The French liked to claim that they had sunk the Tudor flagship but the real reason it sank was that they loaded too many crew and cannons onto it so the ship sat too low in the water and then whilst turning the sea poured in through the gun ports.
The call went out to adjust the ballast on the starboard side as the sudden listing was thought to be due to uneven weight distribution and the Captain gave the order to start bailing out the water which obviously didn't work as it sunk to the seabed with most of the Solent Channel inside it.
The ship itself was made from 600 Oak trees taken from 40 acres of woodland in Southern England and named after either Henry VIII's sister, Mary Tudor, or The Virgin Mary but whichever Mary it was, there wasn't much rising, more Mary Sank than Mary Rose.
Many suggestions for raising the ship were discarded, including constructing an enclosure around the ship and pumping all the water out and even filling the ship with ping-pong balls but they decided to go with a cradle and huge cranes instead and now it proudly stands in Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard where for £24.00 you can spend a few hours looking at some 500 year old planks of wood and think to yourself, they gave all those kids off school for this? They did, and it was double math's that day so well worth it.
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