| Number | Length each | Weight each | Total | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ft. | Cwt. | Tons | Cwt. | |||
| Lower tier— | ||||||
| Luffs, quarters, and sides | 20 | cannon drakes[1121] | 9 | 45 } | 64 | 16 |
| Stern chasers | 4 | demi-cannon drakes | 12½ | 53 } | ||
| Fore chasers | 2 | ” ” | 11½ | 48 } | ||
| Bows abaft the chase | 2 | ” ” | 10 | 44 } | ||
| Middle tier— | ||||||
| Luffs, quarters, and sides | 24 | culverin drakes | 8½ | 28 } | 45 | 4 |
| Fore chase | 2 | culverins | 11½ | 48 } | ||
| After chase | 4 | ” | 11½ | 48 } | ||
| Upper tier— | ||||||
| Sides | 24 | demi-culverin drakes | 8½ | 18 } | 27 | 12 |
| Fore chase | 2 | demi-culverins | 10 | 30 } | ||
| After chase | ” ” | 10 | 30 } | |||
| Forecastle | 8 | demi-culverin drakes | 9 | 20 | 8 | 0 |
| Half-deck | 6 | ” ” | 9 | 20 | 6 | 0 |
| Quarter-deck | 2 | ” ” | 5½ | 8 | 16 | |
| Bulkhead abaft the forecastle | 2 | culverin drakes | 5½ | 11 | 1 | 2 |
The first estimate was for 90 guns, and here again we read, ‘His majesty has since altered his resolution both in respect of the number and nature of pieces.’ If Pett originally designed the ship for 90 lighter guns, and Charles raised the number and weight by a stroke of the pen to 102, trying to ignore, in the plenitude of his royal power, such things as metacentres and centres of gravity, it is not surprising that she proved topheavy at sea. It was one of those cases in which ignorance is bliss, but, without reading modern scientific knowledge into the past, we know he had professional advisers at hand whose empirical skill was sufficient to enable them to warn him of the folly of such a change. The guns were engraved—at a cost of £3 each—with the rose and crown, sceptre and trident, and anchor and cable. In a compartment under the rose and crown was the inscription, Carolus Edgari sceptrum stabilivit aquarum, ‘being a scutcheon and motto appointed by his majesty.’[1122] In January 1640 occurs an estimate for a sister ship to the Sovereign; but of this, of course, nothing more was ever heard.[1123]
We have no station list for the Sovereign, as for the Henry Grace à Dieu but, as a part of ordinary discipline, divisions or quarters seem to have been usual. There is a station list of this period for a vessel of 40 guns and 250 men which may be considered typical.[1124] The heavy guns required 136 men, and 50 more formed the small arms company. The boatswain and his mate had 40 under their command to work the ship under the orders of the master and his mate, who were attended by 2 men. The carpenter and his mates had 6 men, the cook, steward, and surgeon, each 2 for assistants, and 4 men were told off to steer, and 4 to remain with the trumpeters. Finally the captain and lieutenant had 2 men in attendance. The heaviest guns were allowed 5 men each; and the number varied down to 5 men between two of the smaller guns.
Of the eight vessels of 1646 and 1647 there is nothing to say beyond once more noticing the marked increase in the ratio between length and beam. There is not to be found, among the Commonwealth papers, any mention in praise or dispraise of their weatherly and fighting qualities, and from this silence we may infer that they were found to be, in essentials, all that was expected.
Probably a sixteenth or seventeenth century ship was not a particularly picturesque object. Instead of the graceful, beautifully proportioned hulls, spars, and sails of to-day, the reader must imagine a short, squat, hull, round-bowed and square-sterned, enormously high and broad in comparison with its length, and the sides falling in towards each other till the upper deck was perhaps only two-thirds of the width on the water line. The stern was the highest part of the ship, and the bows the lowest, so that she looked as though she was always premeditating a plunge forward, and the longitudinal curve of the sides was broken by huge channels opposite each mast to which were fastened the shrouds. Above, the stumpy masts and spars must have looked ridiculously out of proportion to the ponderous hull, although they were in reality usually too heavy in relation to the badly designed and placed weights below. As for the gilt and painting, a week of rough weather would have converted the original tawdry splendour into a forlorn slatternliness.
The remaining Elizabethan Ships.
Most of the remaining Elizabethan ships passed out of the service. The hull of the Bear was sold in 1629 for £315, the Answer and Crane for £101, and towards the end of the reign, the Dreadnought, Due Repulse, Adventure, and Assurance were broken up. In 1635 Charles, again exemplifying the very real interference, if not control, he exercised in naval matters, ordered, against the recommendations of the Principal Officers, that the Warspite should be cut down into a lighter for harbour service at Portsmouth. But the most serious loss in this class was that of the Anne Royal, which in April 1636, when fitted as Northumberland’s flagship, was bilged on her own anchor when bringing to in the river. The disaster was attributed to the pilot and master giving contradictory orders, and when she was lying on her broadside and full of water her officers made matters worse by cutting holes in the upper side to recover their belongings.[1125] Of course nine members of the Trinity House at once certified that it was impossible to raise the Anne, just as a year before they had petitioned against the Foreland lights as ‘useless and unnecessary,’[1126] and just as on every point referred to them they showed a persistence in being stultified by events, extraordinary even in a corporation. Two townsmen of Great Yarmouth offered to float the ship for £2000; the Principal Officers thought they could do it for £1450, and eventually they did raise her, but with the customary variation in official calculations, at a charge of £5355.[1127] She was taken to the East India Company’s dock at Blackwall, and there, being found to be too severely damaged for repair, broken up.
Of the later ships, the Phœnix and Nonsuch were sold; the Reformation, Antelope, Swallow, and Convertine were carried off by the mutineers of 1648 and lost to the English Navy, and most of the prizes of the earlier years were subsequently given to private individuals or to commercial associations. The King had no fleet after 1642, and seized upon any expedient likely to give him one. In November 1643 he granted a commission to Jeronimo Cæsar de Caverle as Vice-admiral, De Caverle contracting to obtain, man, and fit out five ships for £2000 a month, to be paid out of any prizes he might take from the supporters of the Parliament.[1128] This, like Rupert’s commission, was a premium on piracy.
The French Navy.
Not the least interesting of the papers of this reign are those which show what a close watch was kept on the growth of the nascent French navy. In 1625 Louis was compelled to borrow vessels from Charles, but in 1626 Richelieu bought up or confiscated local or opposing rights and constituted himself head of the navy, assisted by a conseil de marine. That which must have been the nucleus of his fleet, the purchase of four vessels built for him in the Low Countries, is duly reported to our King.[1129] Again in 1627 there are several notices of fresh purchases from the Dutch, and in September Mervyn was ordered to intercept and destroy them on their passage to France.[1130] By this time the French had thirty-three ships before Rochelle, but eighteen of them were under 200 tons each, and probably most were hired merchantmen.[1131] In 1630 ten ‘dragones’ were being built at Havre in imitation of the whelps, and a correspondent, writing from Bordeaux, says that there are ‘so many good ships of the King of France’s navy that unless I had been an eye-witness thereof I should not have believed it possible.’[1132] There were forty ships ‘of good force’ there. In 1631 Charles appears to have obtained a detailed list of the then existing French marine, thus classified:—[1133]