an audience of Irish and other enemies of our nation and government’. The crowd reacted with ‘the greatest satisfaction’. The man who took it upon himself to read the document aloud was the postmaster of Ostend.
In April 1738 the liberties taken with British packet boats by foreign soldiers reached crisis point in an episode that threatened to become an international incident.
According to the British, one afternoon in Ostend, between three and four o’clock, the English packet boat was boarded by a stranger. The crew of the packet boat did not know the man. He was Irish. The crew took him to be a sailor. The packet boat was approached by French soldiers. The soldiers boarded the vessel brandishing ‘muskets, bayonets and swords’, and took hold of the stranger. At some point John Deane was sent for. An officer of the packet boat ordered His Majesty’s colours to be hoisted. As the stranger was being dragged away, an attempt was made to interfere with the arrest by John Howell, a member of the crew. He was thrust away with the butts of the French soldiers’ muskets. In the middle of the confusion Deane had arrived and confronted De Graff, the soldier in command, on the waterfront.
‘You are overstretching your powers greatly,’ Deane said.
De Graff said nothing in response. Instead, according to Deane, De Graff made ‘a flourish of his sword’.