Standing up valiantly to Captain Bently and Lord Howe, the _Formidable_ was as yet to all appearances far from being subdued. She was still gallantly resisting when a third British ship, the _Montagu_, arrived on the scene. Her arrival gave the Frenchmen a breathing space. In trying to cut in between the other two British ships and the _Formidable_ she ran foul of both her two consorts and caused a serious collision. The _Montagu_, “instead of pursuing ahead, must needs run between Lord Howe and the French Admiral, and fell on board the _Magnanime_ and forced her upon the _Warspite_; thus our three ships were entangled and totally prevented from continuing the action, but lay all of a heap alongside the _Formidable_, who might have torn them to pieces if she had not been almost a wreck herself.” What made the _Formidable’s_ position much the worse was that she was practically isolated, cut off from the rest of her fleet. No fewer than seven French ships in her part of the line had refused combat from the first. They had run off without firing a single gun—“sans avoir,” in the words of the French naval historian Troude, “reçu un seul coup de canon.” It was now about three in the afternoon. By that time eight or nine of Hawke’s ships had got into action, and were engaging the enemy as they overhauled them all along their line. * * * * * The pick of the French army meanwhile was looking on from the shore, as big a crowd of spectators, from all accounts, as ever watched a naval battle. Duplessis-Richelieu, Duc d’Aiguillon, Commander-in-Chief, watched it from the windmill of St. Pierre, as did from another point the Second in Command, De La Tour D’Auvergne, father of the “First Grenadier of France,” then a schoolboy of fourteen. Along the beach forty regiments of soldiers, horse and foot, were looking on. They formed the army that the _Formidable_ and her consorts had come to escort across the Channel, in the transports lying at anchor in Quiberon Bay, for that projected invasion of England with which all Europe had been ringing for months past. There they stood, drenched to the skin, all anxiously looking out over the tumbling waste of waters to see what was to come of it; motley masses of men crowding out of camp and massed along the sand dunes and rock ledges of the Quiberon peninsula, or lining the batteries and ramparts of the forts round the bay—a medley of cocked-hatted, white-coated officers and men from every arm of the French king’s service; come down to the shore to see the show. Sturdy linesmen of Boulonnais and Contis, of Saint Chamond, and old d’Artois stood there—marching regiments these, that had seen more than one battlefield elsewhere, but never anything like this. Here were the red waistcoats of de Bourbon and de Cossé and de Quercy; there the green collars and cuffs of Beauvoisis, the blue of de Foix, the red coats with yellow facings