By 1750, however, it was no longer possible to argue that the Established dimensions provided ships large enough to counter the ever-growing French and Spanish ships of the line. Reluctantly, the Admiralty accepted that the existing dimensions were too restrictive, and issued instructions ‘to make such variations in the said ships from the present establishment as shall be thought necessary to make them better ships for war.’ For the First Rate under construction at Woolwich, this meant that the design was amended to broaden the ship by a further ten inches.

In 1755 there were only three 100-gun ships afloat: the Royal George (1715), Royal William (1719) and Royal Sovereign (1729). The elderly Royal William had seen no sea service, being laid up since her launch in 1719, and in 1756 was cut down to a Second Rate of 84 guns. The new Royal Anne was nearing launching stage; an Admiralty Order of 26 February 1755 instructed the Navy Board to complete and fit her for sea ‘for the reception of a flag officer of the highest rank with two captains under him’. Before her completion, however, the Admiralty decided on 10 January 1756 that the new Royal Anne and the elderly Royal George should exchange names. The new First Rate accordingly became the Royal George on 19 January, and was launched at Woolwich on 18 February 1756.

The mid-century 100-gun ship had twenty-eight 42-pounders on the lower deck, the same quantity of 24-pounders on the middle deck and of 12-pounders on the upper deck. The complement of guns was completed by sixteen 6-pounders (twelve on the quarterdeck, and four on the forecastle), while a wartime complement of 850 men was set to run the ship.

THIS draught of Slade’s ‘masterpiece’, the Victory, is a copy of an ‘as fitted’ plan and was drawn in 1830 by which time the ship was a national icon. Given the decorative typography it was probably made for display or demonstration purposes, but depicts the ship as completed and not in the Trafalgar appearance that was responsible for her fame. In the years leading up to the American Revolutionary War, it became standard practice to produce draughts of ships after they were completed (‘as fitted’), which usually included the decorative work absent from design plans; this is probably a copy of one such draught. The ship proved the most successful First Rate of the century.
[NMM J1842]

In December 1758 the Pitt administration gave orders for the construction of twelve new ships of the line, and instructions for nine of these were issued by the Navy Board later that month. The majority of these were to be 74s and smaller two-deckers, but they were to include one First Rate and one Second Rate. The draughts for all these ships were drawn up by the new Surveyor, Thomas Slade, early in 1759. This gave Slade his first (and as it transpired, only) chance to design a First Rate. Slade submitted a design for this on 6 June, and it was approved by the Navy Board on 15 June, while the Second Rate was approved on 6 November, The two three-deckers were to be built simultaneously in Chatham Dockyard, under the direction of the Master Shipwright there, John Lock, until 1762 when Lock’s retirement saw his replacement by Edward Allin.

The Victory Class (Slade design of 1758) – construction history

The Victory Class (Slade design of 1759) – dimensions in feet and inches

The new ship was designed to be some eight feet longer than the 1745 Establishment. This allowed Slade to provide for a fifteenth pair of heavy 42-pounders on the lower deck. An extra pair of 12-pounders was also fitted in on the upper deck, with a consequent reduction in the small 6-pounders (one pair removed from the quarterdeck and another pair from the forecastle).

No name was assigned to the 100-gun ship until 30 October 1760 when, at the Prime Minister’s instigation, she was named the Victory to commemorate the ‘Year of Victories’, 1759, which had seen a series of spectacular naval and military successes at the height of the Seven Years’ War. By the time of her launch in 1765, the war was over, and so she was immediately placed in Ordinary at Chatham. During the next four years she was completed and fitted out, undergoing sea trials in 1769; however, there was no demand for her to be brought into service during the decade of peace that followed the Seven Years’ War, and it was not until France declared war again, in support of the rebellious American colonists, that she was refitted for sea and commissioned. It was at this time that Admiral Keppel, whose flag was to be raised in her in May 1778, argued that the 42-pounders with which she had been completed should be replaced by 32-pounders.

Following this re-armament, the Victory mounted thirty 32-pounders, twenty-eight 24-pounders, thirty 12-pounders and twelve 6-pounders (the latter now disposed ten on the quarterdeck, two on the forecastle), and it was with this armament that, flying Keppel’s flag, the Victory led the British attack on the French off Ushant in July 1778. However, following her return to Portsmouth, and Keppel’s replacement in March 1779, she had the 42-pounders reinstated and retained these until 1797 – indeed, they were still carried by Victory at the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent in February 1797.

The Victory underwent a major (‘Large’) repair from December 1787 to April 1788; following Saint Vincent, she was relegated to harbour service as a hospital ship from December 1797 until January 1799. She then had an extended refit at Chatham, after which she was returned to active service as Lord Nelson’s flagship. After the Battle of Trafalgar, the Victory was perceived as being too old for further service as a First Rate and needing a reduction in the weight of armament to be carried; she was relegated to the Second Rate in November 1807, with two 32-pounders removed from her lower deck so that she was rated as just 98 guns, and with her 24-pounders on the middle deck replaced by 18-pounders; she was then remeasured as 2088 tons.

She was employed as a troopship from December 1810 until April 1811. Subsequently she was used as a prison ship from 1813, but in February 1817 she was restored, like all the other Second Rate three-deckers, to the First Rate and listed as 104 guns. She was dry-docked in January 1822, but recommissioned in January 1824 as the Port Admiral’s flagship at Portsmouth, a task from which she was paid off in April 1830. It was intended to dispose of her, but following an outcry against breaking up Nelson’s famous flagship, she was reprieved, to become one of the earliest examples of ship preservation. She remained afloat until 1922, when she was eventually moved into the dry-dock at Portsmouth where she remains to this day.

The work at Plymouth Dockyard was started under Israel Pownoll, but from November 1775 John Henslow was the yard’s Master Shipwright until he was appointed a Surveyor of the Navy (jointly with Williams) in November 1784; Thomas Pollard took over at Plymouth to complete the Royal Sovereign.

Two significant changes in ordnance arrangements came about towards the end of the 1770s. The difficulty of handling a 42-pounder shot rather than a 32-pounder, especially in a seaway, had always meant that the larger guns suffered a much slower rate of fire. In 1778 Admiral Augustus Keppel, then flying his flag aboard the Victory, successfully applied for the ship’s 42-pounders to be replaced by 32-pounders, but this remained a one-off experiment for more than a decade. Eventually in 1790 the 42-pounder guns which remained on the lower deck in most First Rates were ordered to be replaced by 32-pounders, as the opportunity arose, although the last few 42-pounders were not removed from service for many years, the Royal George and Britannia retaining their 42-pounders until 1807.

The second change was the development in the late 1770s by the Carron ironworks in Scotland of a lightweight, short-barrelled weapon that came to be called the carronade. Experiments with the prototypes were very successful, and the Admiralty decided to fit carronades into the upperworks of all ships of the line, to supplement their existing long guns. While these were not able to match the range of the traditional long gun, they were considered useful additions to ships’ short-range firepower against enemy personnel and rigging. In the Ordnance Board’s first Establishment for carronades of 13 July 1779, ten 12-pounder carronades were assigned to each First Rate in addition to their carriage guns, eight to be mounted on the poop (roundhouse top) and two on the forecastle, in addition to the 6-pounder guns there. These early carronades were only 26in in length and weighed 5¾cwt. Interestingly, the new guns were not added to the ships’ nominal gun-rating, so that the First Rate remained ‘a ship of 100 guns’; for the next 37 years, carronades were not counted in a ship’s rating except where their installation was at the expense of a long-barrelled gun.

The next First Rate was not ordered until 1782. However, by the end of 1792 there were two further ships on order, with a design enlarged to 110 guns. As in earlier times, First Rates did not usually see active service during peacetime (and even in 1778 only one was commissioned), but notably all five 100-gun ships were recommissioned between December 1792 and September 1793 in a period of tension leading up to the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War.

BATTLES OF THE NAPOLEONIC WARS

Before turning to the technical development of the First Rates during the Napoleonic era, it is appropriate to consider the service history of British First Rates during the quarter-century of conflict that began with the French Revolution. Given the long time required to build a First Rate, it was inevitably the pre-war ships that played the greatest part in what the pre-1914 generation called the ‘Great War’. During this period, all the older First Rates served as flagships at most of the major battles.

The Britannia and Victory took part in the attack on Toulon in August 1793, in Hotham’s Action off the nearby Hyères Islands in July 1795 (in his previous action off Genoa in March, only the Britannia was present), in the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent in February 1797, and of course in the classic battle off Cape Trafalgar in 1805 (when the Royal Sovereign was also a flagship). Of the later ships, the Queen Charlotte and Royal George took part in the Glorious First of June battle in 1794 (along with the Royal Sovereign) and in Bridport’s Action off Île Groix in June 1795. Only the Ville de Paris (the British-built ship named after the French prize lost in 1782) saw no major fleet action during the war, while the new Hibernia and Caledonia, which were only to enter service in 1805 and 1808 respectively, were too late to participate in the major actions of these wars, although the last-named ship was flagship during the attack on the French squadron in the Basque Roads in April 1809.

During the occupation of Toulon, the Victory flew the flags of both Vice-Admiral Samuel Hood and Rear-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, while the Britannia carried the flag of Vice-Admiral William Hotham. On the Glorious First of June, the Royal Charlotte was the flagship of Admiral Earl Howe, and his two Vice-Admirals were in the other First Rates present, Sir Alexander Hood aboard the Royal George and Thomas Graves in the Royal Sovereign.

William Hotham flew his flag aboard the Britannia during the 1795 actions in the Western Mediterranean, as a Vice-Admiral off Genoa in March, and as a full Admiral off Hyères in June, when Rear-Admiral Thomas Mann was the flag officer aboard the accompanying Victory. In June of the same year, Lord Bridport commanded his fleet off Île Groix from the Royal George, the Queen Charlotte being a private ship (ie not a flagship) during this action.

For the battle against the Spanish fleet off Cape Saint Vincent in 1797) Admiral Sir John Jervis had the Victory as his flagship, while Vice-Admiral Charles Thompson flew his flag aboard the Britannia. At the next two major naval battles of the Revolutionary War – Duncan’s defeat of the Dutch at Camperdown in October 1797, and Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir (the Battle of the Nile) in August 1798 – no three-decker was present in the British line of battle, the largest ships present being two-decker 74s.

The renewal of war from 1803 onwards produced only one major campaign in which First Rates saw action – that culminating in the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805. Here three 100-gun ships took the leading roles: Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson led the Weather column in the Victory, while Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood led the Lee column aboard the Royal Sovereign, the first ship into the action that day; the remaining British flag officer present was Rear-Admiral William Carnegie (the Earl of Northesk) aboard the Britannia, placed fifth in the Windward column.

The Royal Sovereign Class (Williams design) – construction history

Notes: Although the Royal Sovereign was sometimes described as a Hunt design, Hunt did not become Surveyor (initially Joint Surveyor) until March 1778. Carried twenty-eight 32-pounders (lower deck), thirty 18-pounders (middle deck) and forty 12-pounders (30 upper deck, 8 quarterdeck, 2 forecastle). Complement 750. ¹ 2 × 32-pounder carronades added to QD.

The Royal Sovereign Class (Williams design) – dimensions in feet and inches