G. M. Trevelyan on Henry VIII of England

“The Royal Navy was Henry's creation, and it saved both himself and his daughter after him when they adopted an island policy and defied the Catholic powers of Europe. Wolsey had no notion of the importance of sea power to England. He was a great medieval churchman, a civil servant of the old school, and a diplomatist of the Renaissance type. But of the future development of England at home and on the sea Wolsey had no vision at all. His master, with that curious instinct of oneness with the English people which was the secret of Tudor greatness, saw deeper. He could use Wolsey's consummate administrative powers during the years of his own apprenticeship in statecraft, and then pass over him along a path of his own which no Cardinal could be expected to tread.”

“It is indeed a fact of the first importance that Henry VIII, the most wilful but not the least wise of our Kings, did more for Parliament than any other person in our history. His father, Henry VII, and his own first great Minister Wolsey had seldom summoned Parliament; until the breach with Rome the two Houses seemed, like other European Parliaments, to be declining, perhaps towards ultimate extinction. But Henry VIII, in the middle of his reign, decided to use Parliament as his instrument and accomplice in the destruction of the Papal power, the spoliation of the monasteries, and the subordination of the medieval liberties of the Church to the laity and above all to the Crown. He had no standing Army, and without the general acquiescence of his subjects and the support of their more influential classes Henry could not have carried through this immense revolution. He found in Parliament, particularly in the Commons, the expression of that popular support he required. To be despot himself he raised up in Parliament a force that was destined to prevent his successors from being despots.”

“His policy was both wise and strong. While not encouraging transoceanic adventure in the face of predominant Spanish power, he made possible the future liberation of his country's energies by the only means—the foundation of a Royal Navy... It was Henry VIII who built an effective fleet of royal fighting ships, with royal dockyards at Woolwich and Deptford; he also founded the corporation of Trinity House. Henry's maritime policy had a double importance. Not only did he create ships specially manned and commissioned to fight, and to fight in the public service alone, but his architects designed many of these royal ships on an improved model. They were sailing vessels better adapted to the ocean than the rowed galleys of the Mediterranean powers, and better adapted to manoeuvring in battle than the more clumsy ‘round’ ships of the mediaeval type in which the English merchants sailed the sea, and in which the Spaniards crossed the Atlantic. The new type of English warship was three times the length of its beam or more, while the normal ‘round’ ship was only twice the length of its beam. Hitherto sea-battles had consisted of ramming, archery and boarding, very much like the battles of the old Greek and Roman navies. But a new age was at hand. From the port-holes of Henry VIII's fleet protruded the iron mouths of great cannon in a row, ready to give the shattering ‘broadside,’ the operation of war to which, more than to any other, British maritime and colonial power owe their existence. It was Henry VIII himself who had insisted that his naval architects should mount heavy cannon in the body of the ship; they had devised the expedient of piercing apertures in the very hold itself through which the great shot could be discharged.”