[orchestral music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Majestic, powerful, and deadly.

For over 400 years, British ships ruled the waves.

[cannon fires] These magnificent vessels helped shape history across the globe.

I'm Rob Bell, and in this series, I'll be exploring six of the world's greatest ships.

In this episode, I investigate the mystery of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's gun-laden battleship-- Give fire.

[cannon blasts] Oh, yeah.

--lost in an unexplained tragedy.

It's quite sad to see somebody so young who lost their life in such a way.

I'd say it's quite shocking.

Rediscovered by pioneering archaeologists-- CHRIS COBB: To actually witness it leaving the seabed, it was just another of those magical moments.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): --she's a Tudor time capsule and Britain's most extraordinary shipwreck.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC, WAVES CRASHING] Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard, home to one of the world's greatest archaeological discoveries.

[dramatic music] Raised from the seabed nearly four centuries after she sank, the incredible remains of a 135-foot, 700-ton Tudor warship commissioned by Henry VIII himself.

And here she is today, the Mary Rose, a miracle of history.

She is the only 16th century ship anywhere on Earth.

Being up alongside here now, it's absolutely breathtaking.

You can almost feel the history oozing out of her.

And the scale makes it easy to imagine just how important this ship was for Henry.

She was built for glory and is a real symbol of his power and his ambition.

When the wreck was rediscovered on the seabed, the Mary Rose was battle ready.

The 19,000 objects found on board, including a vast Tudor arsenal, from arrows and longbows to mighty bronze cannon, and alongside them, the remains of the crew, the gunners and archers, carpenter and cook, captain and cabin boy, men and their ship lost together in a moment of extraordinary drama nearly five centuries ago.

It all unfolded less than three miles from the Mary Rose's current location and right in front of Henry VIII himself.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ On the 19th of July, 1545, Henry VIII climbed the steps here at Southsea Castle, near Portsmouth.

By then, he was 54 and probably weighed more than 20 stone, so he would have struggled, but he would have been determined to get up onto these ramparts, because he was about to witness a battle on which the future of his reign rested.

[dramatic music] Just over here, Henry would have seen a massive French invasion force of more than 200 ships that had gathered just off the coast of the Isle of Wight.

This was a serious threat to the realm.

And then, on this side, just outside Portsmouth Harbor, was Henry's own fleet of some 80 ships.

They were outnumbered nearly 3 to 1.

A lot was riding on the performance of one of Henry's great warships, the Mary Rose.

[dramatic music] This unique picture from the time reveals the Mary Rose as she was before the battle, bristling with cannons and filled with a crew of around 500.

[dramatic music] And on the afternoon of the 19th of July, this mighty warship went on the attack against the French.

The exact details of what happened next are hazy, but what's certain is that she attempted a sharp turn close to where that sea fort stands now.

And in doing so, she capsized and sank, all in full view of King Henry VIII.

[dramatic music] The Mary Rose went down with nearly all hands.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ A catastrophe recorded in incredible detail shortly afterwards.

This is known as the Cowdray engraving, a copy of the only picture from the time showing the sinking of the Mary Rose.

You can see Southsea Castle here with Henry VIII approaching on his horse.

And right here, in the middle, you can see all that remains above the water of the Mary Rose, the very tops of her masts.

You can see there are a few men clinging on there, while others are being rescued, but they were the lucky few.

Of more than 400 men on board, only around 30 were saved.

The rest went down with the ship.

And Henry, from here-- well, from right here, Henry would have heard their screams and cries as they went down below the water.

The loss of the Mary Rose was as mysterious as it was horrific.

So what had gone so catastrophically wrong?

Some accounts blame the incompetence of the crew or the captain, while on the day, the French claimed that they'd sunk the Mary Rose with a well-aimed cannonball.

[guitar music] Evidence of what caused the disaster sank with the ship herself.

It would be four centuries before a team of archaeologists rediscovered the shipwreck and began the hunt for clues.

More than 500 divers took part in the most complex ever marine excavation.

It culminated in 1982, with the sensational raising of the Mary Rose and her voyage to a new home at Portsmouth Dockyard.

[guitar music] Maritime archaeologist Alex Hildred was one of the divers who excavated the Mary Rose.

ALEX HILDRED (VOICEOVER): I think all of us were interested, all the people who worked on the site, leading up to the lift.

We were intrigued about the story, about why she sank.

And learning more about the structure and why she sank was one of the major reasons for the entire excavation and lifting it, this mystery.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The team set about examining the hull of the ship for evidence.

They tested competing theories that could explain her sinking, including one bold claim made immediately after the disaster.

One of the accounts of the sinking, the one by the French, just categorically says, "We sunk her during the Battle of the Solent."

So as archaeologists, we were always looking for potential battle damage.

Now you have to realize, we've only got one side of the ship, so we don't know what happened on the port side.

But you can see there's absolutely nothing on the outside of the hull that suggests any damage from warfare whatsoever, no burning, no signs of any shot damage, nothing.

You can't physically find anything.

[gentle music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The team recovered around 50% of the Mary Rose.

Nothing they found showed any sign that the ship had been hit by the French.

And a more recent theory suggests the blame actually lay far closer to home, with her English builders.

The Mary Rose had been put together by over 100 carpenters and shipwrights working without plans.

Instead, they relied on their experience and instinct.

So might they have doomed the Mary Rose with fatal design flaws?

ALEX HILDRED: Once she was out of the water, you could see just how beautiful her lines were and how well they fitted, so she wasn't too tall and too thin.

She wasn't too flat and too wide.

She seemed to be the perfect shape.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): And not just well-designed, but well put together.

ALEX HILDRED: You can see how strong the ship is by getting close and looking at it.

This is the outside structure with strong oak nails reinforced by iron nails.

Now you can see it's pretty hard and pretty strong.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): So the Mary Rose was a masterpiece of Tudor shipbuilding.

Her hull showed no damage from enemy cannon fire, yet something did go catastrophically wrong.

[wave crashes] And some believe that tragic flaw was introduced by Henry VIII himself.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ There's a common misconception that when the Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545, she was on her maiden voyage.

Well, that's far from the truth.

She'd actually been afloat for over three decades.

So could her sailing history contain clues to explain the disaster?

[orchestral music] The Mary Rose was built back in 1510, on the orders of this young man, the 17-year-old Henry VIII, who had only just been crowned king.

Historian Dr.

Joanne Paul is an expert on the young Henry and why he wanted a new warship.

JOANNE PAUL: Henry VIII saw himself as the successor to a previous Henry, Henry V, who had thrashed the French at Agincourt.

Henry VIII wanted to take the fight to the French, to make a legend out of himself, to be a chivalric king, a martial king, a mighty king.

And he needed a navy in order to do that.

The Mary Rose would be the flagship of that Navy.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): In 1512, the Mary Rose set off for her first big test.

She left Portsmouth, leading 25 ships in an attack on the French fleet, just off the Port of Brest.

It was a battle they won by destroying the French flagship, Cordeliere, and killing 1,000 men.

JOANNE PAUL: The Mary Rose did what it needed to do.

It was Henry VIII's flagship.

It led the charge against the French, and it returned victorious.

[gentle music, water splashing] ♪ ♪ ROB BELL: It's fair to say the Mary Rose was a hit.

She'd been comprehensively battle tested and had passed with flying colors.

Henry VIII's Lord High Admiral described this vessel as the "noblest ship of sail in Christendom."

But perhaps the most significant thing about the Mary Rose is what happened to her when the fighting was over.

[gentle music] Across Portsmouth Dockyard, at the Museum of the Royal Navy's library, is an intriguing piece of Tudor bureaucracy dating to 1514.

This is a Tudor accounting book, and it details work carried out on Henry's fleet after the Mary Rose's return from her first campaigns.

What this shows us is that the Mary Rose was repaired immediately after war, and that's unusual.

It was more typical at this time for ships to be laid up and only repaired explicitly before going back out to fight.

Henry broke with that tradition, and instead had a whole fleet of ships that were battle ready, to be sent out to fight at any time.

Henry had effectively created the Royal Navy, and the Mary Rose was its very first flagship.

But Henry's new Navy would face an increasing problem, a lack of firepower.

[whoosh] The Mary Rose and its sister ships relied on light, handheld weapons, according to artillery expert Paul Pattison.

PAUL PATTISON: And this is a very simple handgun.

ROB BELL: It is pretty simple.

I'm glad you said that.

Well, it's an iron tube on the end of a stick.

Yeah.

That's it.

That is as simple as that.

Oh, goodness.

These rudimentary weapons have no mechanical moving parts and are the forerunner of all modern handguns.

Yeah, that's it.

Good.

Give fire!

[sparking] [whoosh] [blasting] Oh, yeah!

Woo!

Oh!

[laughs] God, yeah.

That's quite a bang.

PAUL PATTISON: That's a good bang, that.

It goes straight away as well, doesn't it?

No messing.

I'm glad you're here doing that, because I would have struggled to have any kind of aim or, actually, control, because it's quite heavy, if I was one handed, trying to light that as well.

Yeah.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): But an accurate aim wasn't the point.

Handheld weapons like guns and bows were for close combat.

The Mary Rose was designed to get fighting men near enough to use them.

[dramatic music] PAUL PATTISON: Naval tactics, in 1514, were still really in the medieval period.

The object is to bring two ships together and get your soldiers on board and fight on board the ship.

So this kind of weapon, plus traditional weapons, swords and axes, and you've got bows and arrows, all that's going on at this time.

And so that's what Mary Rose would have been then, a kind of troop ship, a fighting platform with a majority of handheld firepower.

PAUL PATTISON: Yeah, exactly.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Mary Rose was perfectly suited to the up-close sea battles of Henry's early reign, but the world was changing.

Rapid advances in gun technology were producing larger guns, firing bigger shot over greater distances.

[blasting] By the 1530s, Henry knew the Mary Rose would need an upgrade or risk being completely outgunned.

Henry wanted to modify the Mary Rose to increase the larger artillery firepower on board.

Yeah.

What type of weapons was he adding?

Right.

Well, it was larger, better made, more sophisticated guns.

And we have an example behind us.

This is called a saker.

It fires a much larger shot, obviously.

It could fire a shot like this, which is, well, about 5 and a quarter pounds.

ROB BELL: Yeah.

OK.

That could punch a hole in the side of a ship quite comfortably.

And what kind of range are we talking about, firing these?

A maximum range of about 1,500 yards.

1,500 yards?

Yeah.

Well, if we're firing that from here, we're talking, well, way beyond these boats out here.

Sure.

Right out into the middle of the harbor there.

Yeah.

So what's happening is that the strategy of naval warfare is changing from ships that are fighting platforms for soldiers, to board, to ships that can fire at a distance and inflict great damage.

Those modifications then moved the Mary Rose from something that was very much a troop ship to a real gunship.

Exactly.

[gentle music] [waves crashing] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Henry raised the number of heavy cannons on the Mary Rose from just 5 when built to 39 when she sank.

This radically increased the ship's weight, and more guns meant more heavy ammunition.

These heavy cannonballs or shot were brought to the surface 35 years ago, many by Alex Hildred herself.

ALEX HILDRED: This is like a small portion of the shot found on board.

There were about 2,000 individual shot.

About 1,248 were cast iron.

So these are made of cast iron, and you can see that they're in different sizes, which correspond to the different sizes of guns we found.

ROB BELL: So around 2,000 shot found on the seabed there.

That's right.

The first thing that strikes me, when I see all this, is just how much weight there is here.

Well, in shot alone, we estimate about 15 tons.

And then, if you add the weight of the guns, that's 46 tons.

ROB BELL: Tons.

ALEX HILDRED: Tons of gun, yeah.

ROB BELL: So all of that combined, the guns and all of this shot, with the modifications that Henry made on Mary Rose, that must have been quite an additional amount of weight that she was carrying.

Yeah.

Certainly, with the iron shot, there's a considerable difference.

And you can see that that happens around 1540, where there's a huge change in the guns that are put on the ship, and you get less small guns and more big guns that need heavy iron shot.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Mary Rose was becoming as bloated as her owner, Henry VIII.

And some historians have suggested this extra weight destabilized the Mary Rose, causing her to sink.

With all this extra shot, then, and the guns that were added, big guns on the deck, that would have affected the stability of the ship, surely.

Well, the only way you can do it without affecting the stability of the ship is actually bring the new guns lower into the ship, basically, by cutting holes in the side of the ship, lower down, and then you can put a suite of guns lower down, so you lower the center of gravity, and it becomes safe to use.

[dramatic music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): These new openings cut in the Mary Rose's hull were known as gunports.

The lowest were less than 6 feet from the waterline and designed to hold the heaviest guns.

It was a revolutionary idea, according to naval historian Eric Grove.

The great development of this time is the gunport, having these holes in the side of the ship through which the guns fire.

This increases the initial firepower of the ship.

It gives it greater strength when it's attacking an enemy ship.

But if you don't handle the ship right, water can come in as the ship heels over.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): To stop the sea flooding in, watertight lids were added.

But on the day the Mary Rose sank, one witness claims those lids were left open.

The survivor is recorded as saying that the disaster was caused by their not having closed the lowest row of gunports on one side.

That's these ones along here.

So the Mary Rose had fired her guns from this side and was in the process of turning round to fire from the other side, when a gust of wind caught her sails and tilted her over like this.

Now remember, those gunports along the bottom are all open.

And the account says that those open gunports plunged beneath the water, which flooded and sank her.

Now it all sounds plausible, but for four centuries this claim, from just one witness, was unproven.

[gentle music] [water splashes] It would take until the rediscovery of the ship in the 20th century to finally verify this witness statement.

Before the Mary Rose was raised from the water, hundreds of divers scoured the wreck for clues.

Amongst them, maritime archaeologist Chris Dobbs.

The most plausible theory about the sinking, to me, is the eyewitness account that said that there was a gust of wind and she heeled over, and they had failed to close the gunports.

So that was one of the key things that we needed to look at.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Chris and the team wanted to see if the lids were still open more than four centuries later, but it wasn't easy.

They first had to carefully remove centuries of accumulated silt and thousands of Tudor objects hidden within.

Only after more than two years' work did they find their answer.

CHRIS DOBBS: When we were digging under the ship, it was extraordinary to then find all these gunports still with their lids on and open, with the guns sticking out.

And I mean, that was another extraordinary experience for us.

[orchestral music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Here was definitive proof that the eyewitness was right.

ALEX HILDRED: You can see that there is a big opening here.

So that is actually one of the gunports on the main gun deck.

The gunports were open, and water must have entered.

How she got into that situation, where she was turned so much that the water entered is another question entirely.

[dramatic music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Alex and her team had to find out how the ship found herself in such a vulnerable situation, listing dangerously with her gunport lids still open.

One man who thinks he can complete the picture is geographer Dominic Fontana.

His key evidence is the only contemporary image of the disaster, the Cowdray engraving.

[bird calling out] DOMINIC FONTANA: When I started to look at the Cowdray picture, I was astonished by how accurate it is.

It shows so many little details and incidents that happened in the battle.

It also shows places that still exist today.

And we can take those buildings and plot them into their correct position on a modern digital map.

That then means that we can take the positions of the ships as they're shown in the Cowdray picture and plot them into their approximate positions on a modern map.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Dominic used all this detail, along with tide information and weather reports, to work out how the battle unfolded.

The results were revelatory.

DOMINIC FONTANA: On the day of the battle, the English were effectively becalmed out in the Solent.

There was no wind.

The French, equally, couldn't easily move, except that they had about 25 Mediterranean galleys that were powered by oars, so those vessels could move independently of the wind.

The French galleys were able to come into the Solent and then start to run in to attack the bows of the English ships.

That means that something would have hit some of the English ships.

I simply don't believe that they would have missed every time.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): If Dominic's theory is right, Cannon fire from the French galleys struck the Mary Rose, and she was hulled beneath the waterline.

Water seeped into her hull, increasing her weight and leaving her dangerously low in the water.

Then the wind picked up, and despite the damage, the Mary Rose went on the attack.

DOMINIC FONTANA: They managed to loose off a broadside of guns against the attacking French, and they were heading northwards across the Solent.

Except that at that moment, water just managed to pour in over the gunport sills onto the main gun deck, putting a massive weight of water onto the gun deck itself, pulling the ship over, and she sank very quickly.

[dramatic music] [waves crashing] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Dominic's theory, that a French direct hit left the Mary Rose dangerously low in the water, remains unproven.

The 50% of the ship that exists today doesn't show cannonball damage.

And there's a competing theory.

It comes from the one man who should have known what went wrong, the Mary Rose's captain.

The captain was a man named George Carew.

By chance, Carew had a cousin on a ship nearby during the battle.

As the Mary Rose began to flounder, the cousin shouted over to Carew, asking what the problem was.

Carew didn't mention a French direct hit or even the open gunports.

He laid the blame squarely on his crew, shouting back that "I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule."

What Carew was saying was that his crew was made up of a bunch of rogues who didn't follow orders.

So were they to blame for the sinking of the Mary Rose?

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ Here, in the Solent, in 1545, Henry VIII lost his great warship, the Mary Rose.

Her open gunports filled the ship with water, sending the ship and most of her crew to the seabed.

Around 400 men died when this ship sank.

And it was these same men that the captain reportedly blamed as the Mary floundered in the water.

So what do we know about the Mary Rose's crew?

[dramatic music] When archaeologists excavated the Mary Rose, they didn't just recover a ship and thousands of objects.

They also brought to the surface the remains of the dead.

To date, bones belonging to 179 crew members have been found and comprehensively analyzed.

The results have produced an astonishingly detailed picture of the crew.

ALEX HILDRED: OK, Robert, we've got a few members of the crew here for you to look at.

ROB BELL: Wow!

This is one of our fairly complete skeletons.

We've got 92.

ROB BELL: Alex, this is incredible to see all this.

Do we know much about this particular skeleton here?

Well, we know he was male.

He was of average age for the crew, so that's between 18 and 30.

So it's quite a sensible age for a fighting crew.

But he looks like he's a fighting man.

He's got some knocks to the skull here, above his eyebrows.

There are two depressions that are there, and then one at the back of his skull.

And so-- - Yeah, I can see that.

ALEX HILDRED: --he'd either fallen down or been hit on the head or something.

Well, yeah.

Likely in battle, maybe.

Yes.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): This was a typical crew member, healthy but with signs he'd taken a few knocks and about 5 foot 6 tall, the adult male average for the era.

But not all the crew had made it to adulthood.

This is one of our younger adolescents.

He was between the ages of 12 and probably 15.

And you can tell that because-- That young?

--you can see that this long bone, for example, this femur, the end of it hasn't fused yet.

You can see that that fits, but it's not yet fused.

And these happen at very specific times.

But that's showing quite a young chap.

12 to 15, you reckon?

Yeah, 12 to 15.

And that's the size jerkin he would have worn.

ROB BELL: So there were artifacts, personal artifacts found with him?

This shoe was found with him, together with one of his toe bones.

The rest are here.

But this was actually found inside the shoe, so it's quite, I don't know, sad to see such a small individual.

To think that somebody so young-- It's shocking.

--might have been on board and has lost their life.

It's that and, I guess, the horrific scenes that they might have experienced.

Yeah.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): While most crew members were in their 20s, ages ranged between 10 and 40.

They were mainly professional soldiers and sailors who'd volunteered to serve their king, yet they were also alleged to have been unrulable knaves who effectively doomed their ship.

And there does exist evidence of their unruliness, recorded in a naval court case of 1539.

[dramatic music] One June evening, the Mary Rose was lying at anchor in the Thames when four mariners went ashore at Deptford in search of fun.

According to court transcripts, the sailors drank rather too much at a local pub and became overseen with ale.

Now looking to return to the Mary Rose at around midnight, they stole a boat but could only find a single oar, which might explain why they crashed into a Portuguese merchant vessel, somewhere just behind me, here at the entrance to Deptford Creek.

Now instead of saying an embarrassed sorry, the drunken sailors boarded the ship, beat the crew with the flats of their swords, and stole their cargo.

They then spent the night in a local hay barn, presumably sleeping off all the beer they'd drunk, before returning to the Mary Rose the next morning, with some explaining to do.

[gentle music] Some of the ship's crew could clearly be drunk and disorderly.

Others had a more profound motive for insubordination, religion.

By the time Mary Rose sank, Henry VIII had outlawed the Catholic Church that the crew had grown up with and, for good measure, denounced the pope.

JOANNE PAUL (VOICEOVER): The pope was the head of the church to people in this period, and to say that the pope was wrong was to tell people that everything that they had believed for their lives was wrong.

And there would have been reason for ordinary Englishmen and women to resent the king for this taking place.

Now the French were counting on that anger, that resentment.

They were counting on Englishmen who were serving on the Mary Rose to turn on the king, to feel abandoned by him.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The French invaders were Catholics, backed by the pope.

And evidence found on board the Mary Rose suggests the crew might have been sympathetic to their cause.

[gentle music] This cabinet here contains personal religious items that were found hidden in cases on board.

And what's interesting is that many of these items were banned by the king as symbols of the Catholic faith.

These rosary beads could suggest that some of the crew had more loyalty with the pope than they did with his sworn enemy, King Henry VIII.

But could a Catholic crew member have sabotaged his own ship?

[dramatic music] So far, archaeologists have found no proof of treason.

In fact, the only statement that blames the crew comes from one man, Captain George Carew.

And archaeologists believe this might just all be spin.

CHRIS DOBBS: There is a story that Carew shouted that he had the sort of knaves he could not rule, but I think that's particularly unfair.

It was written 30 years after the Mary Rose sank and, in my opinion, just to protect the name of Carew.

So I think it unduly blames the crew for being unruly.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The hard evidence from the thousands of objects recovered from the seabed suggests, instead, that this ship was manned by highly professional seamen.

CHRIS DOBBS: I love the way these objects give us an insight into the crew on board.

They were professional sailors.

They weren't pressed, like in later years.

And so I'm sure they had a great pride in their possessions.

Sometimes this is all they had.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): These were well equipped, skilled sailors, like the team of six on-board carpenters, who had over 200 highly specialist tools.

CHRIS DOBBS: There's a wonderful adze, and adze is a very specialist tool used by a shipwright.

This type is actually called a Spanish adze.

But, I mean, look at the beautiful curve on that.

Many of these objects are just so functional, and that's what gives them a lot of their value.

So there's things like that and other carpenter's objects.

There's a fantastic brace and bit here.

There's a mallet.

I mean, and again, this is actually quite heavy.

It's still as heavy as it was when the Mary Rose sank.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The tools of other crew members were just as well made and well kept.

Vital equipment, like the ship's rigging blocks, were in immaculate condition.

And weapons like these longbows had been neatly stored in purpose-built chests.

This all points not to a mutinous rabble, but to an experienced crew who ran a tight ship.

In fact, we know of only one inexperienced sailor on board, the captain himself, George Carew.

[dramatic music] DOMINIC FONTANA: On board the Mary Rose, there was a very special situation that had occurred, in that the vice-admiral, Sir George Carew, had been appointed to that position by the king himself just the day before.

He wasn't a sailor.

He was a land soldier.

He was an aristocrat.

He hadn't necessarily got a relationship with the crew of the Mary Rose herself, but he would have known, very acutely, that the king himself was watching his every move.

So Sir George Carew would have known that he needed to do something, something aggressive.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Mary Rose was led by a man desperate to impress his king.

But familiar with neither the crew nor the ship, it may have been a crucial factor in what archaeologists increasingly believe was a tragic chain of events.

[dramatic music] CHRIS DOBBS: Something like a sinking of a ship, if only one thing went wrong, then the crew would be able to cope with it.

But when extra things happen, like, there was a gust of wind and they failed to close the gunports, and there's a little bit of overloading, and there's the heat of the battle, I think it's when you get these multiple items happening in a row that it leads to catastrophe.

[tense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Fewer than 1 in 10 sailors survived the sinking of the Mary Rose, an incredibly high death toll, considering it sank so close to friendly ships.

[somber music] The only image of the Mary Rose, painted before she went down, reveals why so many died.

Crisscrossing the upper decks is anti-boarding netting, designed to protect the crew from invaders.

It ended up costing them their lives.

This is what a section of it would have looked like, and it is incredibly tough.

You couldn't cut through that, and for good reason.

Its purpose was to prevent attackers from boarding the ship.

But rigging this all over the upper deck meant that almost everyone on board would have been underneath it.

So when the ship began to sink, they were all trapped.

It's thought that the only survivors were sailors whose position were well up high in the masts, far away from this lethal netting.

[tense music] With the cries of the drowning men ringing in their ears, Henry and his fleet must have been utterly demoralized, while the French invaders would have been spurred on.

Because of the tragic loss of the Mary Rose and her crew, what happened next has usually been overlooked.

But don't forget, a vast French invasion force lay poised to strike just a mile off the coast.

It outnumbered the English fleet 3 to 1 and had just witnessed the catastrophic sinking of one of England's most important ships.

It sounds like an open goal.

So how come we're not all speaking French today?

The French may have had a bigger fleet than the British, but to make good on their advantage, they still needed to get ashore.

DOMINIC FONTANA: The problem they had is that if they were landing them by small boat, they would be picked off by the English defenders because they'd only be coming in, in small numbers at each time.

If they could get to deep water quaysides, they'd be able to offload en masse from the ships.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): To land their men, the French would have to bring their great ships into the deep water harbor at Portsmouth.

But the port was well defended by the English fleet with Henry's heavily armed ships acting like a wall of floating fortresses across the Solent.

ERIC GROVE: What the French are faced with is a bunch of well-armed castles lying there, in the Solent.

They can't get through.

They haven't got sailing ships powerful enough.

And even their galleys, potentially, them as powerful vessels, are not capable of breaking through.

Henry VIII has built a fleet of very powerful vessels that is very hard to defeat, particularly in confined waters like the Solent.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): As the stalemate continued, the French had to keep some 30,000 men fed and watered.

An attempt to seize supplies from the Isle of Wight met stubborn resistance, and illness was beginning to take its toll.

The French had a decision to make, keep their fleet anchored out in the Solent, exposed to the elements and unable to maneuver into a good fighting position, or cut their losses and head home.

After three days, they decided to quit.

Henry and England were safe.

Almost immediately, attempts began to recover the Mary Rose and her precious guns from the bottom of the Solent.

As most Tudor Britons couldn't swim, a team of West African diving specialists were brought out to the Solent, though what they recovered is lost to us now.

The next known attempt came in 1836, when the inventor of the diving helmet, John Deane, recovered numerous guns, longbows and shot, which he sold off on the commercial market.

But when the cost outweighed the income, he abandoned the project.

The ship would be lost for another century before being rediscovered in the late 1960s and eventually brought back to the surface in 1982, in an event that captured the world's attention.

Archaeologist Chris Dobbs had probably the best view of all.

CHRIS DOBBS: I happened to be one of the divers that was underwater when it first came through the surface, so I saw it leaving the seabed and then going up through the water column.

And that was just an extraordinary feeling, because we'd been working so task focused for the whole of the summer of 1982.

And then to actually witness it leaving the seabed, it was just another of those magical moments.

[gentle music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The preservation of the Mary Rose and her many treasures has been as extraordinary as her recovery.

For 19 years, the ship was sprayed with a special chemical compound that slowly strengthened her timbers.

It wasn't until 2013 that the sprays were finally turned off.

A brand new museum was built around the ship, conserving for the future one of Britain's most important and enigmatic historic treasures.

The Mary Rose.

She is an astonishing testament to the power of our most famous king, a unique record of the lives of our ordinary Tudor ancestors.

She represents a moment of tragic drama, frozen in time, and holds countless more secrets we're still to uncover.

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