Sovereign of the Seas (1637) Sovereign of the Seas (1637)The most ornate ship ever built for England’s Royal Navy, the first English warship to have three full gun decks, the first to carry 100 guns and the most expensive yet built – the Sovereign claimed a range of superlatives.
In every way a ‘King’s ship’, the vessel was ordered in 1634 by King Charles I as part of a very proper concern to improve and enlarge the Navy at a time when other nations, notably the Dutch and the French, were developing their own overseas trade and building new ships. The designer was Phineas Pett, England’s leading shipbuilder, and it was constructed at the Woolwich Dockyard, London, by his son Peter.
Three masts, rather than four, became the standard for the English man of war. Additional sails, a larger sail area, and stout canvas with hemp rigging, together with good underwater lines, ensured speed.
With the increasing emphasis on gunnery, certain changes in warship design and organisation appeared. The anti-boarding net across the well was no longer used. Parts of the quarter-deck and forecastle deck were floored with gratings rather than planking, to allow powder fumes to disperse from below. The whipstaff, an upright lever attached to the tiller, made steering somewhat easier and enabled the helmsman to stand in a raised position from which he could watch the sails. Larger capstans, centrally mounted, helped in drawing up heavy anchors. The wheel, for steering, did not come into use until the beginning of the eighteenth century. From the early sixteenth century shipbuilding was increasingly scientific and textbooks began to appear. As a result, innovations were passed on quickly and hull design and rig were increasingly similar in the different navies of Europe. But British men of war continued to ride lower in the water than their French and Spanish counterparts.
Phineas Pett had already built a man of war that was partially three-decked, the 55-gun Prince Royal of 1610, but this ship was half as big again. Whether the triple gun decks were the King’s idea or Pett’s, both liked the thought, the one as a challenge to his skill, the other as a symbol of his royal power.
The King levied a special tax, ‘ship money’, on his reluctant subjects to pay for his naval policy. Sovereign of the Seas was to cost £65,586, a colossal sum for that period. The ship’s name was deliberately chosen: an old tradition, which Charles I’s government tried to revive, held that the King of England held command of the surrounding seas – a claim which neighbouring nations rejected.
A contemporary description noted that the ship had three flush decks, a forecastle, a quarter-deck and a roundhouse. On the lowest gun deck were 30 ports, for 30-pounder demi-cannon and whole cannon; on the middle deck were 30 ports again, for demi-culverin 10-pounder and whole culverin. The upper deck had 26 ports for smaller guns, and there were 12 ports on the forecastle, and 14 on the half-deck. The report also mentions 13 or 14 ports for ‘murdering pieces’ – these were scatter-shot guns that could sweep the deck of an adjacent enemy, and many loop holes for musket shots. These were a recent addition to warship design, since the development of the musket. In addition, the ship carried 10 pieces of ‘chase ordnance’: guns mounted in the bows and at the stern intended to extend the ship’s range of fire to 360 degrees.
This was a ‘state of the art’ ship which deliberately pushed out the frontiers of naval design and put new demands not only on its crew but on the dockyard support necessary to maintain such a large and heavily-gunned ship. Its bulk and weight required a considerable spread of sail to drive it forward at any speed: in this it was typical of other ships of similar size, but these were almost all merchant vessels, while a warship had to be faster than its prey. Sail design and technology was being improved, and Sovereign was one of the first ships to carry a fourth set of sails, royals, mounted above the topgallants, but even so it was considered a slow and unwieldy craft and it had difficulty in keeping up with a fleet formed mostly of smaller ships. In 1642 the number of guns was cut back to 90. Eleven anchors were carried, though only one was a main anchor, reported as weighing about 2 tonnes (2.2 tons).
Specification (as built)
Dimensions |
Length 39m (127ft) (Keel) Beam 14.17m (46ft 6in) Burthen 1380 tonnes (1522 tons) |
Rig |
3 masts, square rig with royals (after 1685) Complement: not recorded |
Armament |
102 cannon |
Sovereign of the Seas had a long active career. Following the establishment of the British Commonwealth it was renamed Sovereign, and much of the decorative carving was removed, taking away a good deal of dead weight. For a time it was the flagship of one of England’s greatest admirals, Robert Blake. After the restoration of kingship in 1662 the 25-year-old ship was extensively rebuilt and Royal was prefixed to Sovereign. Its active service was mostly in the North Sea and the English Channel, in the course of three Anglo-Dutch wars, fighting in the Battles of Kentish Knock (1652), Orfordness (1666), Solebay (1672) Schoonveld (1673) and the Texel (1673). Another large-scale rebuild was done at Chatham in 1685, and Royal Sovereign, by now a venerable vessel, survived to fight at Beachy Head (1690) and Barfleur (1692).
Throughout this time it was the largest ship in the English fleet and its firepower (restored to 100 guns in 1660) made it a powerful asset in battle. It was laid up at Chatham naval dockyard, where on 27 January 1697 a fire broke out on board and burned it to the waterline.
Sovereign of the Seas under full sail, a painting based upon John Payne’s contemporary engraving of 1637, ‘To the great glory of our English Nation, and not paraleld in the whole Christian World.’
