Ordnance Building at the Tower of London
From the Restoration in 1660 until 1714, England was intermittently at war with first the Dutch and then the French - and it became imperative, argues Howard Tomlinson, that the country should have an adequate central armoury for general ordnance equipment.
By the restoration the Ordnance Office - 'the only standing and grand magazine of the principal preparatives, habiliaments, utensils and instruments of war, as well by sea as land, for the defence and safety of the kingdom' – had long been established as a major department of state. It was in the last years of Henry VIII's reign, between 1537 and 1547 in a time of threatened invasion, general rearmament and major military undertakings against the French, when a formal Ordnance board and a separate accounting system were established, that the department was given the general form it was to keep throughout its history until its dissolution in 1855. By 1660 the Ordnance Office had also become the most active of the departments within the Tower of London itself.
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