Lord Howe, in the _Magnanime_, a powerful seventy-four and a prize from the French on a former day, came next. Thierri, best of pilots for that coast, was at the con. He had volunteered for the _Magnanime_, as he explained, “parceque le capitaine ’Owe est jeune et brave!” Howe as he came on meant merely to brush past the _Formidable_ with as brisk interchange of fire as might be, and then push ahead like the others to wing the flyers in the van; but a shot from the French, as he came abreast de Verger, carried his foreyard away and checked the _Magnanime_. “Black Dick”—Howe’s name in the Navy—closed with the _Formidable_ instantly. He “bore down upon the Rear Admiral,” in the words of an eye-witness, “and getting under his lee opened a most tremendous fire from his thirty-twos and twenty-fours.” “Lord Howe, who attacked the _Formidable_,” says Horace Walpole, “bore down upon her with such violence that her prow forced in his lower tier of guns.” In the collision, as we are told by some one else, the _Formidable’s_ port lids “were wrenched clean away.” Ten minutes later up came the _Warspite_, Sir John Bently, the captor of the _Téméraire_ in Boscawen’s battle, who had recently joined the Channel Fleet. Hauling up near at hand, she joined with the _Magnanime_ in the attack. The two ships were two of the smartest in all the British Navy, and under their terrific pounding the _Formidable_ was dismasted and reduced almost to a wreck. “In half an hour,” says our eye-witness, “they made a dreadful havoc in the _Formidable_, whose fire began to slack.” De Verger’s flag, though, still flew defiantly, as did the French ensign at the staff astern, although the gallant Admiral had already fallen, as well as his first captain (de Verger’s younger brother), and most of the other officers, with, in addition, upwards of two hundred men. The Comte de Verger himself, we are told, was badly wounded at the outset of the fighting. He was carried below, and had his wounds dressed, but he refused to stay in the cockpit. He had himself brought up again in a chair and set down on the quarter-deck. There a little later a second shot struck him dead.