With characteristic squat and rounded forms, they were designed to provide massive all-round offensive and defensive firepower. The defences included small artillery ‘blockhouses’, as at Gravesend, and large forts with circular designs – examples survive at Pendennis and St Mawes in Cornwall, Portland in Dorset, Hurst and Calshot in Hampshire, Camber in Sussex, and Deal and Walmer in Kent. He built over 30 new gun forts which, working with increasingly powerful warships, were designed to prevent the capture of harbours and estuaries along the east and south coasts. This local trend continued slowly, with gun towers and bulwarks at, for example, Camber, East Sussex (1512), St Catherine's Castle, Fowey, Cornwall (about 1520), Bayard's Cove (Dartmouth, 1530s) and under royal control at Berwick-upon-Tweed (1520s–30s).īetween 15, Henry VIII developed a national policy for defence against the possibility of an invasion by powerful Catholic forces in Europe. Prosperous towns built gun towers, notably along Southampton’s walls (15th-century) and at Dartmouth, Devon (1490s). Older castles and newer fortified houses incorporated positions for small guns, as at Berry Pomeroy, Devon, and Kirby Muxloe, Leicestershire. This included the ill-fated Mary Rose, which sank in 1545 during an action against the French fleet in the Solent.īy 1500 the English were familiar with gunpowder artillery. Most importantly, by the end of his reign Henry VIII had built a powerful Navy Royal of warships, purpose-built to carry heavy guns, as his first line of defence against invasion. Bronze and wrought-iron artillery was commonplace, and a few cast-iron pieces were appearing on land and in warships. Since in most regions swords were regarded as weapons of war (as opposed to the dagger, for example), peasants and burghers, not belonging to the warrior. Though neither venture proved successful, they provided valuable tactical experience with siege artillery, in logistics, and in combined operations between army and navy.īy 1547, English forces were slowly equipping with new personal firearms, which could be operated by less sturdy men (and after briefer training) than longbow archers. In the same period Henry deployed 5,500 men along the borders and in southern Scotland during the wars of the ‘Rough Wooing’ (1543–50) – Henry VIII’s attempt to force the marriage of his son Edward to the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and to break the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland. In 1544 at least 38,000 men went to France, then the largest ever English expeditionary force.
Henry VIII’s aggressive foreign policy took locally raised militia abroad to fight alongside specialist mercenaries.
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