In November 1759, in the fourth year of the Seven Years’ War—called the French and Indian War in North America—British and French ships-of-the-line clashed, firing broadsides among the small islands, rocks, and shoals of Quiberon Bay off the coast of southern Brittany. In a raging gale and a place too tight for tactical maneuvers, the ships and men fought it out in what was more free-for-all than classic naval battle. When the firing stopped—and the fires had burned out—nine of the fighting ships and the lives of 3,700 men had been lost. But history had been made.
Naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote in 1890 that the Battle of Quiberon Bay was the Trafalgar of the Seven Years’ War. The British Navy would call it “one of the finest victories in the annals of the Royal Navy.”1 The battle destroyed French naval power for a generation, confirmed British command of the seas, and saved Britain from invasion.
It also sealed the fate of North America.
The Beginning of the End
The Seven Years’ War had begun to turn against France 16 months earlier, in July 1758, when British forces captured the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. The fall of Quebec in September 1759 added to the growing French difficulties.
In hopes of a decisive, last-ditch action that would shift the war’s momentum by diverting British troops and attention from North America, French planners began preparations for an invasion of England and Scotland.2 Those plans were set back, however, when British Rear Admiral George Brydges Rodney’s attack on Le Havre in July 1759 destroyed many of the barges that had been collected for the planned invasion, and Admiral Edward Boscawen defeated the French Mediterranean fleet off Spain and Portugal in August at the Battle of Lagos. After the latter action, some of the ships that had been intended to join 21 French ships-of-the-line lying at Brest to support the invasion wound up blockaded in Cadiz instead. The British also captured the sugar plantations of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean around the same time.
The net result of all these actions was that the French scaled back their plans to an attempted invasion of Scotland alone. Admiral Hubert de Brienne, Comte de Conflans, who commanded the ships at Brest, was instructed to sail south to Quiberon Bay as soon as possible and join up with the transports and troops there. The combined force would then sail for Scotland.
Conflans wanted to collect his transports in Quiberon Bay to get to sea before the British reestablished control of the English Channel. If successful, Conflans would have command of a force capable of striking anywhere along the Scottish or Irish coast.3
Conflans, who was born in 1690, had served in the French Navy since the age of 18, when he fought in the War of the Spanish Succession. He later battled pirates in the Caribbean and off the Moroccan coast, served in the War of the Polish Succession, and—in 1747, during the War of the Austrian Succession—was appointed governor-general of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). En route to that assignment, however, he was wounded and captured after a fight with a British ship. He was held prisoner until the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.
In 1752, he was named Lieutenant Général of the navy and, in 1758, a Marshal of France with command over the proposed English invasion.4
Blockade
The Royal Navy, by then aware of the French invasion preparations, blockaded Brest and much of France’s Atlantic coast. It succeeded at the difficult task through a rotating system of refitting and supplying ships that Sir Edward Hawke, Admiral of the Channel Fleet, and Lord George Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, devised.5 The blockade also prevented French reinforcements from being sent to the fighting in North America.
Hawke, like Conflans, had spent his life in the navy, and Mahan would later call him the “first great name in British naval annals.”6 Hawke entered the navy as a midshipman in February 1720, at age 15, and fought against the French in the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748. In 1747, he was promoted to rear admiral. In October of that year, he captured six French warships in an action off Cape Finisterre, Spain, for which he was knighted. By 1756 he was a full admiral.7
Hawke had been on the Brest blockade since June.8 But on 7 November 1759, as foul weather hit the Brittany coast, his flagship, the Royal George, was forced to run north for shelter in the harbor at Torbay. He left behind Captain Robert Duff with five 50-gun ships-of-the-line and nine frigates to try and maintain the blockade. But not even the newly devised British system of blockade, historian Fred Anderson wrote, “could keep the Channel squadron on station in the teeth of the Atlantic’s late-autumn gales.”9
The French Opportunity
Taking advantage of the gale, a small French fleet under Admiral Jean-Baptiste-François Bompart arrived in the area from the West Indies and slipped into Brest to join Conflans. Mahan noted that Bompart’s crews partially were used to reinforce Conflans’ undermanned ships. The strengthened French force then slipped out of the harbor on an easterly wind on 14 November.10 Admiral Conflans’ 21 ships-of-the-line ran south toward Quiberon Bay.
On the afternoon of 15 November, the supply hoy Unity spotted the French fleet and notified Hawke, who coincidentally had set sail the same day as Conflans headed back to the blockaded area. He moved to intercept the French, who had moved to 70 miles southwest of Belle Isle, west of the opening of Quiberon Bay, and were struggling with erratic winds on the night of 19 November. By the following dawn, Conflans had spotted Duff’s ships. With the weather growing worse, the French attacked. Duff split his command in two and fled, with the French center and van in pursuit of the two divisions. Conflans’ rear guard meanwhile held near the bay because of unidentified sails approaching from the west.
Those sails were the main British fleet’s. Mahan notes that Hawke’s diligence had brought him up despite Conflans’ belief that it was impossible the British could have reached him with “forces superior or even equal to his own.”11 He was mistaken.
The Fight Begins
Hawke signaled “line abreast” and moved on the French ships. When, around 0830, the French finally identified the approaching sails as Hawke’s ships, they realized 23 British ships were closing in, as well as Duff’s four 50-gun men-of-war, against their own 21 scattered ships-of-the-line.12 Conflans ordered the chase broken off and headed for Quiberon Bay. He was “trusting and believing,” Mahan wrote, that
Hawke would not dare to follow, under the conditions of the weather, into a bay which French authorities describe as containing banks and shoals and lined with reefs which the navigator rarely sees without fright and never passes without emotion. It was in the midst of these ghastly dangers that forty-four large ships were about to engage pell-mell; for the space was too contracted for fleet manœuvres.13
Boldly, Hawke pursued the fleeing French ships. The British ships engaged the French rear as Conflans, leading the van, was rounding the Cardinals, the southernmost rocks at the entrance of Quiberon Bay.14
At the time, British captains were required to follow the Admiralty’s Fighting Instructions, which dictated that British ships were to form a line parallel to the enemy and slowly sail past, pounding out broadsides until one side or the other withdrew. Most European navies, including France’s, followed similar tactics. But at Quiberon Bay, Admiral Hawke assessed the “terrain” of the bay and the weather conditions, took the initiative, and disregarded the Fighting Instructions.
Anderson writes that Hawke—“one of the most imaginative, and certainly one of the boldest officers in the Royal Navy”—ordered the attack by hoisting the signal for “general chase,” putting his faith in the seamanship of his officers and, in effect, ordering the captains to attack at will. The ships raised all the sails they could manage “and bore down on the French without regard to the hazards of the bay or the ferocity of the gale.”15
The opposing forces were strung out for miles along one of the most dangerous coasts in Europe, but the gap between the trailing French and leading British ships was closing. About 1400, they engaged, and around 1500, the Revenge briefly attacked the 80-gun Formidable, flagship of the French rear, causing some damage and then moving on to engage the Magnifique, which lost her foretopmast and foreyard in the fighting.
Admiral Conflans had tried to form the traditional line of battle, and other British ships were now sailing along what little remained of it, hoping to reach the head of the French fleet. A heavy squall hit the area, costing the Chichester her foretopsail yard, while three other British ships—the Magnanime, Montague, and Warspite—fouled each other, damaging their rigging and delaying the British pursuit. As the rain abated, the Dorchester moved up the French line, engaging five different ships as she sailed past. When the muddle had been cleared, the Magnanime and Warspite fell on the wounded Formidable.
“Her starboard side,” the surgeon of the British Coventry would write, “was pierced like a colander.”16 Rear-Admiral St. André du Verger and his brother were killed on board the Formidable.
At about 1600, the Formidable struck her colors. By then, most of Conflans’ ships had entered the bay, where they milled about without any noticeable formation. “The confusion was awful,” a French officer later wrote of the battle.17
The rest of the contest devolved into a melee of isolated single-ship actions, with British historian Geoffrey Marcus noting the “many thousands of spectators who had run out from Croisic and the surrounding villages.”18 Ships crashed into rocks, ran aground, and collided with each other as the French tried to form a defensive line and the British ships, “swarming around them like wolves around sheep,” prevented them from doing so.19
The French 74-gun Thésée was damaged enough in action against the British 90-gun Torbay that she was listing, and seawater poured in through her lee gunports. She sank, taking 600 of her crew with her to the bottom. The Torbay’s boats were able to rescue only 22 survivors. Meanwhile, the French Héros, another 74, had been battered to the point that she lost her foremast and mizzen topmast and all her officers were dead.20
Admiral Conflans directed his ship, the 80-gun Soleil Royal, to exit the bay, but as she attempted to do so, she encountered Admiral Hawke’s Royal George. The two flagships approached each other, trading broadsides, but other French ships—including the Intrépide—intervened in hopes of protecting Conflans. Their action allowed the Soleil Royal to break off from the Royal George, and she anchored near Croisic at the southern entrance to the bay. The Royal George kept fighting, engaging several other ships, including the Superbe, which the Royal George sank with just two thunderous broadsides.
With darkness falling quickly, Hawke signaled to disengage for the night.21
‘The Great French Fleet Was Annihilated’
At dawn, Conflans awoke to realize he had anchored surrounded by British ships, and again he tried to escape, but this time he ran aground. He ordered the Soleil Royal burned rather than surrender her to the enemy. Two other French ships had escaped during the night, and in the darkness, seven French ships had also been able to move deep into the bay. After jettisoning guns and equipment and catching the high tide, they anchored in the mouth of the Vilaine River.
The fighting was largely over. Hawke sent three of Captain Duff’s ships into the bay to destroy grounded French vessels. They tried several times to reach the ships at the Vilaine’s mouth—including an attempt with fire boats—but without success. The ships remained stuck in the river’s mud and were lost. “The great French fleet was annihilated,” Mahan wrote.22
In the weeks following the battle, Conflans was condemned in France for the defeat, with one French officer calling the fighting at Quiberon Bay “a disgrace to our Navy,” an assessment some modern historians have endorsed.23 “At the crucial juncture off Belle Isle,” Geoffrey Marcus wrote, “[Conflans] appears to have lost his head. First he stood towards the enemy; then he fled from them in such haste as to leave his rear unsupported; next he decided to take refuge in Quiberon Bay; and soon after he wanted to get out again.”24
Hawke, on the other hand, became a national hero in Britain. He was praised for his daring and seamanship in pursuing the French, an achievement one eyewitness said “very few men would have had the nerve to hazard.”
The English and Scottish coasts were made safe, the seas were owned by the British, and France’s North American colonies were doomed. “Although few contemporaries realized it,” Anderson wrote, “the Battle of Quiberon Bay, and not the more celebrated Battle of Quebec, was the decisive military event of 1759.”25
Aftermath
The defeat off Brittany left the French incapable of supplying or reinforcing the troops they still had fighting in the New World. As a result, French forces in Montreal surrendered a year later, in September 1760, effectively ending the North American phase of the Seven Years’ War, though elsewhere it sputtered along for almost three more years. The American phase officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1763. The European part concluded with the Treaty of Hubertusburg, signed five days later. France’s colonies in Canada became English possessions.
Hawke continued to gather accolades, being named to the honorary posts of Rear Admiral of Great Britain in 1763 and Vice Admiral of Great Britain in 1765. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in December 1766 and Admiral of the Fleet in January 1768. In May 1776, he was made Baron Hawke of Towton. He died in 1781. Meanwhile, Conflans, disgraced by his defeat, was forced to try to explain what had happened and why he had burned his flagship. He spent his last years in Paris, dying there in 1777.
The victory at Quiberon Bay and territorial gains on the western side of the Atlantic were part of an especially successful year for Great Britain. In addition to the triumph off Brittany, the British also took Guadeloupe in the West Indies and Gorée on the west coast of Africa and saw the destruction of the French presence in India and the East Indies.
As a result, 1759 became—and remains—known in Britain as “the Year of Victories.”26
1. Royal Navy, “The Battle of Quiberon Bay,” www.royalnavy.mod.uk.
2. Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 4.
3. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 381.
4. “Hubert de Brienne,” Everyone’s Encyclopedia, everipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_de_Brienne/.
5. Anderson, Crucible of War, 381.
6. CAPT A. T. Mahan, USN (Ret.), “Edward Hawke: The First Great Name in British Naval Annals,” www.history1700s.com/index.php/articles/8-biography/830-edward-hawke-biography.html.
7. J. O. Thorne and T. C. Collocott, eds., Chambers Biographical Dictionary (London: W & R Chambers Ltd., 1984), 64.
8. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War, 27.
9. Anderson, Crucible of War, 381.
10. CAPT A. T. Mahan, USN (Ret.), The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, Project Gutenberg e-Book #13529 (1890).
11. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History.
12. Mahan, 301–2.
13. Mahan, 302.
14. Mahan, 303.
15. Anderson, Crucible of War, 382
16. Geoffrey Marcus, Quiberon Bay: The Campaign in Home Waters, 1759 (London: Hollis & Carter, 1960), 152.
17. Marcus, Quiberon Bay, 149–53.
18. Marcus, 149–53.
19. Anderson, Crucible of War, 382.
20. Marcus, Quiberon Bay, 153.
21. Marcus, 153–56.
22. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 303.
23. Marcus, Quiberon Bay, 161.
24. Marcus, 161.
25. Anderson, Crucible of War, 383.
26. Cecil King, H.M.S.: His Majesty’s Ships and Their Forbears (London & New York: The Studio Publications, 1940), 132.