In these circumstances the cruises of the allied Grand Fleets could only be the successive exercises of an overwhelming superiority, directed against an enemy whose resistance must needs be passive, with rare and fitful efforts at retaliation. Year after year the great combined naval armaments of England and Holland sailed south in the spring. Before the Peace of Ryswick (1697) they went once to aid the Spaniards, who were contending feebly against the French in Catalonia. After the renewal of the war, they went repeatedly to aid the Hapsburg pretender, who was endeavouring to drive the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V., from the throne he occupied by right of inheritance and the will of Charles II., the last of the Austrian dynasty. They also served to cover the movements of English and Dutch commerce by mewing up the only fleet which Louis XIV. endeavoured to maintain in Toulon. Incidentally they enabled us to secure what Cromwell had hoped for, and what our Charles II. endeavoured to obtain by his marriage treaty—namely, a port of war near the Mediterranean, where an English fleet could keep its stores, repair damages, and find a safe anchorage without being dependent on the goodwill of an ally. The interest of a conflict between strength and weakness cannot be in proportion to the importance of its results. These campaigns must therefore (considerations of space being also of much weight) “speak by their foreman”; by the typical examples. None seem more representative than the first great cruise into the Mediterranean in 1694, and that expedition of ten years later which put us in possession of Gibraltar. It has been said above that the Grand Fleet had gone to sea in the spring of 1694 under the command of Russell. He was also the chief of the “commission for executing the office of Lord High Admiral”—and therefore combined the whole civil and military authority in his own person. The fleet consisted of fifty-two English and forty-one Dutch ships of the line, with their attendant fireships and small craft, when all were collected at St. Helens. When he was sure that the French had no fleet in Brest to assist in the defence, the admiral returned to St. Helens on the 23rd May, and sailed with his whole force on the 29th. On the 6th June the force designed to carry out the already mentioned raid on Brest was detached, and Russell sailed for the south in pursuit of the French with thirty English and twenty-two Dutch. He was off the Rock of Lisbon on the 25th June. Here he was reinforced by ships both English and Dutch, and his force was raised to sixty-three. A little later he was burdened by the co-operation of nine very inefficient Spaniards.