King Henry VIII, in his efforts to possess fighting ships superior to those of Spain, France and Scotland, raised not only artillery but ships themselves to a different rôle. As he personally urged the manufacture of ordnance in this country by the subsidizing of foreign talent, so he sought to improve the design of his ships by inviting Italian shipwrights to come to England and apply their knowledge to the royal vessels. Dockyards were founded at Woolwich, Deptford, and Portsmouth. Large ships were laid down, several were rebuilt, with many improvements embodied in them: chief of these being a new artillery armament. The king had seized the advantages of the sailing ship with broadside fire. “The development of broadside fire,” says Sir Julian Corbett, “was a question of gunnery, of naval architecture, and of seamanship. With Henry’s introduction of heavy guns on board his larger vessels, however, the true note had been struck, and by the end of his reign the first two arts had made great strides. Guns of all patterns and sizes were being cast in England, both in bronze and iron, which were little inferior to those Nelson fought with.” The result of the king’s efforts was seen in the ships laid down in the last years of his reign. The frontispiece of Mr. Oppenheim’s _History of the Administration of the Royal Navy_ is a picture of one of these, the _Tiger_, a four-masted flush-decked vessel, with no sheer, little top hamper, a long tier of ordnance on the gun deck, and with a beak-head ending in a spur: one of a class “which shows a very great advance on anything before afloat and indicates a steady progression towards the modern type.”