In a contemporary picture of the destruction of this ship in her action with the _Marie la Cordelière_ in 1512, when both ships caught fire and blew up, the _Regent_ is shown with very heavy guns firing through port-holes. Port-holes, by the way, are said to have been invented by Desharges, a Brest shipbuilder, in 1500. I am inclined to think that they were known at an earlier date--possibly Desharges invented port-_lids_. It is, of course, possible that these were cut in the _Regent_ some time after her original construction, and heavier guns mounted in place of some of her serpentines. According to some writers this ship was originally christened the _Great Harry_, while the _Sovereign_ was built out of the remains of an older ship called the _Grace Dieu_. As a very large and renowned _Henri Grace à Dieu_ was launched in 1514, there has been a considerable amount of confusion between one ship and the other. But if the _Regent_ was called the _Great Harry_, she had nothing whatever to do with the _Henri_, which is also sometimes referred to as the _Harry Grace à Dieu_.[17] As a matter of fact, the latter was built to replace the former, the loss of which was considered a national disaster, and so much so that an attempt was made to keep her fate a secret. "At the reverens of God", wrote Cardinal Wolsey, "kepe these tydyngs to yourselfe." There was probably another reason for the construction of an exceptionally fine ship, and that was the desire that the English should not be eclipsed by the Scots in this respect. [Illustration: THE _GREAT HARRY_, THE FIRST BIG BATTLESHIP OF THE BRITISH NAVY] For, the year before the _Regent_ was blown up, the King of Scotland, who was hand in glove with the French, had put afloat what a contemporary chronicler terms "ane verrie monstrous great schip". This was the famous _Great Michael_. Her constructor was Jaques Tarret, a Frenchman, and it has been written that "she was of so great stature and took so much timber, that except Falkland, she wasted all the woods of Fife, which were oak wood, with all the timber that was gotten out of Norway". She took "a year and a day to build", and we are given her dimensions, which compare favourably in point of size with many much later line-of-battle ships. "She was 12 score feet in length and 36 feet within the sides; she was 10 feet thick in the wall, and boarded on every side so slack and so thick that no cannon could go through her." It is rather difficult to understand what "slack" means in this context.