Mary Rose

Construction of the Mary Rose began at Portsmouth on 29 January 1510 and she was launched in July 1511. She and her smaller consort the Peter Pomegranate were ordered months into Henry VIII's reign for a navy that had only two sizeable carracks. Her timber is estimated at some 600 mostly large oaks, about 16 hectares of woodland.

The familiar explanation of her name (Henry's favourite sister Mary Tudor joined to the Tudor rose) has no direct evidence behind it; the historians David Childs, David Loades and Peter Marsden hold the Virgin Mary the likelier namesake.

The Mary Rose first saw battle in 1512, when Sir Edward Howard, newly made Lord High Admiral, took her as his flagship against France. In March 1513 she won a race against nine other ships off The Downs, and Howard called her "the noblest ship of sayle … at this howr, that I trow be in Cristendom". Howard was killed that 25 April, boarding the galley of the French admiral Prégent de Bidoux.

She was laid up "in ordinary" after the peace of 1514, served in the 1522 campaign that took Morlaix, and was then held in reserve until 1545. Thomas Cromwell recorded in 1536 that she and six other ships had been "made new", and dating of her timbers confirms work in 1535 or 1536, though its nature and extent are unknown. The rebuilding is described as turning a ship of 500 tons into one of 700 and adding an entire extra tier of broadside guns.

A French fleet under Admiral Claude d'Annebault entered the Solent with 128 ships on 16 July 1545; the English had around 80 and, having virtually no heavy galleys, withdrew into Portsmouth harbour. On 19 July the French galleys advanced on the becalmed English fleet; the wind then rose and the Henry Grace à Dieu and the Mary Rose led the counter-attack. Early in the engagement she heeled heavily to starboard and water rushed in through her open gunports. Heavy guns came free, and most of the men who got up from below were trapped under the anti-boarding netting and dragged down with her. Out of a crew of at least 400, fewer than 35 escaped. Vice-Admiral George Carew is the only man positively identified among the dead; Henry VIII watched from Southsea Castle.

The one confirmed eyewitness account came from a Flemish survivor, taken down by the imperial ambassador François van der Delft in a letter of 24 July: she had fired all her guns on one side and was turning to bring the other to bear when a strong gust caught her. Hall's Chronicle blamed "to[o] much foly" and ports "left open, which were low". Modern opinion favours instability, though Marsden, noting that guns recovered from both sides were still loaded, has questioned whether she was turning after a broadside.

Salvage was ordered within days under the Duke of Suffolk, but she had settled at 60 degrees into the clay, which made passing cables beneath her all but impossible, and only rigging and some guns came up. In mid-1836 fishermen snagged their nets on her timbers; the diver Henry Abbinett went down on 10 June, and the divers John Deane and William Edwards followed. The wreck was soon identified from the inscriptions on a bronze gun cast in 1537.

The modern search began in 1965 under the diver and historian Alexander McKee. A chart of 1841 found in February 1966 fixed the position; on 5 May 1971 the first structural details of the buried hull were identified. The hull was emptied, braced with steel and bolted to a lifting frame; on the morning of 11 October 1982 her first timbers broke the surface at 9:03, watched by Prince Charles, the project's patron.

Over 26,000 artefacts and timbers came up with the remains of about half the crew: the bones of 179 people, a disproportionate number showing the shoulder condition os acromiale, associated with drawing a heavy bow. The finds include 172 longbows and almost 4,000 arrows, the barber-surgeon's chest of more than 60 objects, and the only surviving still shawm.

The hull has been kept in a covered dry dock at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard since the mid-1980s, the ship hall having opened on 4 October 1983 and a £35 million museum on 31 May 2013. Active conservation with polyethylene glycol began in 1994 and finished with controlled air drying in 2016, when the sealed "hotbox" was removed and the ship stood dry for the first time since 1545. The wreck site is protected under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, interference requires a licence, and Historic England lists it as of historical, archaeological or artistic importance.