4 - French Wars I, 1688–1713

Summary

The repeated campaigns against Algiers and the other Barbary states by English (and other) naval forces had been, above all else, a defence of their merchant ships trading in the Mediterranean. For states with Mediterranean coasts there was also the even nastier issue of the kidnapping and enslavement of their people who lived along those coasts. This was also an issue, if a lesser one, for the English and Scots, whose citizens were taken from the captured ships and enslaved; freeing such captives by raising cash ransoms became a major charity activity in both countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The treaty with Algiers agreed by Admiral Herbert meant that the English had now no intention of establishing a permanent English naval presence in the sea, despite English rule in Tangier. With the evacuation of Tangier in 1684, there was no requirement for an English naval presence; no English warships sailed that sea until 1690.

In the year the new war began, 1688, the French demonstrated very clearly their naval power in the sea. Their Mediterranean fleet, annoyed at the Algerine depredations in previous years (while the English and Dutch treaties were in force) turned their bomb vessels on the city, destroying much of it; a dozen Frenchmen who were in the city at the time, including the consul, were executed in revenge, by being fired from the Algerine guns. It was all pointless, for, as Louis XIV became involved in the European war (using a similar policy of frightfulness, such as the ravaging of the Palatinate, which simply angered his victims and horrified others), he sent a secret envoy to Algiers to make peace, and the dey successfully extracted very favourable terms. Algiers was at war with its Barbary neighbours in Tunis and Morocco at the time, and any defeat tended to mean the deposition and probable execution of the ruling dey – including the man who made the French peace. The real result was a powerful and continuing hatred of France by the Algerines.

An English naval squadron returned to the Mediterranean in 1690 because of the new French war, the Nine Years’ War (or War of English Succession, or War of the League of Augsburg).