Four ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Achille, after the Greek hero Achilles. The French spelling celebrates the capture of ships of this name from the French.
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by the English kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years War against the Kingdom of France. The modern Royal Navy traces its origins to the early 16th century; the oldest of the UK's armed services, it is known as the Senior Service.
In Greek mythology, Achilles or Achilleus was a Greek hero of the Trojan War and the central character and the greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad. His mother was the immortal Nereid Thetis, and his father, the mortal Peleus, was the king of the Myrmidons.
- HMS Achille (1745) was an 8-gun French sloop captured in 1745 during the War of the Austrian Succession.
- HMS Achille (1778) was a 78-gun third-rate ship of the line, originally launched as the French Annibal in 1778. She was renamed Achille in 1786, and was captured at the Glorious First of June in 1794. She was broken up in 1796.
- HMS Achille (1780) was a storeship purchased in 1780 and sold in 1784.
- HMS Achille (1798) was 74-gun third rate launched in 1798. She fought at the Battle of Trafalgar and was sold in 1865.
In the 18th century and most of the 19th, a sloop-of-war in the Royal Navy was a warship with a single gun deck that carried up to eighteen guns. The rating system covered all vessels with 20 guns and above; thus, the term sloop-of-war encompassed all the unrated combat vessels, including the very small gun-brigs and cutters. In technical terms, even the more specialised bomb vessels and fireships were classed as sloops-of-war, and in practice these were employed in the sloop role when not carrying out their specialized functions.
The War of the Austrian Succession involved most of the powers of Europe over the issue of Archduchess Maria Theresa's succession to the Habsburg Monarchy. The war included peripheral events such as King George's War in British America, the War of Jenkins' Ear, the First Carnatic War in India, the Jacobite rising of 1745 in Scotland, and the First and Second Silesian Wars.
In the rating system of the British Royal Navy, a third rate was a ship of the line which from the 1720s mounted between 64 and 80 guns, typically built with two gun decks. Years of experience proved that the third rate ships embodied the best compromise between sailing ability, firepower, and cost. So, while first rates and second rates were both larger and more powerful, the third-rate ships were in a real sense the optimal configuration.
