A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (22 page)

Two events of great significance took place in the life of the
Mary Rose
over the next few years. The first was sailing as part of the fleet that took Henry VIII in June 1520 to the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold', linking her to this most sumptuous of events involving tournaments and feasts set among elaborate tents and portable palaces, possibly the most expensive spectacle of that nature ever staged. The second was a more intimate occasion involving Henry himself. After only two years of peace, relations with France had broken down and Henry sided with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, inviting him to England in May 1522 to cement their alliance. At 2 p.m. on 30 May the two kings arrived in Dover and inspected the
Henry Grace à Dieu
and the
Mary Rose
, Henry's most impressive warships. Henry had undoubtedly been on board the
Mary Rose
before, but this is the one documented occasion and adds great poignancy to the archaeological remains – it means that the decks of the ship, only 45 metres long, had been trodden by every element of Tudor society from the mightiest king England had ever known to the sailors and boys of the ‘lower deck', making it a true microcosm of the nation at the time.

The
Mary Rose
was refitted in 1536–7 in the Thames with extra gunports and improved hull structure, part of a general strengthening of Henry's fleet after his break with Rome and the expected attack by France and Spain. She probably formed part of the fleet that Henry took to Calais in 1544 and then on for the capture of Boulogne that September – the event that triggered the French invasion plan the next year. By the time she was ready for action on the Solent in July 1545 she was an old ship, but had been much loved: ‘your good ship, the flower, I trow, of all ships that ever sailed', according to Sir Edward Howard, Admiral of Henry's fleet in 1513, and the king watching that day must have had a particular affection for her as the first ‘great ship' of his reign, whose life had nearly spanned his time as king to that date.

As well as the Anthony Roll, a remarkable image of the
Mary Rose
exists in the Cowdray Engravings, five reproductions published by the Society of Antiquaries in 1788 of mid-sixteenth century paintings that
adorned Cowdray House in West Sussex, one of England's great Tudor houses – the creation of the engravings being prescient, as the house and paintings were destroyed by fire only five years later in 1793. They depict panoramic scenes in the life of Henry VIII, with one of them, ‘The encampment of the English Forces near Portsmouth', showing the Battle of the Solent on 19 July 1545. The engraving is rendered in watercolour and gives a sweeping view from the Isle of Wight to the inner harbour of Portsmouth, showing the French and English fleets and in the foreground Southsea Castle and the figure of Henry VIII. The image of the king riding a white charger with a rich backdrop is similar to a painting in the Royal Collections of the same period showing Henry riding into the Field of the Cloth of Gold, reinforcing the pageant-like aspect of the battle – with streamers flying from the ships, the Cross of St George repeatedly shown and the colourful tents of the encampment looking like those of knights at a tournament, and the Solent like the tiltyard for a jousting match. For historians and archaeologists the engraving has provided a rich source of material, not only about the course of the battle but also in the detail of ships, armaments, fortifications and the people themselves, with many soldiers and retainers shown in the foreground alongside the king.

The sense of this being a pageant ends abruptly when the eye focuses on the strait just beyond Southsea Castle in the centre of the engraving. It shows a dreadful scene – the immediate aftermath of the sinking of the
Mary Rose
. Between the long bronze guns firing from Southsea Castle and an engagement between a French galley and an English carrack out in the Solent, the remains of the
Mary Rose
can be seen. Two masts poke out of the sea, both with ‘fighting tops' similar to the one found in the wreck and one with the Cross of St George still flying. A survivor stands on one of the tops with his arms raised outwards as if in disbelief; two others cling to the masts. Nine more men float in the sea, most of them seemingly lifeless but one being rescued by an approaching boat. It is a scene of desolation, with so few survivors and so little flotsam. The suddenness of the wrecking is shown by the apparent indifference of many of those on shore – Henry himself is looking in the other direction – with hardly any time to register the event, let alone show shock and dismay.

The most reliable account of the sinking is that quoted at the beginning of this chapter by François van der Delft, ambassador from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In a letter to Charles sent from
Portsmouth on 28 July, van der Delft described dining on board the
Henry Grace à Dieu
, meeting the king and the course of the battle from the arrival of the French to their landing on the Isle of Wight and eventual withdrawal. The French fleet comprised ‘over 300 sail, without counting the 27 galleys they had', while the English ‘did not exceed 80 sail, but 40 of the ships were large and beautiful'. On the 17th the king dined on board the
Henry Grace à Dieu
with various officers including Sir George Carew, whom he appointed vice-admiral. During the evening news came that the French had arrived, and the king hurriedly left for shore while the officers returned to their ships.

The English fleet at once set sail to encounter the French, and on approaching them kept up a cannonade against the galleys, of which five had entered well into the harbour, whilst the English could not get out for want of wind, and in consequence of the opposition of the enemy.

The archaeological evidence of the wreck, heeled over to starboard with the gunports open, would appear to corroborate van der Delft's account. The reason why so many men drowned and yet there were so few bodies was the anti-boarding netting, seen in the Anthony Roll image of the
Mary Rose
stretched across the open upper deck and found in fragments in the wreck. Men who had been below deck and were struggling up the companionways would have been trapped under the netting as the waters rose. It was a tragic residue of medieval warfare at sea, with the netting being a good measure for ships closing in for hand-to-hand engagement but no longer relevant for long-distance gun action. The fate of those men, seemingly lost forever in the bleak image in the Cowdray engraving, has proved a boon for archaeology; the speed of the sinking and the burial of the hull with their bodies means that they are better known than any of the men who survived.

In his letter to Charles V nine days after the sinking, François van der Delft also wrote, ‘They say, however, that they can recover the ship and guns.' The wreck lay only 11 metres deep at low tide, and the protruding masts seen in the Cowdray engraving would have remained visible for some time afterwards. The Lord Admiral employed two Southampton-based Venetian salvage divers for the purpose, with a
plan to run cables under the hull that would be pulled taut by ships on either side at low water to allow the hull to rise with the tide. Their diving technique is unknown, but they may have used a bell; the first recorded use of a bell in salvage had been only a few years before, in 1536 on the Roman emperor Caligula's sunken pleasure barges in Lake Nemi near Rome, though diving bells had been described by the Greek philosopher Aristotle almost two millennia earlier. Already by 5 August sails and yards from the
Mary Rose
had been brought ashore, but soon after that the attempt was abandoned. The hull lay on one side, meaning that the distance to dig beneath it for cables was too great, and rather than being on a hard seabed it had begun to sink into the soft clay of the Solent, a feature that thwarted salvage but was to be crucial for the preservation of timbers and artefacts.

A continued hope that the
Mary Rose
might be raised is suggested by her inclusion in the Anthony Roll, presented to Henry VIII in the following year, though the next recorded salvage attempt focused not on the hull but on the recovery of anchors and guns. In 1547 another Venetian, Piero Paola Corsi, was employed, with a team that included a diver from West Africa named Jacques Francis. We know about him because of a deposition that he gave in 1548 to the High Court of Admiralty in support of Corsi against a claim made by several Italian merchants that Corsi had robbed them of material that he had salvaged from another wreck. Jacques Francis was described in Latin as ‘… A servant, he asserted, of Petri Paolo (
sic
), with whom he had lived about two years, and formerly in the Island of Guinea, where he had been born, at the age of 20 years or thereabouts freely, as he says…' The island was probably Arguin Island off Mauritania, where the Portuguese had established a trading post in 1445. His status as free man or slave is ambiguous, with the Latin ‘famulus', servant, being the translation by the court official of his original description of himself, probably in Portuguese; one of the Italian merchants described him as ‘slave and bondeman to the sayd Petur Paolo'.

Of great interest is the account of Jacques Francis diving and handling artefacts: ‘… this deponent with vij more men abowte Ester laste chauncyd to fynde in the see at the Needles CC blockes tynne, a Bell and certen ledde which this deponent dyd handell and see under water beyng there peryshyde and forsakyn…' People along the coast of West Africa were admired by Europeans for their swimming and diving ability, and it seems likely that Jacques was a skilled free-diver
who would easily have been able to reach the depth of the
Mary Rose
and pass cables around guns on the seabed for lifting.

An account from the time of Queen Elizabeth I described how the ship could still be seen underwater at low tide, but after that there is no reference to the wreck until 1836 when fishermen snagged their nets on timbers in the Solent that had probably been exposed by heavy seas or a change in the currents. The pioneer divers John Deane and William Edwards were at work nearby on the wreck of HMS
Royal George
, which had sunk in 1782 less than a kilometre away, with the loss of over 900 lives. They used a pump-supplied diving helmet that had been invented by John Deane and his brother Charles and manufactured by Augustus Siebe, who later created an improved version that was to be the basis for the standard hard-hat diving suit used until recently. Soon after arriving at the new site in the summer of 1836 they uncovered a bronze gun with an inscription of Henry VIII and the date 1542, indentifying it as the
Mary Rose
. After recovering more artefacts that year, in 1840 they returned and used iron bombs filled with gunpowder to blow their way into the seabed. Most of their finds appear to have come from above a hard upper layer that sealed in the hull, and once they had removed what they could, the site was abandoned – with beautiful illustrations made of the bronze guns to satisfy the antiquarian curiosity of the period, but the location of the wreck forgotten and not to be investigated again for more than a century.

The modern rediscovery of the
Mary Rose
came about through the invention of the aqualung and the exploration for wrecks off the south coast of England by the British Sub-Aqua Club from the 1950s onwards. In 1965, a historian named Alexander McKee teamed up with the local Southsea branch of the club to search the Solent for wrecks. The Cowdray engraving gave what proved to be an accurate general location for the
Mary Rose
, about a kilometre and a half off Southsea Castle, but it was a chart made by the Deane brothers that was the key to the rediscovery in May 1971. In 1978, a trench across the site showed that large parts of the decks survived, leading to the decision to excavate the wreck in its entirety, and in 1979 to the foundation of the Mary Rose Trust, with the Prince of Wales – now King Charles III – as president, closely involving royalty once again with the ship. Over three years a professional team and more than 500 volunteer divers carried out thousands of dives on the site, resulting
in more than 19,000 artefacts being recovered and culminating in the raising of the hull itself, lifted using a special frame on 11 October 1982 and taken to the dry dock where it remains today with the Mary Rose Museum built around it.

A major factor in the success of the project was the appointment as archaeological director of Margaret Rule, former curator of Fishbourne Roman Palace, who brought a land archaeologist's view to bear on wreck excavation and herself learnt to dive to oversee the site, just as George Bass had done for the Bronze Age Gelidonya excavation discussed in Chapter 2. During conservation of the hull much was learnt from the experience of preserving the
Vasa
, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus' flagship from 1627 that was raised from Stockholm harbour in 1962 – using the same technique that had been planned for the recovery of the
Mary Rose
in 1545 – and is now also displayed in a magnificent museum. The timbers were impregnated with polyethylene glycol, which replaced the water in the wood and kept it from shrinking on drying out. The spray on the
Mary Rose
was shut off in 2013 just before the opening of the new museum, and the hull was revealed dry in 2016. The museum is one of the outstanding archaeological exhibits in the world, combining a display of the hull with a walk-through reconstruction of the missing port side in which many of the artefacts are shown in their original shipboard setting.

The largest artefact from the excavation is the hull itself, of which some 40 per cent survives. The erosion of the port side as the wreck lay heeled over means that the surviving starboard side can be viewed from the interior as a cross-section, showing the hold, three decks and the lower sterncastle. The forecastle is missing, but renewed exploration at the site in 2003–5 revealed timbers from the bow including the Tudor rose emblem of the figurehead. Of utmost importance – and justifying the painstaking recording of everything
in situ
– was the preservation of cabins on the starboard side with their contents intact, including the sea-chests in which mariners kept their belongings and tools of trade. As a result, the wreck can be seen as an unfolding series of contexts from the ship in general to the private places of individuals and their physical remains, giving an extraordinarily rich picture of life on board a warship at the time of King Henry VIII.