A curious feature of Henry VIII's reign is that the two principal occasions on which he used his navy came near the beginning and end of it. As a very young man, barely out of his teens, he set out to win medieval glory in France, and to do so sent forth his father's ships and the new ones he had built himself. As an old man (in condition if not in years) he watched his fleet defend his kingdom off Portsmouth in the summer of 1545. Two years later he was dead, and the history of the Henrician navy per se comes to an end. But a central theme in this discussion has been the significance of the Henrician navy not only as a phenomenon in itself, but as the foundation for later development, and it is the latter that made him "the father of the Royal Navy."
This chapter will be devoted to the epilogue of the Henrician navy--an epilogue that is vastly more famous than the main story, for after the short reigns of Edward VI and Mary, Henry's fleet was ultimately a legacy to Elizabeth I. It is well to remember the time-scale here. The Elizabethan navy seems at first glance to exist in a different world than the Henrician. It has different ships, fighting a different enemy, using different tactics. The Henrician navy never operated farther from home than the coasts of France and Scotland; the Elizabethan navy encompassed the world. (Drake's Golden Hind was not, strictly speaking, a Queen's ship, but her voyage was both warlike and quasi-official, and surely deserves to be considered as part of the Elizabethan naval experience.) But thirty-two years separate the naval actions of the First and Third French Wars, while only forty-three years separate the French invasion of 1545 from the Spanish Armada. We may fairly consider these three episodes, each a generation apart, as three stages in the battle experience of the English fleet.
This discussion is necessarily partly speculative. In the administration of the fleet there is cl...