Vaisseau (1st rate) (3m). Hull: wood. Arm.: 104 guns. Built: Brest, France; 1669.

Named in honor of the Sun King, Louis XIV, Le Soleil Royal was one of the most powerful ships of her day. As flagship of the revitalized French Navy brought into being by Minister of Marine Jean-Baptiste Colbert, she was sumptuously decorated with wooden carvings depicting a variety of motifs emblematic of the French monarch. The taffrail was embellished with a rendering of the sun god drawn across the sky by a team of horses, while the ornate figurehead showed a seahorse flanked by winged maidens. The hull was painted a royal blue highlighted by the wales, strakes, and additional embellishments in gold. As the sculptures recovered from the Swedish warship Wasa prove, such lavish ornament was not uncommon in seventeenth-century warships. Charles Le Brun's drawings of the statuary for Le Soleil Royal are in the Louvre.

Details of the first decade of Le Soleil Royal's service are obscure, but after her refit in 1689, she flew the flag of Vice Admiral Anne-Hilarion de Cotentin, Comte de Tourville, Admiral of the French fleet. The year before, England's Catholic King James II had been overthrown in favor of the Dutch Protestant William III of Orange in the Glorious Revolution. In March 1689, a French fleet helped James II land in Ireland in the first of several failed efforts to regain his throne. In July 1690, Tourville led a fleet of seventy ships out of Brest and on July 10, he met a combined English and Dutch force of fifty-seven ships off Beachy Head. Ordered to engage the enemy against the larger fleet, Admiral Arthur Herbert, Lord Torrington, lost eight ships while the French lost none in a victory they called Béveziers.

Two years later, the position was reversed as Tourville, with a fleet of only forty-four ships—the remainder were with Vice Admiral Jean d'Estrées in the Mediterranean—was ordered to sail from Brest on May 12, 1692, to clear the English Channel for Louis XIV's invasion force of 30,000 men assembled near Cherbourg. On May 20, Tourville met an Anglo-Dutch fleet of eighty-eight ships off Pointe de Barfleur. By increasing the distance between his ships sailing in line ahead, Tourville prevented his fleet from being encircled or outflanked by the English and Dutch ships, under command of Admiral Edward Herbert, Earl of Orford, in HMS Britannia. But Le Soleil Royal was so badly damaged that Tourville was forced to transfer his flag to Ambiteux the next day. Ten French ships slipped away, but Le Soleil Royal, Admirable, and Conquerant were forced into Cherbourg where they ran aground and were destroyed by English fireships. Another twenty ships made for Brest, and Tourville ordered the remaining twelve to the shallow roads off La Hogue. There, on June 2, Tourville's brilliant handling of the fleet at Barfleur was obliterated, and as the French Army and James II (audibly proud of his disloyal subjects, to the chagrin of his allies) looked on from shore, the English fleet burned or sank a dozen ships.