The Mary Rose’s final voyage was not a long one. After 34 years service, she sailed from Portsmouth for the last time to intercept a French invasion force larger than the Spanish Armada. The French king Francis I, stung by the recent capture of Boulogne, had sent a fleet to land a 30,000-strong army on English soil. On 19 July 1545 the French galleys entered the eastern mouth of the Solent, the channel between the mainland and the Isle of Wight. All that stood between them and a successful landing was a handful of the King’s Ships, the forerunner of the Royal Navy.
Watching from Southsea Castle, Henry VIII saw his fleet becalmed and immobile. The situation was serious. At the head of the English force was the warship Mary Rose. Carrying the Vice Admiral of the fleet, Sir George Carew, she was bristling with over 30 carriage-mounted guns. Finally a wind blew up as the Mary Rose engaged the French galleys only 2km from the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour. Precisely what happened next is lost in the fog of war.
Flower of England
A French witness, Martin du Bellay, claimed that their guns sank the ‘MarieRose’, but his is a lone voice and there is no sign of battle damage on the surviving part of the hull. Others blamed overloading with weapons or men – one estimate has 700 people crammed on the ship’s decks – or Vice Admiral Carew’s inability to control an unruly crew. A letter penned only five days after the loss is often viewed as the most authoritative account. Written by François van der Delft, the Holy Roman Emperor’s London ambassador, it records a conversation with a Flemish survivor. He revealed that ‘the disaster was caused by their not having closed the lowest row of gun ports on one side. Having fired the guns on that side, the ship was turning, in order to fire from her other side, when the wind caught her sails… plunging her open gun ports beneath the waves’. While consensus remains elusive, many scholars now believe that the loss of the Mary Rose came from a combination of mishaps, each harmless on their own, but deadly in unison.
War Classics – Flashman