She was laid down in January 1914 and launched in April 1915; she was completed in May 1916, but was not ready for service in time to participate in the Battle of Jutland at the end of the month.

Royal Sovereign was present during the Battle of Calabria in July 1940, but her slow speed prevented her from engaging the Italian battleships.

The secondary armament was primarily controlled by directors mounted on each side of the compass platform on the foremast once they were fitted in March 1917.

In the 1937–1938 refit a HACS Mark III director replaced the Mk I in the spotting top and another was added to the torpedo-control tower aft.

During her 1921 refit, Royal Sovereign was fitted with an anti-torpedo bulge that ran the length of the ship between the fore and aft barbettes.

Jellicoe purposely left Royal Sovereign behind in port due to the inexperience of her crew; causing her to miss the Battle of Jutland the following day.

They enforced strict wireless silence during the operation, which prevented Room 40 cryptanalysts from warning the new commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral David Beatty.

The British learned of the operation only after an accident aboard the battlecruiser SMS Moltke forced her to break radio silence to inform the German commander of her condition.

Conflicts between Greece and the crumbling Ottoman Empire prompted the Royal Navy to deploy a force to the eastern Mediterranean.

[25] While in the Ottoman capital Constantinople, Royal Sovereign and the other British warships took on White émigrés fleeing the Communist Red Army.

Royal Sovereign and her sisters, however, were smaller and slower than the Queen Elizabeth class, and so they were not extensively modernised in the inter-war period.

[32] In 1939, King George VI made a state visit to Canada; Royal Sovereign and the rest of the fleet escorted his ship halfway across the Atlantic and met it on the return leg of the voyage.

[33] In early 1939, the Admiralty considered plans to send Royal Sovereign and her four sisters to Asia to counter Japanese expansionism.

They reasoned that the then established "Singapore strategy", which called for a fleet to be formed in Britain to be dispatched to confront a Japanese attack was inherently risky due to the long delay.

[34] In the last weeks of August 1939, the Royal Navy began to concentrate in wartime bases as tensions with Germany rose.

[37] She was assigned to the North Atlantic Escort Force, which was based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was tasked with protecting convoys to Britain.

[40] On 28 June, aerial reconnaissance located Italian destroyers off Zakynthos; Admiral John Tovey took the 7th Cruiser Squadron.

[38] The Admiralty decided in May 1941 to deploy a powerful fleet to be based in Singapore to counter any Japanese attempt to invade Western colonies in Southeast Asia.

[46] At the beginning of March 1942, Royal Sovereign, the heavy cruiser Cornwall, and several smaller vessels escorted the convoy SU.1 of twelve troopships transporting 10,090 soldiers.

Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's powerful Kido Butai, composed of six carriers and four fast battleships, was significantly stronger than Somerville's Eastern Fleet.

As a result, only the modernised Warspite could operate with the two fleet carriers; Royal Sovereign, her three sisters, and Hermes were kept away from combat to escort convoys in the Indian Ocean.

[48] In late March, the code-breakers at the Far East Combined Bureau, a branch of Bletchley Park, informed Somerville that the Japanese were planning a raid into the Indian Ocean to attack Colombo and Trincomalee and destroy his fleet.

[49] Following the raid in April 1942, Somerville withdrew Royal Sovereign and her three sisters to Mombasa, where they could secure the shipping routes in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

While Royal Sovereign was moored in Philadelphia, the American light cruiser USS Boise, a badly-damaged veteran of the Battle of Cape Esperance, shared a pier with her.

[54] On 30 May 1944 she was transferred on loan to the Soviet Navy as Arkhangelsk in lieu of war reparations from Italy, as there was concerns about mutiny from sailors in the newly allied country.

The ship left Britain on 17 August 1944 as part of the escort for Convoy JW 59, which contained thirty-three merchant vessels.

[59] While in Soviet service, she was the flagship of Admiral Gordey Levchenko and was tasked with meeting Allied convoys in the Arctic Ocean and escorting them into Kola.

[60] The ship itself was poorly winterized before its transfer to the Soviet Navy, and it lacked shipwide heating systems as well as turret lubricants suited for the conditions of the Arctic convoys.

Upon returning to the Rosyth naval base, Royal Navy personnel thoroughly inspected the ship and found much of her equipment to be unserviceable.

[62] The elevation mechanisms from her main battery gun turrets were later reused in the 250-foot (76 m) Mark I radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire built in 1955–1957.