For those who may not know the dates of the Seven Years War — Americans know it as the French and Indian War — it ended in 1763.

For nearly two centuries since that time, the Royal Navy dominated the seas. Lone among major powers, it figured out how to beat scurvy so that its sailors could stay at sea for months at a time. As a result, it spent the period from the French Revolution to the First World War defeating Napoleon, exploring the globe, stamping out the slave trade, and keeping the seas safe for international commerce.

Indeed, the Royal Navy had more to do with creating the climate for the industrial revolution than any other entity. It also changed the cultural face of England by providing a climate where men could distinguish themselves and advance, without regard to birth, blood or title.

After World War II, the Royal Navy shrank, and shrank, and shrank, as the U.S. Navy asserted its global dominance, and the United Kingdom grew gradually less able to field a massive fleet. By the Falklands War, the Royal Navy was a shell of its former self, but its men and ships were, as ever, up to the task of protecting British interests to the four corners of the globe.

No more.

According to the Times of London, the Labour Government in Great Britain has finally succeeded in doing what Napoleon never could — reducing the Royal Navy to a mere handful of ships and effectively neutering it as a meaningful fighting force.

There is much to lament about the Royal Navy’s demise, but the worst bit of all is the government’s proposal to close the royal dockyard at Portsmouth.

The Portsmouth dockyard has been producing ships for Her Majesty’s navy since Henry VIII. The HMS Victory — Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar — is still moored there, the oldest ship in commission anywhere in the world. (Built, incidentally, to help fight the Seven Years War.)

No dockyard has been more important to Great Britain than Portsmouth; none more wrapped up in the fabric of a nation that grew into an empire on the basis of its navy and merchant marine. And the government wants to simply cast it aside like a tabloid discarded in the tube.

I have no voice in British politics, and I have no misapprehensions that this decision will be somehow reversed. For the demise of the Royal Navy, I have only sadness.