she appears to have been simply a large merchant ship of the period, which on the sixth day of October, in the twenty-third year of the reign of Henry VIII. (A.D. 1531), was viewed or inspected by Christopher Morris, a government officer, for the purpose of being employed in the public service.
The Great Harry. The largest and most important vessel built at this period in England appears to have been King Henry's Harry Grace à Dieu.[1] Two representations of this ship are extant, one in the Pepysian Library in Magdalen College, Cambridge, another in an original picture of Hans Holbein, published by Allen in 1756.[2] The drawings however differ so widely that it is probable they refer to different vessels.
With the exception of the very high forecastle, an extra range of cabins on her poop, and her extraordinary rig, she does not materially differ from the wooden line-of-battle ships of much later times. All accounts agree in describing the Harry Grace à Dieu as the largest English man-of-war up to the period of her construction; but Henry VIII. had also previously built a vessel called the Regent, of one thousand tons, to carry a crew of eight hundred men,
- ↑ Macpherson states that the name of the Great Harry was first given to the Lion, a Scotch ship belonging to Andrew Barton, which was taken by Lord Edward Howard in 1511 (vol. ii. p. 39).
- ↑ Mr. Spedding, in his elaborate edition of Lord Bacon's works, has given this plate (reduced) as the title-page of his second volume; and in editing Lord Bacon's paper entitled 'The History of the Winds,' has suggested that Bacon, when speaking of a ship "of 1200 tons," must have had in his mind either this ship or the Prince Royal, which was built in 1610 by Phineas Pett of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (vol. v. p. 79). The whole of Bacon's short treatise, and his details about the masts, sails, and rigging of large ships, is most interesting. See also Appendix No. 4: 'Furniture of the Harry Grace à Dieu,' Pepys' Library, Cambridge.
