Mary Rose

The Spanish Armada off the English Coast in 1588 by Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen Rijksmuseum Amsterdam SK A

This week: the Spanish Armada

With 130 ships, 2,431 guns, and 30,000 men, Philip II’s invasion force was, according to one English admiral, ‘the greatest and strongest combination that was ever gathered in all Christendom’. If it had been successful, the history of the past…

Hms

This week: shipwrecks

On 11 October 1982, an estimated global audience of 60 million people tuned in to watch one of the televisual events of the decade: the long-awaited raising of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's ill-fated Tudor flagship, from the seabed near Portsmouth, where it had rested since capsizing while fighting against the French at the Battle of the Solent some 437 years previously.

The Mary Rose as seen from the lower deck of the virtual hull.

The Mary Rose Museum

The Mary Rose museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard was reopened 471 years to the day since the sinking of Henry VIII’s flagship – for the first time giving the public a clear view of her hull

Above Jacques Francis, illustration by Joe Lillington. below The Mary Rose, as she would have looked in 1545, in a painting by Geoff Hunt.

Jacques Francis

He was not, Jacques Francis insisted as prosecution witnesses tried repeatedly to have his testimony thrown out, a slave. They called him ‘blackamoor’ and ‘infidel-born’, but he called himself famulus rather than servus – a member of the household, a…