Battle of Beachy Head
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After besting the English at Bantry Bay, Ireland, in the first major naval engagement of the Nine Years War, the French navy, supporting the deposed King James II, defeated an allied Anglo-Dutch fleet supporting William III off Beachy Head, in southern England, on July 10 (June 30 OS), 1690. The victory briefly gave France control of the English Channel and led to the imprisonment of the English admiral, Arthur Herbert, Earl of Torrington, in the Tower of London.
On June 23, 1690, the French admiral, Anne-Hilarion de Contentin, Count of Tourville, sailed the combined Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets out of Brest with orders to destroy the Anglo-Dutch fleet. His force of seventy-seven ships of the line outnumbered the allied fleet in the Channel, which had thinned to fifty-seven ships of the line because many had been sent elsewhere to protect commercial shipping.
On July 2, the fleets met near the Isle of Wight and sailed up the Channel without engaging. Seeing that the French outnumbered him significantly, Torrington wanted to withdraw to protect his fleet, but on July 9 Queen Mary II ordered him to engage the French. The next day, near Beachy Head, roughly midway between the Isle of Wight and the Strait of Dover, he sailed toward the French with the Dutch in the vanguard. The Dutch failed to reach the front of the French line, so the leading French ships were able to cut across them while the French center completed an encirclement from the rear. The surrounded Dutch ships were battered mercilessly, the English unable to help them. After hours of fighting, Torrington broke off the fight by ordering his fleet to drop anchor, so the tide carried the French out of range. He then sailed for the Thames, abandoning Dutch ships too damaged to follow.
Imprisoned and court-martialed, Torrington was cleared of failing to support the Dutch but lost his post. Despite his supremacy, Tourville did not exploit his victory apart from briefly landing near Teignmouth in Devon and setting the town afire, then sailing to Le Havre to rest and repair his fleet. Like Torrington, Tourville was criticized for leaving the field of battle.
On July 11 (July 1 OS), the day after Beachy Head, William’s army decisively defeated James’s at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland, taking some of the sting out of the naval defeat. By autumn, the Anglo-Dutch had ninety ships in the Channel, and the brief French superiority there was over. Two years later, in May 1692, a vastly superior Anglo-Dutch fleet destroyed Tourville’s at the Battle of Barflour/La Hougue, off the eastern tip of the Cherbourg Peninsula.
Losses: Anglo-Dutch allied, 13 Dutch ships and 1 British ship of a combined fleet of 57; French, no ships of 77.
