Battle of Beachy Head, 1690: the Dutch van left to fight alone

In 1688 William of Orange, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, took the English throne, and the deposed King James II found an ally in Louis XIV of France. In 1690 James was fighting for his crown in Ireland with French help, and the struggle merged with the wider Nine Years' War. Command of the Channel mattered more than ever, as the Oxford Companion to British History notes: France could threaten England with invasion as a diversion from Ireland.²

The English fleet was stretched thin. According to Leigh Husband Kimmel, writing for EBSCO, it had too few ships to guard the Channel and support William's campaign in Ireland at the same time, and Jacob F. Field's Britannica account adds that many ships had been sent off to protect merchant shipping.³

Tourville comes up the Channel

On 23 June 1690 Admiral Anne-Hilarion de Cotentin, Count of Tourville, sailed out of Brest with the combined Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets and orders to destroy the allied fleet. Britannica counts seventy-seven ships of the line; the Oxford Companion gives seventy-eight vessels. Against them the allies had fifty-seven ships of the line in the Channel.⁴

The fleets met near the Isle of Wight on 2 July and sailed east up the Channel without fighting. The allied commander, Arthur Herbert, Earl of Torrington, was cautious. "The odds are great," he wrote, and his aim was not to hazard his fleet. On 9 July Queen Mary II, who governed while William was in Ireland, ordered him to engage.⁵

The Dutch in the van

Torrington formed his fleet in three squadrons off Eastbourne. The Zeeland admiral Cornelis Evertsen led the white squadron of 22 Dutch ships in the van, Torrington the red squadron in the center, and Ralph Delaval the blue squadron, English and Dutch ships, in the rear, according to the maritime archaeology database of the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency. Torrington held the weather gage, the windward position, and on 10 July he bore down on the French.⁶

The attack went wrong from the start. In Field's account the Dutch failed to reach the head of the French line, so the leading French ships were able to cut across them while the French center closed in from behind. The surrounded Dutch were battered without mercy, and the English could not or did not come to their aid.⁷

The Dutch remembered it bitterly. The nineteenth-century biographer A. J. van der Aa wrote that the English admiral held back and left the Dutch to an overwhelming enemy, and that they fought on for three hours. He credits Evertsen with saving the rest of his squadron by signaling it to drop anchor with all sails still set, so that wind and tide carried the French fleet past them. Britannica gives the order to anchor to Torrington, who broke off the fight that way as the tide took the French out of range.⁸

Retreat to the Thames

Torrington then made for the Thames, abandoning Dutch ships too damaged to follow. Van der Aa writes that Evertsen's battered squadron, still pursued for days, anchored in the mouth of the Thames off Sheppey on 18 July.⁹

The losses are given differently. Britannica counts 13 Dutch ships and one English ship lost. The Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency records eight ships of the line lost, all Dutch except HMS Resolution, and says that of the 22 Dutch ships only three were still fit for service. The Oxford Companion speaks of six Dutch ships, and EBSCO of twelve allied ships. On one point all agree: the French lost none.¹⁰

A victory not followed up

For a few weeks France ruled the Channel, but Tourville did little with it. He landed briefly near Teignmouth in Devon, set the town on fire and sailed to Le Havre to repair his ships. Like Torrington, he was criticized for leaving the field, and the Dutch agency notes that he was relieved of his command. On 11 July, the day after Beachy Head, William beat James at the Boyne, which took some of the sting out of the defeat at sea.¹¹

Torrington was sent to the Tower of London and court-martialed for failing to support the Dutch. He defended himself with a phrase that outlived him: by keeping his fleet intact, he argued, it remained a "fleet in being" that still protected England from invasion. Kimmel calls this the first time a commander put the idea into words. He was acquitted but lost his command.¹²

Evertsen was praised on both sides of the sea. Queen Mary wrote to him in her own hand to thank him, William wrote as well, and the States of Zeeland thanked him for his conduct and courage. The Encyclopedia of Zeeland records the nickname his boldness earned him: Keesje de Duivel, little Kees the Devil.¹³

By autumn the allies had ninety ships in the Channel and the French moment had passed. In May 1692 a much larger Anglo-Dutch fleet destroyed Tourville's ships at Barfleur and La Hougue. Beachy Head remains, in Kimmel's words, the last time the Royal Navy was beaten in a fleet action, and the Dutch agency judges that the Dutch navy never fully recovered from it.¹⁴