Previously to the reign of Henry VIII. no reliance can be placed on any details with respect to English ships; indeed it was only when in his reign the royal navy became a regular and permanent branch of the government service, that any careful record was kept of the fittings of vessels so employed. Happily one of these accounts has been preserved in the Cottonian collection at the British Museum, and this document derives further elucidation from another manuscript in the Harleian collection, explaining, as this does, many antiquated or obsolete words in the former. In Appendix (3) will be found the substance of the ‘Inventory of the Great Barke,’ which is the oldest account extant of the details of an English ship; but whatever antiquaries may have written about this ‘Great Barque,’ she appears to have been simply a large merchant ship of the period, which on the sixth day of October, in the twenty-third year of the reign of Henry VIII. (A.D. 1531), was _viewed_ or inspected by Christopher Morris, a government officer, for the purpose of being employed in the public service. [Sidenote: The _Great Harry_.] The largest and most important vessel built at this period in England appears to have been King Henry’s _Harry Grace à Dieu_.[100] Two representations of this ship are extant, one in the Pepysian Library in Magdalen College, Cambridge, another in an original picture of Hans Holbein, published by Allen in 1756.[101] The drawings however differ so widely that it is probable they refer to different vessels. With the exception of the very high forecastle, an extra range of cabins on her poop, and her extraordinary rig, she does not materially differ from the wooden line-of-battle ships of much later times. All accounts agree in describing the _Harry Grace à Dieu_ as the largest English man-of-war up to the period of her construction; but Henry VIII. had also previously built a vessel called the _Regent_, of one thousand tons, to carry a crew of eight hundred men, a ship, however, surpassed by a French one, the _Cordilier_, which carried one thousand one hundred men. The _Harry Grace à Dieu_ was destroyed by fire when lying at Woolwich on the 27th of August, 1563. [Illustration: HARRY GRACE A DIEU.—FROM PEPYSIAN LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE.] [Sidenote: Number and strength of the fleet at the death of Henry VIII., 28 Jan., 1547.]