The Taming of the Queen

The cannon of the Mary Rose roll forward to every open gunport so that she is bristling with weapons, all of them moving as one. She turns and fires from her left-hand guns and there is a simultaneous roar. It is beautifully done, and powerful as a move in a chess game. At once, we see one of the galleys struggling in the water, going down. The king’s great plan, Thomas’s strategy, is showing its power to the astounded enemy. Ship is engaging with ship, and the soldiers have nothing to do yet but cheer in their fighting castles and raise their swords in threat. The great ship is coming about, turning in the water, so that she can fire her starboard guns while the port guns reload.

A sudden gust makes all the standards snap with a noise like tearing silk. ‘Fire! Come about and fire!’ Henry shouts, but the wind is too loud for anyone to hear him. I hold my hat and Anne Seymour loses her cap, which goes sailing from the walls of the castle and out to sea.

Someone laughs at her mishap and it is then that we realise something is going wrong. The Mary Rose was reefing her sails and turning against the wind to get her starboard guns to bear on the French just as the gust of wind caught her. She heels over in the sea, dangerously low, her sails dipping towards the waves, her beautiful square sails no longer proudly upright above her arched decks, but now at an angle, odd and ugly.

‘What are you doing?’ the king bellows, as if anyone can answer him. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

She is like a horse that has taken a curve too tight. You can see a horse with his legs going from under him, running harder and faster, and yet everything happens very slowly, but with a terrible inexorability.

‘Right her!’ Henry howls like a dog, and now everyone is beside him at the castle wall, leaning out as if they will ever hear us shouting instructions. Someone is screaming ‘No! No! No!’ as the beautiful proud ship, her standards still rippling, goes further and further over on her side and then we see her slowly lie on her side like a fallen bird, half in, half out of the scudding waves.

We can’t hear them scream. The sailors are trapped below decks as the water rushes in through the open gunports, and they cannot climb up the narrow ladders in the waist of the ship. They drown in their own coffin as she takes them gently, softly down. We can hear the men on the upper deck. They are clinging to the boarding nets, which are now entrapping them, trying to slash them away. Some of the fighting men jump down from the ship’s turrets and stab with their pikes at the ropes or hack with their swords at the thick net. But they can’t get the men free, can’t open the nets. Our soldiers and sailors die like netted mackerel, struggling to breathe against the mesh.

The free men on top tumble off the castles like so many toy soldiers, like the little lead men that Edward plays with, and their leather jackets drag them down in moments. Those who have helmets feel them fill with cold sea water before they can untie the straps. Thick boots drag their owners down, heavy plate armour strapped on knee and breast plunges men in a rush to the bottom. I can hear a voice crying: ‘No, no, no.’

It feels like a long hour of agony, but perhaps it is only minutes. It feels timeless. The side of the ship seems to rest on the water like a sleepy bird, moving with the sea as a handful of men, no more, fling themselves from the rigging and disappear into the smoke-drenched waves. The roar of the cannon goes on, the battle itself goes on. Nobody but us has frozen in horror to watch as the keel rolls a little more to the sky, as the sails fill with water, not wind, and billow and swell in their strange submerged beauty, and then drag the ship down to the green depths.

I can hear someone weeping: ‘No, no, no.’

COWDRAY HOUSE, MIDHURST, SUSSEX, SUMMER 1545

The battle is inconclusive, they tell me, when the smoke finally clears and the fleets limp their different ways: the French back to France, the English ships into port. They report to the king that England was triumphant. We sent out a few tiny ships against a great French armada, and the French soldiers that landed on the coast of Sussex and the Isle of Wight burned a few barns but were driven off by the farmhands.

‘Englishmen,’ Sir Anthony Denny whispers encouragingly to the king. ‘For God and for Harry!’