The fleets had, as usual at the time, been laid up for the winter. The money available for fitting them out in the following spring was diverted to other purposes and squandered by the King and the Court. Charles counted on having no need to commission a great fleet in the summer. He knew the Dutch were feeling the strain of the war and the destruction of their trade, and would soon have to patch up a peace, and he opened preliminary negotiations. Such negotiations must be prudently backed by an effective force on the war footing. The King had practically disarmed as soon as there was a prospect of peace. But the Dutch had fitted out the fleet in view of possible contingencies, and De Witt and De Ruyter could not resist the temptation of revenging the defeat of 1666 and the sack of Terschelling by a raid on the Thames and Medway. It was the dishonesty and incapacity of the King and his parasite Court that laid England open to the shameful disaster that dimmed for all time the glory of Monk and Rupert's victory. But even after De Ruyter's exploits at Chatham the Dutch had no hope of continuing the war, and within a few weeks of the disaster peace was signed at Breda. The story of the Dutch raid is a lasting lesson on the necessity of an island power never for a moment relaxing the armed guard of the sea. CHAPTER VIII THE BATTLE OF THE SAINTS' PASSAGE 1782 In the days when fleets in action relied upon the oar, all fighting was at close quarters, and, as we have seen in our study of typical battles of this period, naval engagements fought out at close quarters gave very definite results, the fleet that was defeated being practically destroyed. When battles began to be fought under sail, with the gun as the chief weapon, a new method had to be evolved. The more the fire of broadside batteries was relied upon, the greater was the tendency to fight at short artillery range, without closing to hand-to-hand distance, and when the sailors and sea-fighters of the seventeenth century adopted line ahead as the normal formation for making the most of broadside fire, battles had a marked tendency to degenerate into inconclusive artillery duels.