sums of £30 and £36 a year respectively. Sir Richard Morris, the Master of Ordnance, and James Needham, the Surveyor of the King's Works, led on the defences along the Thames. The efforts of the Hampton Court Palace architectural team, under the leadership of the Augustinian canon, Richard Benese, contributed to the high-quality construction and detailing seen in many of Henry's Device projects. Henry himself took a close interest in the design of the fortifications, sometimes overruling his technical advisers on particular details. Southsea Castle, for example, was described by the courtier Sir Edmund Knyvet as being "of his Majesty's own device", which typically indicated that the King had taken a personal role in its design. The historian Andrew Saunders suspects that Henry was "probably the leading and unifying influence behind the fortifications". England also had a tradition of drawing on expert foreign engineers for military engineering; Italians were particularly sought after, as their home country was felt to be generally more technically advanced, particularly in the field of fortifications. One of these foreign engineers, Stefan von Haschenperg from Moravia, worked on Camber, Pendennis, Sandgate and St Mawes, apparently attempting to reproduce Italian designs, although his lack of personal knowledge of such fortifications impacted poorly on the end results. Technical treatises from mainland Europe also influenced the designers of the Device Forts, including Albrecht Dürer's Befestigung der Stett, Schlosz und Felcken which described contemporary methods of fortification in Germany, published in 1527 and translated into Latin in 1535, and Niccolò Machiavelli's Libro dell'art della guerra, published in 1521, which also described new Italian forms of military defences. Architecture The Device Forts represented a major, radical programme of work; the historian Marcus Merriman describes it as "one of the largest construction programmes in Britain since the Romans", Brian St John O'Neil as the only "scheme of comprehensive coastal defence ever attempted in England before modern times", while Cathcart King likened it to the Edwardian castle building programme in North Wales. Although some of the fortifications are titled as castles, historians typically distinguish between the character of the Device Forts and those of the earlier medieval castles. Medieval castles were private dwellings as well as defensive sites, and usually played a role in managing local estates; Henry's forts were organs of the state, placed in key military locations, typically divorced from the surrounding patterns of land ownership or settlements. Unlike earlier medieval