History - especially that in the modern media - hasn't been too kind on Henry VIII, focusing on his various marital and extra-marital escapades, the fact that he had two wives beheaded and that he treated his first wife pretty abysmally.

Add to that the fact that the majority of portraits and portrayals we have of Henry are in his later life, when he really did look as if it was he who had eaten all the pies and Bluff King Hal comes across as a very unsympathetic figure.

Much of this he clearly brought on himself, of course, and apart from the odd extreme, what we see and read about him is more or less true, but it's only true in as far as it goes and leaves out a lot of things about a man who, despite his shortcomings, was a pretty effective monarch, in a troubled age.

But there will be another place in this website where we can talk a bit more about Henry Tudor the man and we'll have a link to it from here, once we do just that - for now, we need to concentrate on what Henry the king did for Portsmouth.

However, before we look at Henry VIII's involvement in Portsmouth, it's worth taking a quick peak back, to the middle of the fifteenth century - to either 1449, or 1450, whichever versions you happen to be reading, when Adam Moleyns, the Bishop of Chichester, was murdered whilst conducting a service at the Domus Dei, which was formerly the St Nicholas Hospital and which we, today, know better as the Garrison Church.

The unfortunate bishop's demise came at the hands of a number of very annoyed seamen - annoyed because they had not received their full wages and had received only partial provisions. Quite what the poor old cleric had to do with that, I confess I have no idea, other than the fact that he was an unpopular advisor to the king!

Why ever the mob chose the bishop as the object for their rage, it resulted in the Pope placing the entire town under what was known as the Greater Excommunication and, as Portsmouth then went through a period where it languished, at times in near poverty, many of the residents were prepared to put that down to God showing his wrath.

In 1508, the year before Henry VIII succeeded his father, the Excommunication was lifted, at the request of Bishop Fox of Winchester, but one condition of this was the building of a Chantry Chapel (a small, private chapel) next to the main hospital building.

And so onwards, into the reign of Henry VIII, who ordered both Round and Square Towers rebuilt in stone, then further ordered that the earthwork dykes should be replaced by more stone walls and, during the 1520s, set about constructing the first dry dock facilities.

Previous to this, the maintenance of wooden ships would have been a nightmare - scraping off and repairing the lower hull, below the waterline, meant waiting for an unusually high tide and then dragging the vessel as far up the foreshore as possible.

Once the tide receded, work could begin, but even if the ensuing tides were lower, there would still be a lot of water sluicing about, slowing up the progress of any work and then, once the necessary repairs had been completed, it was a case of waiting for another unusually high tide, on which to float off the vessel - sometimes, that could mean a wait of weeks!

With a dry dock facility, maintaining and repairing warships became a much more efficient process and Henry's innovative step was what really started Portsmouth on course for becoming the country's premier naval base.

Having invested so much on making Portsmouth the home of his naval strength, Henry had to give further consideration as to how best to protect his investment. The two towers, together with a "twin" Round Tower on the Gosport side, now long since consigned to history, offered command of the harbour entrance, and any vessels trying to attack the port via that narrow channel would have been blown out of the water, but previous French raiders had adopted a different tactic at times.

Rather than trying to sail directly into the harbour, they had anchored further along the coast, off what we now know as Southsea and Eastney, rowing troops ashore and attacking Portsmouth from the landward side. In 1522, a huge chain was installed across the harbour entrance in any case, so it was now almost certain that any future threat would indeed come from the landward approaches.

Henry, having dissolved the monasteries in the mid-1520s, found himself with a nice nest egg of investment capital and set about employing some of that wealth in the construction of Southsea Castle, overlooking the shore from where the present day Southsea Common is, but also, and perhaps more importantly, protecting the landward approaches to the town proper.

Unlike the much older Portchester Castle, the castle at Southsea was born into an era of gunpowder and cannonfire and it followed (albeit very roughly) the now established design of a "star" fort. Some people have suggested that Henry himself designed Southsea Castle, but there is nothing to back that up and, in any case, the idea of the "star" fort had been around for a few years by this time.

The term comes from the ground plan of such forts, multi-sided, like a star, offering oblique angles to incoming cannon projectiles, so that they tended to glance off the walls, rather than smashing directly into the brickwork.

The angled walls also created triangular "killing fields", into which attacking troops had to venture, in order to attack the walls. Cunningly placed apertures for both cannon and musketry meant that the defenders could fire into the flanks of any such attack and offer supporting fire from wall to wall*.

In the case of Southsea, however, the star principle is only just visible and more reliance was placed on the deep ditch that surrounded the walls, whilst the wall facing the sea is curved in the middle - it's certainly a singular design, so maybe Henry did have something to do with its design, after all!

During this period, several similar forts were constructed along the south and south east coasts, in one of the most ambitious sea defence plans ever seen, for Henry knew that an attack from the French was an ever growing threat.

Whatever part Henry may have played directly in the design and construction of the castle, there can be little doubt that the hectic building programme - Henry drove the project forward so that the castle was finished in an astonishingly short time for such a building, as Henry was becoming increasingly afraid of an imminent French attack - did wonders for the local economy.

Those fears proved well founded - hardly had the fortifications been completed, in 1544, than the French fleet appeared off Portsmouth on 18 July 1545 and began landing men on the Isle of Wight, whilst another seaborne force landed further east, on the Sussex coast.

The outnumbered English fleet put up a stoic defence, led by Henry's pride-and-joy flagship, the Mary Rose and on the first day, despite a lot of manoeuvring and regular broadside exchanges, neither fleet sustained much damage.

However, on the second day, tragedy struck and the Mary Rose capsized and sank, whilst heeling over in a tight turn. There are many theories as to how this happened, but we will leave those for now and talk about them in a separate section, later on.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of information available at the official Mary Rose website and you can visit that by clicking on either the dedicated link tab at the top of each of our pages, or on the icon on the right here.

In the end, despite the loss of the Mary Rose the French commander realised that the overall defences at Portsmouth presented too great a challenge for his force - sailing into the harbour, as we have already discussed, would have been suicidal - and nigh on impossible - and Southsea Castle was capable of withstanding attacks by much greater numbers than he had available.

The French fleet withdrew to the Isle of Wight, presumably to discuss possible changes in tactics, but with the smaller Sussex contingent making no progress and the English recruiting additional forces to help the heavily outnumbered fleet and army contingents that they had available in the south, the French commanders decided to embark their troops again and sail back home.

So far as Portsmouth was concerned, things now went fairly quiet for a few years, but in 1561, Queen Elizabeth I paid her first visit to the town** and vowed to use her position, influence and ingenuity to further its development.

The fortifications around Portsmouth - and others - were improved and extended at great expense, but not using the queen's own money. Instead, the first ever English state lottery was set up, with 400,000 tickets sold at ten shillings each, a not unsubstantial chunk of money in those days!

The first prize was worth £5,000 - £3,000 in cash, £700 in plate (gold and silver) and the balance in linens. There were a further 25 "consolation" prizes, worth £100 or more, but that lottery still returned a handsome profit, which was put to immediate use.

Certainly the extensive building programme in Portsmouth had a beneficial effect on the local population, which in 1560 is estimated to have been approximately 1,000 people. This, of course, would have been the permanent inhabitants and would not have included itinerant merchants, soldiers and sailors, of which there were now more and more.

By 1563, it is thought that that number had more or less doubled, but an outbreak of plague in that year killed 300 of these! Nevertheless, Portsmouth was now really beginning to thrive as never before and, in 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh landed the first potatoes, tobacco and oranges ever seen in England.

Military historians may reflect on both Elizabeth's foresight and on the role Portsmouth might have played, had the Spanish Armada succeeded in landing its invasion army in 1588.

Given the sort of cannons available at the time, and the strength of the walls, the Spanish would probably have sustained extensive casualties and in the following century, during the Civil War, had the castle been garrisoned by more than a dozen men and had the Royalist commander, Captain Chaloner, not been a perpetual drunk, who quickly surrendered, the Parliamentary forces that occupied Portsmouth would likely have suffered similarly.

Unfortunately, as the sixteenth century - and Elizabeth's reign - drew to a close, Portsmouth's role in shipbuilding began to wane, as new shipyards were opened along the Thames and, as a result, by 1600, the permanent population of the town had risen to no more than 2,500.

That, however, would begin to change towards the latter end of the seventeenth century ...

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( * In fact, Southsea Castle isn't a true "star fort", at least, not in the way that such forts first evolved in Italy several decades earlier, but the idea behind the shape and positioning of its walls is much the same and can be seen in many surviving forts and fortresses of similar age, which are known collectively as "Device Forts", or "Henrician Forts" - in total, 30 of these, including Southsea, were built between 1537 and 1545.

** At odd times throughout this site we have referred to Portsmouth as a "city" rather than as a "town", the latter being its official status up until 1926 - we hope that you'll forgive these little anomalies, which we'll correct as we go!)