From early in 1777 Sartine had begun to prepare a squadron at Toulon. It was got ready with difficulty, for the Treasury was always in straits, and the classes then, as ever, worked ill. The purpose it was to serve was to carry help to the Americans. The command was given to the Comte d’Estaign, a great noble of the Rouergue, now known as the department of Rodez. D’Estaign had been bred a soldier, had served in the East Indies, and had held a governorship in the West Indies. He was accused by us of having shown sharp practice when a prisoner of war to the East India Company. His bold, undertaking disposition had induced his sovereign to impose him on the corps of naval officers, which was discredited by the failures of La Clue and Conflans in 1759, and the timidity of D’Aché. That he was our ostentatious enemy was another strong recommendation. From his conduct in command we may gather that his daring was born of a heat of the blood, and not of a settled resolution of mind. He was therefore subject to fits of depression under the weight of responsibility. D’Estaign, whose destination was well known, was allowed to sail unmolested. Reinforcements were sent to Howe under the command of Admiral Byron. Byron, the grandfather of the poet, had all the knightly virtues of his brilliant cavalier house. He had sailed with Anson, had shared the wreck of the Wager to the south of Chiloe, had recorded his adventures of starvation among savages, or in friendship and love among the Spaniards of Chili, in a fine narrative, and had been the commander of a voyage of circumnavigation singularly barren of discovery. He was a brave, steady officer, but without original faculty for the higher parts of war, and so persistently unfortunate in meeting storms that the sailors had nicknamed him “Foul Weather Jack.”
The first movement was made by D’Estaign, who left Toulon on the 13th April with a squadron of twelve sail of the line and four frigates. Baffling winds, the unskilfulness of his crews which contained few seamen, and the bad sailing qualities of some of his ships delayed his progress, and it was not till the 15th May that he was able to clear the Straits of Gibraltar. The series of operations which opened with his appearance off the Delaware on the 9th July was long, and ranged from New England to the southern limit of the West Indies. While it was beginning, the main fleets of England and France were coming to battle in the Channel. It will tend to make a narrative which runs the danger of being confused from the number of contemporary events somewhat clearer if we turn to the first meeting between Keppel and D’Orvilliers, noting only that Byron left Plymouth with thirteen sail of the line and a frigate on the 9th June to reinforce Howe, and therefore race D’Estaign across the Atlantic in a parallel and more northerly course. How he lost the race we shall see.
Amid delays and the wrangling of opposition with ministerial orators, the grand home fleet, or Western Squadron, was slowly made ready. On the 12th June, Keppel sailed from Plymouth with twenty sail of the line, and was joined later by two more. When on his way to his station off Brest, and at a distance of some twenty miles to the west of the Lizard, he met the French frigates Belle Poule and Licorne. There was as yet no formal declaration of war, but the absence of this mere ceremony only served to give an air of irregularity to his actions. The French frigates were ordered to come under the admiral’s lee. The Licorne being overtaken by the Hector 74, obeyed, but not without firing a broadside as she hauled her flag down—a mean demonstration very much on a level with our exercise of the rights of war while we denied that war as yet existed. The Belle Poule was summoned by the frigate Arethusa, a vessel of equal strength. Her captain, La Clochetterie, naturally refused to obey an order which Captain Samuel Marshal of the Arethusa had no right to give. A smart action ensued. The Arethusa rigging was cut to pieces, and the Belle Poule made off on the approach of fresh British ships.
Keppel returned to St. Helens on the 27th June, having learnt that the French fleet at Brest was stronger than his own. On the 9th July, the very day by the calendar on which D’Estaign was seen off the Delaware, he again went to sea with thirty sail of the line and six frigates. His second in command was Sir Robert Harland, and his third was Sir Hugh Palliser, the member of Sandwich’s Board of Admiralty who has been already named. D’Orvilliers had left Brest on the previous day with thirty-two sail of the line and fourteen frigates. He was endowed with large powers to punish or reward, and carried energetic instructions from Sartine to repair the misfortunes and errors of the past. The minister gave him clearly to understand that the king might pardon his officers for being beaten, but not for failing to fight hard.
On the 23rd July the fleets sighted one another 90 miles W.N.W. of Ushant in a westerly wind. We were between the enemy and the land, and therefore to leeward. The French admiral did not avail himself of his windward position to force on a battle, but followed the cautious tradition of his service and kept aloof. Four days of thick unsettled weather followed, hiding the opponents from one another. In this interval two of D’Orvilliers’ ships, the Bourgoyne, 80, and the Alexandre, 64, had separated and returned to Brest. Thus he was reduced to equality of numbers with Keppel, and to real inferiority of force, for one of his ships was of only 56 guns—a tolerably sharp warning of what may happen to officers who miss opportunities. At 9 a.m. on the 27th the French were seen eight miles to the W.S.W. with the wind at S.W. They were on the port tack, and heading to seaward. Keppel at once pressed in chase, while D’Orvilliers brought his fleet round to the starboard tack, and continued to hold his wind as if wishing to avoid battle. It was Keppel’s object to bring one on, and he headed for the rear of the French line. His own rear showed the usual tendency of a long line to straggle, and signals were made to Palliser, who commanded, to urge him on. Shortly after ten we were coming close on the rear of the French. A squall of both mist and rain swept over both fleets, hiding them from one another. When it cleared, the French admiral was seen to have turned his fleet again, and was heading to the west, still to windward, but so close that he would pass within cannon shot on the opposite tack. To Keppel this was a disappointment, for he actually avowed his belief that if the Frenchman meant to fight seriously he would have remained where he was. In other words he was of opinion that D’Orvilliers ought, as a man of honour, to have allowed his rearguard ships to be overtaken one after another, and crushed by the fire of the English as they came up in succession. By taking this absurdity for granted, Keppel gave the measure of his own intelligence as an admiral, and of his inferiority to D’Orvilliers as a manœuvrer.
The much debated battle of Ushant was in fact little more than a feeble parade. The fleets were going at the rate of five miles an hour, or at a combined speed of ten miles; allowing 150 feet for the average length of a ship this meant that each individual vessel would be abreast of the passing enemy for about a minute. A little more than an hour was employed by the whole of the two forces in sweeping alongside from end to end. During this brief period of cannonading, made up as it was of much briefer flashes of combat between their component parts, the French gunners did more execution than ours. They pierced some of our ships on the water line where they were exposed as they lay over to leeward, and seriously crippled the rigging of many of them. As the two lines began to pass clear, D’Orvilliers ordered his van, nominally commanded by the Duc de Chartres afterwards known to infamy as Philippe Egalité, to turn and engage Keppel’s rear division on the lee side, meaning to turn his centre and rear at the same time, thus putting Sir Hugh Palliser between two fires. But he was ill obeyed by the Duc de Chartres, whom common fame accused of cowardice, and finding that his plan could not be executed, he ran down to leeward and formed his fleet on the starboard tack heading to the east, and in the same direction as ours. Keppel had wished to turn his fleet also, but many of his ships were severely crippled in hull and rigging, and the order could not be executed. One of the most injured was the Formidable, 90, flagship of Sir Hugh Palliser. We therefore remained on the same tack. With both heading in the same direction, and we to windward, an opportunity might appear to have offered itself for our favourite manœuvre of bearing down, and engaging from end to end. But in the course of these twistings and turnings, the van and centre, which were less injured than the rear, had gone further to leeward and were nearer the French. Palliser found the Formidable unmanageable, and his division remained about him. Thus Keppel could not get his whole force together, and would not attack with a part. When night fell D’Orvilliers left two quick sailing vessels to show a light in order to produce the erroneous impression that he was still there, and steered for Brest where he anchored on the 29th. Keppel, concluding on reflection that he had many ships injured, that the enemy was better able to repair damage than he was, and that Brest was a dangerous lee shore, decided to return home, and anchored in Plymouth on the 31st July. On the 23rd August he was at sea once more, and on the 28th October back at Spithead. D’Orvilliers came out on the 18th August and was home again at Brest on 30th September. Our fleet took several French prizes, but there was no meeting, while our trade was fortunate in escaping French cruisers. And this was the summer campaign of 1778 in home waters.
I would prefer to say nothing of the shameful service and national quarrel which arose out of this poor battle, but it is too full of warning, and had too much influence on the history of the coming years to be passed over. We know from a letter of Samuel Hood, who was then Commissioner of Portsmouth dockyard, that as early as the 4th of August it was common knowledge that the chiefs of the fleet were on bad terms. Keppel, in his public letter, had praised both Harland and Palliser, but in truth he was fiercely angry with the second, whom he accused in his heart of having deliberately prevented the action of the 27th from becoming a real victory. It is obvious from his recorded words and his whole tone, that he believed Sir Hugh Palliser had acted as the agent of Sandwich in the execution of a conspiracy for his ruin. The solitary dignity of his quarterdeck left him unchecked to brood over this imagination till he was in the state of mind of some unhappy victim of the mania of persecution. I fear we must add that there were sycophants under his command who fed his delusions. We still possess a toadying acrid letter from no less a man than John Jervis, then captain of the Foudroyant, and at all times a strong Whig, which shows him busy in the mean work of making bate. Being answered according to his folly, Keppel grew so wise in his conceit that he reached the point where he became convinced that there was a plot to cause the overthrow of the British fleet, in order to discredit such an eminent Whig as himself, that Sandwich was the author, and Palliser the agent thereof. It was not sane, and it was the kind of insanity to which only a dull intelligence would have been liable when exasperated by soured vanity. But “the spirit of faction” was so rampant in England at the time, and had so thoroughly aroused one of the worst faults of our character, a tendency to loud-mouthed and contentious hectoring, that he did not want kindred spirits to fool him to the top of his bent.
The press, animated as it was by the malignant spirit of Junius, whose voice had only just fallen silent, took up the tale. Whigs bragged that their admiral had saved the state from the ministerial treason of Sandwich. Ministerial papers replied that their vice-admiral had baffled the Whig traitor. Charge and counter-charge came thick and grew more specific. On the 15th October the Morning Intelligencer made a poisonous attack on Palliser, fortified by details which must have come from Keppel’s partisans, and would not have been given without his approval. Sir Hugh, being hot-headed, by no means a clever man, and probably ill advised, called upon Keppel for a contradiction. He ought to have been silent or to have sued the paper for libel, and to have produced his admiral in the witness box. Keppel, who shirked taking responsibility all through, would not write an answer. In an interview he took a high and mighty tone, and spoke of the dignity of despising the press. Sir Hugh, again most foolishly, made a public answer to The Intelligencer, and allowed himself to be entangled in a controversy with “the bronzed and naked gentlemen of the press.” Both men were members of Parliament, and they met in the debate of the 2nd December. Palliser spoke to vindicate himself, Keppel to injure his subordinate. He got over the question why he praised Sir Hugh in his public letter, by saying that he meant only to refer to his personal courage, which was undoubted, and that this was the most important quality of an officer. If we could suppose that he meant what he said, these words might again be quoted as giving the measure of his intelligence. But his excuse was a subterfuge. For the rest he would say nothing definite. He would sneer. He would insinuate. He would give to be understood. He would do anything except show candour. He wished Sir Hugh to be condemned for gross misconduct, and while forwarding the condemnation with cunning, he wished to maintain a fine attitude of magnanimity and of regard for the king’s service, thus escaping the inconvenience of having to prove his charges at a court martial.