Chapter IX: On Board Our Flagships at Trafalgar:—captain Hardy and (5)

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.

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.

_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.

_From a Contemporary Print_]

Beyond the _St. George_ lies another “Mediterranean ship,” just returned home—the _Revenge_, one of the ships in Byng’s battle. It was the damning evidence of the _Revenge’s_ captain—Frederick Cornwall, now at home on half-pay—as they all say in the fleet, that settled Byng’s fate. “If I cannot disprove what you have said, Captain Cornwall,” exclaimed Byng, as the one-armed captain of the _Revenge_ turned to leave the cabin, after a futile attempt at cross-examination on the part of the Admiral, “may the Lord have mercy on me.” There is no need to go further.

If you could look round to Spithead from the Hard, you would see the old _Royal Sovereign_ on duty as the port flagship. On board her it was that, on the morning of the execution, Admiral Boscawen put his signature to Byng’s death warrant, and the order for the firing party. She is the oldest ship in the King’s Navy, in which connection the _Sovereign_ has other memories of her own. The great Duke of Marlborough named her at her launch in the year that William the Third died, and it was in her great-cabin, during the _Sovereign’s_ first cruise, that Rooke’s council of war planned the swoop on the Vigo treasure galleons, which Vigo Street, in London, serves to commemorate. Some of the old ship’s timbers, it is the fact, formed part of the frame of Charles the First’s world-renowned _Sovereign of the Seas_, and were salved, by special Admiralty order, out of the _débris_ when the _Sovereign of the Seas_ was burned at Chatham in January, 1696, by the carelessness of a sleepy bos’un’s mate.

Out yonder at Spithead, too, at this moment, rides at anchor yet another veteran of our old-time navy, the _Royal Anne_. They have a really marvellous continuity of service, some of these ancient men-of-war. The _Anne_ carries us back to the time of the Dutch raid up the Medway. She was launched as the _Royal Charles_ to fill the place of the _Royal Charles_ that the Dutchmen carried off. William the Third renamed her the _Queen_, in honour of his consort, and the ship kept that name until George the First came over. King George, having at that time his legal consort under lock and key in Germany, promptly renamed the ship. He called her after himself, _Royal George_—the first of the series. Three kings, indeed, have been present at this ship’s various “christenings.” Charles the Second was present at her first naming as the _Royal Charles_; William the Third saw her renamed the _Queen_. George the First paid a special visit to Woolwich when she received the name _Royal George_, and gave £300 to be divided among the dockyard men employed at the float-out, in honour of the occasion. The name _Royal Anne_ was given to the ship only two years ago, when the present _Royal George_, Hawke’s flagship in the Channel Fleet, was launched. She exchanged the name for that borne on the stocks by the _Royal George_.

Within sight from the Hard is an 80-gun three-decker, the _Royal William_, just back from the capture of Louisbourg, Cape Breton. She, too, was launched as long ago as Charles the Second’s reign, under the name _Royal Prince_, and she fought her first battle at Solebay, eighty-six years ago. She carried James Duke of York’s flag during part of the battle, and Prince Rupert in turn had his flag in her in a later battle. William the Third gave the ship her present name, and under it she fought at La Hogue as Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship, not without distinction.

If one might dip into the future and witness events just one year later, the visitor to Portsmouth would then see the _Royal William_ there again, and again just arrived from across the Atlantic. This time she would be in other guise—a ship “in mourning,” all over funereal black, with yards set to point in all directions—“a-cockbill,” as the old term went—and colours at half-mast, firing minute guns, and with a funeral procession of boats putting off from alongside to bear to the shore the body of General Wolfe.

Off the dockyard, on this October afternoon of 1758, awaiting their turn for repair, are two jury-rigged ships. One is a small, old-fashioned sixty-four, firing a broadside of some 540 lb. weight of metal. The other is a giant 80-gun ship of French build, and brand new. She is bigger than the finest first-rate in King George’s service, a fair match for the new _Royal George_, and fires the tremendous broadside of 1136 lb. weight of metal. Yet the little ship took the big one in a midnight battle last February. It was as fine a feat of arms as the Navy has seen. The two are the _Monmouth_ and the _Foudroyant_. They have just come into port, and both show plenty of marks by way of battle scars. If you were to row round the _Foudroyant_ you would find her, on her larboard side, where the _Monmouth_ made her attack, battered almost to splinters. The fight lasted four and a half hours, from eight till after midnight, and went on for most of the time within pistol-shot. The _Monmouth_ in that time used up four tons of powder and about ten tons of cannon-balls. At Gibraltar, where they repaired the _Foudroyant_ to bring her to England, they had to plug over seventy shot-holes at the water-line—and two or three cannon-balls had gone through some of the holes.

One more word of the _Foudroyant_. It would seem as though, in the Portsmouth of these times, we cannot lay the shade of Admiral Byng. The _Foudroyant_ was flagship of the fleet that Byng failed to beat, and Arthur Gardiner, who later commanded the _Monmouth_ when she took the _Foudroyant_, was Byng’s flag-captain. Captain Gardiner, after Byng’s battle, it is said, swore that if ever he got another ship, however small, and met the _Foudroyant_, he would attack her and take her, or sink alongside. He got the _Monmouth_ and met the _Foudroyant_ and kept his word; meeting himself a heroic death on his own quarter-deck in the heat of the battle.

A second French man-of-war, taken on the same occasion and also badly mauled—the _Orphèe_, a smart 70-gun ship, prize to the _Revenge_—lies near the _Foudroyant_; also recently brought to England from up the Straits.[8]

All the day long there keeps on a continuous passing up and down the harbour of small war-vessels and dockyard craft of every sort. Here a fireship goes by, a small two-masted vessel, readily distinguishable by the heavy iron double hooks and grapnels that tip the yard-arms; and that little boat towing astern. The hooks are meant to grip and hold fast the fireship’s destined prey as she sheers alongside. The fireship’s crew set the quick match-train leading to the stacks of pitch-barrels and other combustibles all over the vessel, ablaze at several points just as they are closing the enemy, and the little boat is for them to escape in at the last moment. Now a bomb-ketch passes, a clumsy craft with masts set well aft and two heavy 13-inch mortars, trained for firing over the bows right ahead, set side by side in the fore part of the ship, where the foremast would stand in an ordinary vessel. A rakish-looking Portsmouth privateer, it may be, now comes by, towing a prize astern of her—some captured French “sugar ship” from Martinique, snapped up off Ushant. Then there passes, on the way to one of the guardships or “receiving” ships, a press-gang tender, coming in from a run along the South Coast. She has been out for some days to pick up hands for the fleet, and some of those on board could tell more than one ugly story of high-handed doings among the villages and farmsteads on the coast, within a night’s march from the sea. In confinement under hatches on board, it is quite possible, is also the unfortunate crew of some homeward-bound merchantman, waylaid and boarded almost within sight of home, off the back of the Isle of Wight. It is very sad, but this is war time, and the fleet must be manned.

All day long duty-boats keep going up and down. Now it is an admiral’s twelve-oared barge with the flag at the bows; now a captain’s gig, or a pinnace, pulling between ship and shore; now a midshipman’s boat scurrying off to answer the flagship’s signal. Ships’ long-boats with water-casks and pursers’ stores for various men-of-war in harbour, pass and repass, and beer hoys and yard craft of all kinds. You can always tell a dockyard boat by the heavy way in which the “maties” row, giving their elbows a curious lift with each stroke. At intervals, also, ships’ launches and wherries go past, and lighters carrying cables or anchors, spars and sailcloth, or gangs of shipwrights from the yard on their way to Spithead to attend to pressing repairs to some Channel Fleet ship or frigate just come in and impatient to be off again.

_1. North Dock._
_2. Boat-Houses._
_3. Officers’ Houses._
_4. Dock Clock._
_5. Commissioner’s House._
_6. Sail and Mould Loft._
_7. Rope House._
_8. Royal Academy._
_9. Landing Place at the Dock._
_10. Rigging House._
_11. The Common._
_12. Officers’ Lodging in the Gun-Wharf._
_13. Lamport Gate._
_14. Portsmouth Church._
_15. The Point._
_16. Flag on the Platform._
_17. Round Tower._
_18. Spit-Head._

_From a Contemporary Print._]

Now and again, two or three times a month perhaps, a line of ships’ launches from newly arrived vessels from Spithead are to be seen following one another up the harbour, crammed with men—swarthy foreigners, poor, ragged, dejected-looking wretches for the most part. Each boat has its guard of red-coated marines, standing under arms at the head and stern, all with bayonets fixed. The boatloads comprise prisoners of war, taken at sea and on their way to undergo confinement in Porchester Castle,[9] going to join their two thousand compatriots already there. A favoured few in due course may obtain exchange by cartel, but the greater number must perforce endure their captivity to the end of the war.

Such were some of the every-day scenes to be witnessed in Portsmouth Harbour at the very time that the Admiralty order for the building of the _Victory_ was being drafted.

Ashore in the streets of Portsea, old salts who had fought with Vernon when he took Porto Bello, are to be met with any day of the week. You may come across, indeed, an occasional old fellow who can remember Benbow, and how the news first came to England of the taking of Gibraltar. And sitting at his door on a sunny morning you may yet find an old Portsmouth grandsire here and there who can carry his memory further back still, and tell you how the bonfires blazed in High Street in honour of the battle of La Hogue.

Turn away now from the harbour and the Hard and take a short walk through the streets of Portsmouth town. Soldiers in the uniform that Corporal John’s men wore at Blenheim and Ramillies, rub shoulders with you every hour of the day. Some are for Canada, some for the West Indies, some for Northern Germany. All are passing through Portsmouth on the way to the great depôt camp in the Isle of Wight where the troops for oversea service assemble. Most are men of the foot regiments, with long-skirted red coats, red waistcoats, and red breeches with high white gaiters. Some wear the big cocked hat that came in with George the First; others the tall sugar-loaf grenadier cap of the Prussian pattern. Those with buff facings are “Howard’s” men; those with yellow facings, “Kingsley’s”; those with willow green, “Rufane’s”; those with blue, “Duroure’s.” For six or seven years past our regiments have had numbers, but the men still hold to the old way, and each regiment calls itself for preference according to the custom of the army for these eighty years past. Now and then a party of dragoons pass through the streets, red coated and wearing black leather fur-crested helmets and long jack-boots. These come from one of the cavalry camps at Chichester or Southampton. Occasionally, too, cocked-hatted artillerymen are to be met with, in blue coats with red waistcoats and breeches and white gaiters.

Batches of men of the standing garrison of the Fortress of Portsmouth, the “Royal Invalids,” as the corps they belong to is called, are to be seen about the streets at all hours; veterans drafted from off the Chelsea Hospital out-pension list as being sufficiently able-bodied for home-service fortress duty, old war-worn warriors bearing scars, many of them got in action at Dettingen and Fontenoy.

A Portsmouth visitor would certainly, too, have seen in and about the town a personage of some notoriety in those times: Governor Hawley, Commandant of the Garrison, the Duke of Cumberland’s hard-riding, hard-drinking friend. “Bloody Hawley” was what the soldiers called him, taking the _sobriquet_ from the name that years before the hapless clansmen of the north gave the man who led “Butcher” Cumberland’s dragoons in the merciless chase after Culloden. In General Hawley you would have seen perhaps as badly hated an officer as ever held a King of England’s commission. “Chief Justice Hawley” the rank and file also called him: and the reason for it any one would have seen for himself by walking round Governor’s Green any day of the week, or passing beyond the postern and strolling out across the Portsmouth ramparts to the glacis on an execution morning.

* * * * *

The talk of the place—and of all England too at the moment—is of a French invasion.

England, in 1758, had not yet recovered from her last bad fit of nerves, brought on by truculent vapourings from Versailles at the outset of the Seven Years’ War. Government was urgently pushing on arrangements for forming an efficient militia force to fill the place of the regular battalions fighting abroad in Germany and in America, in view of the invasion scare that was threatening in the near future. Already reports had come to hand from France of the building of flat-bottomed beach-boats and preparations for large encampments next summer in the vicinity of the French Channel ports—at Dunkirk and Calais, Havre and St. Malo, and in Lower Brittany on the shores of Quiberon Bay. In every county of England and Wales the local authorities were getting ready for the early muster of the new militia levies—now, for the first time in our history, to be formed into regiments. Along the coasts of Sussex and Kent, from Selsea to beyond Dungeness and Hythe, where the open coast-line might seem to invite attack—at Littlehampton, Brighton, Blatchington, Seaford, Hastings, Rye, Hythe, Folkestone—the sites for four- and six-gun batteries were being pegged out by military engineers, to be thrown up by local labourers under expert supervision. At every point along the seashore from Spurn Head to the Lizard the beacons were being watched night and day, while the local authorities of every seaboard district had standing orders to be ready, on the first alarm of a hostile landing, to transport the women and children in farm carts to the nearest towns, and drive inland the horses and sheep and cattle.

We have to turn over many pages of the world’s history to get to the year that saw the _Victory_ brought into the British Navy. The Seven Years’ War itself, the exigencies of which called the _Victory_ into existence, is nowadays but a schoolbook term. Frederick the Great, in the year that the _Victory_ first figures in the Navy Estimates, was the man of the hour. Peter the Great’s daughter ruled in Russia. The “Old Pretender”—the “warming-pan baby” of Whitehall, of the year 1688—was still alive, dragging out his last years in Rome as a pensioner of the Pope. Captain Cook was as yet an unknown master’s mate, serving on board a man-of-war away across the Atlantic with Boscawen. Nelson, as has been said, was a long-clothes baby; Napoleon and Wellington were not yet born. The Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Viscount Ligonier, was a French Huguenot refugee, born a subject of the Grand Monarque, who first saw war under Marlborough at Blenheim. Wolfe was an unheard of Major-General, nearly at the bottom of the list. News of Clive’s victory at Plassey had not long reached England. The elder Pitt, “the Great Commoner,” had only been in power for little over a twelvemonth. William Pitt was not yet born. Smeaton was building the Eddystone Lighthouse. James Watt was a Glasgow mathematical instrument maker, his ideas about steam hardly yet in embryo. Burke was a young Irishman in London, making a poor living out of essays for Grub Street magazines. Lord Chesterfield was still writing his letters. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary was a new book, being advertised in publishers’ announcements, in two bulky quarto volumes at £4. 10s. Garrick was playing nightly at Drury Lane.

It was still the custom at Bath to announce the arrival of lords and ladies and “nabobs” with peals on the Abbey bells and serenadings by the Assembly band. Brighton was hardly on the map as yet; it was merely Brighthelmstone, a Sussex fishing village, just beginning to be visited for sea bathing by the handful of people who had heard of it through Dr. Russell’s pamphlets. Old London Bridge still had houses on it. Traffic in imported merchandise throughout the country was still carried on by pack-horse. One coach—or “machine”—a month, ran between London and Edinburgh, and took a fortnight on the road. A similar conveyance between London and Portsmouth took, under the most favourable conditions, two whole days. The mails went by postboy, and hardly a week passed without people failing to get their letters, because the local postboy had been stopped by a highwayman. Gibbets, indeed, with the bleached bones of these gentry in chains, stood on every main road out of London. Pirates were still from time to time publicly borne from the Old Bailey down the Thames in boats, heavily chained, to be hanged at Execution Dock and gibbeted at Galleons Point—on the average half a dozen a year. Just as the Admiralty draughtsmen were outlining the plans of the _Victory_, the news of the hour for nine people out of ten in England was the committal of Eugene Aram to York Castle for the murder of Daniel Clark.

_Thomas Rowlandson._]

_Thomas Rowlandson._]

On the day that the _Victory’s_ keel was laid two men were pilloried in Cheapside for blackmailing a City merchant, and a bad egg accidentally hitting the Sheriff’s officer in charge of the proceedings led to a riot and fighting with drawn swords. On the day before the _Victory_ was launched, one Mary Norwood, an unfaithful wife, condemned at Taunton Assizes for poisoning her husband, was publicly strangled in the market-place of Ilverston, her home, and her body tied to the stake and burned before several hundred spectators.

So far back does the life-story of our “old” _Victory_ take us, touching at either end the middle of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, directly linking King George the Second with King Edward the Seventh.

HOW THEY BUILT THE _VICTORY_ AT CHATHAM

This is the story of the building of the _Victory_ at Chatham Dockyard, and how, why, and when the order to set to work on this particular first-rate man-of-war was given.

On the 20th of September, 1758, Lord Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, after commanding at sea on Special Service off the coast of France all the summer, arrived in London to resume his duties on the Board. Nine days later, in the old parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, was born into this world the infant boy to whom six days later was given the name Horatio Nelson. The two dates are a coincidence of interest in our story of the _Victory_.

Anson came back to town to hold conference with Mr. Secretary Pitt, the War Minister. Pitt had laid his plans for the future, and was ready. There were first of all to be no more half-military, half-naval expeditions up and down the coast of France. They had done little real harm to the enemy, and in two cases had ended in downright failure. The wits of St. James’s were not to get a second chance for a sneer that “the French were not to be conquered by every Duke of Marlborough” (an allusion to the general commanding the troops employed—the second Duke). The Channel Fleet was not to be received a second time on returning to Spithead with a dumb peal on the bells of Portsmouth Church. That plan of campaign had been to some extent a legacy to Pitt from the previous Ministry; he was prepared now to set on foot his own scheme. Great Britain would henceforward take the offensive vigorously and deal with the enemy at all points. Pitt’s plan was to make it first and foremost a naval war, to attack the oversea possessions of France all the world over, utilizing every ship at the disposal of the nation. The striking success achieved by Boscawen at Louisbourg had shown the way, and what could be done.

The War Minister’s projects made known to him, Anson acted. On the 14th of October the First Lord called on the Navy Board—the Department charged with the general administration and dockyard business of the Navy—for a detailed return of every seaworthy ship in the fleet, and of every ship capable of being made seaworthy. On the 24th of October he called for a Supplementary Return of the older ships, which, if for the present available, would necessarily, through wear and tear, go off the effective within three years and need replacing. Both returns, from details specially supplied by each dockyard, were presented to the Admiralty on the last day of November. They were considered forthwith, and a decision in regard to them was come to on the 13th of December. Five days later, as the result, a shipbuilding programme to add twelve ships of the line to the fleet was laid, with the Navy Estimates for the coming year, on the table of the House of Commons. Nine of the twelve men-of-war proposed were to be put in hand at once—five in the dockyards and four in merchants’ yards. At the head of the list was a new first-rate of a hundred guns, as to the preparations for which the Commissioner of Chatham Dockyard had already received instructions. That ship was the future _Victory_.

* * * * *

They were ready at Chatham. They had been expecting an order of the kind for some years. Ever since, indeed, the autumn of 1746, when the Admiralty had made inquiries at Chatham in regard to a new first-rate that it was then proposed to build at Chatham, “in the room,” as the official term went, of the three-decker _Victory_, old Admiral Balchen’s ship, lost with nine hundred men and officers on board, on the Casquets in the terrible shipwreck of October, 1744. The project for various reasons had been shelved, but the dockyard authorities at Chatham had not lost sight of it. To that fact, probably, we owe it that the next _Victory_, when she at length did come into existence, lasted to fight at Trafalgar, and also, in some degree, that the _Victory_ remains afloat at the present hour.