Finally brought into active service during the War of Jenkins' Ear, she played an undistinguished part in Sir John Norris' 1740 expedition to the Bay of Biscay, and at the Battle of Toulon in 1744.

In 1690, Admiral Arthur Torrington advised the British Parliament that France was expanding its fleet and that the Royal Navy would soon be outgunned.

First, the weight of the additional half deck so increased her draught that her lower gun ports were at the waterline and opening them risked shipping a large quantity of seawater into the hull.

On reviewing one band of press-ganged men, Admiral Philip Cavendish noted, "Cambridge's two lieutenants ... have brought from Dublin seventy or eighty people - all boys, broken tradesmen, diseased landsmen and so on - that I can't pick ten out of the whole number fit to be sent aboard.

Norris' fleet was intended to cruise the Bay of Biscay in search of Spanish warships, but its departure was delayed by a chronic shortage of crew.

On 1 September Cambridge's lieutenants and warrant officers reported that 131 crew were too diseased to work, and that the remaining 30 healthy men were too few to sail the ship.

[10] The lieutenants also noted that these healthy men were all impressed landsmen with no useful skills, describing them as "raw and unskilled sailors, the very worst that any of us were ever at sea with.