Battle of Beachy Head

He was so much annoyed by these censures that he soon became, unfortunately for his country, bold even to temerity.

There has scarcely ever been so sad a day in London as that on which the news of the Battle of Beachy Head arrived.

The shame was insupportable, the peril was imminent.

What if the victorious enemy should do what de Rutter had done? What if the dockyards of Chatham should again be destroyed? What if the tower itself should be bombarded? What if the vast array of masts and yard-arms below London Bridge should be ablaze? Nor was this all.

For a moment he was again the Shrewsbury of 1688, His nature, lamentably unstable, was not ignoble, and the thought that, by standing foremost in the defense of his country at so perilous a crisis, he might repair his great fault and regain his own esteem, gave new energy to his body and his mind.

He had retired to Epsom, in the hope that quiet and pure air would produce a salutary effect on his shattered frame and wounded spirit.

But a few hours after the news of the Battle of Beachy Head had arrived, he was at Whitehall, and had offered his purse and sword to the Queen.

It had been in contemplation to put the fleet under the command of some great nobleman with two experienced naval officers to advise him.

It comes from the naval concept of fleet in being.

The first recorded use of the term was in 1690 by Admiral Arthur Herbert, 1st Earl of Torrington, commanding the Anglo-Dutch fleet in the Battle of Beachy Head.

With a superior French fleet, he believed maintaining a credible naval deterrent was enough to deter the threat of French invasion.

In the late 19th century Alfred Thayer Mahon, an American naval strategist, refined the concept to a defensive active posture, essentially a way for a weaker navy to tie down a stronger opponent without engagement.