The situation was as follows. The country was divided between the partisans of James II. and the supporters of William III. James was in Ireland, where his strength was greatest, and William had gone thither to encounter him, his transit having been covered by a small squadron of six men-of-war, under the command of Sir Cloudesley Shovel. The army was with William in Ireland, and Great Britain could only be defended on land by a hastily levied militia. Its sole effective defence was the fleet; and the fleet, although reinforced by a Dutch contingent, was, for the moment, insufficient to defend it. The chief reliance of James was upon the friendship and forces, naval and military, of Louis XIV. Here was a case in which the security of England against insurrection at home and invasion from abroad depended on the sufficiency and capacity of her fleets to maintain the command of the sea--that is, either to defeat the enemy's naval forces or to keep them at bay, and thereby to deny freedom of transit to any military forces that Louis might attempt to launch against British territory. The French king resolved to make a determined attempt to wrest the command of the sea from his adversaries, and by overpowering the allied fleets of England and Holland in the Channel, to open the way for a successful invasion and a successful insurrection to follow. A great fleet was collected at Brest, under the supreme command of Tourville, and a squadron from Toulon under Château-Renault was ordered to join him in the Channel, so as to enable him to threaten London, to foment a Jacobite insurrection in the capital, to land troops in Torbay, and to occupy the Irish Channel in such force as to prevent the return of William and his army.