A flagship of Henry VIII’s navy
The Mary Rose was one of the first major warships of the navy of King Henry VIII. She was built at Portsmouth in the early 1510s and served for more than thirty years, taking part in several wars with France and Scotland. She was rebuilt and modified in the 1530s, which probably increased her size and armament. During her career she became a favourite of the king, though how closely Henry was associated with her in day-to-day matters is uncertain.
She was a carrack-type warship, with high castles at bow and stern and a hull built with the planks laid edge to edge, a style called carvel construction. Her guns were heavy muzzle-loaders, mounted low in the hull and fired through ports cut in the sides. Warships carrying guns through gunports belong to a transition period in the history of warfare at sea, a story that leads eventually towards the ship of the line.
July 1545
In the summer of 1545, a large French fleet entered the Channel with the aim of attacking England. English ships assembled at Portsmouth, and the king himself was reported to be present on shore. On 19 July 1545, the French fleet approached the Solent, the strait between the Isle of Wight and the English mainland, and the English ships moved out to meet it.
The Mary Rose heeled over and sank in the water close to Portsmouth. A number of men escaped, but several hundred are believed to have died. Estimates of the number aboard are usually around 500, which is unusually high because the ship also carried soldiers, and only a small number, commonly put at around 30 to 35, are thought to have survived. These are estimates only.
Why did she sink?
This is the central question, and the honest answer is that no single explanation has been proved. Several possibilities are discussed:
- Open gunports. Some accounts suggest that the lowest gunports were open and water entered when the ship turned and heeled. Gunports on this deck were reportedly only a short distance above the waterline.
- A sudden gust. The ship may have been caught by a squall as she turned, adding to the heel.
- Overloading and men on board. Extra soldiers and equipment, including anti-boarding nets across the upper deck, may have hampered escape and affected stability.
- Handling and command. Contemporary and later writers have suggested problems among the crew or between officers, though the evidence is limited.
- Structural modifications. The ship’s rebuild and the added weight of guns may have altered her handling, although this is open to debate.
French sources claimed to have sunk the ship by gunfire, but the English accounts of the time did not agree, and modern research considers a combination of factors the most likely. Only a few contemporary documents describe the event, which is part of the problem.
Finding and raising the wreck
For centuries the ship lay buried in the silt of the seabed. Attempts to salvage guns were made soon after the sinking and again in the 1830s, when divers using early diving equipment worked on the site. The modern search began in the 1960s, led by amateur researchers and divers, and the wreck was located in 1971. A long underwater excavation followed, carried out by volunteer and professional divers.
The hull, much of which survived because the silt had covered one side, was lifted on 11 October 1982 in a major operation watched by a large audience on television. It was raised in a cradle and brought to dry land at Portsmouth. The recovery is one of the best-known projects in the field of maritime archaeology.
What the wreck revealed
The ship carried thousands of objects, which made her a time capsule of Tudor naval life. Finds included weapons, among them longbows and the arrows that went with them, together with cannon, tools, navigational items, clothing, musical instruments and the personal belongings of the crew. Human remains were also recovered. Together, these items tell us about daily life afloat in a way that written records rarely do. Studies of the skeletons have provided information about health and working life among the crew.
The ship’s design also gave historians a detailed look at how a large warship of the early sixteenth century was constructed, including the structure of the hull, the arrangement of the gun decks and the details of the fittings.
Conservation and display
Conserving a waterlogged wooden hull is difficult. After recovery, the Mary Rose was kept wet by spraying and then treated for many years with a wax-like polyethylene glycol, before slow drying took place. The work was demanding and took decades. She is now displayed in a purpose-built museum at Portsmouth, close to HMS Victory, the later flagship preserved in the same historic dockyard area, and the site is often grouped with the other treasures of the royal dockyards that supported Britain’s navy.
Today the ship and her contents are among the leading exhibits of any of the maritime museums in Britain. The Mary Rose Trust manages the collection and the museum.
A loss that gained a second life
The Mary Rose is a rare case where a disaster has been of greater value to later generations than the ship was in service. Her loss in 1545 was a tragedy for the families of the men aboard, and it remains, in some respects, unexplained. But the recovery of the hull and its contents has given us an unusually clear picture of life aboard a warship in the Tudor period.