On the morning of the 6 May 1682, in unremarkable weather, the Gloucester, a 50-gun frigate of the Royal Navy, collided with a sandbank off the Norfolk coast. The wreck that followed was no ordinary one. For aboard was James, Duke of York, heir to the English throne and a glittering array of fellow travellers. Within hours of the collision, two hundred people were dead.

Today we travel back to the late seventeenth century and to the Norfolk coast to witness that dramatic shipwreck. It was an event that very nearly changed the course of English history.

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England was a nervous country as the 1680s began. The king, Charles II, was aging and in spite of his reputation as the ‘merrie monarch’ and his enthusiasm towards the opposite sex, he had no legitimate heir to succeed him. As students of Tudor history know, this was not an unusual scenario. But the situation was made fraught by the fact that Charles’s younger brother, James the Duke of York, was openly a Catholic.

At the end of the 1670s this dynamic had caused serious problems at the very top of politics. With his brother firm in his faith and his subjects divided in their loyalty, Charles had asked James to leave the country for a period. A spell of informal exile had followed for James. And then, in 1682, the situation had begun to change.

In early 1682 Charles had sent a letter to his brother, who was then living in Edinburgh. This longed-for communication invited James to meet Charles at Newmarket Races. Within weeks, James’s return was underway. After Newmarket he travelled to London where, once again, the reception he met with was encouraging.

By the end of April James had decided the time had come to collect his wife, Mary of Moderna, and bring her back to London with him. In true Stuart style – the Stuarts were never ones to do things by half – James decided that he would bring Mary back by sea. His journey to Edinburgh would begin with a river pageant on the Thames and then, at Margate, he would meet his fleet. Ten ships awaited him in the North Sea: four glistening royal yachts and six magnificent war ships. Here James transferred into HMS Gloucester to travel north to meet his wife.

The story of James’s return and of his fateful trip northwards provides the plot for Nigel Pickford’s absorbing new book, Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester. Following the action, often from the point of view of that ubiquitous operator, Samuel Pepys, Pickford shows us how an event that was designed to stir passions and unite foes, instead ended in calamity.

Two hundred people perished in a tragic few hours off the Norfolk coast. Arguments over what had happened and who was responsible rumbled on for years afterwards. As ever the analysis was coloured by the historical condition of the time. To some James was seen as a reckless Catholic: a man more concerned with his possessions and his pets than the welfare of his subjects. To others he was the heroic survivor of a perilous event.

While the story of the Gloucester has since fallen out of popular memory, it was, like the sinking of the White Ship 500 years before, a moment of real political consequence. As Pickford explains, even today it remains a story full of drama, politics and personality.

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Click here to order Nigel Pickford’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

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Show notes

Scene One: Early Morning, Wednesday 3 May 1682. James, Duke of York, embarks on a royal barge at Putney.

Scene Two: 5am on the morning of 6 May 1682. The wrecking of HMS Gloucester.

Scene Three: 6 June 1682. Aboard the Charlotte yacht for the court martial of the pilot James Ayres.

Memento: A seventeenth-century wine bottle.

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Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Nigel Pickford

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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About Nigel Pickford

Nigel Pickford is a maritime historian and works as a consultant for salvage companies, helping to locate shipwrecks and recover lost cargo and treasure. His previous books include Lady Bette and the Murder of Mr Thynn.

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More about the scenes from the guest

Scene One: Early Morning, Wednesday 3rd May 1682.

James, Duke of York, embarks on a royal barge at Putney. The river is crowded with wherry boats, shallops, skiffs, gigs, smacks, pinks and hoys, all crowded with his supporters and well wishers. This is the moment that James had been anxiously waiting for. For the past three years he has been living in virtual exile, firstly in Brussels then in Edinburgh. James was a devout Catholic who made no secret of his religion and anti-Catholic feeling had been running so high in the country that King Charles the Second, James’ elder brother, had decided it would be best to remove him altogether from the centre of power, where he had been a lightening rod for the opposition.

But the situation was now changed. Feelings in the country had calmed down. And more critically, Charles had recently been ill and was very aware he had no legitimate children. James was his designated heir. He could no longer be kept at arm’s length. So James had been summoned to London (via Newmarket). His reception there had gone well. And he had now at last been given permission to return to Edinburgh and fetch back his pregnant wife Mary of Modena and take up permanent residence in Whitehall.

The River Thames must have looked exceptionally beautiful that morning with black gulls diving over the water, and hundreds of oars plashing the river into white foam, and hundreds of sails fluttering on the small boats.

Those who were not on the river, crowded onto the roof leads of Westminster and Whitehall to cheer the flotilla as it passed. It was a noisy as well as a colourful scene. Firecrackers were let off, trumpets sounded, watermen, notorious for their foul language, shouted raucously at each other. The fleet of small river craft passed the grand houses, Northumberland House, Somerset House. They passed the Duke’s Theatre where a play by Thomas Otway was playing called Venice Preserv’d. James had been to see it a few days previously. It satirized his political opponents and ended with a poem wishing him safety on his much anticipated voyage. After the Duke’s Theatre they shot through the arches of London Bridge. This was the most dangerous part of the river journey for the waters swirled and eddied and many a small rowing boat had come to grief there. The barge passed through without incident and the grand procession continued all the way to Erith where the magnificently gilded Royal Yacht Mary was waiting to receive the Duke.

There was already a large crowd of his most loyal supporters waiting for him on board the Mary. According to the Mary’s Captain, Christopher Gunman, there were nearly 300 crowded together on the small poop deck, such a weight of people he was afraid it might collapse under the strain. Included amongst them were such notable figures as Samuel Pepys and John Churchill the future Duke of Marlborough. Both of them had been invited to accompany James on what was planned as a triumphal voyage, along with many others guests, including famous scientists, lawyers, business men, and aristocrats, as well as a small orchestra for entertainment on route, and huntsmen for entertainment on arrival.

A fleet of ten ships finally assembled off Margate: four glistening royal yachts and six magnificent war ships. It was an impressive display of martial power. James with most of his guests transferred to the largest of the warships, HMS Gloucester. 26 cannon were fired. The Stuarts loved nothing better than a great cacophony of noise and smoke. Samuel Pepys, very uncharacteristically, declined to go on the Gloucester, opting instead to make the voyage on the Katherine, which was largely full of luggage.

Scene Two: 5am on the morning of May 6th 1682.

Unlike the first scene this is not a picture of visual delight. It is dramatic and powerful but also deeply disturbing. It is 5 a.m. on the morning of 6 May 1682. It is a day of dark clouds and blustery winds. The Gloucester has just struck a sandbank while sailing at the considerable speed of nearly six knots and is now beating along the ridge of the sand. Very shortly it comes off the bank and is anchored in deep water head to the wind. Within 30 minutes it has sunk down beneath the waves and nearly 200 men have drowned.

I would like to be in the Katherine yacht together with Samuel Pepys watching this tragedy unfold. It would provide me with the definitive answer to a number of questions that have caused great controversy among historians down the centuries.

1. James was one of the first to arrive on deck but to begin with he was reluctant to abandon the ship. This may have been because he genuinely believed the ship could still be saved. But his enemies accused him of unnecessary delay while he tried to get his strong box in to the small life boat that hung beneath the window of the great cabin. In the event the strong box was not saved, James removing from it some crucial papers before abandoning it. It would be interesting to know just how many minutes were wasted. Was it two or was it twenty? I suspect it was nearer two but it may have seemed like twenty to those in attendance at the time.

2. James was also accused of taking with him in his shallop just a few favourites like Churchill, along with his priests, and his pet dogs, when his boat could have saved 80 more. I believe this was nothing more than anti catholic propaganda. The archival records indicate there was only one priest on board the Gloucester and he had to swim for his life. As for pet dogs, again it is most probably nonsense. There is strong evidence that James’ pet dog Mumper drowned, having lost out in a struggle for a plank with Charles Scarborough, a famous physician. As for the idea that his boat could have held 80 more this is a wild accusation. A dozen people was the most you could get in a small shallop, including the 4 oarsmen. The accusations seem preposterous and yet they have been repeated over and over again, including by such famous names as Winston Churchill.

3. The pro-James lobby also made some claims that seem in retrospect somewhat fanciful. One of these is that those sailors who were left on board the ship with no obvious means of rescue, when they saw James safe in his shallop, threw off their caps into the air and cheered, happy in their drowning now that their future King was saved. This seems like crass royalist propaganda but it was again much repeated. I would like to have seen for myself whether or not there was any truth in it.

4. On the other hand there were some accusations made that were most probably true. One of the more harrowing of these is that those who found safety in a rescue boat drew their swords to cut off the hands of some of those who were still struggling in the water and had seized hold of the side of a boat to try and save themselves. It must have been an extremely distressing sight. But as Sir James Dick one of the saved, admitted in one of his letters written shortly after the event, if they had allowed all those in the water to get into the boats, then all would have been drowned because the boats would have quickly become overfull and capsized. It was a graphic illustration of how in extreme circumstances, with the breakdown of law and order, it can quickly become the survival of the most brutal.

5. I would also like to have closely observed Samuel Pepys himself at this moment of great crisis. Once he reached Edinburgh he wrote to his good friend William Hewer in a very over excited state a long letter full of how divine providence had saved him for if he had been on the Gloucester he would certainly have drowned for he was a non swimmer. But he does not explain why he made that decision in the first place. It would have been very interesting to observe whether or not his reactions at the moment the sinking took place gave anything away about his inner feelings. 

Scene Three: 6 June 1682. Aboard the Charlotte yacht for the court martial of the pilot James Ayres.

I would like to be a silent spectator at a scene that occurs a month later on the morning of 6 June 1682. Again it takes place on board a royal yacht, this time the Charlotte, which was also part of the fleet that went on the Scottish voyage. The yacht is now moored on the Thames just by the newly built Greenwich palace constructed in gleaming white Portland stone and designed by the architect John Webb. Greenwich was a favoured playground of the Stuart brothers. It was an idyllic situation. The hill rising behind with its tiered terraces. The new observatory at the crest. Cherry orchards on the lower slopes. The main cabin of the yacht itself had been gorgeously painted by the van de Veldes, father and son, depicting scenes of recently constructed warships, in rich tones of gold and yellow. But the occasion that particularly morning was less than glorious. For a start it was clammy and wet. And more importantly the great cabin was to be used as the place for the Court Martial of James Ayres who had been the pilot on the ship Gloucester and who was now on trial for ‘mistaking both his course and his distance’, in the words of James. It looked like Ayres was the man who was going to take the blame for the loss of so many lives, many of them members of the nobility.

For several weeks Ayres had been incarcerated in the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark. Prisons in this period were run very much as a commercial enterprise. If you had sufficient resources you could buy in good quality food and drink, walk in the prison gardens, play bowls, even purchase a day out, so long as an appropriate guard was part of the package. But for most, including the hapless Ayres it was a squalid and miserable place.

It is one of the ironies of this story that when Ayres first arrived in the Marshalsea there was already another inmate who would have taken a particular interest in his incarceration. This was Sarah Hunter, 56 years old and an indigent, meaning she had no means of supporting herself. She was in goal for debt. She owed a brewer called Mark Lund more money than she possessed. She had a drink problem. Soon after she was thrown into goal her eldest son John Hunter signed on to the books of the Gloucester as a young seaman. There was no doubt a connection between the two events. His seaman’s wages would enable him to pay off the brewer and get his mother released. Unfortunately, he was one of the drowned. It must have been a very bitter moment when she realised that the man who was being blamed for her son’s death was in a cell just a few yards from her own. A further and in some ways even crueller irony was that James, as part of his own propaganda campaign, ordered the Navy Board to pay the dependants of any drowned seamen an exceptional Bounty payment of 11 months wages. So her son’s death proved to be the means for her immediate release.

Ayres was brought to the Charlotte on the back of a cart. He travelled through the streets of Deptford and Greenwich where crowds of sightseers had gathered to watch him pass. These were places where many seamen lived and a number of the bereaved watched him pass on his way. The verdict of the Court Martial was pretty much a foregone conclusion. He was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment ‘in perpetuity’. Samuel Pepys, who was there in the crowded Great Cabin watching proceedings, was disgusted that Ayres had not been sentenced to hang.

Strangely the transcript for Ayres’ court martial has not been preserved in the National Archives even though the transcript for another court martial that took place the same day, also on the Charlotte, is still there in the records. It is particularly for that reason that I would like to have been at the trial and hear for myself what he had to say in his own defence. The only surviving newspaper report suggests that the only defence he offered was that the recent storms had moved the sand banks far from where they usually resided. Detailed hydrographic studies have proved that actually these sandbanks only move a few inches a year.

Ayres would have been better advised to point the finger at the state of contemporary cartography. The standard charts of the time were by John Seller and they laid down the Leman and Ower sandbanks, the sands on which the Gloucester wrecked, at a distance of about 15 miles from land, when in reality they are about 30 miles from land. The truth is that a proper survey of the sandbanks of the North Sea had never been undertaken but ironically Charles had commissioned Grenville Collins to carry out just such a survey shortly before the Gloucester wrecked. It took another ten years before it was completed and was published as Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, which became the standard work for navigation of britain’s seas for the next hundred years.

But even if Ayres did not think of complaining about the current state of England’s charts, he may well have said something about how, during the afternoon before the sinking, Captain Gunman on the Mary yacht had twice intervened regarding the course that was being followed, insisting that they should stand off further out to sea. In the end it had been James himself who had made the crucial navigational decisions, to settle the great row that had broken out amongst the various captains. In truth the voyage, far from being a great show of military prowess, had been a great shambles from the very start. A few hours after first setting sail from the mouth of the Thames 3 of the warships had misinterpreted a signal and got lost from the main fleet, never to rejoin it. One of these three also ran on a sandbank but luckily got off without significant damage.

There were, however, other reasons as to why the Gloucester perished so disastrously, reasons that Samuel Pepys knew all about, but which it appears from his own writings that he did not mention at the trial, or at any other point, presumably because it would have been extremely uncomfortable for him to say a word on such a subject. It does help explain, however, why he fulminated so angrily against Ayres, who was in reality little more than a convenient fall guy in this whole sorry episode.

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