h ships, which were in {p.312}
communication with Egmont, stood in as near as they could venture, so
as to command the sands.

De Thermes, obliged to advance when the tide would permit him, dashed
at the dangerous passage; the guns of Gravelines on one side, the guns
of the English vessels on the other, tore his ranks to pieces, and
Egmont charging when their confusion was at its worst, the French were
almost annihilated. Five thousand were killed, De Thermes himself,
Senarpont of Boulogne, the Governor of Picardy, and many other men of
note, were taken. If Clinton had been at hand with the strength of the
fleet, and a dash had been made at Calais by land and sea, it would
have been recovered more easily than it had been lost. But fortune had
no such favour to bestow on Queen Mary. Clinton was still loitering at
Spithead, and when news of the action came it was too late.

The plan of the naval campaign for the season was to attack Brest with
the united strength of England and Flanders, and hold it as a security
for the restoration of Calais at the peace. It was for the arrival of
his allies that Clinton had been waiting, and it was only at the end
of the month that the combined fleet, a hundred and forty sail, left
Portsmouth for the coast of Brittany. They appeared duly off Brest;
yet, when their object was before them, they changed their minds on
the feasibility of their enterprise; and leaving their original design
they landed a force at Conquet, which they plundered and burnt, and
afterwards destroyed some other villages in the neighbourhood. The
achievement was not a very splendid one. Four or five hundred Flemings
who ventured too far from the fleet were cut off; and as the Duke
d'Estampes was said to be coming up with 20,000 men, Clinton
re-embarked his men in haste, returned to Portsmouth, after an
ineffectual and merely mischievous demonstration, and then reported
the sickness in the fleet so considerable, that the operations for the
season must be considered at an end.[653]

[Footnote 653: _MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xiii.]

In the meantime, the contending princes in their own persons, Philip
with the powers of the Low Countries and Spain, Henry with the whole
available strength of France, sate watching each other in entrenched
camps upon the Somme. The French king, with the recollection of St.
Quentin fresh upon him, would not risk a second such defeat. Philip
would not hazard his late a