Monarch
Henry VIII
present at Southsea Castle, witnessed the sinking
The Record
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 Voyage
The French fleet appeared off the Isle of Wight on 18 July 1545, the largest foreign force assembled against English waters since the Norman Conquest. Henry VIII himself rode out to Southsea Castle to watch his navy engage it. The English fleet, 80 ships under John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, stood out from Portsmouth to meet them the next morning.
The winds were light. The French fleet included galleys with sweeps that let them manoeuvre without sail, while the English ships lay largely becalmed. Two French galleys closed the English line and the Mary Rose moved to engage; she fired a broadside from her starboard guns and began turning to bring her port side around for the second broadside. The manoeuvre was the one she had been refitted to perform. Her gun ports were open for the firing of the second broadside. She heeled in the turn; whether from a sudden puff of wind or from her own imbalanced stores or from poor helmsmanship is the subject of five centuries of speculation.
The heel was catastrophic. The lower gun ports, less than a metre above the waterline, dipped below it. Water poured in along the starboard side. The netting that had been rigged over the upper deck to repel boarders became a cage; the men below could not climb out. The ship rolled onto her starboard side and sank in the Solent in under five minutes, within sight of the French fleet, within sight of the English town, within sight of the king.
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.
The Legacy
She lay in forty-one feet of water, preserved by the anaerobic Solent silts, for 437 years. The Deane brothers in 1836 rediscovered her and brought up several of the upper guns, which entered the Royal Armouries. The wreck was lost again. In 1971 the divers of the Mary Rose 1967 Committee, led by the archaeologist Margaret Rule, relocated her. For eleven years they excavated by hand at a site that was also a working marine transit channel, mapping 19,000 objects from clothing and musical instruments to arrowheads and archers' wrist guards.
On 11 October 1982, in the largest archaeological underwater lift ever attempted, her hull was raised from the seabed onto a cradle and lifted into the air off Spithead. The BBC broadcast the recovery live. She was moved into a dedicated preservation hall at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and sprayed for thirty-three years with polyethylene glycol to displace the seawater from her timbers; the treatment ended in 2013 and she was gradually dried in a controlled atmosphere until 2016.
The Mary Rose Museum opened in 2013 around her preserved starboard hull, which is presented on her original angle of list, with the contents of her decks reconstructed on the opposite wall at the matching level. Her recovered longbows, lute, dice, shoes, coins, and human remains are the single most complete inventory of Tudor life anywhere; she has given more to the archaeology of the sixteenth century than any land site ever excavated. She is the reason the discipline of marine archaeology exists as a profession.
Connections
Archaeologist
Margaret Rule
led the 1970s-80s excavation
Contemporary Vessel
Henry Grace à Dieu
Henry VIII's other great flagship, sister to the Mary Rose era