The Mary Rose (1545)
the mary rose (1545)
This page contained additional material and images for Chapter 7 of my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks.
The excavation of King Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose is one of the most celebrated shipwreck projects ever to have taken place, and the museum housing the hull and artefacts is one of the greatest archaeological displays anywhere. It makes an excellent day trip from London - the train from Waterloo Station to Portsmouth Harbour takes a little over two hours - and encompasses not only the Mary Rose but also the two other great warships in the Historic Dockyards, HMS Victory and HMS Warrior, and (if time allows!) the Royal Navy Submarine Museum and Museum of Naval Firepower on the other side of the harbour entrance. For those unable to make the trip, the Mary Rose Museum has an excellent website with numerous photos of the artefacts discussed in my chapter. Rather than replicating those images, I am showing several photos of my own on this page as well as images of the Cowdray engraving and the Anthony Roll that help to illustrate my narrative.
I was too young to participate in the first years of the Mary Rose excavation, and then my summers in 1981 and 1982 were taken up with the University of Bristol expeditions to Sicily (see the chapter on the Plemmirio Roman wreck) and in a Mediterranean study tour that was part of my degree course. However, I was very fortunate to see the hull in a study visit with Dr Toby Parker from Bristol only a few weeks after it had been raised, and then to be invited by Dr Margaret Rule to work under her direction on the excavation of a Roman wreck off St Peter Port in Guernsey in 1984-5 - an experience that gave me a sense of the excitement and passion behind the Mary Rose excavation, and the guiding light that Margaret Rule gave to the project. It was a great pleasure for me to visit the museum and artefacts several times while I was writing my book and to see the hull again forty years after I first stood before it in the autumn of 1982.
I’m very grateful to Dr Alex Hildred of the Mary Rose Trust for providing the photo of the hull published in the book and for her comments on the history of the project.
Click on the images to enlarge:
I took this photo of the Mary Rose in April 2018, five years after the polyethylene glycol spray had been switched off and the timbers allowed to air-dry. It looked very different from the first time I saw it in October 1982, when the hull was still in the steel cradle in which it had been lifted from the seabed and the timbers were shrouded in fresh-water spray. Today it remains in the same place - No 3 Dry Dock in the old Royal Navy Dockyard, next to HMS Victory - but within a purpose-build museum opened in 2013. The starboard side of the hull remains well-preserved, a result of being buried in the silt of the Solent after the ship had heeled over. Artefacts from the missing port side that had fallen into the starboard side have been reconstructed in their original position on the left side of the museum, giving a marvellous sense of the ship having been opened up in cross-section for the visitor - as you can see in the next photo (photo: David Gibbins).
One of a series of photos I took in May 2022 of the reconstructed port-side gun-deck, showing the original artefacts - including the wooden gun carriages - arranged as they would have been before the ship sank. The image illustrates the transitional period of the mid-16th century in the history of naval guns, with the more modern cast bronze muzzleloader in the foreground alongside older wrought-iron breechloaders. The latter represent a continuation of late medieval tactics in which guns were mainly used as anti-personnel weapons, whereas iron shot from a bronze muzzleloader - able to withstand a much more powerful charge -could penetrate a hull or bring down a mast. It was not until the mid-19th century that cast-iron technology and better breech mechanisms allowed breechloaders to supersede muzzleloaders as anti-ship weapons (photo: David Gibbins).
The Cowdray engraving, a copy of a painting made shortly after the Battle of the Solent and hung in Cowdray House, West Sussex. In the 1770s the Society of Antiquaries commissioned a copy of the painting from the engraver James Basire, one of whose apprentices was the young William Blake; the commission proved prescient, as the house was destroyed by fire in 1793. It is one of the richest portrayals to survive of life in the Tudor period, and is particularly important for the details of soldiers and their armaments, fortifications and ships. King Henry VIII is show in the centre riding from Portsmouth to Southsea Castle just ahead of him, with the sinking of the Mary Rose shown above that in front of the English fleet in the Solent.
I took this photo from a boat in Portsmouth harbour looking out over the Solent towards the Isle of White, to replicate the view that sailors would have had as the English ships massed in preparation for their foray towards the French fleet - if you look at the Cowdray engraving above, it is the view from the furthest ship to the right past the tower at the harbour entrance towards the site where the Mary Rose foundered. The tower has long gone but the present-day buildings on the left side of the harbour entrance - some of them 18th century or older - given an idea of its appearance in the 16th century (photo: David Gibbins).
Detail of the Cowdray engraving showing the horrifying aftermath of the sinking of the Mary Rose. Many aspects of this depiction are borne out by the archaeology and circumstances of the wreck, and indicate that the artist had reliable eyewitnesses - including a general sense of the rapidity and shock of the sinking, the depth and angle of the wreck shown by the protruding mastheads and the very few survivors or bodies on the surface, most having been trapped under the anti-boarding netting when the ship went down.
Depiction of the Mary Rose on the Anthony Roll, a register of Henry VIII’s navy compiled under the guidance of Anthony Anthony, overseer of the Ordnance Office. It was presented to Henry shortly after the sinking, suggesting optimism that she might be raised and refloated. The 58 ships are depicted with a list below of the crew size and weapons and ammunition aboard. This record has proved invaluable for archaeologists studying the Mary Rose, with crucial details that help to explain the extent of the disaster - for example, the anti-boarding netting, visible in the depiction, that probably trapped many of the men - though with some debate about the accuracy of the very high stern and forecastles. As in the Cowdray engraving, the flags and streamers give a sense of pageantry to the ship, a reminder that the early16th century was also a time of jousting and extravagant displays of kingship and wealth. This image was in part of the roll given in 1646 by King Charles II to Samuel Pepys (then Secretary of the Navy), and is in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge (Pepys 2991).
The elaborately decorated bronze gun described in my chapter bearing the inscription below the lion’s head trunnels of the brothers Owen (spelled Owyn), gunfounders of London, and that of the king below the roundel with the Tudor rose (photo: David Gibbins).
Another bronze gun from the wreck bearing the inscription of Henry VIII. The close association of the Mary Rose with Henry VIII comes not only through being a flagship of his navy but also because he himself came aboard at least once, and probably a number of times - perhaps including the eve of her final battle (photo: David Gibbins).
Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger of Sir George Carew, captain of the Mary Rose. This is the only known portrait of a member of the ship’s company who died on that day, though facial reconstruction based on skeletal remains has brought others back to life in a different way. The inscription (with his name spelled incorrectly) was added in the 18th century. Black and coloured chalks and metalpoint (Royal Collection Trust RCIN 912197).
At the Portsmouth Naval Dockyards you can walk through the entire history of the Royal Navy, from its origins at the time of the Mary Rose to the present-day, with Portsmouth still being an active naval base - a few metres from the Mary Rose is HMS Victory (still a commissioned ship in the Royal Navy), and behind that the berth of the aircraft carriers HMS Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth. It is a history of the ships that gave Britain a global reach in exploration, trade, colonisation and war (photo: David Gibbins).