GREAT HARRY'S NAVY: HOW HENRY VIII GAVE ENGLAND SEAPOWER

Geoffrey Moorhouse

"If Henry VIII is best remembered for six wives and gluttonous habits, his complex domestic life unjustly overshadows a now almost forgotten, but important fact: that Henry founded what would become the Royal Navy." "Without Henry's interest, would the sailors who served his daughter, Elizabeth I, have had the sea power to beat off the Spanish Armada? Would Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher, most notably, have been in a position to so assiduously and so profitably raid the Spanish Main?" "When Henry ascended the English throne in 1509, the country's fleet consisted of just five ships. At his death, nearly forty years later, he handed down to his young son, Edward VI, a navy of more than fifty vessels." "Thanks to the survival of one of the two most-cherished warships in Henry's fleet, the Mary Rose, recovered nearly a quarter of a century ago from the cloying mud of the Solent, we know a...

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