Opposition to the building of such a prodigious vessel appeared from different quarters. Great ships, in the opinion of Sir Walter Raleigh, were “of marvellous charge and fearful cumber.” The cost of so large a ship must needs be great, for not only the whole cost, but the cost per ton, increased with the size of the vessel; so wasteful a process was the building of a great ship, indeed, that it was not unusual to build a small ship simultaneously, out of the timber discarded: a practice known as “building a small ship out of a great one’s chips.” Ships of the greatest size, again, were “of little service, less nimble, less mainable, and very seldom employed.” Nor was it believed that so large a vessel as that projected could be built. Trinity House, when they heard of the design, uttered a formal protest. Such a ship, they argued, would be too big for service, and unsafe from her enormous size. To carry such a number of pieces she must be a three-decker, and to build a serviceable three-decker was beyond the art or wit of man; if the lower tier were too low they would be useless in a sea, if at 5 or 5½ feet above the water-line then the third tier would be so high as to endanger the ship. In spite of this protest the new ship was laid down, and nearly two years later, in the autumn of ’37, she was launched at Woolwich, “the pride and glory of the Caroline navy.” The _Sovereign of the Seas_, the _Sovereign_, or the _Royal Sovereign_, as she was called by successive governments, was another great advance in size and solidity on all preceding construction, and was the masterpiece of Phineas Pett. Her length by the keel was 128 feet, her main breadth 48 feet, her overall length 232 feet. She had three flush decks and a forecastle, a half-deck, a quarter-deck, and a roundhouse. Her armament showed an approach to symmetry; the lower tier consisted of cannon and demi-cannon, the middle tier of culverins and demi-culverins. In one respect she was less advanced than Pett’s earlier effort, the _Prince Royal_, in that she had an old-fashioned beakhead, low hawses and a low and exposed forecastle. In general form she was extolled by all, and bore witness to the genius of her designer. No better form, said a later critic and constructor[14] after making an analysis of her lines--no better form could have been devised for a ship built (according to the prevailing customs of the times) so high out of water and so overloaded with ornaments. The king took a personal pride in her, and during her construction visited Woolwich and “seriously perused all the ship within board.” For him an elaborate description was written which, quoted at length by various writers, serves to show the extent to which mere decoration contributed to the cost of a royal ship. Two pictures of the vessel are reproduced by Charnock, of such obvious disparity that they serve to show (as the author observes) to what a degree artists may differ in the presentment of the same vessel.