As early as the 19th May, Russell learnt that Tourville had already sailed for the south. Before starting in pursuit, the new Admiral of the Fleet was able to deliver one effectual stroke at the enemy. A large French convoy of merchant ships was lying in Berteaume Bay under the protection of one French man-of-war. Russell dispatched a light squadron under Captain Pritchard to destroy it. The work was thoroughly done, and was followed up by the destruction of a number of other vessels going south with provisions to Tourville. Then, on the 5th or 6th June, Russell sailed for the south, leaving Lord Berkeley to carry out the attack on Brest. On the 7th of June Berkeley entered the wide channel between the Pointe St. Mathieu and the Pointe du Raz, called the Iroise. The entrance to the Bay of Brest, named Le Goulet, or Gullet, is on the north-east corner of this channel. It is a narrow passage which leads into the land-locked Bay of Brest. The bay is shut off from the sea by a peninsula running south from the Goulet. The western side of this peninsula, after running due north and south, turns to the west with a curve to the end at the north, and forms the anchorage known as the Roads or Bay of Camaret.
The object of the expedition was to land in Camaret Bay, seize the peninsula on the western side of the harbour, and, using that as a basis of operations, open the entry to the bay to the fleet; and then destroy the arsenal of Brest. The French were on their guard; Camaret Bay was bristling with batteries and lined with troops. To go on was an act of folly, and so Carmarthen, who surveyed the bay, gave Tollemache to understand; but the soldier, though an exceedingly brave man and a good subordinate, was no general, and he was burning to distinguish himself. He urged the naval officers on, and among them he found an ally in Lord Berkeley. The result was that several ships were all but battered to pieces by the French cannon, and Tollemache landed at the southern corner of the bay with a few hundred men—an act of headlong folly which cost him his life, and sacrificed the lives of many others. Then the expedition came away.
There was a kind of wrong-headed magnanimity about the conduct of Tollemache which extorts a certain respect, but the succeeding operations are merely examples of how to combine the greatest possible malignity of intention with a high degree of ineptitude in the execution. Berkeley came back to St. Helens for refreshments, and then returned to the coast of France to take revenge. What he did was morally on a level with the desolation of the Palatinate, for which King Louis had been so bitterly reproached by his enemies, and it had this further disgrace attaching to it, that it was imbecile. The English fleet only bombarded Dieppe and Havre, killing a certain number of women, children, and unarmed men, and burning a few houses. Then it threatened La Hogue and Cherbourg. This done, it came back to St. Helens for refreshments. When invigorated by repose it returned to Dunkirk, and exploded more infernal machines to no purpose.
In 1695 it was the same story. We made a demonstration at St. Malo, then we burnt the little fishing town of Granvelle, and then we achieved another failure at Dunkirk. In the following year these feats were renewed at Calais and elsewhere, till the war died down and was brought to a pause by the truce called the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. When it was resumed, the Admiralty had learnt that these expeditions were forms of waste, and we hear little or nothing of them during the reign of Queen Anne. It is probable that Captain Pritchard did more harm to the enemy by destroying the convoy in Berteaume Bay than was inflicted in all these expeditions, and he did it at a thousandth part of the cost.
More legitimate and fruitful than these attacks on the French coast towns were other operations of the fleet, which may be classed under two heads. First are the cruises of what our ancestors called “The Grand Fleet”—that is to say, movements of great forces representing the bulk of our effective naval power in Europe. Then contemporary to, but apart from them, were the cruises of squadrons, designed to protect our own colonial possessions or menace those of the French. These two kinds of naval operations were so far independent of one another that it is not necessary to tell them together. Again, many of them were so barren in results that it is superfluous to tell them in detail. Yet the mere fact that they took place shows the magnitude, the persistence, and the coherence of our efforts to make full use of the fleet. It has seemed to me most advisable to set them both forth briefly in parallel columns, and give particular accounts of the more notable among them afterwards.
There was now a break of four years, due to the truce which followed the Peace of Ryswick, 20th September 1697.
These two lists are not exhaustive. They do not include minor operations against the French coast in the Channel, nor do they mention all the subordinate parts of the colonial expeditions. It is also necessary to bear in mind that the Grand Fleets were the fleets of the allies, not of England alone. The Dutch always contributed a part of the strength, and their share of the common force was nowise inferior in spirit, or skill, to ours. In one of the elements which go to make efficiency they were not rarely superior. Their health was too often better, since, to the deep discredit of British administrations of that time, we did not on the average feed our men as well as the Dutch. The colonial expeditions were our own, and the work was done at an awful cost of life by disease.
In these circumstances the cruises of the allied Grand Fleets could only be the successive exercises of an overwhelming superiority, directed against an enemy whose resistance must needs be passive, with rare and fitful efforts at retaliation. Year after year the great combined naval armaments of England and Holland sailed south in the spring. Before the Peace of Ryswick (1697) they went once to aid the Spaniards, who were contending feebly against the French in Catalonia. After the renewal of the war, they went repeatedly to aid the Hapsburg pretender, who was endeavouring to drive the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V., from the throne he occupied by right of inheritance and the will of Charles II., the last of the Austrian dynasty. They also served to cover the movements of English and Dutch commerce by mewing up the only fleet which Louis XIV. endeavoured to maintain in Toulon. Incidentally they enabled us to secure what Cromwell had hoped for, and what our Charles II. endeavoured to obtain by his marriage treaty—namely, a port of war near the Mediterranean, where an English fleet could keep its stores, repair damages, and find a safe anchorage without being dependent on the goodwill of an ally.