In our first three chapters, we saw how Edward Hawke established himself as the foremost operational leader of the navy in the period ending in 1763. As a captain off Toulon in 1744 he had his first experience of battle and at once demonstrated the moral courage and tactics of very close engagement that characterised his subsequent performance as an admiral. But allied to those qualities was an ability to assess the strategic picture. It varied from the subtle moves and calculations that produced his unprecedented interception of a major French force and convoy some 300 miles to the west of Lorient to the awesome decisions to risk Britain's main seagoing fleet in 1759, firstly by undertaking the close blockade of the main French naval base at Brest and secondly by pursuing the last big enemy fleet into a tempestuous Quiberon Bay. The common factor was moral courage allied with perfect professional judgement of what could, or must, be attempted. In Chapters 3 and 4 we used twelve criteria of leadership excellence derived from Hawke, but shared by Nelson, as a yardstick of merit to apply to other British admirals.

It is our contention that British fleet tactics and blockade strategy in the middle of the eighteenth century reached a level of sustained aggression and decisiveness in their outcome that had never been achieved before, and that Hawke played the leading operational role in this.