List of pre-dreadnought battleships of the Royal Navy

[a] Primarily concerned with maintaining its "two-power standard" of numerical superiority over the combined French and Russian fleets, the Royal Navy built or purchased a total of fifty-two battleships of this type prior to the 1906 completion of the revolutionary all-big-gun Dreadnought, which gave the pre-dreadnoughts their name.

The nine Majestic-class battleships followed as refinements of White's original design, and they proved to be widely influential as foreign navies copied their general characteristics.

A trend toward larger secondary batteries in foreign battleships led to the eight-ship King Edward VII class, which carried 9.2 in (234 mm) guns.

The ships built for the Royal Navy served in a variety of roles across the globe, seeing service in the Mediterranean, Home, and Atlantic Fleets, among others.

One vessel, Montagu, was lost in an accidental grounding in 1906 and the oldest battleships of the Royal Sovereign and Centurion classes were broken up beginning in the early 1910s.

The surviving vessels were all broken up in the post-war reduction in naval strength save one, Agamemnon, which was converted into a radio-controlled target ship.

They were the first in a series of British battleships designed by William Henry White, the Director of Naval Construction (DNC); he was to be responsible for most of the pre-dreadnoughts built in Britain.

Long-since obsolete by the early 1910s, the members of the class began to be discarded: Repulse was broken up in 1911 and Empress of India was expended as a target ship in 1913.

[5] The Centurion class, also designed by White, completed the initial ten new battleships called for by the Naval Defence Act 1889.

[9][10] Centurion served as the flagship of the China Station from her commissioning while Barfleur was initially sent to the Mediterranean Fleet, where she also joined the International Squadron in 1897.

Both ships returned to Britain in 1901 for reconstruction and Centurion briefly served in the China Station until 1905, when the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance rendered the presence of a significant British squadron redundant.

"Jacky" Fisher, and the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Cyprian Bridge, an improved Centurion design was prepared, despite the fact that no requirements for a third vessel of the second class existed.

After a brief period in reserve in 1905, she received additional modifications for use as a royal yacht, and later that year she carried the Prince and Princess of Wales—the future King George V and Queen Mary—on a tour of India.

[15] Intended for the 1892 programme, what was initially to have been a class of three ships was delayed to the following year as the new 12-inch gun they were designed to carry had not completed testing.

White proposed a battleship with the same armament as the Majestics, the freeboard of Centurion, and the speed and fuel capacity of Renown; these characteristics would come at the cost of reducing the belt armour to 6 in (152 mm).

During the design process, Krupp armour became available, so the reduction in thickness accounted for less of a decrease in effective protection than the mathematics would imply.

Six members of the class were built, and while they proved capable of the task for which they had been designed, many officers in the fleet were opposed to the nominal reduction in their belt armour effectiveness.

[23][24] Canopus initially served in the Mediterranean before joining her sisters on the China Station, though the Anglo-Japanese Alliance permitted their withdrawal in 1905, as with the Centurions.

[25] The Formidable class arose as an improvement on the Majestic design, incorporating the innovations of the Canopus class—Krupp armour and water-tube boilers—along with a new, more powerful, 40-calibre 12 in gun.

Hydrodynamic testing with a model allowed White and the design staff to make refinements to the hull shape that improved their handling characteristics.

White was compelled to reduce displacement by about 1,000 long tons (1,016 t) for budgetary reasons, which forced reductions in the scale of armour protection to meet the required speed needed to counter the Peresvets.

White developed the revised bow protection scheme that had been incorporated into the Londons as a stopgap whilst he completed work on the Duncans.

They were constituted as the 6th Battle Squadron, and at the start of the First World War, the ships were used to strengthen the Northern Patrol, which enforced the blockade of Germany.

The increase in calibre brought significant problems, however, since the weight high in the ship rendered the vessels prone to severe rolling and forced the designers to reduce freeboard.

[43] The ships initially served with the Atlantic Fleet, with King Edward VII as its flagship, per the request of her namesake, the sitting monarch.

Swiftsure escorted troopship convoys in the Indian Ocean at the start of the war, while Triumph joined the search for the East Asia Squadron and then participated in the Siege of Tsingtao.

Swiftsure was reassigned to the 9th Cruiser Squadron in early 1916 for convoy operations in the Atlantic before being paid off in 1917 to free up crews for anti-submarine vessels.

They then joined the fleet off the Dardanelles in 1915 and spent the rest of the war in the eastern Mediterranean to guard against a sortie by the ex-German battlecruiser Goeben, now under Ottoman control as Yavuz Sultan Selim.

Neither Lord Nelson-class ship was able to reach the area in time to intervene in the Battle of Imbros when the Ottoman vessel surprised and sank a pair of monitors.

After the war, Lord Nelson was scrapped in 1920, while Agamemnon survived for several years as a radio-controlled target ship, ultimately being broken up in 1927.