The Glorious First of June
French Revolutionary Wars, 1793-94

Lieutenant Charles Henry Nevile, Queen's 2nd Regiment of Foot
Leeds Minster, Yorkshire

They must have been drunk with the assumption of power, overflowing with self-confidence and pulsating with revolutionary fervour. A pragmatic France would presumably not have declared war on Great Britain and the United Provinces as a response to the two nations breaking off diplomatic relations following the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793. After all, France had already declared war on Austria, Prussia and Piedmont. Surely taking on two new foes was expecting too much? 
History has proved that scepticism wrong, but by early 1794 the new republic was facing starvation, and looked as though it had overstretched itself. The internal conflicts, amounting almost to civil war, had badly affected the previous year’s harvest, and a harsh winter had made matters worse. Effectively, the country was running of grain, and if a solution wasn’t found France would succumb to famine, and if the food ran out the armies would fail, and if the armies failed France’s royalist enemies would invade and would almost certainly restore the monarchy.
A tricky problem, but someone came up with an ingenious solution. France’s North American colonies were replete with grain. Why not send it over the Atlantic to France? A huge cargo fleet of over one hundred ships assembled in Chesapeake Bay to take on the grain. The supplies from the French possessions were supplemented by the United States, still grateful for French support during its own struggle for independence two decades earlier. All that was needed was to get the huge convoy over the five and a half thousand kilometres of Atlantic Ocean without the British Navy intercepting.
Somewhere out at sea the was navy’s Atlantic Fleet, thirty-seven ships, most of them ships of the line (battleships to you and me), under the command of Admiral Sir Richard Howe. Their aim was to intercept the grain convoy. Elsewhere at sea was a French fleet of thirty-four ships, also mostly battleships, whose purpose was to prevent that interception. A giant game of hide-and-seek across a vast ocean .
This is where Lieutenant Charles Henry Nevile of the @nd (Queen’s Royal) Regiment enters the story. Despite the regiment being a regiment of Foot, some detachments were posted as Marines in some of Howe’s ships, and Neville was one of them, serving on Howe’s own flagship, the Queen Charlotte. He was born in Mears Ashby, in Northamptonshire, in 1775, but in 1794 the family were living in the hall at Badsworth, a few miles south of Pontefract in West Yorkshire. 
The move was because his father, who had been born John Pate Nevile Lister at Sysonby, near Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire, had inherited estates in Yorkshire. His mother had been born Dorothy Neville in Holbeck, Leeds, and it was through her that John was bequeathed the estates in Holbeck and Badsworth. As he did so he relinquished his surname, and adopted the name Nevile.
John had been an army man, a Captain in the Royal Hors Guards, with a twin brother, Cavendish, who was an officer in the 3rd Foot Guards, and so it is not surprising that so many of his sons joined the army - five of them ( Charles, John, Brownlow, Martin and Samuel) were to die on active service.
Out in the Atlantic the two fleets and the convoy were trying to locate one another. The French fleet became aware that the convoy was in real danger of being spotted by the British fleet, and so they played the role of decoy, making themselves known to the British, and drawing them away from the convoy’s route. Thus, at dawn on June 1st 1794, the two fleets faced each other, and at nine-thirty Admiral Howe ordered his captains to attack.
Now this was unusual. Usually ships of the line (so called because they arrayed themselves in a line to face the enemy) engaged by firing at longish range with their heavy cannon. Instead, Howe ordered his captains to attack the space between two of the opposing French ships and thus engage at close quarters. Not all obeyed, either because they did not understand or through sheer disobedience or fear, but enough did, with Howe’s own ship, the Queen Charlotte, to the fore.
It must have been hell. Sailing closer and closer to the French ships, and mid-ocean is rarely like the proverbial millpond; the deafening sound of the discharged cannon; the devastation wrought the cannon as the British ships drew alongside the French, on at least one occasion so close that the gun ports could not be opened, and the cannons had to fire through the wooden covers, the firing of the sharpshooters perched in the rigging; the falling of rigging and spars as they fell victim to the struggle; the falling masts; the smoke; the screams; the curses. In the midst of that Lieutenant Charles Henry Nevile died, aged nineteen, one of over a thousand British killed or wounded.
The French fared worse, however. Although much battered, so battered indeed that they could not pursue the defeated French, Howe’s fleet did not lose a ship. The French lost one sunk and six captured, with about four thousand casualties, and a further three thousand captured. The British press called it The Battle of the Glorious 1st of June - it is also known as the Battle of Ushant, a bit of a misnomer given that Ushant is seven hundred kilometres to the east. The British hailed it as a great victory, but ironically so did the French. While the British fleet was recovering and licking its wounds, the grain convoy was delivering its precious cargo to France. The decoy had cost lives and ships, but it had worked.

Charles Henry NEVILE. Lieutenant in the Queen's or 2nd Regiment of Foot who being on the Marine Duty on board EARL HOWES ship. After behaving in a most brave and gallant manner in the engagement which took place, between the English and French fleets for three days, was killed by a grape shot, June 1st 1794 aged 19 years.
Ye sons of peace, who blest with all the dear delights of social life behold this tablet. Which affection reard to the loved memory of the Young and Brave: Whose early bloom, smote by the ruthless hand of war, FELL, ADMIRED, LAMENTED: Oh, give one pitying tear, in grateful memory of the generous youth. Who dauntless met the dreadfull battles, died and nobly bled that you might live secure.

Sources

Wikipedia - pages on: the French Revolutionary Wars; the Battle of the Glorious First of June; Admiral Richard Howe; HMS Queen Charlotte.
Burke's A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (Volume 2) (Harrison, London)
The Biographia Leodensis or Biographical Sketches of the Worthies of Leeds and Neighbourhood from the Norman Conquest to the Present Time (Rev. R. V. Taylor, John Hamer, Leeds, 1865)