HMS Truelove (1647)

Type

Frigate

Period

17th Century

Nation

Great Britain

Overview: HMS Truelove was a small English/Royal Navy Sixth Rate, notable chiefly as the first named ship in the Royal Navy. She began life as the Royalist 14-gun Katherine during the English Civil War before capture and renaming. Classification: Catalogued here as a Frigate for database purposes, but she is more accurately a mid-17th century small Sixth Rate; some modern lists loosely group her with later corvette and sloop lineages, though this is a list of Sixth-rate, corvette, and sloop classes of the Royal Navy, and the English Royal Navy adopted a scheme of six classes or "rates" in 1626, well before any formal frigate designation existed for her. Specifications: She measured 59 feet 0 inches keel for tonnage, breadth of 18 feet 0 inches, and depth of hold of 7 feet 1 inch, with a builder's measure tonnage calculation of 101 64/94 tons. Her armament initially was fourteen guns, of unknown type, dropping to twelve guns by 1653. Not much information on the construction of this vessel has survived, which limits precise plan-based modeling. Service History: She was captured by the Irish Squadron of the Parliamentary Forces in early 1647, then purchased for 75.1.02d and fitted for service at Bristol. She was commissioned in 1648, joined the Royalists then surrendered in November 1648 to Parliament; in the Commonwealth Navy she spent her time patrolling, as a guardship, and moving troops. After the restoration of the monarchy, she was converted to a fire ship and expended at the Battle of Texel in 1673. Threedecks records add that she served on the Irish coast and Irish Sea in 1650, as a guard ship in the Medway and stationed in the Downs in June 1666, and was converted to a fireship in 1668. Notable Facts: No historical draughts, paintings, or contemporary images of the 1647 warship are known to survive. Wikimedia Commons image searches for "Truelove" return only material for the unrelated 1764 Hull whaling ship — files such as "The Whaler Truelove of Hull" held by the Yale Center for British Art — and for a modern Royal Canadian Navy officer of the same surname, confirming that no image exists for this ship; none is included in this record as a result.