ding event--none too glorious for
British arms--of that campaign. "Both as a strategist and as a
tactician," says Admiral Bridge, "Torrington was immeasurably ahead of
his contemporaries. The only English admirals who can be placed above
him are Hawke and Nelson." Yet he was regarded by many of his
contemporaries, and has been represented by many historians, merely as
the incapable seaman who failed to win the Battle of Beachy Head, and
thereby jeopardized the safety of the kingdom at a very critical time.

The situation was as follows. The country was divided between the
partisans of James II. and the supporters of William III. James was in
Ireland, where his strength was greatest, and William had gone thither
to encounter him, his transit having been covered by a small squadron of
six men-of-war, under the command of Sir Cloudesley Shovel. The army
was with William in Ireland, and Great Britain could only be defended on
land by a hastily levied militia. Its sole effective defence was the
fleet; and the fleet, although reinforced by a Dutch contingent, was,
for the moment, insufficient to defend it. The chief reliance of James
was upon the friendship and forces, naval and military, of Louis XIV.
Here was a case in which the security of England against insurrection at
home and invasion from abroad depended on the sufficiency and capacity
of her fleets to maintain the command of the sea--that is, either to
defeat the enemy's naval forces or to keep them at bay, and thereby to
deny freedom of transit to any military forces that Louis might attempt
to launch against British territory. The French king resolved to make a
determined attempt to wrest the command of the sea from his adversaries,
and by overpowering the allied fleets of England and Holland in the
Channel, to open the way for a successful invasion and a successful
insurrection to follow. A great fleet was collected at Brest, under the
supreme command of Tourville, and a squadron from Toulon under
Chateau-Renault was ordered to join him in the Channel, so as to enable
him to threaten London, to foment a Jacobite insurrection in the
capital, to land troops in Torbay, and to occupy the Irish Channel in
such force as to prevent the return of William and his army.

Now, of course, none of these objects could be attained unless the
allied fleets in the Channel and adjacent waters could be either
decisively defeated in the open or else so intimidated by the superior
fo