Mary Rose: the First Ship of Our Standing Navy Transcript
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Mary Rose: The first Ship of our Standing Navy Transcript Date: Wednesday, 25 February 2009 - 12:00AM MARY ROSE: THE FIRST SHIP OF OUR STANDING NAVY Rear Admiral John Lippiett It is on April 21st this year that we will be celebrating Henry VIII coming to the throne, at seventeen years old, and he changed our country radically. The first thing he did was to order to be built the Mary Rose and another ship called the Peter Pomegranate. To anticipate the question about this other ship, Peter was St Peter, Pomegranate was Catherine of Aragon's family crest, and so 'Mary Rose' is probably the Virgin Mary, although custom has it that it was his favourite sister Mary, and the rose the Tudor Rose. The Mary Rose was a revolutionary as a ship. When it was built, in 1509, with its maiden voyage in 1511, it was as scientifically advanced as the space shuttle was in the 1980's. It has a new form of construction for warships in this country. For the first time, we have got a ship that is smooth-sided, that is carvel-built with planks abutting each other to give a smooth side, as opposed to clinker-built, which is where the planks overlap. Carvel ships were built from the keep up and the planks were just laid on top of each other. For the first time, this was building a ship with frames and then putting the planks around it. It was 150 feet long and it was a mighty warship with castles at the stern and bow, the aftercastle and the forecastle (you will probably know that forecastle is now abbreviated to 'focsle' of a ship). In years before, if they wanted to go to war, monarchs would hire merchant ships and they would put castles on them to go off to sea and fight, or transfer anyway troops across to France, where we did most of the fighting. Those castles were kept around the Cinque Ports and so on; they were in flat-packs, rather like IKEA kits, and they would be put on for war, then taken off, and the ships would go back to being trading ships. But here, Henry VIII has built the castles into a ship, in the Mary Rose, for the first time, and big and mighty castles they are. For quite a long while, we thought that the Anthony Anthony Roll had completely exaggerated the height of those castles, but now, from documents and other evidence, we have actually worked out that it is more then likely to be correct. They had got great height in them in those days, because we found they had another gun deck above the one we had originally thought. An advantage of the ship's revolutionary carvel-built design was that they were able to cut holes in the ship's side. Because they were smooth-sided, they could cut holes in and put a port on it to close it down and make it watertight, and so this was coming in during his reign. This meant that they were able to have gun-ports below the deck of the ship. The number of these gun ports were increased throughout Henry VIII's reign as more and more holes were cut into the side of the ship. We know a lot about the Mary Rose because of the Anthony Anthony Roll, which is now in Magdalen College if anyone needs to see the original. Anthony Anthony was Clerk of the Royal Ordinance in the 1540s, and he drew every ship of Henry's Navy. In his picture of Mary Rose, he gives an inventory, in effect, of the gunpowder, shots of iron, shots of stone and lead, and so on. Also, in manpower terms, he lists something like 180 sailors, 30 gunners, 200 soldiers, and 17 servators and trumpeters, which I rather like! He does not mention how many officers; he does not mention how many in the retinue and so on of the Admiral and so on on board. We have found documents in the last year that showed, in 1545, she had 600 people on board, so there were an awful lot of people. This is the size of a minesweeper of a modern Navy, 150 feet long, and a minesweeper would have about thirty people, so just imagine how they were crammed on board in those days - it really is extraordinary! She is listed in this document as weighing about 500 tons. Tonnage in those days was a rather vague term anyway. Later accounts say 700 tons, so it varies quite a lot. In measurement terms, a ton was a barrel, and because ships were used for importing wine from France and Portugal, the ton was how many barrels a ship could carry to bring it back. Interestingly, there was a tax on each ton of wine, which had been going on for centuries prior to this. From the Anthony Anthony Roll we can see her in her full four-masted, carrack build glory. Her front two masts are square rigged, as you would see in the Victory and so on later on. The after two masts are actually lateen masts, triangular sails, so you have actually got the equivalent of the Norse longboat, square-sail, in the front two sails, and the Mediterranean dowel shape sail on the after two masts. The guns on board, at the start of the reign, were wrought iron guns, long strips of iron, and then bound by hoops, just as they made barrels, and we call it the barrel of the gun for that reason. They had breach chambers at the rear end, into which gunpowder was packed. Those breach chambers were then put onto this wooden sledge and effectively dovetailed into the cannon, with the stone cannonball hand-chipped. A wedge was put in and it was fired. The cannonball would rattle out, if it did not explode in the first place and kill the gun crew. It would go about 200 yards, it would scare the enemy, it would scare the people on board, there would be a lot of noise, there would be a lot of smoke, and it probably did little more than that. But during the reign of Henry VIII, it began to change. There were great contrasts in the ship at the time. Low down aft, was the gunroom, where you would have stayed were you a junior officer. In contrast, the Admiral lived in the upper quarters, with the captains and then the officers. It is also important to recognise how decorated the ship were, in particular the castles, because this shows the function of the ship was not simply to do battle, but also it was about the grandness, the show, the magnificence, and these ships were built to impress. They were not just built as utility ships. This was Henry showing how powerful he was. This was Henry showing 'I am going to take on Europe, I am going to fight you, and I am very rich and very important.' I think it was £800 that he spent on just the flags and bunting for the commissioning of Mary Rose back in 1511. That was an awful lot of money in those days, and it shows how important that sort of grandness was. Later on in the reign, they went from having those wrought iron guns with stone cannonballs, to founding bronze calverine guns. Henry himself was involved in the technology, and as technology increased and improved, so he was able to import it from Holland. The Dutch people were able to found guns and set them up in Houndsditch, where they actually then taught the English how to do it. At the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, we have the original guns, although most are currently in conservation at the moment, and they show a wonderful level of architectural detail on them. There is a lovely little inscription on one of them, which says: 'Robert and John Owen, Brethren of the City of London, Sons of an English, made this bastard, Anno Domini 1531'. It is called the Bastard Calverine because any gun that was not an exact size in those days was called a bastard. The school kids who visit our museum love that fact! In Henry VIII's day, we are at the forefront of experimenting with technology and taking things on. The first cast iron guns were in mass production at this time, having only just been invented. They are about a metre long and they are called hailshot pieces. Anthony Anthony Rolls says there were twenty of them on board. They sprayed iron dice, tiny little sort of half-inch iron dice, around to kill people. They weigh an awful lot, and they were mass produced, but the imperfections in the castings meant that at this stage, in Henry's time, they daren't cast a much bigger one because when they tried it, they would explode and kill the gun crew. So these smaller ones were cast iron from those days. To move ahead, the Mary Rose fought three wars against the French and one against the Scots. In 1512, the one against the French, the Admiral on board, Sir Edward Howard, led a boarding party from the Mary Rose and boarded a French ship but was killed, so that was not very successful. He was relieved by Sir Thomas Howard II, his elder brother, who was then the Lord High Admiral for some long time after that.