The project of 1779 marked these principles even more strongly, for it demonstrated them working even when our home fleet was greatly inferior to that of the enemy.  In this case the invader’s idea was to form two expeditionary forces at Cherbourg and Havre, and under cover of an overwhelming combination of the Spanish and French fleets, to unite them at sea and seize Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.  It was in the early summer we got wind of the scheme, and two cruiser squadrons and flotillas were at once formed at the Downs and Channel Islands to watch the French coasts and prevent the concentration of transports.  Spain had not yet declared war, but she was suspected, and the main fleet, under the veteran Sir Charles Hardy, who had been Norris’s second in command in 1744, was ordered to proceed off Brest and prevent any Spanish squadron that might appear from entering that port.  The French, however, outmanoeuvred us by putting to sea before Hardy could reach his station and forming a junction with the Spaniards off Finisterre.  The combined fleet contained about fifty of the line, nearly double our own.  The army of invasion, with Dumouriez for its Chief of the Staff, numbered some 50,000 men, a force we were in no condition to meet ashore.  Everything, therefore, was in favour of success, and yet in the navy, at least, a feeling of confidence prevailed that no invasion could take place.

The brains of the naval defence were Lord Barham (then Sir Charles Middleton) at the Admiralty and Kempenfelt as Chief of the Staff in the fleet; and it is to their correspondence at this time that we owe some of the most valuable strategical appreciations we possess.  The idea of the French was to come into the Channel in their overwhelming force, and while they destroyed or held Hardy, to detach a sufficient squadron to break the cruiser blockade and escort the troops across.  Kempenfelt was confident that it could not be done.  He was sure that the unwieldy combined mass could be rendered powerless by his comparatively homogeneous and mobile fleet, inferior as it was, so long as he could keep it at sea and to the westward.  The appreciation of the power of a nimble inferior fleet which he wrote at this time has already been given.[23] When the worst of the position was fully known, and the enemy was reported off the mouth of the Channel, he wrote another to Middleton.  His only doubt was whether his fleet had the necessary cohesion and mobility.  “We don’t seem,” he said, “to have considered sufficiently a certain fact that the comparative force of two fleets depends much upon their sailing.  The fleet that sails fastest has much the advantage, as they can engage or not as they please, and so have always in their power to choose the favourable opportunity to attack.  I think I may safely hazard an opinion that twenty-five sail of the line coppered would be sufficient to harass and tease this great unwieldy combined Armada so as to prevent their effecting anything, hanging continually upon them, ready to catch at any opportunity of a separation from night, gale or fog, to dart upon the separated, to cut off convoys of provisions coming to them, and if they attempted an invasion, to oblige their whole fleet to escort the transports, and even then it would be impossible to protect them entirely from so active and nimble a fleet.”