Why Britain preferred more battleships to more guns per hull

Why was Britain unlikely to answer larger foreign gun batteries with fourteen-gun battleships of its own?

British strategy valued more deployable hulls, so it preferred spreading a comparable gun total across a larger number of ships.

Given a similar total number of guns, the Royal Navy generally preferred to distribute them across more hulls. Five eight-gun battleships could cover more duties and create more operational choices than three fourteen-gun ships, even if each individual British ship looked less imposing.