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.
First of these the _Torbay_, Commodore Keppel’s ship, a smart and
powerful seventy-four, ranged alongside. Setting-to briskly by himself,
Keppel gave the Frenchmen a cruelly trying quarter of an hour, after
which the _Resolution_ and the _Swiftsure_, both seventy-gun ships, drew
near to take their part. Keppel, according to his own log, “had silenced
her,” and without waiting to see her colours come down, as the new
arrivals neared the spot he moved off, intent on finding a single-handed
fight for himself further ahead.
Keppel did so immediately, and settled the fate of the hapless _Thesèe_,
a seventy-four, the same size as his own ship, which went to the bottom
with awful suddenness as they were fighting yard-arm to yard-arm, struck
by a fierce squall that burst on her and heeled her over just as she had
opened her lower-deck ports to leeward in order to give the _Torbay_ a
broadside. Swamped by a tremendous sea, the luckless _Thesèe_ filled
and sank like a stone. Out of eight hundred men on board, not twenty in
all were saved, picked up from floating wreckage. The _Torbay_ herself
narrowly escaped sharing the _Thesèe’s_ fate. Her lower-deck ports had
just been opened too. “Keppel’s,” relates Horace Walpole, “was full of
water, and he thought he was sinking; a sudden squall emptied his ship,
but he was informed all his powder was wet. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘I am sorry
I am safe.’ They came and told him a small quantity was undamaged. ‘Very
well,’ said he, ‘then attack again.’”
The _Resolution_ and _Swiftsure_ were in turn joined by the _Revenge_,
and then the _Essex_ added herself to the long suffering _Formidable’s_
foes. Still, though, the _Formidable_ kept her colours flying, while shot
after shot—at intervals—came sullenly from her tiers of ports. She was
practically silenced, but not as Keppel had thought, absolutely. There
was little satisfaction in such odds, and three of the British ships
moved away, leaving the _Resolution_ to finish the business off.
[Illustration: HAWKE’S VICTORY IN QUIBERON BAY
_Painted by Swaine. Engraved and Published in 1760._
_The picture shows the “Royal George” (in the centre) sinking the
“Superbe,” and the “Formidable” (immediately beyond the “Superbe” and in
the background) lowering her colours to the “Resolution” (the ship coming
up astern of the “Royal George”)_]
The _Formidable_ was plainly at her last gasp, as it were; a wreck above
and below, her masts down and her rigging lying in tangled heaps of torn
canvas and cordage over the side, the bulwarks shattered to the level of
the deck, the hull gashed with gaping holes from which streams of sea
water spouted in cascades at every roll of the ship. Still, with all
that, her gallant first lieutenant, the sole surviving naval officer on
board, would not give in. The _Formidable_ was a flagship, he declared,
and, as a point of honour, to a flagship only should she strike. Manning
what guns he could, he made his final effort to hold out just a little
longer. It was magnificent, but it was hardly war. It was heroic, but it
proved impossible. The gallant young Frenchman’s ambition was destined
not to be realized. There was no time for it. The big _Royal George_,
with Hawke’s blue flag flying out at the main, could be seen approaching,
but she was not yet quite alongside. Before the _Royal George_ could
challenge, the deadly fire of the _Resolution’s_ guns had done its
work, and all hope of further resistance was at an end. Yet another
British ship also, the _Burford_, was fast approaching the scene, intent
apparently on joining in with the _Resolution_. It was hopeless now to
wait for the _Royal George_, and the heroically defended ensign of the
_Formidable_ had to come down. The _Formidable_ lowered her colours to
the _Resolution_—exactly at five minutes to four o’clock.
Towards the end, Conflans himself in the _Soleil Royal_, with de
Beauffremont and one of his captains, tacked and doubled back as if to
the rescue of the _Formidable_, but they were too late.
* * * * *
What took place elsewhere on the scene of battle, during the short
three-quarters of an hour that the waning daylight of the stormy winter’s
afternoon lasted, before the fighting had of necessity to cease, are
beyond our limits. How, for instance, the master of the _Royal George_,
getting anxious about the reefs and sandbanks that showed up amid the
breakers on either side as they surged ahead into the fight, declared
that he dared not take the big three-decker further inshore, and drew
from Hawke’s lips the heroic words, “You have done your duty in pointing
out the danger; now go on and lay me beside the French Admiral!”; how the
_Royal George_ herself after that came within an ace of shipwreck as she
fought; of the catastrophe to the French _Superbe_, sent to the bottom
in attempting to keep the _Royal George_ from closing with her flagship,
by one terrific broadside from the _Royal George_, to the horror of the
British flagship’s crew themselves as the smoke of the guns blew off and
they saw three topmasts disappear under water, “in a hideously sudden
manner,” where thirty seconds earlier had floated a noble man-of-war; how
finally Conflans himself sheered off before the _Royal George’s_ guns,
and ran away to wreck his flagship and burn her next morning:—to recount
in detail these and the many other dramatic incidents of that “thunderous
miscellany of cannon and tempest,” as Carlyle called the battle of
Quiberon Bay, are beyond our present scope.
All was over about five o’clock. As soon as might be after that, victors
and vanquished alike let go anchors where they lay, each ship where best
she could, as the guns gave over firing in the dark, to ride the fearful
night out as well as it was possible on both sides, each holding to
her anchor for dear life, and powerless to help others. “In the night
we heard many guns of distress fired, but, it blowing hard, want of
knowledge of the coast, and whether they were fired by a friend or an
enemy, prevented all means of relief.”
As the result to England of the afternoon’s work, two French ships were
sunk and one was burned; two surrendered (one stole away before the
weather would allow a boat from an English ship to take possession of
her), one—the _Formidable_—was taken and secured. Of the rest of the
enemy some scraped over the mud-flats at the mouth of the little river
Vilaine, a few miles off, and lay there with broken backs, unable ever
to put to sea again; a small remnant got into Rochfort, losing one of
their number by shipwreck on the way. In killed and wounded and drowned,
the total loss to France in the battle, it has been calculated, numbered
between four and five thousand men. It was probably nearer the higher
figure, for most of the French ships were crammed with men. There were
twelve hundred, it was said, sailors and soldiers, on board Conflans’
flagship, the _Soleil Royal_, alone. A thousand officers and men were
returned as on board the _Formidable_.
The French wounded, with a few men rescued from the ships that were sunk,
were sent on shore by cartel to the Duc D’Aiguillon, as soon as the
weather had moderated sufficiently. With them were sent also a hundred
and twenty French soldiers, the poor remnant of a half-battalion of the
regiment of Saintonge, and a company of militiamen gunners from Brest,
who had served on board the _Formidable_.
Two of our own ships were wrecked in Quiberon Bay, one on the night of
the battle. That was the _Resolution_, to which ship the _Formidable_
had hauled down her flag. The other was the _Essex_, which was cast away
early next morning while trying to secure Conflans’ flagship. The storm
continued to rage with unabated fury during the whole of the day after
the battle. To Hawke, though, their fate was only part of the price for
the risk incurred in bringing the French to battle.
This was the victor’s summing up on the day’s work. “When I consider the
season of the year,” wrote Hawke to the Admiralty, in his modestly worded
dispatch, “the hard gales on the day of action, the shortness of the day,
and the coast they were on, I can boldly affirm that all that could
possibly be done has been done. As to the loss we have sustained, let
it be placed to the account of the necessity I was under of running all
risks to break this strong force of the enemy. Had we had but two hours
more daylight the whole had been totally destroyed or taken, for we were
almost up with their van when night overtook us.” In this plain way did
the victor of Quiberon Bay render his account to the nation, this grand
old fighting seaman and leader to whom England has not yet found room for
a monument, either at the Abbey or in St. Paul’s.
The battle of Quiberon Bay sealed the fate of France at sea for the Seven
Years’ War. The building of “flat bottoms” stopped after that; there was
no more mustering of armies along the French coast, no more discussion in
the Pompadour’s boudoir of schemes for the invasion of England.
The guns that should have conquered us they rusted on the shore,
The men that would have mastered us they drummed and marched no more,
For England was England, and a mighty brood she bore—
When Hawke came swooping from the West!
“It seems as though France is never to have a navy,” said King Louis
morosely, while sitting at supper with the Pompadour on the night that
the Quiberon dispatches reached Versailles.
* * * * *
A British officer who went on board the _Formidable_ on the morning after
the battle, wrote down a description of the scene that met his eyes
there. “A lieutenant and 80 men,” he says, “being ordered from our ship
on board the _Formidable_ to assist in repairing her rigging, etc., I
embraced the opportunity of seeing the havoc that had been made by the
fire of so many large ships who had battered her. The destruction of
her upper works was dreadful, and her starboard side was pierced like
a cullender by the number of shots she received in the course of the
action. The loss of men was prodigious in killed and wounded, amounting
to more than 500; among the former the Admiral, M. St. André de Verger
and his brother, the first captain, all the other officers either killed
or wounded, except a lieutenant-colonel, who assured me that every man of
his detachment, drawn up on the quarter-deck and forecastle, etc., had
been either killed or wounded but himself; that he had served in the army
for thirty years, had been present at the bloody field of Fontenoy, but
had never before witnessed such a scene of carnage. The grand-chamber was
filled with wounded officers, many of whom had suffered amputation....
Monsieur major invited me below to certify the number of his patients,
and there a melancholy scene presented itself. The large gun-room and
every space between the guns on the lower deck was crammed with wounded
soldiers and sailors, besides three rows of cradles in the hold,
containing 60 seamen, and many not yet dressed.... I am afraid that few
of the wounded could recover, considering their very miserable situation
and circumstances.”
As soon as the weather would allow her to start the _Formidable_ was sent
off to England under escort. She arrived at Plymouth “almost in a sinking
state, from the shot-holes she had received, and only kept afloat with
great difficulty.” She rolled away her jury masts, we are told, and the
cook’s coppers were washed out of the ship. The prize crew, the officers
and men from the wrecked _Essex_, and the prisoners, had to live for four
days on the boatswain’s tallow.
The _Formidable_ was taken into the British Navy, and the name was
registered on the roll of King George’s fleet in its original form; but
the ship had suffered too severe a mauling to be fit for sea service
again. Some ten years after her capture Hawke, as First Lord of the
Admiralty, signed the death warrant of his old prize—the order that
delivered his old Quiberon trophy over to the shipbreaker.
* * * * *
One final word. The _Formidable’s_ magnificent defence was the redeeming
event for the other side of the “Journée de M. Conflans,” as the French
Navy, pillorying the memory of its unfortunate Admiral, has ever since
called the battle. So, too, France has recognized it. A new _Formidable_
was laid down in France at the first fitting opportunity, so named in
honour of the Comte de Verger’s gallant man-of-war. The French battleship
_Formidable_ of to-day—not so long since, with her armour plates of 44
tons weight each and 75-ton guns, the pride of her fleet, and still, as
reconstructed, a ship capable of striking a hard blow for the honour of
her flag—commemorates the heroism of de Verger and his gallant men for
the twentieth-century French Navy.
VI
WHEN THE _VICTORY_ FIRST JOINED THE FLEET
Thou great vessel, whose tremendous claim
So well is proved to Victory’s famous name!
In stately guise, all smart and trim, rides the _Victory_ to-day at the
flagship’s moorings in Portsmouth Harbour, flying at her masthead the red
St. George’s Cross flag of the Admiral holding the chief command at the
principal naval port of the British Empire. To see her now, spick and
span and as smart as paint can make her, she looks at the first glance
barely a day older than the latest launched of the old style wooden
men-of-war that are yet left among us doing harbour duty in various
capacities. The old _St. Vincent_, which passed away only the other day,
a worn-out veteran, was launched ten years after the _Victory_ had fired
her last shotted gun. The still existing _Asia_, at Portsmouth, was
launched thirteen years after the _Victory_ had finally retired from the
sea. The _Victory_ as a fact had been some years afloat and had fought
her first battle long before the great-great-grandfathers of most of us
were old enough to trundle a hoop or spin a top. She forms in herself,
indeed, a direct and actual link between our own day and the times of
George the Second.
Two famous Admirals of the Seven Years’ War time, Anson and Boscawen,
were the Lords of the Admiralty who signed the order to lay the
_Victory’s_ keel. The names themselves take us back into history well
over a century and a half. And the difference between things then and now
is wider than the gap of years. It is difficult indeed, as we nowadays
see the _Victory_ in Portsmouth Harbour, amidst the stir and activity
of a modern naval port, to realize how wide a space her lifetime really
covers.
* * * * *
Imagine yourself as a visitor at Portsmouth on any afternoon almost
of the present year of grace, and observing what takes place in the
harbour round the _Victory_. Here comes along, sliding swiftly past
between ship and shore, a long, low-built black torpedo-boat; or a yet
more grim-looking sleuthhound of the sea, a thirty-knot destroyer, with
squat funnels and high-raised forecastle, from which peers forward the
long barrel of a twelve-pounder, shearing its way ahead on business of
its own. Now a snub-nosed gunnery-school gunboat passes, returning from
a day’s target-practice out beyond the Warner lightship, with a weapon
that can fire from twelve to twenty aimed shots in a minute. Then, it
may be, a brand new twenty-three-knot cruiser passes, coming back
from a trial run, or a huge high-sided four to five hundred feet long
battleship of from fifteen to eighteen thousand tons, stern and resolute
of appearance, her giant barbette guns of massive bulk and enormous
length, weighing each from fifty to sixty tons, and able to send an
eight hundredweight twelve-inch shell from fifteen to twenty miles, and
with the certainty of being able to hit the mark with each shot at half
that range—the horizon limit from on board. It was not so long ago that
one of our battleships (the _Commonwealth_), firing at eight thousand
yards at a target representing an enemy’s battleship, dropped successive
twelve-inch shells into a space the size of a lawn-tennis court, and, at
the same distance at the third round, shot away a boat’s flagstaff that
topped the target. At all times, too, there is a passing and repassing
of Navy steam-launches and pinnaces, and now and again the busy forging
to and fro of puffing harbour tugs and yard craft of all sorts. Such are
every-day sights in Portsmouth Harbour in these times of ours.
Then carry your mind back to the year in which the _Victory_ first
figured on the Estimates of the Navy—1758. Imagine yourself standing
on the Hard as a sightseer in the Portsmouth of the Seven Years’ War
time—on, say, a day in October of the year when my Lords at Whitehall
were making their final decision about the ship’s dimensions.
At this same moment, by the way, there is lying in a far-off parsonage,
in an out-of-the-world locality on the Norfolk coast, a puny baby boy, a
fortnight or three weeks old, so sickly that he is not thought likely to
live. So weakly, indeed, is the child that his baptism—at which the name
Horatio was given to the small babe—has taken place privately, just six
days after his birth.
You would, in Portsmouth Harbour on that October afternoon of 1758, have
seen something very much like this.
First of all, almost opposite the Hard, and just where the _Victory_
herself now lies, there is moored a big yellow-sided two-decker of
foreign build flying the British flag. Just now, perhaps, there is no
man-of-war name all the world over of more unpleasant notoriety than
hers. She is the _Monarque_, a seventy-four, taken from the French, and
it was on her quarter-deck, some eighteen months ago, on a dull and
cloudy March day, that they shot Admiral Byng. The _Monarque_ has now
just returned from “Straits” service, and if you went on board her you
would see, still there, and part of the ship’s company, the men of the
platoon of marines who formed Byng’s firing party.
Near the _Monarque_ lies a big ninety-gun three-decker—a yellow-sided
vessel also, for all men-of-war are so painted. It is the _St. George_.
In her cabin Byng’s court martial sat some twenty months ago. The court,
by a grim coincidence, was held in the very cabin that had been Byng’s
own thirteen years before that, when Byng was captain of this same _St.
George_. There, on a snowy January day, as plenty of people at Portsmouth
can tell you, for they were looking on, Byng stood to hear his sentence
in his own old cabin, crowded almost to suffocation with spectators,
stuffy and close, and the walls “sweating down” with trickling beads of
water; the hapless, doomed British Admiral, standing there, firm and
erect, with squared shoulders, calmly facing his judges, with his own
sword lying on the table, its point turned towards himself.
To the very last, they say, Byng expected an acquittal. He had not
anticipated, at the worst, a sentence more severe than a reprimand. So
he himself said in the cabin of the _Monarque_, on the very morning of
the 27th January, when the Admiralty Marshal came to accompany him on
board the _St. George_ to hear the finding of the court. He learnt the
dread reality first as he came up the side of the _St. George_. At the
entering port a personal friend, instructed privately by the President of
the Court to do so, stood waiting to give the Admiral a word of warning.
As he met his friend, Byng saw instantly from his downcast countenance
and embarrassed manner that things had gone adversely and that the
sentence was a hard one. “What is the matter,” asked the Admiral, “have
they broke me?” The bearer of the news, convinced that Byng had no idea
of what was coming, hesitated and stammered. Byng stopped short. He
gazed fixedly at his friend for a few seconds, and then changed colour
as he seemed to take in the situation. A moment later he had recovered
himself. Exclaiming in a calm tone, “Well, well, I understand: if nothing
but my blood will satisfy them, let them take it,” he passed with set
countenance into the presence of the Court.
[Illustration: THE EXECUTION OF ADMIRAL BYNG
_From a Contemporary Print_]