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This delay was due to bad administration, as was also the further misfortune that the English government did not learn of Tourville's departure until after its own fleet had sailed with the trade. Tourville surprised the convoy near the Straits, destroyed or captured one hundred out of four hundred ships, and scattered the rest.
Among admirals, the greatest name of this later period is the French Tourville, a master of the science of his profession, and gifted with a personal courage of the heroic type; while the leading exponent of Tourville's ideas, as well as historian of his achievements, was the French priest Paul Hoste, chaplain to his fleet, and the father of the systematic treatment of naval evolutions.
In Torrington's and Tourville's time, when ships were unhandy and fleet tactics in their infancy, the difficulty of avoiding action, when a determined enemy had once got contact, were undoubtedly great, unless a port of retreat was kept open. But as the art of naval warfare developed, the possibilities of "a fleet in being" were regarded as much wider, at least in the British service.
Not only had he prevented the French doing anything that could affect the issue of the war, but he had completely foiled Tourville's plan of destroying the British fleet in detail. That he had done, but retribution by passing to the offensive was no longer in his power.
Tourville's communications were thus cut, his line of retreat threatened, and he seized the first opportunity to elude Russell and to return into port. Beyond taking a few ships from one of the West India convoys, he accomplished nothing. The central French offensive in Ireland was broken at the battle of the Boyne, and the prestige of England at sea was restored.
It is true our trade suffered in the North Sea, but this was not directly due to the concentration which Tourville's cruise forced upon us, but rather to the failure of the Dutch apparently by a misunderstanding-to provide for an effective blockade of Dunkirk.
To British eyes it will seem that the heresy which was latent in Tourville's instructions was a seed that choked all the finer aspirations of the French navy.
Accordingly, Tourville's squadron, consisting of fifty three men of war, set sail from Brest on the twenty-fifth of April and passed the Straits of Gibraltar on the fourth of May. William, in order to cross the designs of the enemy, determined to send Russell to the Mediterranean with the greater part of the combined fleet of England and Holland.
See Map of English Channel, etc., p. 107. That is, nearly motionless. Hoste: Naval Tactics. Seignelay, the French minister of marine of the day, called him "poltron de tête, mais pas de coeur." The author has followed in the text the traditional and generally accepted account of Tourville's orders and the motives of his action.
You will ask, what put it into our heads to make the comparison? A slight circumstance which happened yesterday evening. Rosamond was showing Mr. Gresham some of my drawings, and among them the copy of that beautiful miniature in M. de Tourville's snuff-box. My father told him the history of Euphrosyne, of her German prince, and Count Albert. Mr.
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