The action at Cherbourg was not a battle on its own. It was the bitter end of something larger. On 19 May 1692, an Anglo-Dutch fleet under Edward Russell, Earl of Orford, had caught the French fleet of Vice-Admiral Anne-Hilarion de Tourville off the Norman cape of Barfleur and torn into it. Tourville fought with the cold elegance for which he was famous, but the odds were impossible and the French line came apart. As Russell pursued, the French ships scattered along the Cotentin coast looking for shelter. Three of the worst hit - Tourville's flagship Soleil Royal among them - found nothing better than the open beach at Cherbourg. Russell detailed his vice-admiral, Ralph Delaval, to follow them in and finish the job. So many English ships joined Delaval that his command became unwieldy. He kept eleven and sent the other sixteen back to Russell.

The French had made serious preparations. The three ships were grounded with their broadsides facing seaward, every cannon manned, presenting their full firepower like floating fortresses. Shore batteries covered them - the Soleil Royal under the guns at Fosse du Galet, the Admirable and Triomphant beneath the muzzles of two coastal towers further east. Delaval shifted his flag from the unwieldy Royal Sovereign of 100 guns down to the handier 50-gun St Albans. On the morning of 21 May (Old Style) he led his first attack in with St Albans and Ruby, taking soundings as he went and creeping in under fire. The French gunners were not surrendering. The return fire was so fierce that after ninety minutes Delaval pulled back, his ships chewed up and nothing to show for it.

On the morning of the 22nd he tried again, this time with a more elaborate plan: St Albans and Advice to work the Admirable while Delaval himself in Grafton of 70 guns, backed by Monk of 60 and the rest of his 3rd and 4th rates, went after the others. The tide betrayed them. Monk and her consorts could not find depth enough to close, and the second attack ground to a halt in the shallows. Delaval pulled back and waited for the water to rise. He had one more idea, and it was the oldest weapon in the age of fighting sail.

At one o'clock that afternoon, at high water, Delaval sent in his fireships. These were old hulls deliberately packed with combustibles, sailed by skeleton crews who would set their own ship ablaze, lash the wheel, and escape in a boat at the last second. The fireship Blaze, commanded by Thomas Heath, went for the Soleil Royal. Heath brought her in to pistol-shot range, set the fuses, and abandoned ship. The great French flagship - 104 guns, the pride of the Atlantic fleet - went up in a column of flame visible from miles inland. James Greenway took the fireship Wolf alongside the Triomphant and burned her in turn. The third fireship, Hound, was set alight by French gunfire before she could close on the Admirable and was lost prematurely. So Delaval went in personally, in ship's boats, with a boarding party. The Admirable's captain, Beaujeu, and her crew abandoned her. About forty wounded Frenchmen were taken prisoner. The ship was burned with the two frigates and the remaining fireship that had sheltered alongside her. By evening, the most powerful warships of Louis XIV's Atlantic fleet were charred timbers on a Norman beach.

Delaval sailed off late that afternoon to rejoin the fleet at La Hogue, where another, larger destruction of French ships was about to follow. The action at Cherbourg cost the English few casualties. But it cost the French something larger than three hulls. The Soleil Royal was not merely a warship - she was a symbol, the largest and most expensively decorated vessel in the French navy, named for the Sun King himself. Watching her burn on the beach in front of his own coastline, Tourville must have understood that the bid for naval dominance of the Channel was over. The English fireship captains - Thomas Heath of the Blaze, James Greenway of the Wolf - had their names in the dispatches. The forty wounded Frenchmen taken aboard the Admirable spent the war as prisoners. Cherbourg's lack of a deep-water harbour had killed the ships that came to it for refuge. Within a century, a different French king would order that harbour built.