Mary Rose

1545

Henry VIII's flagship, sunk in the Solent Location: The Solent, Portsmouth, England · Coordinates: 50.79°N 1.10°W · Casualties: ~500 · Survivors: ~35 · Depth: 14 m · Cause: foundered — Capsized during a gun battle with the French fleet. Gun ports were open for firing when she heeled; the lower ports took water; she went down in minutes. · Fate: raised 1982 · Type: warship · Tonnage: 700 tons · Crew: 415 · Flag: Kingdom of England · Launched: 1511 Capsized in battle against the French fleet in sight of Henry VIII watching from Southsea Castle. The king reportedly heard the screaming of men trapped below decks. Raised in 1982 in the largest archaeological recovery in maritime history. Now the centerpiece of a museum built around her. The Vessel The Mary Rose was built at Portsmouth between 1509 and 1511 for King Henry VIII, one of the first ships of the new Royal Navy the young king was assembling at his accession. She was named, in the careful theology of the court, for the king's favourite sister Mary Tudor and for the rose that was her house's symbol. 500 tons at launch, rebuilt to perhaps 700 by the late 1530s, she carried between 78 and 91 guns in her prime and about 400 men at muster. She was a carrack of the early Tudor transition, built for both boarding and stand-off artillery, caught in the middle of a century-long change in the way European ships fought. Her lower gun ports, cut through the hull below the weather deck, were one of the innovations of her refit: they let her mount heavy bronze guns on the lowest deck, where their weight would not raise her centre of gravity, and fire through broadside rather than over the rail. The invention would transform naval warfare inside fifty years. It would also be her undoing. She fought in Henry's French war of 1512-1514 under Sir Edward Howard, carried the flag at the Battle of Saint-Mathieu, and survived the rest of her reign in and out of action. By July 1545 she was Vice-Admiral George Carew's flagship, moored at Portsmouth to meet a French invasion fleet of 200 ships and 30,000 men bearing down on the Solent. The Disaster The king reportedly heard the screaming of men trapped below decks, a detail preserved in the French account and repeated by English chroniclers the following generation. George Carew went down with his ship; Roger Grenville, captain, went with him. Around thirty-five men climbed out of the rigging or swam clear. Of the 415 aboard, 380 died in a ship that sank inside her own harbour, in a battle her navy was winning. The French ambassador wrote to Francis I that evening describing the sinking as providential; the English Privy Council wrote to Henry that it was inexplicable. Contemporary chroniclers settled on the heeling-and-gunports explanation within weeks. Modern forensic analysis of the recovered hull confirms the sequence but cannot resolve whether the triggering cause was a gust of wind, a badly stored weight of stone shot, or a helm misjudged by a steersman who had never sailed her with the new refit. Salvage began the next morning. Masts and guns were marked with buoys. Sir Peter Carew, brother of the admiral, was still trying to raise her through August. The Venetian engineer Piero Paolo Corsi, hired by the king, proposed passing cables under her and lifting her on the tide; several of her upper guns were recovered by this method. The lower hull resisted every attempt. In the winter of 1545 she sank further into the Solent mud and the salvors gave up.