The wreck of a 17th century ship that almost cost the life of the future King James II when it sank has been found off the east coast of England.
HMS Gloucester sank in the North Sea in 1682 and the wreck has now been discovered 28 miles off the seaside resort of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk.
The ship had been carrying the Duke of York, James Stuart, who three years later would become the last Roman Catholic King of England.
Professor Claire Jowitt, a maritime history expert at the University of East Anglia, said it could be “the single most significant historic maritime discovery” since King Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, was discovered and raised from the seabed off Portsmouth in 1982. The Mary Rose sank in 1545 with the loss of 500 lives.
She said: “The discovery promises to fundamentally change understanding of 17th-century social, maritime, and political history. It is an outstanding example of underwater cultural heritage of national and international importance.”
The discovery comes only a week after news emerged the wrecks of two 18th century Spanish ships had been discovered off the coast of Colombia. The wrecks were close to the resting place of the galleon San Jose, which was sunk by the British near Cartagena in 1708 and is believed to contain huge amounts of treasure.
The wreck of the HMS Gloucester was found by Lincoln Barnwell and his brother Julian, who spent four years searching miles of seabed off the Norfolk coast.
Lincoln Barnwell said: “We were starting to believe that we were not going to find her, we’d dived so much and just found sand. On my descent to the seabed, the first thing I spotted were large cannon laying on white sand, it was awe-inspiring and really beautiful. It instantly felt like a privilege to be there, it was so exciting.”
The ship, which was en route from Portsmouth to Edinburgh to collect the heavily pregnant wife of the Duke of York, ran aground as the royal heir argued with the ship’s pilot, James Ayres.
More than half of the 250 people on board drowned but James survived and refused to accept any responsibility for the incident, blaming Ayres, who was court-martialled and jailed.
In 1685 the Duke of York was crowned King James II but three years later he was deposed by his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, in what is known as the Glorious Revolution.
James later tried to regain the throne but his campaign in Ireland ended with defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, an event which marked the defeat of Catholicism in the British Isles and is still celebrated by the Protestant Orange Order in Northern Ireland to this day.
