Edward Hawke

Edward Hawke was one of the great fighting admirals of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy. His career developed during a period when Britain’s maritime strategy was becoming increasingly aggressive and global in scope.

Hawke became known for hard-driving command and for a style of warfare that emphasized offensive spirit and the destruction of enemy fleets. His service belongs to the phase in which the Royal Navy emerged as the dominant naval force of the Seven Years’ War.

He is significant because his biography stands in the tradition of active fleet warfare that later generations admired and emulated. Hawke belongs to the high operational history of the Georgian navy.