The Channel and the Crown

The Channel and the Crown: The Naval War of the Grand Alliance, 1688-1697

On the morning of 10 July 1690, an Allied fleet sailed into the worst naval defeat in English history, and very nearly didn't survive it. The Channel and the Crown reconstructs the Nine Years' War at sea from the ground up: Louis XIV's ruthless machine of conquest, the mass exodus of persecuted Huguenots who armed his enemies with skill and secrets, and the revolution that fused England and the Dutch Republic into an uneasy maritime alliance. At the heart of the story stands the Battle of Beachy Head, told hour by hour, the fatal gap in the line, the Dutch vanguard trapped between two fires, and the extraordinary anchor stratagem that saved a shattered fleet from annihilation. Thorson Griffith follows the wreckage into the Tower of London, where a condemned admiral mounts a defense history would later vindicate, and across the Channel to Versailles, where a stunned France squandered the greatest naval opportunity of the century. From the burning ships of Sussex to the decisive reversal at La Hougue, this is a story of catastrophe, blame, and hard-won recovery, and of the doctrine, born from one commander's ruin, that would shape naval strategy for two hundred years. History has rarely offered a defeat this instructive, or a redemption this complete