High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! HMS Royal James was a 100-gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, designed by Sir Anthony Deane and built by his successor as Master Shipwright at Portsmouth Dockyard, Daniel Furzer, and launched in 1675. She was renamed HMS Victory on 7 March 1691 as the old second rate Victory of 1666 had been condemned by survey and taken to pieces in 1691. Recommissioned in January 1691 under Captain Edward Stanley, as the flagship of Admiral Sir John Ashby she participated in the Battle of Barfleur on 19 May 1692 – 24 May 1692.