HMS Duke of Wellington (1852)

HMS Duke of Wellington was a major British warship of the mid-19th century, symptomatic of an era of rapid technological change in the Royal Navy, powered both by sail and steam. She was a screw ship of the line, with towering masts and trim square-set yards, and was the flagship of Sir Charles Napier.

She was the first of a class of four that represented the ultimate development of the wooden three-decker ship of the line which had been the mainstay capital ship in naval warfare for 200 years. She was originally ordered in 1841 to a design of Sir William Symonds, the Surveyor of the Navy, but was not laid down until May 1849 at Pembroke Dock by which time Symonds had resigned and the design had been modified by the Assistant Surveyor John Eyde. At this stage the ship, first christened HMS Windsor Castle, was still intended as a sailing vessel. Although the Royal Navy had been using steam power in smaller ships for three decades, it had not been adopted for ships of the line, partly because the enormous paddle-boxes required would have meant a severe reduction in the number of guns carried. This limitation was altered by the adoption of the screw propellor in the 1840s. Under a crash programme announced in December 1851 to provide the Navy with a steam-driven battlefleet, the design was further modified by the new Surveyor, Captain Baldwin Walker. The ship was cut apart in two places on the stocks in January 1852, lengthened by 30 feet overall and given screw propulsion. She received the 780 hp engines designed and built by Robert Napier for the iron frigate Simoon, which had surrendered them on conversion to a troopship. The ship was launched on 14 September 1852. On that day the Duke of Wellington died, and she was subsequently re-named in his honour and provided with a new figurehead in the image of the duke.

When completed early in 1853 HMS Duke of Wellington was, on paper at least, the most powerful warship in the world and the largest yet built for the Royal Navy, twice the size of Nelson’s Victory and with a far bigger broadside. She was 240 feet long, displaced 5,892 tons, and carried 131 cannon, weighing a total of 382 tons and mainly firing 32 lb balls.

After service in the Western Squadron of the Channel Fleet, she was designated the flagship of the fleet that Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Napier was to lead to the Baltic on the outbreak of the war with Russia (later known as the Crimean War). HMS Duke of Wellington served as his flagship throughout the Baltic campaign of 1854 and returned to the Baltic the following year as the flagship of Napier’s successor in the command, Rear-Admiral Richard Saunders Dundas. Under trials on 11 April 1853 she had made 10.15 knots under steam and she proved a magnificent sailing ship, but the second-hand engines turned out distinctly unsatisfactory and the hurried conversion had compromised her structural strength; she thus saw no active service after the Crimean War. She served as a receiving ship at Portsmouth, where she became a familiar and much-photographed sight, always described on postcards as "the flagship of Sir Charles Napier". She served as flagship for the Commander-in-Chief for Queen Victoria's birthday celebration at Portsmouth in 1896 "dressed smartly for the occasion". She was broken up in 1902. As with her sister-ships she was, in any case, the product of an obsolete conception of naval firepower. With the recent improvements in accuracy and reliability of British naval guns there was no longer a need for ships to mount enormous numbers of cannon but it would take a further decade for this to be fully appreciated.

Of her three sisters, all of which received more powerful machinery specially designed for them, HMS Marlborough was completed to a modified design and served as flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet from 1858-64; thereafter she too was a receiving ship at Portsmouth, renamed Vernon II, surviving until broken up in 1924. HMS Prince of Wales was completed to the same design as Marlborough in 1860 but saw no sea service; in 1869 she was renamed Britannia and became the stationary training ship for officer cadets on the River Dart. HMS Royal Sovereign was completed to the same design as the Duke of Wellington but was cut down to the lower deck and converted in 1862-4 into the first British turret ship to try out the ideas of Captain Cowper Phipps Coles. She was fitted with four turrets mounting 9 inch muzzle-loading rifled guns. She was regarded as primarily experimental and her longest voyage was to Cherbourg in 1865 before becoming the tender to the gunnery school HMS Excellent. She was scrapped in 1885.

References

"HMS Windsor Castle". Retrieved 2006-04-06.