When did the Mary Rose Sink?

The Mary Rose was Henry VIII’s great flag ship which was built between 1509 and 1511. When Henry VIII succeeded to the thrown after his father’s death he decided to build up the English navy since the country was under the constant threat from a French invasion. Amongst other ships Henry VIII ordered the building of the Mary Rose, most probably named after his younger sister Mary Tudor.

After a long and successful naval career the Mary Rose tragically sunk on July 19th 1545 in the Solent during a battle with the French fleet. When the Mary Rose met her fate and sank she was thirty four years old, one of Henry VIII’s greatest war ships and she carried magnificent guns and had a crew of over four hundred men. Nearly all of the four hundred crew and soldiers perished when the Mary Rose went under. It has been proposed that a possible reason the Mary Rose sank was because she was making too tight of a turn and that the gun ports close to the water level were still open thus letting water into the hull of the ship. It has also been suggested that there was disorganisation and unruly men aboard the ship either not taking orders or due to the chaos unable to hear and understand the orders. The orders may have been given to close the gun ports before the ship turned, but unfortunately they were not heard or understood.

The hull of the Mary Rose was raised in 1982 and is currently located at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard where it is undergoing restoration and preservation to be viewed by the public in 2012.

Mary Rose

The Mary Rose, image from wikipedia.


National Geographic, ‘The Ghosts of the Mary Rose’, date watched 10th July 2011.

The Mary Rose Trust,  2011, ‘19th July 1545: when their world stopped our story began’, viewed 19 July 2017, <Available from Internet < http://www.maryrose.org/index.html&gt;.

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