A few illustrations may here be cited. We have seen how in the Beachy Head campaign Tourville, having failed to force a decision on Torrington's fleet in being, could not turn aside with Torrington at his heels and Killigrew and Shovel on his flank to bring over an invading force from France. He was paralysed by that abiding characteristic of French naval strategy which impelled the French naval commanders to fix their eye on ulterior objects and blinded them to the fact that the best way to attain those objects was to destroy the naval forces of the enemy whenever the opportunity offered of so obtaining a decision. Hence their preference for the leeward position in action, their constant reluctance to fight a decisive action, their habitual direction of their fire at the masts and sails of the enemy rather than at his hulls, and in Tourville's case his failure to annihilate Torrington's fleet in being, resulting in the total miscarriage of the schemes for invasion, to be followed by internal insurrection, which, as Admiral Colomb has shown, were the kernel of the French plan of campaign. In the case of the Armada in the previous century, the task of invasion was entrusted to Parma, who had collected troops for the purpose, and vessels for their transport, in the ports of the Spanish Netherlands. But Justin of Nassau kept a close watch outside, and Parma could not move. He summoned Medina Sidonia with the Armada to his assistance, but he summoned him in vain, for the Armada, harassed throughout the Channel, and, as it were, smoked out of Calais, was finally shattered at Gravelines. Precisely the same thing happened in the eighteenth century during the Seven Years' War. Troops and transports were being collected in the Morbihan, but their exit was blocked by a British naval force stationed off the ports. Conflans with the French main fleet was at Brest, and there he was blockaded by Hawke. Evading the blockade, Conflans put to sea and straightway went to release the troops and transports, hopelessly blockaded in the Morbihan. But Hawke swooped down on him and destroyed him in Quiberon Bay, Boscawen having previously destroyed at Lagos the fleet which De La Clue was bringing from Toulon to effect a junction with Conflans.