The Glorious First of June, 1794: Howe's victory and the grain convoy

It was a battle fought for bread. In the spring of 1794 Revolutionary France was close to famine, and a great convoy was crossing the Atlantic from America with the grain and flour it needed. To bring it home, the French Republic sent its main fleet out of Brest; to stop it, Britain sent the Channel Fleet. The two navies chased each other for days through rough water and fog, nearly 400 miles out in the ocean, and after four days of maneuvering and skirmishing fought the first fleet battle of a war that would last more than twenty years.²

Background: a convoy France could not lose

The convoy was enormous: 117 merchant ships, by the counts of W. Laird Clowes and the Oxford Companion to British History, which adds that they carried 67,000 barrels of flour for the poorly supplied capital. For France this made putting the fleet to sea a political order more than a naval choice.³

The fleet he commanded was a product of the Revolution. Herodote.net describes Louis Thomas Villaret-Joyeuse as one of the few capable officers of the old royal navy who served the Republic, and his crews and officers as of very mediocre quality; Clowes notes that before the Revolution Villaret himself had been merely a lieutenant, and that most of the French captains had risen from junior ranks, the merchant service or coastal piloting. The Republic also sent a member of its government to sea with the fleet: Clowes names Jean Bon Saint-André, whose journal of the campaign he calls untrustworthy, and Payne describes him as what later ages would call a political commissar.⁴

Armies and commanders

Admiral Richard Howe, Earl Howe, was nearly seventy, a veteran who had commanded in American waters in the War of Independence, known to his sailors as Black Dick for his swarthy complexion. On 2 May 1794 he sailed from Spithead with the Channel Fleet, then detached six ships of the line under Rear-Admiral George Montagu to see the outward convoys clear, leaving himself with twenty-six. His flagship was the three-decker Queen Charlotte of 100 guns.⁵› Richard Howe

Howe looked in at Brest on 5 May, found the French still in port and headed out into the Atlantic to look for the convoy. He found nothing. When he came back to Ushant on 19 May, his frigates reported Brest empty. Villaret had sailed on 16 May with twenty-five ships of the line, and in the misty weather the two fleets had passed close to each other without either seeing the other. Following the French west, Howe captured and burned two French corvettes because he could not spare men to sail them home as prizes.⁶

The battle in phases

28 May. The fleets sighted each other early that morning, some 365 nautical miles off Ushant according to the Royal Museums Greenwich. Howe sent Rear-Admiral Thomas Pasley's fast division ahead to harry the French rear. The Russell fired first, and in the evening the Bellerophon, Leviathan, Audacious and others mauled the French rearmost ship, the 110-gun three-decker Révolutionnaire. She lost her masts and dropped out of the fight, but she was not taken; she reached port, towed into Rochefort, and the damaged Audacious also had to leave for home.⁷

29 May. The next day Howe tried to break through the French line and win the weather gauge, the windward position that would let him choose when to fight. His leading ships made a poor job of it, but Howe himself in the Queen Charlotte, with the Bellerophon and Leviathan, cut through and isolated several French ships. Villaret came down with most of his fleet to rescue them and saved them, but at the price of the wind: by evening the British held the weather gauge. Clowes quotes the American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan's verdict that by sheer tactical skill Howe had won a marked advantage for the decisive action.⁸

Fog. On 30 and 31 May thick fog came down and the ships lost sight of each other. When it lifted on the 31st, Howe chose not to attack that evening: after the confusion of the 29th he wanted a full day of light in which his captains could see his signals.⁹

1 June. Next morning Howe hoisted his signal: having the wind of the enemy, the admiral meant to pass between the ships of the French line and engage them from leeward. Each British ship was to cut through astern of its opposite number and fight at close range on the far side. Not every captain understood. A few ships went through; the rest hauled up to windward and fought at varying range. The Queen Charlotte went for the French flagship, the 120-gun Montagne, but lost her fore-topmast and dropped astern, and the Montagne escaped.¹⁰

Turning point: the Brunswick and the Vengeur

The fiercest fight of the day was that of the British 74 Brunswick. Unable to pass through the closely packed French line, she ran foul of the Vengeur du Peuple, her anchors hooking into the French ship's rigging, and the two ships drifted out of the line locked together, firing into each other's hulls at point-blank range for hours. Her captain, John Harvey, was mortally wounded. The Vengeur lost two masts and much of her crew and began to take in water through gunports torn open in the collision; her captain, Jean-François Renaudin, judged her lost and struck.¹¹

Elsewhere the French line was torn apart. Twelve French ships were dismasted, according to both Clowes and Payne. Villaret gathered what he could and towed away several of his crippled ships, but six ships of the line struck their colors to the British. The Vengeur did not survive her surrender. Boats from the Alfred, the Culloden and the cutter Rattler took off much of her crew, but she sank in the evening with many of her wounded still aboard, a rare event in an age when wooden warships were very hard to sink.¹²

The losses were very unequal, as was usual in sailing-ship battles, where the beaten side suffered almost all the casualties. For the British, Clowes counts 290 killed and 858 wounded over the three days of fighting, Payne 279 killed and 877 wounded, and the Oxford Companion about 300 killed. For the French, the Oxford Companion gives about 1,500 killed; Clowes counts more than 1,200 killed and wounded in the six captured ships alone, and some 7,000 killed, wounded and taken prisoner in all.¹³

Aftermath

Howe did not pursue. Howe's own journal, quoted by Payne, records the Marlborough and Defence totally dismasted and 2 and 3 June spent fitting jury masts, moving prisoners and taking the six prizes in tow; Clowes agrees that the fleet could not make sail again until the morning of 3 June.¹⁴

Meanwhile the convoy that had started it all, never sighted by the British, reached France unharmed. Clowes has it arriving in Bertheaume Bay outside Brest on 12 June; the Oxford Companion dates its arrival at Brest to 15 June. The Revolution had its bread, and Herodote.net calls it saved once again by a narrow margin.¹⁵

Howe's fleet anchored at Spithead on 13 June with its six prizes. King George III went to Portsmouth and visited him on board the Queen Charlotte, and gave him a diamond-hilted sword and a gold chain. Gold medals went to the admirals and captains named in Howe's report. Collingwood, left off the list, received his only years later, after he protested. Howe had to wait until 1797 for the Order of the Garter.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

Each side remembered the battle in its own way. In Britain, as the Oxford Companion puts it, the action was popularly hailed as a triumph over French republicanism, even if some saw it as a partial and overdue success for Howe. The 1911 Britannica called it an epoch-making victory, praising Howe for an originality unusual in a veteran, and Payne judges that it set the standard for British naval superiority for the next twenty years of war, the years of Cape St. Vincent and Trafalgar.¹⁷

In France the battle of 13 Prairial, Year II, by the revolutionary calendar, became the legend of the Vengeur. Soon afterward Bertrand Barère, speaking for the Committee of Public Safety, told the National Convention that the ship had gone down with all her crew, flags flying and still firing, her men crying “Long live the Republic” rather than surrender. Clowes and Herodote.net both show that it did not happen that way: the Vengeur had struck, and hundreds of her men, Renaudin among them, were rescued by the British and later went home. The story was repeated by French writers for generations.¹⁸

The battle's best-known image, Philip James de Loutherbourg's painting at the top of this article, now hangs in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. It shows the duel of the two flagships and, in the foreground, British sailors pulling the Vengeur's men out of the sea.¹⁹