Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval branch of the British military.

Royal Navy in Ruled Britannia
In 1588, the Royal Navy, under Admiral Charles Howard, was defeated by the Spanish Armada. The Armada was thus able to proceed to the Netherlands where it rendezvoused with the Spanish army of the Duke of Parma, and the army was able to land in Britain unopposed and conquer England. However, ten years later, the Royal Navy redeemed itself by destroying several Spanish ships during Robert Cecil's rebellion to restore Queen Elizabeth.

Royal Navy in Southern Victory
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Royal Navy was the world's premier navy. In 1862, for instance, it forced the U.S. Navy to lift its blockade of Confederate ports.

However, in the Great War, its reputation began to suffer. The U.S. Navy easily took the Sandwich Islands from it, and held its own against the combined might of British and Japanese naval forces throughout the remainder of the war. The Royal Navy managed, with great difficulty, to contain the German High Seas Fleet, but was defeated in the South Atlantic by a joint Central Powers force of American, Chilean, and Brazilian ships. This allowed the Central Powers to cut British supply lines to Argentina, thus forcing Britain out of the war.

Though no longer the world's premier naval power, the Royal Navy remained a major naval force throughout the interwar years and into the Second Great War. It built aircraft carriers.

In the Second Great War, the Royal Navy smuggled weapons into Canada and took Bermuda from the United States in a daring feint. It seems to have won a major victory over the German fleet in early 1943. However, it was unable to prevent the Japanese from taking Malay, Hong Kong, and Singapore later that year, and it was decisively defeated in the North Atlantic by the U.S. Navy. The US retook Bermuda, and the Royal Navy failed to keep US warships from smuggling weapons into Ireland to support the Irish resistance movement.