How the British Navy came by its first Formidable man-of-war, the predecessor in the direct line of the fine first-class battleship, the Formidable of our modern Navy, is one of the most exciting tales in our naval annals. It serves too to commemorate one of the most brilliant victories ever won at sea—the dashing encounter on that eventful winter’s afternoon in the Bay of Biscay, “When Hawke came swooping from the West”:—

How the Formidable passed that day from France to England is, indeed, something of which both England and France may be jointly proud. Never fought men more heroically on both sides—the enemy to keep, we to take—amid all the horrors of a furious storm and ever imminent shipwreck and catastrophe.

This is the story of how, where, and when the Royal Navy won its first Formidable, the first of a famous line.

It was the afternoon of the 20th of November, 1759, a Tuesday. The scene was among the black-fanged reefs of granite rock, and the treacherous quicksands that fringe the “sickle-shaped sweep” of Quiberon Bay on the coast of the Morbihan, in Lower Brittany, in the north-eastern quarter of the Bay of Biscay. The battle was fought in the height of a wild raging storm from the Atlantic, a tremendous gale from the north-west, howling blasts of wind, and torrents of hissing rain, and thick, dark weather, with the sea lashed to fury all round, and gigantic breakers running “so high that no boat could live for a moment among them,” as one who was present described. “A network of shoals and sandbanks” is what a French writer calls Quiberon Bay, “with heavy surf breaking along the shore on the calmest days of summer, and ugly cross-currents swirling to and fro with the strength and rush of a mill race”; a place “lined with reefs that the navigator never sees without alarm, and never passes without emotion.”

Hawke and his captains swept down on the French fleet, cornered between the storm and the shore, in the midst of the rocks and quicksands; without charts themselves, and for the most part without pilots, or, at least, pilots that they could trust; flinging themselves on the enemy heedless of gale and breakers, attacking ship after ship of the French as each was met with, “to make,” in Hawke’s own expressive words, “downright work of them.”

De Conflans, Maréchal de France, commanded the French Fleet. He was one of a batch of eight marshals created, honoris causa, some two years before; a boon companion of royalty, one of the “flying tables” set, a fine figure of a man to look at, as his portrait at Versailles shows him, handsome, tall, and well made, a hard rider to hounds at Compiègne or Fontainebleau, with a pretty wit in the boudoir and over the card table; also one of the Pompadour’s courtier friends, which was perhaps the main reason why a man of de Conflans’ stamp as a naval officer found himself in chief command at that place that day. There were marshals of the French Navy as well as of the army under the ancien régime. The rank was first instituted by Louis XIV when he solaced Admiral Tourville with the bâton and its consequences—a big salary, the title of “Monseigneur,” and court precedence at the head of the Grand Officers of State—to make up for his ill-fortune at La Hogue.

As an admiral Conflans proved an utter failure. That morning, when he first, some forty miles to westward of Belleisle, saw Hawke approaching, he formed line and brought-to. He would fight the English, he said, in the open sea to the south of Belleisle. As Hawke came nearer, when it was too late, he changed his mind and ran off pell-mell to take shelter among the reefs and shoals of Quiberon. With Conflans were de Beauffrement, Vice-Admiral, the second in command, and the Comte de Verger, Rear-Admiral, the third in command, who had his flag in the Formidable. De Verger’s squadron formed up astern, its place in the line of battle.

As Hawke’s leading ships began to overtake the French the gallant Rear-Admiral shortened sail and dropped back. He would await his fate at what in the circumstances was the post of honour, as rearmost ship of all. There, practically single-handed, the Formidable bore the brunt of Hawke’s opening attack.

Hawke’s van ships caught up the rear of the French Fleet just to the south-east of Belleisle, as it was in the act of heading to round the Cardinals, a chain of dangerous rocks and outlying islets, and stand in for Quiberon Bay, then still ahead of them some eighteen to twenty miles. Conflans was that distance from his intended refuge when the first shots went off. Both fleets began to fight as they overlapped, the British coming up under every stitch of canvas which their masts could stand—“not a topsail was reefed”—the ships now wallowing in the trough of the waves, now plunging and rolling and staggering forward on the crest, while heavy surging cross-seas burst and broke in deluges of seething foam over the ships’ bows. So terrible was the weather that on board some of the British ships men were flung down on deck or hurled helplessly about and seriously injured and maimed. In one or two men were washed overboard and never seen again. The guns were double-breeched; eight men were at the wheel in every ship. So on that awful November afternoon did Hawke swoop down to strike.

On the French side there were twenty-one ships—with Hawke, twenty-three; but the French ships were on the average bigger vessels than ours, and carried heavier guns. That for fighting purposes in such weather gave Conflans the advantage. Another thing was this: all the fighting that day was done by barely two-thirds of Hawke’s fleet. A full third of the British Fleet were too far in rear—out-paced in the chase—and were unable to come up in time to have any influence on the fortune of the fight.

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.

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.

“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.