...an army of twenty thousand troops assembles around Cherbourg, while the French fleet, Europe’s finest, concentrates in the Norman and Breton ports.
Reminiscent of 1588 and the threat from the Spanish Armada, all England is alerted and its defenses prepared to resist the invasion, but the coming battle for the control of the channel is to be a very uneven struggle.
Anne Hilarion de Tourville, as a Knight of Malta at age seventeen, had fought his first naval battle on a frigate of the Order of Malta.
Joining the French Royal Navy at twenty-five, he had started an active career, fighting the 1673 campaign of the Franco-Dutch War on the Sans-Pareil, at the Battle of Agosta where he was in command of the Syrene, and later in command of the Sceptre.
He had served under Abraham Duquesne during the campaigns of 1676, and had become a commander in 1690 during the War of the Grand Alliance.
He had his flag on the Soleil-Royal, where it is to stay until the battle of La Hougue in 1692.
Reinforcements from Toulon fail to arrive; Tourville nevertheless attacks.
His fleet of forty-four vessels is soon scattered by Admirals Russell’s and Rooke’s fleet of ninety-nine rated ships.
French skill and seamanship gain the advantage on the first day, and Tourville begins that night to withdraw westward, sending twenty ships to St. Malo.
