Hand-coloured engraving entitled at top: "THE TRUE PORTRAICTURE OF HIS MATIES ROYALL SHIP THE SOVERAIGNE OF THE SEAS. BUILT IN THE YEARE 1637. Captn Phineas Pette being supervisor, and Peter Pett his sonne M[aste]r Builder": and below the image, which shows the 'Sovereign of the Seas' (later 'Royal Sovereign') in port broadside view with an imagined rugged coast astern of her and several small craft around; 'PRAEGRANDIS ILLIUS ATQ CELEBERRAE. NAVIS SUB AUSPICIS CAROLI MAGN: BRIT: FRA: ET HIB: REGIS ANO. 1637 EXSTRUCTAE DELINEATIO EXPRESSISSIMA ARCHINAVPEGO PETRO PETT jun: sculptore I. Payne. Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum.' (The greatest and most celebrated ship constructed under the auspices of Charles, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, expressly designed by shipbuilder Peter Pett: engraver J[ohn] Payne. With the sole privilege of printing). Two cartouches in the top corners of the image frame laudatory verses by 'Henr. Jacob' (possibly intended as Henry James, left, in Latin) and Thomas Cary (right, in English). The ship was the first English vessel to carry 100 guns (in fact 102, on three decks). Her cost was enormous, not least for her decoration which was designed to a programme devised (and published) by the dramatist Thomas Heywood, and therefore known in great detail taken with this and other images. She was intended as a major symbol of state power, as much as an effective instrument of it, and the extension of Ship Money to inland counties (rather than solely and traditionally coastal ones) to fund the naval rearmament programme of which she was highlight was one of the causes of the Civil War that saw Charles I deposed and executed. The ship saw no service until 1652, and then for the Commonweath during the First Dutch War. At the Restoration of Chales II in 1660 she was renamed 'Royal Sovereign' and (considerably rebuilt) continued as an active flagship in the Second and Third Dutch Wars and later, against the French under William III, at the Battles of La Hogue and Barfleur in the 1690s before she was accidentally destroyed by fire while at Chatham Dockyard for refit in 1696. See NMM digitized image A6719 for this item. [PvdM 3/12]