Wight Island

Title

Wight Island

Description

Map showing the Isle of Wight and part of the south coast of England. Two inset maps, each with a city plan of Newport and Southampton, five coats of arms, mile indicators, title cartouche, two sailing ships and a sea monster.

ca. 1611

Artist

Speed (1552-1629)

John Speed was an English cartographer and historian. He is known as England's most famous Stuart period mapmaker. It was with the encouragement of William Camden that Speed began his Historie of Great Britaine, which was published in 1611. Although he probably had access to historical sources that are now lost to us, his work as a historian is considered mediocre and secondary in importance to his map-making, of which his most important contribution is probably his town plans, many of which provide the first visual record of the British towns they depict. Much of the engraving was done in Amsterdam at the workshop of Jodocus Hondius. His maps of English counties are often found framed in homes throughout the United Kingdom.

Historical Description

In 1374, the Castilian fleet, led by Fernán Sánchez de Tovar, the 1st Lord of Belves, sacked and burned the island. The Lordship thereafter became a royal appointment, with a brief interruption when Henry de Beauchamp, 1st Duke of Warwick was in 1444 crowned King of the Isle of Wight,[9] with King Henry VI assisting in person at the ceremony, placing the crown on his head. With no male heir, the regal title expired on the death of Henry de Beauchamp in 1446. The French landed an invasion force on the island on 21 July 1545 but were rapidly repulsed by local militia. English ships were engaged in battle with the French navy, and it was two days earlier, on 19 July, that the Mary Rose was sunk. Henry VIII, who developed the Royal Navy and its permanent base at Portsmouth, fortified the island at Yarmouth, Cowes, East Cowes, and Sandown. Much later, after the Spanish Armada in 1588, the threat of Spanish attacks remained and the outer fortifications of Carisbrooke Castle were built between 1597 and 1602.