The Nine Years War and Beyond
THE EARL OF TORRINGTON’S downfall led to the domination of naval affairs by his bitter rival, the abrasive and often exceptionally drunken Edward Russell, whose claims to fame include responsibility for what has been described as ‘the largest cocktail in history’.1 Three admirals were commissioned jointly to command the fleet for the remainder of the 1690 campaign, but Russell was then given the sole command for 1691, though he was unable to bring the French fleet to battle and had to devote most of his attention to Ireland. But this was the third full-scale naval campaign in successive years, meaning that King William’s French war was already longer than any of the three Anglo-Dutch wars that had preceded it. The navy had to adapt to ongoing conflict against a different enemy in the longest war that it had fought for a century.
NEW CONSTRUCTION
Priority was given to remedying the perceived deficiency in smaller warships which could undertake cruising duties. During the course of the war, twenty-nine new Fourth Rates were built, along with thirty-one Fifths and nineteen Sixths. The utility of the Third Rate remained apparent, with twenty being built during the war; but sixteen of these were comparative monsters mounting eighty guns, which would have been classed unquestioningly as Second Rates only a few years earlier, and although relatively cheap and economical to run, they were criticised for being overgunned and poor sailers.2 The number of First and Second rates surviving from earlier reigns, and the unwillingness of the French to send their battlefleet to sea after 1692, led to a virtual moratorium on construction of the biggest ships. No entirely new First Rates were built, although the Prince was rebuilt as the Royal William, the Royal Charles as the Queen and the Royal James as the Victory. Four new Second Rates were built towards the end of the war, the most famous of these being the Association, Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship in 1707 when he, the ship and 2,000 men of his fleet perished on the Isles of Scilly after a disastrous navigational error.3 Pressure on the building slips of the royal dockyards led to many of the new warships being built under contract in private yards, and as in the 1650s the net had to be cast wider than the usual shipbuilders on the Thames. Consequently, ships were built as far afield as Southampton, Ipswich, Shoreham, Redbridge, Cowes, Bursledon and, in two cases, New England (the Falkland and Bedford Galley, both apparently built speculatively).4
OFFICERS AND MEN
William and Mary largely retained the officer corps created by Charles and James. Only a sixth of the commissioned officers in service at the end of 1688 were removed because of suspected Jacobite sympathies, and many of those who remained had risen under the patronage of Russell and above all of Torrington. The rapid expansion of the navy to meet the demands of war, and a desire to disassociate the new regime from the policies of its predecessor, led to greater favour being shown towards tarpaulins. One officer, who had been granted his first commission by Richard Cromwell, was recalled to the service after almost thirty years, and a command was offered to Nehemiah Bourne, aged nearly eighty, who had been a commissioner of the navy almost forty years earlier, despite having originally emigrated to Massachusetts as long ago as 1638.5 John Benbow, who had drifted into the merchant service in the 1680s after a brief spell in the navy, was given his first lieutenant’s and then captain’s commissions within the space of three months in 1689. He died heroically in battle in the West Indies in 1703, thereby becoming perhaps the most iconic figure in naval ‘popular culture’ between Drake and Nelson (as demonstrated by the number of public houses named after him, including the fictitious hostelry in Treasure Island).6
King William III. A professional soldier, William was less knowledgeable of, and certainly much less interested in, naval matters than either of his immediate predecessors.
The manpower requirements of the French war were far greater than those that existed in the Dutch wars. A total of 31,971 men served in 1690; that increased to 40,274 by 1692, and then to 48,514 by 1695.7 These demands reflected both the increased size of the navy, with its increasingly global commitments, and the attrition rate during an unprecedentedly long war. They triggered an important pamphlet war, in which the inadequacies (and legality) of pressing were discussed, and ways of improving the recruitment system were put forward. Some suggested fairly conservative schemes, such as using customs officers in the various ports as pressmasters, or that watermen and Newcastle colliers should employ and train additional men for naval service.8 Eventually, an Act of 1696 led to the creation of a national register of seamen, modelled on the French Inscription Maritime, but this collapsed ignominiously because the various financial and other incentives essential to its working were either never put properly in place, or else were badly mismanaged.9 The debate over improving the recruitment process continued through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth.10 Indeed, in a theoretical sense it continued into the twenty-first, where in July 2007 the newly created Ministry of Justice put forward a proposal finally to abolish the crown’s prerogative right to impress men into the navy.11
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PLYMOUTH DOCKYARD
The outbreak of war with France meant that in effect, all of the dockyards were in the wrong place. The only one that faced the new enemy, Portsmouth, was too far to the east to be much use as a base from which to contain the main French fleet, based at Brest. The need to send the ships which required repair after Bantry Bay all the way back to Portsmouth demonstrated the urgency of the problem, and within three months a plan was in place to survey all the harbours from Dartmouth to Falmouth as potential locations for a new yard. Edmund Dummer, assistant surveyor of the navy, was sent west in September 1689 and reported in favour of Plymouth. On 30 December 1690 a contract was signed for the construction of a stone dry dock capable of taking Third Rates. The stone dock would be the first in an English dockyard, and was based on the recent French examples at Rochefort.12 A site was chosen on the Hamoaze, three miles from Plymouth and the existing naval facilities on the Cattewater; despite the comparatively difficult navigation to and from the open sea, the site was spacious, and by 1694 the comparatively limited initial project had expanded into a full-scale new yard capable of taking First Rates.13 Dummer added a wet basin at the entrance to the dry dock, another innovation for an English dockyard, and in 1692 work began on a series of impressive buildings which included a large storehouse, a 1,056 feet long ropery, the usual boat- and mast-houses and an impressive 400-foot-long terrace of officers’ residences.14 The establishment of the dockyard went hand in hand with the increasing use of a number of harbours of refuge, which the fleet monitoring Brest could enter and leave rapidly without negotiating the awkward Hamoaze channel. Plymouth Sound itself could be used in summer, but it was a treacherous anchorage in bad weather, and from August 1689 onwards the fleet usually relied on Torbay, although this was dangerously exposed in easterly winds.15
Ludolf Bakhuizen’s painting of the battle of Barfleur depicts Tourville’s flagship Soleil Royal closely engaged with Edward Russell’s flagship Britannia, on her starboard side. Bakhuizen ignores the presence of fog and wrongly suggests that the visibility was good. The Soleil Royal is also being pursued by Dutch warships, including the Castel Medenblick, flagship of Vice-Admiral Gerald Callenburgh, which is firing her chase guns.
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)
The surviving portion of the terrace of officers’ houses built at Plymouth in the 1690s (and largely devastated in an air raid in 1941).
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)
THE BATTLES OF BARFLEUR AND LA HOGUE
In the summer of 1692 Louis XIV decided to launch an invasion to restore King James to the throne. A Franco-Irish army was assembled in Normandy, and it was hoped to land in Dorset before the Dutch contingent made its customary late arrival to join the British fleet. Tourville was ordered directly by the king to engage the enemy if the opportunity arose, even if they had superior numbers.16 In fact, Russell hastened to sea and rendezvoused with the Dutch in the Downs on 7 May before proceeding down the Channel. Meanwhile, Tourville had also put to sea, and on 17 May he appeared off Portland, sending invasion hysteria in England to new heights.17 Jacobite fifth columnists were suspected everywhere, and Tourville had been led to believe that many British captains were among them and would defect to his side during the battle. (There were even persistent doubts about the loyalty of Russell himself.18) At dawn on 19 May the two fleets sighted each other about 21 miles north of Cap Barfleur on the Cotentin peninsula. The French line of battle consisted of forty-four ships, of which eleven carried more than eighty guns; facing them was an allied fleet of eighty-two, twenty-four of which had more than eighty.19 The French were outgunned by rather more than five to three, and that takes no account of the fact that on average the French generally carried lighter guns than the British.20 Despite the huge disparity in the odds, and the realisation that the optimum moment for an invasion had already passed, Tourville and his captains may have felt themselves bound by their king’s explicit order, which actually covered only the moment of landing the invasion army. More prosaically, Tourville simply may not have realised the odds against him, as the morning was foggy and he would not have been able to see the entire allied fleet.21 In any event, the French cleared for action and formed their line of battle.22
It took some time to form the vast allied fleet into a line, and Tourville attempted to exploit this by attacking the enemy’s centre, while the leading division of his van moved ahead and successfully prevented the Dutch, in the allied van, from tacking to double the head of the French line. At 11.15 the two lines opened fire on each other.23 Fierce fighting erupted in the centre, around Russell’s Britannia and Tourville’s Soleil Royal, in the van and in the rear, particularly around Rear-Admiral Richard Carter in the Duke. At about one the wind came round from roughly west-south-west to north-west, and Shovell, rear-admiral of the Red in the Royal William, seized the moment. He luffed up and broke the French line ten ships from its rear, followed by six of his division. The change of wind also allowed the Dutch admiral, Philips van Almonde, to tack to windward of the French. Meanwhile, battle was raging in the centre, and several of the ships around Russell and Tourville had suffered severe damage and casualties. Seeing that the battle was turning against the French, Tourville ordered the Soleil Royal to withdraw. At four a thick fog came down, attended by a flat calm, and forced something of a respite for an hour.24 At five a new breeze came up, this time an easterly, which favoured the allies. Russell ordered a chase, but the fog returned, and at six, as the flood tide set in, Tourville ordered his ships to anchor. The tide carried some of the British ships into the midst of the French line, where they suffered severely; among them was the Duke, aboard which Carter was mortally wounded. At about seven, though, the two other divisions of the Blue, which had seen little action so far, finally got up with the French. Shovell launched a fireship attack against the Soleil Royal, but this was beaten off. Several of the remaining ships of the Blue were then carried by the tide through Tourville’s line, as Carter had been, receiving severe damage in the process and opening the way for the French to run for their harbours.25
Remarkably, neither side had lost a ship (apart from a few fireships), although many had received severe damage, especially on the French side. During the 20th and the morning of the 21st Tourville sailed west, pursued by the allied fleet with the Dutch in the van. He attempted to get his fleet through the dangerous Alderney race, but the strength of the flood drove the French back. Some were still able to run for Brest, and twenty-one remained at anchor off Alderney, eventually getting through the race in an astonishing piece of navigational skill on the afternoon of the 21st and reaching safety in St Malo. However, most of the rest of Tourville’s dispersed fleet was now forced to run eastwards by a strong flood tide, passing the allied fleet before it had a chance to respond.26 At eleven in the morning of the 21st three ships left the remnant of the French fleet as it fled eastwards and attempted to seek refuge in Cherbourg. Among them was the badly damaged Soleil Royal, no longer Tourville’s flagship. Ralph Delaval, the vice-admiral of the Red, detached a substantial force to deal with them; two of the French ships, including the magnificent Soleil Royal, were destroyed by fireships, the other by boat’s crews.27 By the morning of the 22nd another twelve survivors of Tourville’s fleet were at anchor in the bays on either side of Cap de la Hogue, warped right up to the lower water mark and protected in part by the two forts that guarded the bay. Light winds, and the need properly to reconnoitre the waters, delayed the final attack by almost two days; additionally, Shovell, the intended commander of the inshore squadron that would make the attack, was struck down with what may have been blood poisoning from a splinter and had to be replaced by Rooke.28 During the evening of the 23rd fireships and boats finally moved in to attack the six ships at anchor north of the cape. There was little resistance, and by midnight all six were ablaze. At dawn, the British boats went out again, this time against the six ships on the other side of the cape. There was more resistance, but the outcome was the same: all six French ships were set ablaze. On 27 May Russell’s fleet weighed and set sail for home.29 As King James II and VII watched from the Normandy cliffs while the French fleet on which his best hopes of a restoration were pinned was destroyed by skilful British boatwork, he could not help cheering the fleet that he had done so much to create: ‘Ah! None but my brave English could do so brave an action!’.30
The Britannia, Russell’s flagship at Barfleur, shown in two positions and flying the royal standard of William III in this excellent painting by Isaac Sailmaker. Built at Chatham in 1682 as the only First Rate in the ‘thirty ships’ programme, she was a relatively unsuccessful ship, and Barfleur marked the only real high point of her career.
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)
The twin battles of Barfleur and La Hogue marked the high point of the naval war for the allies. Admittedly, Barfleur itself had been a disappointment, during which the French had more than held their own against overwhelming odds, but the allied commanders had shown considerable skill in quite difficult weather and tidal conditions. There was some disappointment that many of the French ships escaped the coups de grâce at Cherbourg and La Hogue,* the invasion transports further up the bay at La Hogue were not attacked, and there was no immediate counterattack against French territory. Overall, though, the victory clearly prevented any prospect of a Franco-Jacobite invasion of the British Isles, and, despite subsequent attempts up to and including the 1745 rebellion, it ended the best hope of a second restoration that the Stuarts ever possessed. There was rejoicing in London, and, despite quibbles over his conduct and a violent falling-out with William and Mary’s powerful minister, the Earl of Nottingham, it was the making of Russell’s reputation and career. He ultimately became Earl of Orford, a member of the ruling whig junto and thus one of the very few ‘former naval persons’ effectively to reach the very pinnacle of the political world.31 But in practice, the victory made no difference at all to the main focus of the war, the bitter attritional campaigns in Flanders between King Louis’ armies and those of his Anglo-Dutch opponents, other than freeing up the putative invasion force to reinforce the already mighty French field army.
The destruction of the French fleet at La Hogue.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
GUERRE DE COURSE
Within a year, the triumph of Barfleur and La Hogue was supplanted by an unmitigated disaster, the loss on 17 June 1693 of a quarter of the outward-bound Smyrna convoy of almost 400 merchant ships, which had been provided with inadequate naval protection. Parliament was furious, but when its own preferred strategy, the capture of Brest, was attempted in June 1694, the landing was repulsed with heavy losses. Russell’s fleet then sailed into the Mediterranean, where William ordered it to remain for the winter, forcing the hasty improvisation of dockyard facilities at Cadiz (but presaging the forward presence in the Mediterranean, and the blockade of Toulon, that would be such a feature of eighteenth-century wars). By 1695 state finances on both sides were in a dire state, and inevitably naval funding suffered. Another Franco-Jacobite invasion, planned to be launched from Dunkirk in 1696, was defeated more by financial and administrative collapse on the French side than by the efforts of the disorganised British fleet that was placed in the Channel to thwart it.32 Great fleets were simply too expensive to keep at sea permanently, especially when both states were also maintaining vast armies, were finding it difficult to finance such a prolonged conflict, and were suffering from a succession of poor harvests. From 1694 onwards, therefore, the French in particular became increasingly dependent on the guerre de course, commerce raiding using smaller warships and privateers, with the two operating together. Led by such daring commanders as Jean Bart and Duguay-Trouin, these achieved some stunning successes. They panicked the English Parliament into passing ‘convoys and cruisers’ legislation, tying down specified numbers of ships to the defence of particular ports and trades.33 Ultimately, financial crises on both sides of the Channel led to the signing of a peace treaty in 1697, though this lasted for barely four years before Britain, France and their respective allies embarked on an even longer war.
* In an echo of the previous great invasion scare, the Armada of 1588, four of the French ships got away by sailing northabout round Scotland and ultimately returning safely to Brest.