In this year she acted with some vigour both in the Channel and in the Mediterranean. At the close of 1743 troops had been collected at Dunkirk for an invasion again, in the hope of causing a Jacobite rebellion. A fleet of twenty-four sail was armed at Brest, and put under the command of M. de Roquefeuil. He sailed at the end of January, was off the Eddystone on the 3rd February 1744, and had come as high as Dungeness by the 24th. The peril served for a moment to calm the feuds of the politicians, for the country was terribly frightened. English soldiers and foreign mercenaries were called in from abroad, and we applied to the Dutch for the contingent they were bound to supply by treaty. A fleet was collected under Sir John Norris in the Downs, and a battle seemed inevitable. But a succession of heavy gales from the east and north-east drove the French out of the Channel back to Brest, and the peril passed away. While the wind and the inefficiency of the enemy were standing our friends in the Channel, a transaction was taking place in the Mediterranean which did us little honour and was the beginning of infinite bitterness. It was known by the end of 1743 that France was coming actively into the naval war. In January 1744 Mathews came down from Turin, where he had been acting as Minister, and resumed his functions of admiral. His fleet was at anchor in the roadstead of Hyères, between the mainland and the islands of Porquerolles, and there it remained till M. de Court and Don José Navarro put to sea from Toulon on the 19th February. It consisted of twenty ships of the line when he rejoined it, but was raised by reinforcements to twenty-nine. The allies numbered twenty-eight, twelve of them being Spaniards. One of the Spanish ships, the _Real Felipe_, carried 116 guns, and her fellows were fine ships. The French were somewhat inferior, and the weight of metal as well as of numbers was in favour of Mathews, but the battle which followed was a disgrace alike to the discipline, the intelligence, and, with a few exceptions, even to the manhood of the navy.