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xlviii SONGS AND BALLADS |
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It refers in the last verse to the rumours spread against the loyalty of the admirals :
' Go on, true sons of Honour, still advance
The English glory by depressing France :
Go on to prove, how much a royal trust
Works upon spirits that are brave and just:
This our great mistress knew, whose piercing eyes,
Unprejudiced by lying calumnies,
Could look through every faithful breast,
And saw the loyal zeal they afterwards exprest.'
The year after La Hogue was marked by the capture of a large part of the Turkey fleet which Sir George Rooke was convoying. On this event the naval muse is silent. On May 10, 1694, Captain Pickard, in command of two third-rates, the Monmouth and the Resolution, and of the Roebuck fireship, fell in off the French coast with a fleet of fifty-two merchantmen bound for Dunkirk, and destroyed thirty-five (Luttrell, Diary, iii. 312 ; Burchett, p. 214). This is the subject of a ballad entitled The Valiant Seaman s Courage (p. 125) More interesting is England's Glory in the behaviour of brave Killeygrove, which relates the capture of two French ships, the Content, of sixty guns, and the Trident, of fifty-two, off Pantelaria, by a squadron of six ships, under the command of Captain James Killigrew (p. 126). The action took place about January 27, 1695, and Killigrew lost his life early in the engagement (Burchett, p. 266 ; Charnock, Biographia Navails, ii. 327).
From July 1694 to the autumn of 1695, Admiral Russell, in command of a combined Dutch and English fleet, dominated the Mediterranean and checked the progress of the French arms in Spain. The significance of his operations is brought out in Mr. Julian Corbett's England in the Mediterranean |
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