Royal Navy

The Royal Navy was formally established in 1546 under Henry VIII, though the Kingdom of England had maintained less organized naval forces for centuries before that. It defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 and grew into the world's dominant naval power over the following two centuries. Its most celebrated single engagement came at Trafalgar in 1805, where a fleet under Horatio Nelson defeated a combined French and Spanish force during the Napoleonic Wars, securing British naval supremacy for the following century. The Royal Navy maintained the Grand Fleet against Germany in the First World War, fighting the largest fleet action of that war at Jutland in 1916, and in the Second World War covered the Dunkirk evacuation and fought the Battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats to keep Britain's supply lines open.