The naval side of the war waged by the powers of western Europe from
1689 to 1697, to reduce the predominance of King Louis XIV., was not
marked by any very conspicuous exhibition of energy or capacity, but it
was singularly decisive in its results. At the beginning of the struggle
the French fleet kept the sea in face of the united fleets of Great
Britain and Holland. It displayed even in 1690 a marked superiority over
them. Before the struggle ended it had been fairly driven into port, and
though its failure was to a great extent due to the exhaustion of the
French finances, yet the inability of the French admirals to make a
proper use of their fleets, and the incapacity of the king's ministers
to direct the efforts of his naval officers to the most effective aims,
were largely responsible for the result.
When the war began in 1689, the British Admiralty was still suffering
from the disorders of the reign of King Charles II., which had been only
in part corrected during the short reign of James II. The first
squadrons were sent out late and in insufficient strength. The Dutch,
crushed by the obligation to maintain a great army, found an increasing
difficulty in preparing their fleet for action early. Louis XIV., a
despotic monarch, with as yet unexhausted resources, had it within his
power to strike first. The opportunity offered him was a very tempting
one. Ireland was still loyal to King James II., and would therefore have
afforded an admirable basis of operations to a French fleet. No serious
attempt was made to profit by the advantage thus presented. In March
1689 King James was landed and reinforcements were prepared for him at
Brest. A British squadron under the command of Arthur Herbert
(afterwards Lord Torrington), sent to intercept them, reached the French
port too late, and on returning to the coast of Ireland sighted the
convoy off the Old Head of Kinsale on the 10th of May. The French
admiral Chateaurenault held on to Bantry Bay, and an indecisive
encounter took place on the 11th of May. The troops and stores for King
James were successfully landed. Then both admirals, the British and the
French, returned home, and neither in that nor in the following year was
any serious effort made by the French to gain command of the sea between
Ireland and England. On the contrary, a great French fleet entered the
Channel, and gained a success over the combined British and Dutch fleets
on the 10th of July 1690 (see BEACHY HEAD, BATTLE OF), which was not
followed up by vigorous action. In the meantime King William III. passed
over to Ireland and won the battle of the Boyne. During the following
year, while the cause of King James was being finally ruined in Ireland,
the main French fleet was cruising in the Bay of Biscay, principally for
the purpose of avoiding battle. During the whole of 1689, 1690 and 1691,
British squadrons were active on the Irish coast. One raised the siege
of Londonderry in July 1689, and another convoyed the first British
forces sent over under the duke of Schomberg. Immediately after Beachy
Head in 1690, a part of the Channel fleet carried out an expedition
under the earl (afterwards duke) of Marlborough, which took Cork and
reduced a large part of the south of the island. In 1691 the French did
little more than help to carry away the wreckage of their allies and
their own detachments. In 1692 a vigorous but tardy attempt was made to
employ their fleet to cover an invasion of England (see LA HOGUE, BATTLE
OF). It ended in defeat, and the allies remained masters of the Channel.
The defeat of La Hogue did not do so much harm to the naval power of
King Louis as has sometimes been supposed. In the next year, 1693, he
was able to strike a severe blow at the Allies. The important
Mediterranean trade of Great Britain and Holland, called for convenience
the Smyrna convoy, having been delayed during the previous year, anxious
measures were taken to see it safe on its road in 1693. But the
arrangements of the allied governments and admirals were not good. They
made no effort to blockade Brest, nor did they take effective steps to
discover whether or not the French fleet had left the port. The convoy
was seen beyond the Scilly Isles by the main fleet. But as the French
admiral Tourville had left Brest for the Straits of Gibraltar with a
powerful force and had been joined by a squadron from Toulon, the whole
convoy was scattered or taken by him, in the latter days of June, near
Lagos. But though this success was a very fair equivalent for the defeat
at La Hogue, it was the last serious effort made by the navy of Louis
XIV. in this war. Want of money compelled him to lay his fleet up. The
allies were now free to make full use of their own, to harass the French
coast, to intercept French commerce, and to co-operate with the armies
acting against France. Some of the operations undertaken by them were
more remarkable for the violence of the effort than for the magnitude of
the results. The numerous bombardments of French Channel ports, and the
attempts to destroy St Malo, the great nursery of the active French
privateers, by infernal machines, did little harm. A British attack on
Brest in June 1694 was beaten off with heavy loss. The scheme had been
betrayed by Jacobite correspondents. Yet the inability of the French
king to avert these enterprises showed the weakness of his navy and the
limitations of his power. The protection of British and Dutch commerce
was never complete, for the French privateers were active to the end.
But French commerce was wholly ruined.
It was the misfortune of the allies that their co-operation with armies
was largely with the forces of a power so languid and so bankrupt as
Spain. Yet the series of operations directed by Russel in the
Mediterranean throughout 1694 and 1695 demonstrated the superiority of
the allied fleet, and checked the advance of the French in Catalonia.
Contemporary with the campaigns in Europe was a long series of cruises
against the French in the West Indies, undertaken by the British navy,
with more or less help from the Dutch and a little feeble assistance
from the Spaniards. They began with the cruise of Captain Lawrence
Wright in 1690-1691, and ended with that of Admiral Nevil in 1696-1697.
It cannot be said that they attained to any very honourable achievement,
or even did much to weaken the French hold on their possessions in the
West Indies and North America. Some, and notably the attack made on
Quebec by Sir William Phips in 1690, with a force raised in the British
colonies, ended in defeat. None of them was so triumphant as the plunder
of Cartagena in South America by the Frenchman Pointis, in 1697, at the
head of a semi-piratical force. Too often there was absolute misconduct.
In the buccaneering and piratical atmosphere of the West Indies, the
naval officers of the day, who were still infected with the corruption
of the reign of Charles II., and who calculated on distance from home to
secure them immunity, sank nearly to the level of pirates and
buccaneers. The indifference of the age to the laws of health, and its
ignorance of them, caused the ravages of disease to be frightful. In the
case of Admiral Nevil's squadron, the admiral himself and all his
captains except one, died during the cruise, and the ships were
unmanned. Yet it was their own vices which caused these expeditions to
fail, and not the strength of the French defence. When the war ended,
the navy of King Louis XIV. had disappeared from the sea.
See Burchett, _Memoirs of Transactions at Sea during the War with
France, 1688-1697_ (London, 1703); Lediard, _Naval History_ (London,
1735), particularly valuable for the quotations in his notes. For the
West Indian voyages, Tronde, _Batailles navales de la France_ (Paris,
1867); De Yonghe, _Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Zeewezen_
(Haarlem, 1860). (D. H.)