This thread was originally written and published in October 2020

On this day (October 12) in 1511, a warship was launched in the little village of Newhaven on the shore of the Firth of Forth which was the largest ever seen in Europea. This was the Great Michael, a flagship for the Royal Navy of King James IV of Scotland and it is an intriguing tale of national extravagance but also the very founding of Newhaven itself.

So how did a relatively small and unprosperous nation like 16th century Scotland come to build the largest warship in the western world at the time, and how did it come to be built in a sleepy little fishing village with no previous history in shipbuilding? The answer lies with that one man, King James IV. James had a bit of an obsession with building up a navy for Scotland, you might say in modern terms it was a bit of a strategic policy. The young King James was only on the throne a year when in 1489 a small English fleet came sailing up the Forth, setting fire to and ravaging all it could find along the Fife and Lothian coast and anything floating in between. The King needed a response.

The only man who could take any form of action was Andrew Wood of Largo, a one-time privateer in the service of James III. Wood took what was at the time effectively the Scottish Navy, his ships Yellow Carvel and Flower and set off to meet the English.

He was outnumbered by five to two, but had the wind behind him and aggressively took the initiative. He brought the English to battle near Dunbar and after a hard won fight he returned victorious to Leith with the English vessels as his prize. Naval warfare at the time effectively involved getting close to your enemy, letting off a few smallish cannon at them, then locking yourself alongside and fighting it out man-to-man while archers in the tops took pot shots. Ships rarely sank eachother in combat, they were captured.

The English returned in revenge the following year, with a bigger fleet. Once again Andrew Wood sailed out to meet then and once again he emerged victorious and captured his opponents.

Andrew Wood became a hero, and was knighted by the young King, upon whom the importance of sea power was now impressed. James set about building up his navy with great abandon. There was a fundamental stumbling block however in that Scotland had no domestic ship-building industry to speak of, certainly nothing that could produce the sort of vessels that James was interested in acquiring. The country lacked the shipyards and it lacked the masters and wrights and skilled labourers. So for now it had to be content to either impress captured ships or buy them from the Low Countries.

Between about 1502 and 1506, the Margaret (named for his wife, Margaret Tudor) was the first home-constructed warship for James. She was built at Leith with quite some difficulty. To deal with the deficiency of labour and skills, this was bought in from France – John Levans and Jenne Diew arrived in 1502; “the French wricht that cam first for the schip bigging.” Scotland also lacked tymir (oak timber) and so the shipwrights scoured the country in to the Highlands looking for the correct sorts. The last major problem was that Leith was a tidal port and the waters were just too shallow to effectively launch ships larger than boats. When Margaret was launched it required 100 casks to be lashed to the hull to help her float high enough to clear the sandbars. But launched she was, the first big warship built in Scotland and the biggest thing by far in the Scottish navy.

But James wasn’t content to stop there, he had bigger ideas. Why build the largest warship in Scotland when you could build the largest in England, or France, or in Europe? Such a vessel would be a huge strategic bargaining chip for the ambitious king and he had an idea that it could be used as the centrepiece of a crusade fleet. But a bigger ship would need somewhere deeper to launch it than Leith. Jacques Terriel, another French shipwright, was charged with finding it. He didn’t need to go far, half a mile up the coast from North Leith the conditions were perfect, and so it was that the New Haven (New Harbour) was established. There is some evidence that at this time Newhaven was a small, natural bay; protected by rocky or sandy spits to the east and west.

The new ship was to be named the Michael, after the archangel. A community was established at Newhaven of wrights and crafstmen from France and the Low Countries and much local labour. They toiled for over 5 years to build the huge ship. The chronicler Pitscottie records ” this scheip was of so greit statur and tuik so mekill timber that scho waistit all the wodis in Fyfe except Falkland wode, by all the tymmer that was gottin out of Noraway” (This ship was of so great a stature and took so much timber that she consumed all the woods in Fife except Falkland Wood and the remaining timber was gotten from Norway.). The “great schipe cummerit Scottland to get hir to the sie” (it was hard work for Scotland to get her to sea), but gotten to sea she was!

After her launch she was towed up the Forth to Airth, near Kincardine, well beyond the reach of English raiders, to be completed. Once her four great masts were stepped and her upperworks complete she returned to Newhaven to be burned (to prevent against rot and worms) and was re-caulked to seal her. The great ship is recorded as being “XII scoir of futtis of length and XXXV futte withtin the wallis; scho was X fute thik in the waill” (240 feet long, 35 feet wide internally and with 10 foot thick walls) and “thik that na canon could gang throw hir” (so thick that cannon couldn’t penetrate her hull). Her sails were a mix of square and lateen (triangular sails set at about 45° to the mast), which gave her a good combination of speed with the wind and an ability to sail against it.

With a displacement around 1,000 tons, she was the biggest thing around by some margin. Not only that, but she had advances in her armament in that she was designed from the start to fight with large guns from a distance; “hir artaillye… was werie great and costlie to the king” (her artillery was very great and costly to the King.) Pitscottie describes her armament thus; “cannons sex on everie syde witht thrie great basselis, tua behind in hir dock and ane befoir“, In total 24 large brass guns and 3 “basiliks” the largest and heaviest ship guns of the time.

In addition to the above, the Michael carried moyen and batterit facouns and quarter fallcouns (Middle, Bastard and Quarter Falcons), slingis (Sling guns), pestelent serpitantis (Serpentine guns), and doubill doggis (Double Dog guns). You may notice a pattern here that artillery of this period was generally named according to an animal-themed system. And not to be content with that there was a complement of light weapons; hagbut and cullvering, corsebowis and handbowis; hagbuts (from the Dutch haakbus or hook gun) were an early form of hand-held weapon and culverins were small, hand-swung, breech-loaded cannons that were mounted on railings.

On paper, the crew of the Michael was 300 mariners and 120 gunners. These men would sail the ship and fire the big guns, and in addition she could carry 1,000 “men of war” to man the small weapons and to carry out the hand-to-hand combat of boarding actions. The great ship put to sea some time in 1512. Appropriately Sir Andrew Wood was her first captain. To test her strength, the King had a cannon fired at her when in Leith roads and it “deirit hir nocht and did her lyttill skaith” (it harmed her not and did her little damage).

It wasn’t just her size and armament that was monumental, so was her cost. She took some £30,000 (Scots) to build, probably not including her artillery. She cost £500 a month in her crew’s pay and £168 in victualling. At the time the national annual revenue was just £35,000! This was clearly unsustainable for the country to support, but James had a plan; lease her to the French to fight the English with, and get his ally to pay for his largesse. This aspiration became a reality after King Henry VIII of England commenced an invasion of France through Calais in May 1513. King Louis XII of France agreed to pay James IV 50,000 Francs and for the victualling of James Navy if he would come to Louis’ aid against Henry. At the end of May, Henry himself embarked on his fleet to join the invasion; if James was going to intervene it would have to be now.

And so it was in July that year that the Great Michael (as she is usually referred to) went to sea at the head of the greatest Scottish naval fleet that ever did sail; 26 ships in total under the command of James Hamilton, Earl of Arran. As a show of strength, Arran went first to Carrickfergus in Ireland to assist Irish rebels under Hugh O’Donnell of Tyrconnell by bombarding the English garrison there. Arran succeeded in reducing the town to rubble and cinders, but had to leave for Ayr to resupply. Only then did he then head south to France, but by this time had missed the opportunity to catch the English fleet bottled up in Calais and had to content himself with acting as a deterrent. Everything changed on September 9th that year when King James went and got himself and the “Flower of Scotland” killed at the disasterous battle on Flodden Field…

Flodden neutralised Scotland as a military threat to England and plunged the country into political and economic chaos. She was never in any position to support her oversize fleet anyway without foreign patronage and so she was sold to Louis XII for the knock-down price of £18,000 Scots (40,000 French livres) as La Grande Nef d’Ecosse (The Big Scottish Ship). As she ship drew too much water to make it into the harbour at Dieppe and so Louis had her tied up at Honfleur. What happened next is not that clear. In 1522 a capture Scottish master mariner, Dougall Campbell, told Henry VIII that she was in Brest under Captain Stephen Valois. Although she was still the notional flagship of the French fleet and a huge strategic threat to the English, it seems perhaps that she was just left to slowly rot away at Brest and her trail goes cold after 1527.

The Great Michael was built at a crippling cost, served her King and country for less than a few months, and soon disappeared into obscurity, but her myth has managed to retain something of a grip on the psyche of the people of Leith and Newhaven for centuries. In 1879, the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society built a grand office and warehouse on Leith Links called “Great Michael House”.

In 1957, Edinburgh Corporation built a new housing scheme in the Newhaven development area, designed by Basil Spence, as Great Michael Rise and in 1968, Parliament Square in Newhaven was renamed as Great Michael Square (with Great Michael Close adjacent) as part of an exercise to rationalise street names.

And what of the Lord High Admiral of Scotland Sir Andrew Wood of Largo, who twice fought the English on unequal terms for King James IV and twice bested them and outlived his King by 2 years? In 1976 he was honoured by a small cul de sac of council flats in Newhaven. And why not? If it wasn’t for Andrew Wood, there would have been no Great Michael, and if it wasn’t for the latter there would be no Newhaven.

Anyway, if you’re still here, thanks for sticking with it. And if you’re reading this from Newhaven, you can thank King James IV and his strategic maritime ambitions for having that place to call home.

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