Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester: The Shipwreck That Shocked Restoration Britain

Nigel Pickford

In 2007, divers searching for the most infamous British shipwreck of the late seventeenth century came across the remains of their prize, the Gloucester, lost May 6, 1682. In its day, the loss of the third-rate ship of the line together with about 130 sailors and 40 well-to-do passengers and their servants was remarkable enough. But an air of intrigue hung over this sinking because the 160 or so survivors included James, Duke of York, the brother of Charles II.

A number of questions were raised in the aftermath. If the loss was due to navigational error, who was to blame? Did the duke’s reluctance to abandon ship lead to an unnecessary loss of life? Was the ship sunk intentionally?

The last was more than idle speculation. Charles had no legitimate children and his brother was heir presumptive to the throne of England, Ireland, and Scotland. But as a devout convert to Catholicism in a fervently Protestant kingdom, James had many enemies. In an effort to calm the waters, Charles all but exiled his brother from London by making him High Commissioner of Scotland in 1679, where he remained until summoned south in 1682. When the Gloucester sank, James was returning to Edinburgh to retrieve his pregnant wife, Mary of Modena.

While James had sailed between Scotland and London on royal yachts, a warship more befit his return to the halls of power. Built in 1654, the Gloucester was a veteran of the second and third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1665–67 and 1672–74). The ship’s last action was at the battle of Solebay, where James was the last member of Britain’s royal family to lead a battle fleet in person. Following the battle, the Gloucester was found to leak badly. The ship was also sheathed in lead, which together with seawater corroded the ship’s iron fittings, notably the pintles that attached the rudder to the ship.

When repairs proved unavailing, the Gloucester was placed in ordinary in 1674. The choice of such a decrepit vessel as the duke’s flagship is a curious one, yet the only person who seems to have had any misgivings was Samuel Pepys, a reformist member of the Navy Board from 1660 to 1680 who knew the fleet as well as anyone. Pepys had long been a protégé of James, who invited him to sail in the Gloucester, but Pepys made strenuous efforts to sail in any ship but the Gloucester, though his expressed reasons for so doing do not mention the ship’s condition.

James’s flotilla of ten ships sailed from Margate Road on May 4 and anchored for the night to avoid the shoal waters of the Thames estuary. The next day they continued northward, amid increasingly sharp disagreements about the best route to take to clear the succession of treacherous sandbanks off the Norfolk Coast. Shortly after dawn on May 6, four of the ships were passing over the Ower Bank when the Gloucester struck the submerged ridge of sand. As the ship shuddered along, the impact sheared off the rudder and “struck out a plank nigh the [stern]post,” instantly flooding the ship with eight feet of water.

The Gloucester struck the bank in about 3 fathoms, and had it held fast, many of the crew might have been saved. Instead, it bounced off the Ower and into 16 fathoms of water where it sank, 24 miles off the Norfolk Coast. Hoping “the ship might be saved,” James delayed hoisting out his barge, thereby preventing anyone else from leaving the ship. The loss of life was considerable, and the death of so many “persons of quality”—which some attributed to the duke’s delay—made him no friends.

The surviving ships continued to Edinburgh, and James and Mary sailed back to London in the aptly named Happy Return, a 4^th rate that had accompanied the Gloucester north. The fleet pilot, Captain James Ayres, was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison. Though some intimated that he was “a known Republican” and part of conspiracy to kill James, there is no evidence of such a plot.

Nigel Pickford anchors each of the brief thirty-four chapters in a place—“The Norfolk Coast,” “Dorset Gardens,” “The Marshalsea [Prison]”—a device that, combined with color plates, his attention to primary sources from letters and diaries to archival records, including the bounty payments to sailors’ survivors, and color plates, enlivens his brief but vivid narrative.

Pickford, Nigel. Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester: The Shipwreck that Shocked Restoration Britain. New York: Pegasus Books, 2023.