But they took the foe for pilot and the cannon’s glare for light,
When Hawke came swooping from the West.
How the Formidable passed that day from France to England is, indeed, something of which both England and France may be jointly proud. Never fought men more heroically on both sides—the enemy to keep, we to take—amid all the horrors of a furious storm and ever imminent shipwreck and catastrophe.
This is the story of how, where, and when the Royal Navy won its first Formidable, the first of a famous line.
It was the afternoon of the 20th of November, 1759, a Tuesday. The scene was among the black-fanged reefs of granite rock, and the treacherous quicksands that fringe the “sickle-shaped sweep” of Quiberon Bay on the coast of the Morbihan, in Lower Brittany, in the north-eastern quarter of the Bay of Biscay. The battle was fought in the height of a wild raging storm from the Atlantic, a tremendous gale from the north-west, howling blasts of wind, and torrents of hissing rain, and thick, dark weather, with the sea lashed to fury all round, and gigantic breakers running “so high that no boat could live for a moment among them,” as one who was present described. “A network of shoals and sandbanks” is what a French writer calls Quiberon Bay, “with heavy surf breaking along the shore on the calmest days of summer, and ugly cross-currents swirling to and fro with the strength and rush of a mill race”; a place “lined with reefs that the navigator never sees without alarm, and never passes without emotion.”
Hawke and his captains swept down on the French fleet, cornered between the storm and the shore, in the midst of the rocks and quicksands; without charts themselves, and for the most part without pilots, or, at least, pilots that they could trust; flinging themselves on the enemy heedless of gale and breakers, attacking ship after ship of the French as each was met with, “to make,” in Hawke’s own expressive words, “downright work of them.”
De Conflans, Maréchal de France, commanded the French Fleet. He was one of a batch of eight marshals created, honoris causa, some two years before; a boon companion of royalty, one of the “flying tables” set, a fine figure of a man to look at, as his portrait at Versailles shows him, handsome, tall, and well made, a hard rider to hounds at Compiègne or Fontainebleau, with a pretty wit in the boudoir and over the card table; also one of the Pompadour’s courtier friends, which was perhaps the main reason why a man of de Conflans’ stamp as a naval officer found himself in chief command at that place that day. There were marshals of the French Navy as well as of the army under the ancien régime. The rank was first instituted by Louis XIV when he solaced Admiral Tourville with the bâton and its consequences—a big salary, the title of “Monseigneur,” and court precedence at the head of the Grand Officers of State—to make up for his ill-fortune at La Hogue.
As an admiral Conflans proved an utter failure. That morning, when he first, some forty miles to westward of Belleisle, saw Hawke approaching, he formed line and brought-to. He would fight the English, he said, in the open sea to the south of Belleisle. As Hawke came nearer, when it was too late, he changed his mind and ran off pell-mell to take shelter among the reefs and shoals of Quiberon. With Conflans were de Beauffrement, Vice-Admiral, the second in command, and the Comte de Verger, Rear-Admiral, the third in command, who had his flag in the Formidable. De Verger’s squadron formed up astern, its place in the line of battle.
As Hawke’s leading ships began to overtake the French the gallant Rear-Admiral shortened sail and dropped back. He would await his fate at what in the circumstances was the post of honour, as rearmost ship of all. There, practically single-handed, the Formidable bore the brunt of Hawke’s opening attack.