Battle of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, 1622: the Huguenot fleet against the king

The Île de Ré lies off La Rochelle, across the mouth of the channel that leads to the city from the Bay of Biscay. In the autumn of 1622 the strait between the island and the mainland, the Pertuis Breton, became the stage for a sea fight between the fleet of King Louis XIII and the fleet of his most stubborn Protestant city.²

Background

After Henry IV was murdered in 1610, the crown under his son Louis XIII grew more openly Catholic, and the Huguenots, the French Protestants, rose against it in the 1620s. In 1620 the king forced the restoration of Catholic worship in Protestant Béarn, and a Huguenot political assembly sitting at La Rochelle answered with defiance. Henri, Duke of Rohan, became the rebels' foremost general.³

The war of 1621 went badly for the crown at its climax. Louis took Saint-Jean-d'Angély after a siege, but his army spent nearly three months before Montauban and abandoned the siege in mid-November. In the spring of 1622 he took the field again, captured several Huguenot towns and laid siege to Montpellier.⁴ › Battle of Jarnac, 1569

La Rochelle was the Huguenots' great port, and it had a fleet of its own. Its admiral was Jean Guiton, whom the city gave command of its ships when the unrest returned; the naval historian Charles de La Roncière describes him as a peaceable shipowner and alderman who imposed a strict discipline on his squadron. Through 1621 and 1622 his ships fought a running war with the royal squadrons along the coast, while the king's men began a fort, Fort Louis, outside the city.⁵

Armies and commanders

The royal fleet was commanded by Charles de Lorraine, Duke of Guise. It brought together ships from Brittany and the Mediterranean, merchantmen of Saint-Malo, a squadron of oared galleys under their own general, and the great Galleon of Malta, a warship borrowed from the Knights of Malta. The Count of La Rochefoucauld followed with 1,500 foot soldiers and 200 gentlemen volunteers, ready to land once the fleet had won.⁶

Guiton's ships were smaller than the royal galleons, many of them merchantmen armed for war, and he had fireships with him. His vice admiral was Macquin, who had sworn, as the Rochellers boasted before they sailed, to burn the royal admiral's ship.⁷

The size of the two fleets is uncertain, and every figure has a side. La Roncière, working from royal officers' letters, counts 72 royal ships with about 14,000 men against 56 Rochelle ships with five to six thousand; Jean-Louis Monnot, from a royal galley captain's letter, gives 70 against 56. The Rochelle historians P.-S. Callot and Louis Meschinet de Richemond give Guiton only 39 smaller ships and about 5,000 men. A London pamphlet of 1622, which openly takes the royal side, credits the Rochellers with 70 ships.⁸

The battle in phases

The royal fleet came within sight of the coast on 24 October, but a dead calm left it moving only with the tide. Guise spent the next days ordering his fleet into three squadrons under himself, his vice admiral Saint-Luc and the rear admiral Mantin, and entered the Pertuis Breton.⁹

On the morning of 27 October the Rochelle fleet lay at anchor in the open roadstead before Saint-Martin. The galleys opened the action in the calm, rowing in line abreast and firing their bow guns, and Guise himself went aboard a galley to study the range of the Rochelle guns.¹⁰

Then the wind rose. Guiton's ships worked up along the shoals of the island until they held the weather gauge, while the heavy royal ships could not beat up to windward. At about three in the afternoon the Rochellers bore down and fell on the royal vanguard under Saint-Luc.¹¹

The fighting at close range was savage. The Rochelle ship Postillon, with some 200 men aboard, was sunk by royal gunfire; only her captain, a Rochelle councillor and a handful of others were saved. Other Rochelle captains grappled and boarded the royal ship Marguerite and had nearly taken her when the Galleon of Malta, towed into action by galleys, came up and drove them off.¹²

Turning point

Seeing his vanguard in danger, Guise turned his flagship alone toward the main Rochelle fleet. The 1622 pamphlet says his officers and pilots begged him on their knees not to go. The Rochellers now turned on the flagship, and under cover of their guns two fireships chained together were grappled to its side. The flames climbed the rigging to the mastheads.¹³

Musket fire swept the deck, and Vincheguerre, one of Guise's captains, was shot dead beside him. Volleys fired at the waterline broke the fireships away, the crew fought the fire, and royal galleons and galleys came up to support the admiral. The pamphlet says the fire was out in less than an hour.¹⁴

The battle ran on past dusk. Both sides fired an enormous weight of shot: La Roncière and Callot, the latter quoting the Rochelle chronicler Mervault, put it at more than 14,000 rounds, and the pamphlet at more than 15,000. At nightfall Guiton, his own ship riddled and hard to handle, drew off toward the shallows of the island, and his fleet scattered in the dark. ¹⁵

The darkness saved much of the Rochelle fleet. Both royal accounts say that Rochelle crews slipped through the royal lines by shouting the royal fleet's own watchword, and that in the confusion royal ships fouled one another. Guise's flagship, chasing into three fathoms of water, had to anchor alone and hang out its lanterns.¹⁶

The next day the royal fleet offered battle again, but the Rochellers had taken refuge in the shallows off the island, where the big ships could not follow; the pamphlet counts some twenty of them aground there. In the calm the royal galleys caught the Saint-Louis, a ship the Rochellers had taken from the Duke of Nevers the year before. The pamphlet says she was sunk. La Roncière, following other royal letters, says that her captain, the vice admiral Macquin, threw himself into the sea and drowned, but that a lieutenant rallied a few men, beat off the boarders and brought the shattered ship into harbor. Callot also records that Macquin lost his life.¹⁷

Aftermath

Nearly every count of the losses comes from the royal side. Séguiran de Bouc, the royal fleet's sergeant of battle, wrote that the Rochellers lost six or seven ships and more than 1,500 men, killed or taken, and the royal fleet about 450 dead or wounded; Monnot and Meschinet de Richemond also give 1,500 Rochelle losses. The London pamphlet claims ten Rochelle ships sunk, more than 2,000 men killed or drowned and about 400 royal dead.¹⁸

On the day after the battle Guise forced the surrender of the small fort on the island of La Dive near L'Aiguillon, which the Rochellers had seized. He was preparing to pursue Guiton into the shoals of Ré when a messenger brought word of peace: the king had come to terms with the Huguenots at Montpellier in October.¹⁹

Guiton did not submit at once, and there was more firing in the following days. In mid-November he came aboard the royal flagship and offered his standard to Guise as the king's representative. Guise laid his hand on it and gave it back, saying that he had not won it in battle, embraced the Rochelle admiral and praised the courage of his captains. Guiton replied that God had so far given him the grace never to turn his back in a fight. La Roncière dates the meeting to 13 November, Callot to 14 November.²⁰

The Peace of Montpellier ended the first of the rebellions. The walls of Montpellier were pulled down, and La Rochelle, untaken, remained the most important Huguenot stronghold in France.²¹ › The Greatest Naval Battles in History

Legacy and memory

The peace was a truce. When war came again, Guiton was given command of the Rochelle fleet once more, and in September 1625 he was heavily defeated off Ré by a royal fleet under Montmorency.²²

In July 1627 the Duke of Buckingham landed on the Île de Ré with an English army to support the city, but he failed to take the royal citadel of Saint-Martin and withdrew. Richelieu then closed La Rochelle off by land with miles of entrenchments and by sea with a great dike. Guiton was elected mayor in 1628, in the middle of the siege, and led the defense until famine forced the city to surrender at the end of October 1628.²³ › Battle of Rocroi, 1643

Guiton himself was sent into exile for a time after the surrender. He later served the king at sea, commanding a ship in the royal fleet, and died in 1654.²⁴

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