Champions of the fleet

by Edward Fraser

Hawke’s van ships caught up the rear of the French Fleet just to the south-east of Belleisle, as it was in the act of heading to round the Cardinals, a chain of dangerous rocks and outlying islets, and stand in for Quiberon Bay, then still ahead of them some eighteen to twenty miles. Conflans was that distance from his intended refuge when the first shots went off. Both fleets began to fight as they overlapped, the British coming up under every stitch of canvas which their masts could stand—“not a topsail was reefed”—the ships now wallowing in the trough of the waves, now plunging and rolling and staggering forward on the crest, while heavy surging cross-seas burst and broke in deluges of seething foam over the ships’ bows. So terrible was the weather that on board some of the British ships men were flung down on deck or hurled helplessly about and seriously injured and maimed. In one or two men were washed overboard and never seen again. The guns were double-breeched; eight men were at the wheel in every ship. So on that awful November afternoon did Hawke swoop down to strike.

On the French side there were twenty-one ships—with Hawke, twenty-three; but the French ships were on the average bigger vessels than ours, and carried heavier guns. That for fighting purposes in such weather gave Conflans the advantage. Another thing was this: all the fighting that day was done by barely two-thirds of Hawke’s fleet. A full third of the British Fleet were too far in rear—out-paced in the chase—and were unable to come up in time to have any influence on the fortune of the fight.

Ship after ship of the advancing British Fleet as they reached the enemy attacked the Formidable hotly. First, the Dorsetshire, of seventy guns, captained by Peter Denis, an Irishman (Anson’s dashing lieutenant of the old Centurion days), gave her a flying broadside as she swept by to windward; passing on then and driving ahead, making for the French van. Then the Defiance, another seventy-gun ship, following fast in the Dorsetshire’s wake, gave the Formidable a second broadside.

Lord Howe, in the Magnanime, a powerful seventy-four and a prize from the French on a former day, came next. Thierri, best of pilots for that coast, was at the con. He had volunteered for the Magnanime, as he explained, “parceque le capitaine ’Owe est jeune et brave!” Howe as he came on meant merely to brush past the Formidable with as brisk interchange of fire as might be, and then push ahead like the others to wing the flyers in the van; but a shot from the French, as he came abreast de Verger, carried his foreyard away and checked the Magnanime. “Black Dick”—Howe’s name in the Navy—closed with the Formidable instantly. He “bore down upon the Rear Admiral,” in the words of an eye-witness, “and getting under his lee opened a most tremendous fire from his thirty-twos and twenty-fours.” “Lord Howe, who attacked the Formidable,” says Horace Walpole, “bore down upon her with such violence that her prow forced in his lower tier of guns.” In the collision, as we are told by some one else, the Formidable’s port lids “were wrenched clean away.”

Ten minutes later up came the Warspite, Sir John Bently, the captor of the Téméraire in Boscawen’s battle, who had recently joined the Channel Fleet. Hauling up near at hand, she joined with the Magnanime in the attack. The two ships were two of the smartest in all the British Navy, and under their terrific pounding the Formidable was dismasted and reduced almost to a wreck. “In half an hour,” says our eye-witness, “they made a dreadful havoc in the Formidable, whose fire began to slack.”

De Verger’s flag, though, still flew defiantly, as did the French ensign at the staff astern, although the gallant Admiral had already fallen, as well as his first captain (de Verger’s younger brother), and most of the other officers, with, in addition, upwards of two hundred men. The Comte de Verger himself, we are told, was badly wounded at the outset of the fighting. He was carried below, and had his wounds dressed, but he refused to stay in the cockpit. He had himself brought up again in a chair and set down on the quarter-deck. There a little later a second shot struck him dead.

Standing up valiantly to Captain Bently and Lord Howe, the Formidable was as yet to all appearances far from being subdued. She was still gallantly resisting when a third British ship, the Montagu, arrived on the scene. Her arrival gave the Frenchmen a breathing space. In trying to cut in between the other two British ships and the Formidable she ran foul of both her two consorts and caused a serious collision. The Montagu, “instead of pursuing ahead, must needs run between Lord Howe and the French Admiral, and fell on board the Magnanime and forced her upon the Warspite; thus our three ships were entangled and totally prevented from continuing the action, but lay all of a heap alongside the Formidable, who might have torn them to pieces if she had not been almost a wreck herself.” What made the Formidable’s position much the worse was that she was practically isolated, cut off from the rest of her fleet. No fewer than seven French ships in her part of the line had refused combat from the first. They had run off without firing a single gun—“sans avoir,” in the words of the French naval historian Troude, “reçu un seul coup de canon.”

It was now about three in the afternoon. By that time eight or nine of Hawke’s ships had got into action, and were engaging the enemy as they overhauled them all along their line.

The pick of the French army meanwhile was looking on from the shore, as big a crowd of spectators, from all accounts, as ever watched a naval battle. Duplessis-Richelieu, Duc d’Aiguillon, Commander-in-Chief, watched it from the windmill of St. Pierre, as did from another point the Second in Command, De La Tour D’Auvergne, father of the “First Grenadier of France,” then a schoolboy of fourteen. Along the beach forty regiments of soldiers, horse and foot, were looking on. They formed the army that the Formidable and her consorts had come to escort across the Channel, in the transports lying at anchor in Quiberon Bay, for that projected invasion of England with which all Europe had been ringing for months past. There they stood, drenched to the skin, all anxiously looking out over the tumbling waste of waters to see what was to come of it; motley masses of men crowding out of camp and massed along the sand dunes and rock ledges of the Quiberon peninsula, or lining the batteries and ramparts of the forts round the bay—a medley of cocked-hatted, white-coated officers and men from every arm of the French king’s service; come down to the shore to see the show. Sturdy linesmen of Boulonnais and Contis, of Saint Chamond, and old d’Artois stood there—marching regiments these, that had seen more than one battlefield elsewhere, but never anything like this. Here were the red waistcoats of de Bourbon and de Cossé and de Quercy; there the green collars and cuffs of Beauvoisis, the blue of de Foix, the red coats with yellow facings of the Irish regiment of Clare; all intermingled with Dragoons de la Rochefoucauld and de Tessé; Dragoons de la Reine, in their queer-looking “bonnets de guerre” of royal blue; Dragoons du Dauphin in green coats with violet facings, silver buttons and silver lace, and helmets covered with leopard’s skin; Dragoons de Mailly, and the long red cloaks of the Penthièvre horsemen, adding a flower-bed touch of colour to the scene. Coast militiamen were in the throng, garbed like the regulars in the white coats of the line; heavy artillerymen, in sombre blue and dull red—there were two brigades of them on shore at Quiberon, de Chabrie, and de la Brosse—the whole mingled together in a motley crowd that stretched for miles round the bay, gazing their hardest to seaward and facing the gusts of blinding rain in their anxiety to see what they might of the battle thundering out in the storm over yonder. Quite a third of the “État Militaire de France,” of King Louis’ army list, formed the audience for Hawke and Conflans on the day that saw the Formidable’s name entered on the roll of the British Fleet. The soldiers, indeed, too, had a personal interest in the battle beyond the general issue. Some of their comrades were on board the fleet with Conflans, doing duty as marines; among them two whole battalions of Saintonge, and a draft or two of the regiment de Guyenne. They had been shipped at Brest. Poor wretches! If it was bad for the lookers-on to stand here in the open, drenched to the skin and chilled to the marrow, what was it over there, out yonder—heaving and pitching and rolling, at the mercy of a raging storm, sea-sick and helpless and hopeless, and being shot at with English cannon balls all the while!

It was not until some little time after their collision that the Montagu and the two other British ships, the Warspite and the Magnanime, got clear of one another. By that time they had drifted to leeward of the Formidable, and were too far off to reopen their attack. But fresh foes for the brave de Verger’s ship were soon at hand.