"If Henry VIII is best remembered for six wives and gluttonous habits, his complex domestic life unjustly overshadows a now almost forgotten, but important fact: that Henry founded what would become the Royal Navy." "Without Henry's interest, would the sailors who served his daughter, Elizabeth I, have had the sea power to beat off the Spanish Armada? Would Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher, most notably, have been in a position to so assiduously and so profitably raid the Spanish Main?" "When Henry ascended the English throne in 1509, the country's fleet consisted of just five ships. At his death, nearly forty years later, he handed down to his young son, Edward VI, a navy of more than fifty vessels." "Thanks to the survival of one of the two most-cherished warships in Henry's fleet, the Mary Rose, recovered nearly a quarter of a century ago from the cloying mud of the Solent, we know a little more about how ships of the period were built. But Great Harry's Navy is far more than a history of naval warfare. Geoffrey Moorhouse is just as interested in what it must have been like to live on board a Tudor warship, how the felling of oak forests led to the first Act of Parliament concerned with the destruction of the environment, how the small Dorset town of Bridport became a centre of the rope making industry and why sailcloth, more often than not, came from Brittany."--BOOK JACKET.