The Navy Before Henry VIII

Britain is an island, and as such, control of its neighboring waters is at least potentially an inherent component of its security. This potential had been grasped and acted upon, from time to time, many centuries before Henry VIII. The first "British Navy" was built by the Roman Empire; the so-called classis Britanniae was an integral part of the Roman defensive system for the island province. It must have ceased to be effective, however, before the time of the Germanic invasions; at any rate we are given no hint that any actual attempt was ever made to stop invaders by sea. The centuries that followed are lost in obscurity, leaving us only the shining legend of King Arthur, but once the English were established on parts of the island, any opportunity to bar further inroads at sea was lost.

By the nineth century, a unified English state emerged out of the wreckage, and this state was agains threatened from abroad, this time by the Vikings. Alfred the Great shares with Henry VIII the distinction of being called a "Father" of the English navy, and he did in fact build a fleet that was evidently configured specifically for maritime defense. We are told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that "King Alfred ordered warships to be built to meet the Danish ships. They were almost twice as long as the others, some had sixty oars, some more; they were faster and steadier, and had more freeboard." The Anglo-Saxons had substantial contact with By

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th decidely mixed success. Henry VIII was born into a world in which maritime and naval technology and sea warfare were undergoing radical flux, a point well-conveyed by the reflection that he was born the year after the first voyage of Columbus. To these developments he would make a major contribution, and to understand the nature of that contribution it is necessary to say something about the state of the art when he came to the throne. Popular naval histories tend to treat naval warfare as a new-found art, properly coming into being as late as Elizabeth's day; hence one popular writer can go so far as to say of Sir Francis Drake that "naval strategy had hardly existed before him." Nothing could be further from the truth, though it is true that a new type of naval warfare and naval strategy evolved in Henrician and Elizabethan times. In the Mediterranean at least, however, both went back in essentially unbroken development to classical times. Oared longboats, usable at least for sea-raiding, went back to prehistorical times, and the "Sea Peoples" implicated in the collapse of Mycenean civilization c. 1200 BC were plainly sea raiders. The evidence of Greek vase-paintings shows that the ramming-beak appeared about 1000 BC
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