The Royal Navy
To: Cindy at RA
From: Rick
Subj: He
This is an excerpt from the paper...
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
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hipwrightry:" in this manuscript, the midship hull-section of the Tiger is drawn and noted as representing the ideal form for a fast-sailing ship. In sixteenth-century practice, the midship section was the primary determinant of a ship's hull form; that cross-section, along with the length of the keel, were the basis upon which the lines of the entire hull were determined. The superior sailing qualities of these ships must have been recognized early on, and presumably it supplied ample justification to take extra measures for their preservation. We do not know the details of their maintenance histories; the actual hull material might well have been almost wholly replaced when they were rebuilt with lower-deck guns instead of oars. If so, we must assume that careful attention was taken to preserve their lines and performance along with their identities.
In these four Henrician ships, then, we are justified in supposing that we have the true prototype of the Elizabethan race-built galleon--and, indeed, for a line of development that would be followed till the end of the age of sail. The term "race-built" was not a reference to the ships' speed (though they were indeed fast); the word "race" here has the same root as raze, and
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Some common words found in the essay are:
English Shipwrightry, Hawkins Frobisher--were, Frank Howard, Mary Rose, Grand Mistress, Jesus Lubeck, Henry VIII, Anthony Anthony, Henry VIII's, Privy Council, lower deck, mary rose, grand mistress, henrician ships, henrician navy, jesus lubeck, henrician fleet, high-charged ships, citation pending, tactical doctrine, anthony anthony rolls, grand mistress anne, york burt franklin, san juan de, tactics henrician navy,
Approximate Word count = 3667
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
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