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:

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 gone, her engines had disappeared, and she had a roof which made her look much more like Noah's Ark than a battleship, but I can remember her in all her glory when she carried the flag of the commander-in-chief at Portsmouth. I was only a boy then, but I recollect that her appearance was fine in the extreme. In reckoning the beam of the Great Michael we must remember to add 20 feet for the thickness of her sides, since Pitscottie only gives us her internal width. Having done this, I will put down the dimensions of the two ships for comparison—

The old Scots writer, however, offers to prove his figures; for he says: "If any man believe that this ship was not as we have shewn, let him pass to the place of Tullibardine, where he will find the length and breadth of her set with hawthorne: as for my author he was Captain Andrew Wood, principal Captain of hir, and Robert Bartone, who was made her Skipper".

With regard to the plan of the vessel in hawthorns, I am indebted to Lady Strathallan for the following interesting items: Tullibardine Castle has quite disappeared. What little was left of it was used in the construction of farm buildings from 1830-40. The spot where the hawthorns were planted to show the dimensions of the Great Michael is still known, but there is nothing to mark it. When the great ship was built, the carpenter or "wright" of the castle went down to superintend the shipwrights. When he got home, as the people at the castle were very anxious to form some idea of the size of this "Dreadnought" of that period, he was given orders to have an excavation made of the exact size of the ship. The hawthorns were, it would appear, planted round the excavation, which was tilled with water and aquatic plants, and remained as an ornamental pond till about the time of the battle of Waterloo. In 1837 the shape of the vessel was distinctly perceptible, but three only remained of the hawthorn-trees that formerly surrounded it. Some time ago Lady Strathallan, anxious that this curious monument of antiquity should not disappear altogether, directed the forester to renew the hawthorn outline of the Great Michael. The trees were procured for the purpose, but the tenant of the farm on which it was situated objected that it would take up too much room in his field, so that the project was abandoned. It seems a thousand pities that something cannot, even now, be done to perpetuate this relic of the famous Scots man-of-war, which, year by year, is being rendered more and more indistinguishable by the plough. The field in which traces of the hollow may be looked for is situated 400 yards from the old parish chapel, which was restored a good many years ago and used as a burial vault.

The Great Michael did not long remain a Scots ship. The fleet of Scotland went to France in 1513, and in the following year she was bought by Louis XII for 40,000 francs, to replace the CordeliÈre, which, as you will remember, was blown up with the Regent. This brings us back to the Henri Grace À Dieu, which was built to replace the latter ship. But before we turn our attention to her we cannot but note the difference between the alleged cost of the Great Michael and that for which she was sold. The bargain does not seem worthy of the Scots reputation for "canniness". But we must bear in mind that a "pound Scots" was not at all the same thing as an English pound at that date. Ever since 1355 its value had been falling, till by 1603 it was only worth twenty pence instead of twenty shillings. It was, in fact, at the time of the sale, the kind of "silver pound" that the "chieftain to the Highlands bound" paid or promised the boatman if he would row Lord Ullin's daughter and himself "o'er the ferry". But even if we put it at about a tenth of a pound sterling in 1513, the bargain seems a poor one. Probably it was more of a political deal than anything else, comparable to the German sale of the Goeben to Turkey.

The Henri Grace À Dieu—I think we may as well call her the Henri for short, and save time and paper—is a ship about which we have the most extended information in some respects—those dealing with her decoration and equipment, for instance; but we are left entirely in the dark as to her size and measurements. The only dimensions I have been able to find are those indicated on a plan which, on very insufficient grounds, is claimed to be a copy of the official one on which she was built, and which is stated to be—or at any rate to have been within the last century—at Plymouth dockyard. So far this original has not been traced, and I may remark that anyone who knows anything about the Navy would not dream of referring to the dockyard in the western port except as "Devonport Dockyard". However, I give the dimensions for what they may be worth—not much, I think:

Now if this, by any chance, is anything like correct she must have been a very much smaller ship than the Great Michael, which is not very likely, since Henry VIII would naturally have wanted "to go one better". Moreover, she is generally credited as having been of at least a thousand tons displacement, and carried a battery little, if any, inferior in weight and numbers to that of the Michael.

She was heavily equipped with ordnance, very little of which is apparent in her pictures. According to her inventories she carried something like 185 guns of all sorts and sizes, but many of these must have been kept on shore as reserve stores. She is generally credited with carrying 14 heavy guns on the lower and 12 on the main deck, and 46 light cannon on her upper works. Some of the large and all the smaller ones were breech-loaders, and as most were provided with at least two "chambers" or breech-pieces, which contained the powder-charge and could be quickly substituted one for the other, we may almost call them "quick-firers". She was gorgeously decorated in the first place, and poop, waist, forecastle, and tops were hung with shields showing alternately the St. George's Cross, the Golden Fleur-de-Lis on a blue ground, and the Tudor Rose on a green and white ground. Her sails were woven with a decorative design in gold damask, and she carried a lion figure-head, but the lion was badly executed and a very tame one. Like all Tudor ships she flew a profusion of flags, standards, and immense streamers bearing the St. George's Cross, the fly or long-pointed end being half green and half white. These were the Tudor livery colours. The plain red-cross flag or "Jack" was well in evidence and generally carried on the fore masthead as well as among the smaller flags placed on poles at equal distances along the bulwarks. The royal standard was also carried, but not in every ship, and sometimes it appears "impaled" with the national red-cross flag—that is to say, the two were placed side by side on the same flag.

The national status of the Royal Navy was becoming recognized. Before this time, though the English "Jack" generally found a place somewhere on board an English ship, the banners and pennons of the nobles and knights on board were most in evidence. Now we see nothing but royal and national emblems. In the war with France in 1455 the ships of the squadron forming the "van" or leading portion of the fleet carried the St. George's Cross at the fore, those of the centre at the main, and the rear squadron at the mizzen.

In describing the Henri we have practically described all the "great shippes" of her class, of which there were a considerable number, though none were quite so large, or probably quite so elaborately decorated. Of course she was what we may call "a show ship", like the Royal James and Sovereign of the Seas of a later date.

But by 1546, if we may accept Anthony Anthony's Roll as correct, "timber colour" with scarlet masts and spars was uniform for all classes of ships.

But it is time we turned our attention to the men who manned them. The changes in this respect were quite as important as those we have noted in the ships themselves. To begin with, the nobles and gentry of the kingdom were beginning to wake up to the fact that war afloat offered them at least equal opportunities of distinction to those they had hitherto looked for in land warfare. Besides, they had now little or no chance of that at home, and there was no longer any land frontier over in France across which they could ride and raid and harry and fight as their fathers and grandfathers had so often done. Naval strategy was still confined to cross raiding, but ships were now better fighting-machines and were not merely used as platforms for hand-to-hand fighting and as transports; so that men of the class which had hitherto looked down on ships and sailors began to turn their eyes towards the sea.

Looking at the lofty hulls, the immense mainsails, and the nearness of the ports to the water-line, we can easily understand how a want of care wrecked the Mary Rose. The ship in the background on the right is apparently trying to reduce sail, and has had to lower her main-yard. Her mainsail is almost in the water, to the apparent danger of the ship.