The Tudor period, to which this chapter is devoted, is noteworthy as witnessing the birth of the Royal Navy as a permanent national institution. Though we have accounts—probably to a great extent mythical—of the 3600 "very stout" ships of the Saxon King Edgar (A.D. 975), which are said to have been divided into three squadrons, cruising on the north, east, and west coasts of Great Britain; though Edward III, after the victory over the French at Sluys, was dubbed "King of the Sea"; and though Henry V got together the most formidable navy of his time, yet at none of these periods was there what we may term a navy of the realm. Indeed, for the two years, August, 1447, to August, 1449, there may be said to have been no navy at all, since during the whole of this time only £8, 9s. 7d. was expended upon what we now regard as our first line of defence.
At the death of Henry V, in 1422, the "Little Navy" disease broke out again, and nearly the whole of his fine fleet was sold. Things went from bad to worse, till the disgust and uneasiness of the nation found expression in a little work entitled The Libel of English Policie. The author, who is supposed to have been Bishop Adam de Molyns, exhorted the nation to "Keepe the Sea and namely the Narrow Sea", and also to secure both Dover and Calais. "Where bene our shippes", says he, "where bene our swerdes become?" He went on to point out how much our naval force had deteriorated since the time when Edward III had caused the famous Golden Noble to be struck, in which he is represented standing in a ship, sword in hand and shield on arm, and thus referred to the signification of the device:
"Four things our Noble sheweth unto me:
King, Ship and Sword and Power of the Sea".
That this appeal had some kind of effect is shown by the fact that in 1442 an order was issued "for to have upon the See continuelly, for the sesons of the yere fro Candlimes to Martymesse, viii Shippes with forstages; ye wiche Shippes, as it is thought, most have on with an other eche of hem cl men. Item, every grete Shippe most have attendyng opon hym a Barge and a Balynger." "Hym" strikes one, by the way, as a curious way to refer to a ship. These vessels with "iiii Spynes", which seem to have been what we might call dispatch vessels, were stationed, one at Bristol, two at Dartmouth, two in the Thames, one at Hull, and one at "the Newe Castell". The whole fleet combined was manned by 2160 men. It was a poor affair, but still it was better than nothing.
Then came the Wars of the Roses, which, naturally, diverted men's thoughts from the navy. That Edward IV, when he had established himself on the throne, had some idea of emulating the naval deeds of the third Edward may be suspected from his having issued a gold noble, which was evidently closely copied from the one we have already referred to. But nothing much was done either by him or by his successor, Richard Crookback, and it was left to Henry VII to reap the honour of being, to some extent, the founder of the Royal Navy of which we are all so proud. Though by some his son, "Bluff King Hal", may be regarded in this light, on account of the very formidable fleet which he raised and organized and the improvements which he is said to have made in its ships, yet I think we must admit that Henry VII laid the foundation-stone upon which his successor built.
He depended greatly on hired merchantmen—we do not despise this method of augmenting our navy even at the present day—but he resurrected the Royal Fleet. Though it was but a very small one, of only about a dozen ships, yet two of them, at any rate, were finer ships than any the British Navy had before possessed. These were the Regent and the Sovereign. While we had neglected our shipbuilding, to carry on war between ourselves, it had progressed abroad, especially in France, and there is little doubt that the Regent, built on the River Rother, was inspired by the French ship Columbe, which, perhaps, was the ship which had brought Henry to England. The Regent had four masts, the Sovereign three, and each of them was much more like some of the ships we are familiar with in pictures of the Spanish Armada fight than the old cogs of a few years previously, even in their most improved forms. The armament of the Regent consisted, it is said, of 225 "serpentines". The number is formidable, but not the weapons themselves. They were merely what might be called breech-loading wall-pieces, corresponding to Chinese "jingalls", and firing balls weighing from 4 to 6 ounces.
In a contemporary picture of the destruction of this ship in her action with the Marie la Cordelière in 1512, when both ships caught fire and blew up, the Regent is shown with very heavy guns firing through port-holes. Port-holes, by the way, are said to have been invented by Desharges, a Brest shipbuilder, in 1500. I am inclined to think that they were known at an earlier date—possibly Desharges invented port-lids. It is, of course, possible that these were cut in the Regent some time after her original construction, and heavier guns mounted in place of some of her serpentines. According to some writers this ship was originally christened the Great Harry, while the Sovereign was built out of the remains of an older ship called the Grace Dieu. As a very large and renowned Henri Grace à Dieu was launched in 1514, there has been a considerable amount of confusion between one ship and the other. But if the Regent was called the Great Harry, she had nothing whatever to do with the Henri, which is also sometimes referred to as the Harry Grace à Dieu.[17] As a matter of fact, the latter was built to replace the former, the loss of which was considered a national disaster, and so much so that an attempt was made to keep her fate a secret. "At the reverens of God", wrote Cardinal Wolsey, "kepe these tydyngs to yourselfe." There was probably another reason for the construction of an exceptionally fine ship, and that was the desire that the English should not be eclipsed by the Scots in this respect.
For, the year before the Regent was blown up, the King of Scotland, who was hand in glove with the French, had put afloat what a contemporary chronicler terms "ane verrie monstrous great schip". This was the famous Great Michael. Her constructor was Jaques Tarret, a Frenchman, and it has been written that "she was of so great stature and took so much timber, that except Falkland, she wasted all the woods of Fife, which were oak wood, with all the timber that was gotten out of Norway". She took "a year and a day to build", and we are given her dimensions, which compare favourably in point of size with many much later line-of-battle ships. "She was 12 score feet in length and 36 feet within the sides; she was 10 feet thick in the wall, and boarded on every side so slack and so thick that no cannon could go through her." It is rather difficult to understand what "slack" means in this context.
"This great ship", goes on the account, "cumbered Scotland to get her to sea." By the time she was afloat and fully equipped she was reckoned to have cost the King from thirty to forty thousand pounds. She carried a heavy battery, and if her cannon were as formidable as their names, they must have been most effective in action. "She bore many cannons, six on every side, with three great Bassils, two behind in her dock, and one before, with three hundred shot of small Artillerie, that is to say, Myand and Battered Falcon and Quarter Falcon, Slings, pestilent Serpentines and Double Dogs, with Hagtar and Culvering, Cross-bows and Hand-bows. She had three hundred mariners to sail her: she had six score of gunners to use her artillery, and had a thousand men of war by her, Captains, Skippers, and Quartermasters." A "basil" or "basilisk", it may be explained, was a gun throwing a ball of 200 pounds weight, a much heavier projectile than any used at Trafalgar.
Space forbids further details as to the "menagerie" of other pieces that armed the decks of the Great Michael, but you will find more about these and other old-fashioned cannon in another chapter. As soon as she was afloat the King had her fired at to test the resistance of her tremendously thick sides, but, says our old writer, "the cannon deired hir not"; that is to say, could not penetrate her. This is the oldest experiment of the kind of which we have any record. But the most remarkable thing about the Great Michael—at least to my mind—is her size. According to the old account from which I have quoted, which, by the way, was written by one Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, she must have had almost the exact dimensions of the Duke of Wellington, one of the last and finest of our steam three-deckers. Now I have a perfect idea of her size, because I had the honour of serving on board her for a couple of years. She was in the "sere and yellow leaf" then, her masts had