''Constant Reformation'' was a 42-gun

great ship The rating system of the Royal Navy and its predecessors was used by the Royal Navy between the beginning of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th century to categorise sailing warships, initially classing them according to their assi ...

Second rate In the rating system of the Royal Navy used to categorise sailing warships, a second-rate was a ship of the line which by the start of the 18th century mounted 90 to 98 guns on three gun decks; earlier 17th-century second rates had fewer guns ...

of the English

navy A navy, naval force, military maritime fleet, war navy, or maritime force is the military branch, branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval warfare, naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake-borne, riverine, littoral z ...

, built by William Burrell (Master Shipwright of the

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company that was founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to Indian Ocean trade, trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (South A ...

) at

Deptford Dockyard Deptford Dockyard was an important Royal Navy Dockyard, naval dockyard and base at Deptford on the River Thames, operated by the Royal Navy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It built and maintained warships for 350 years, and man ...

and launched in 1619.

Design and modification

The ''Constant Reformation'' was the first of the six "Great Ships" (or

s) to be designed and built at

for

James I James I may refer to: People *James I of Aragon (1208–1276) * James I of Sicily or James II of Aragon (1267–1327) * James I, Count of La Marche (1319–1362), Count of Ponthieu * James I, Count of Urgell (1321–1347) *James I of Cyprus (1334� ...

's navy by Burrell (as well as three

Third rate In the rating system of the Royal Navy, a third rate was a ship of the line which from the 1720s mounted between 64 and 80 guns, typically built with two gun decks (thus the related term two-decker). Rating When the rating system was f ...

s and a

Fourth rate In 1603 all English warships with a complement of fewer than 160 men were known as 'small ships'. In 1625/26 to establish pay rates for officers, a six-tier naval ship rating system was introduced.Winfield 2009 These small ships were divided ...

). The other Second Rates were the ''Victory'', ''Swiftsure'', ''Saint Andrew'', ''Saint George'' and ''Triumph''. These ten vessels were all part of the fleet modernisation programme instituted by the 1618 Jacobean Commission of Enquiry. The first three ships were designed with a keel length of 103 ft and a beam of 34 ft, intended to be of 650 tons each, but the ''Constant Reformation'' as completed measured 106 ft on the keel and had a breadth of 35 ft 6 in. Her nominal tonnage was 742 "tons and tonnage", while her burthen tonnage was 710 bm. Like the other five, the ''Constant Reformation'' was built as a two-decked ship with 42 guns (although only 38 of these were carriage guns, the other four being swivel-mounted on the superstructure), but during

Charles I Charles I may refer to: Kings and emperors * Charlemagne (742–814), numbered Charles I in the lists of Holy Roman Emperors and French kings * Charles I of Anjou (1226–1285), also king of Albania, Jerusalem, Naples and Sicily * Charles I of ...

's reign a spar deck was added over the upper deck, and later this was hardened to support a third gundeck, although there were no guns mounted in the middle part of this deck (with three pairs of gunports forward and four pairs aft of this unarmed section). There was no forecastle over this third deck. By 1651 she carried about 56 guns. Her original complement of 280 men rose to at least 300 by 1651.

Career and Fate

The ''Constant Reformation'' first saw action in the English expedition to Algiers (1620–1621), then in the unsuccessful

Cádiz expedition (1625) Cádiz ( , , ) is a city in Spain and the capital of the Province of Cádiz in the autonomous community of Andalusia. It is located in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula off the Atlantic Ocean separated from neighbouring San Fernando by ...

, part of the Anglo-Spanish War (1625–1630). In the

First English Civil War The First English Civil War took place in England and Wales from 1642 to 1646, and forms part of the 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms. An estimated 15% to 20% of adult males in England and Wales served in the military at some point b ...

from 1642 to 1646, ''Constant Reformation'' was the flagship of the Parliamentarian deputy commander,

Vice-Admiral Vice admiral is a senior naval flag officer rank, usually equivalent to lieutenant general and air marshal. A vice admiral is typically senior to a rear admiral and junior to an admiral. Australia In the Royal Australian Navy, the rank of vic ...

William Batten Sir William Batten (c. 1601 – 5 October 1667) was an English naval officer and administrator from Somerset, who began his career as a merchant seaman, served as second-in-command of the Parliamentarian navy during the First English Civil War ...

, before being taken over by

Thomas Rainsborough Thomas Rainsborough, or Rainborowe, 6 July 1610 to 29 October 1648, was an English religious and political radical who served in the Parliamentarian navy and New Model Army during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. One of the few contemporaries who ...

when he was appointed commander in January 1648. His crew mutinied in May 1648 and with Batten acting as captain, the ''Constant Reformation'' was one of the ships that defected to the

Royalists A royalist supports a particular monarch as head of state for a particular kingdom, or of a particular dynastic claim. In the abstract, this position is royalism. It is distinct from monarchism, which advocates a monarchical system of gover ...

during the

Second English Civil War The Second English Civil War took place between February and August 1648 in Kingdom of England, England and Wales. It forms part of the series of conflicts known collectively as the 1639–1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, which include the 164 ...

in August 1648. While acting as a Royalist

privateer A privateer is a private person or vessel which engages in commerce raiding under a commission of war. Since robbery under arms was a common aspect of seaborne trade, until the early 19th century all merchant ships carried arms. A sovereign o ...

, it ran aground near

Terceira Island Terceira () is a volcanic island in the Azores archipelago, about a third of the way across the North Atlantic Ocean at a similar latitude to Portugal's capital Lisbon, with the island group forming an insular part of Portugal. It is one of the ...

in the

Azores The Azores ( , , ; , ), officially the Autonomous Region of the Azores (), is one of the two autonomous regions of Portugal (along with Madeira). It is an archipelago composed of nine volcanic islands in the Macaronesia region of the North Atl ...

and was lost on 30 September 1651, with some 300 men drowned.

Notes

References

Sources

*Lavery, Brian (1983) ''The Ship of the Line – Volume 1: The development of the battlefleet 1650-1850.'' Conway Maritime Press. . *Winfield, Rif (2009) ''British Warships in the Age of Sail 1603-1714: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates''. Seaforth Publishing. . {{DEFAULTSORT:Constant Reformation (1619) Ships of the English navy Ships built in Deptford 1610s ships