Mudie, in his History of Hampshire, though doing scant justice to the interest and story of Portsmouth, gives a fairly vivid sketch of the famous “Hard” about this period. He writes: “Immediately beyond the gun wharves there is an opening, with the buildings of Portsea on the other side. This is the Common’s Hard, and it and the row (houses) opposite are much devoted to the sale of frippery, so that this is neither the most cleanly nor the most moral spot in England. It is,” he goes on to say, “the great landing-place from the ships in the harbour—at least, for the common sailors and those who keep up intercourse with them.... This common Hard displays no very pleasant scene in times of peace; in war time it must be far worse.”
But even Mudie sees some use in the Hard, though a questionable one, as he adds, “But as such scenes are inseparable from places where sailors resort in great numbers, it is probably better to have it thus concentrated than if it were dispersed all over the town.”
It was not, however, until the reign of King John that the town appears to have attained any great prominence as a shipbuilding port; but during the reign of that monarch, and ever afterwards, there are frequent mentions of it, as such, in the Records. About the same time as the commencement of shipbuilding at Portsmouth we find an account of the assembly by Henry III in 1229 of a great army for his French war in Poitou, undertaken in order that he might recover the possessions which John had lost. The naval preparations for the campaign, however, seem to have been inadequate, as we find the “assemblage of men so great that they were with but difficulty numbered,” but they had to be disbanded for lack of both stores and transport across seas. Here, too (or, to be exact, upon what is known as Southsea Common, nowadays the resort of ogling nursemaids and children when not used for drill), Edward III in the summer of 1346 gathered together the army of knights and fighting men, and good bowmen, upwards of 30,000 strong, which shortly afterwards won for him the stricken field of Crecy against the French army of four times the number. Amongst the 30,000 French who lost their lives was the King of Bohemia, whose crest and motto—three ostrich plumes and Ich Dien—the Prince of Wales afterwards adopted. At Portsmouth, too, in somewhat later times were assembled the armies of John of Gaunt and of Edward IV, both bound for the interminable French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Afterwards Henry VIII in 1545 used the ground as the site of the huge depôt needed for the victualling and fitting out of the hundred high-sterned, cumbersome ships with which he intended to sail and attack the French coast.
The French, however, were already at sea, burning for revenge on account of the English having taken and destroyed part of Boulogne, and suddenly, in the July of 1545, with a boldness which it is not easy for us to understand, the French sailed across Channel with a fleet of considerable strength and lay to just off Brading for lack of wind. King Henry VIII, who was at Portsmouth at the time, and had dined aboard the Mary Rose ere she set out with the rest of the fleet to meet the enemy, was on Southsea Common an interested, if not alarmed, spectator of the Frenchmen’s audacity.
But owing to lack of wind neither fleet became generally engaged, and the affair, which might have been a naval battle, descended to the level of a mere desultory fight between the French galleys and the English ships which had succeeded in creeping out nearest the French fleet ere the wind entirely dropped. The Mary Rose was not one of the ships near enough to take part in the engagement. She was manned, so one authority asserts, with officers and seamen who had so good an opinion of their own importance and skill that they considered themselves “fitter to command than to obey.” The gun ports were opened, the guns run out, and, by carelessness on account of the calm, the latter were not properly secured. As the day wore on, however, a breeze suddenly came, the ship heeled over to it, and in consequence the windward tier of guns crashed across the deck, causing the ship to heel still further over with the great additional weight. The lee ports were suddenly dipped under water, the sea rushed in, and a few moments later the great, unwieldy ship sank with 600 on board of her.
It is said that the watchword of the fleet on that memorable occasion was “God Save the King,” and the pass words, “Long to reign over us.” Some authorities assert that to these words may be traced the origin of our National Anthem. How true this view may be it is not easy to say.
There have been other disasters near the same spot, too; notably the loss of the Royal George, the 108-gun ship of Rear-Admiral Kempenfeldt, which sank at Spithead on August 29, 1782, whilst heeled over for the repair of a pipe. All hands were aboard to the number of about 600 souls, including women and Jews. Also there was the sinking of the Newcastle, which went down with her crew in 1703; the loss of the Edgar and 400 lives by the blowing up of her powder magazine in 1711; and that of 98-gun line-of-battle ship Boyne from a similar cause in 1795.
War always brought stirring times for Portsmouth, for though, perhaps, the hum and bustle was not equal to that of to-day’s stress and hurry, these things are, after all, comparative, and the seamen of “Bluff King Hal’s” time worked probably with as good or better will than those of our own in manœuvring the galleons and caravels, which must, as one writer says, “have been fickle craft in all save a beam wind.”
Leland when he visited Portsmouth found it a place of great interest. For one thing, he saw the old ship, Henri Grace de Dieu, in the dock, which seems to have impressed him greatly. As he says, it was “one of the biggest ships that has been made within the memory of man.” He also saw the great iron cable which was used for blocking the harbour entrance in times of feared attack. A similar contrivance to that in common use, for example at Dartmouth, and Fowey, in those days. Regarding the town itself Leland is not very enthusiastic, for he calls it “bare, and little occupied in time of peace.” which presents a striking contrast to what it was even in Nelson’s day, when “the great activities incidental to a seagoing and naval nation were ceaselessly going on.”