The Times - UK (2022-06-11)

the times | Saturday June 11 2022 31

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Miscarriage of justice was a deep secret

Ship’s pilot who was blamed for the sinking of HMS Gloucester in 1682 was a scapegoat for royal culprit who survived

Some even suggested that Ayres

was a hired anti-Catholic assassin,

“an agent for a party of conspirators

who desired the death of the Duke of

York” and had deliberately sunk his

own ship before escaping.

Ayres was arrested and imprisoned

in the Marshalsea in Southwark, the

prison memorably described by

Charles Dickens as a “living grave”.

His court martial took place on June

6, 1682, aboard HMS Charlotte, part

of the fleet on the ill-fated Scottish

voyage, now moored in the Thames.

Crowds gathered to watch the cart

carrying Ayres in chains through the

streets of Deptford and Greenwich.

The verdict was never in doubt.

Ayres might reasonably have put all

blame on to the duke, but he did not.

Instead, he argued that the

shipwreck was the result of naturally

shifting sands: “The late great Storms

had removed the Sands far distant

from the place in which they were

before, which thing sometimes

happens.”

Ayres was found guilty and

“condemned to prisonment during

life”. For James’s supporters, no trace

of blame could be allowed to attach

to the heir apparent, for a king who

could not navigate a ship would be

seen as incompetent to steer the ship

of state.

Mysteriously, Ayres served only

one year of his life sentence. On June

5, 1683, Charles II ordered “James

Aires late Pylott of his Majesties ship

the Gloucester & now a prisoner in

custody to be released & sett att

liberty”. Did the king know that an

innocent man had been wrongly

convicted for his own brother’s

incompetence? Was Ayres’ early

release payback for keeping quiet

about James’s role in the disaster?

James Ayres emerged from the

Marshalsea and sank into obscurity:

the victim of a political trial whose

story, had it emerged at the time,

might have scuppered the accession

of King James II before it happened,

and altered the course of history.

ROYAL MUSEUMS GREENWICH

middle route. As lord high admiral,

heir to the throne, and the highest-

ranking officer aboard, his view

prevailed, with disastrous results.

One of Ayres’ accusers later

claimed that the pilot, “presuming

and confident, affirmed that this

course would carry the ship out of all

danger”. But Ayres backed James’s

orders because he had no choice:

disobeying the duke would have

been an act of mutiny.

After the disaster, the duke and his

circle immediately pinned the blame

squarely on Ayres. Sir James Dick,

another survivor, reported that the

tragedy was “occasioned by the

wrong calculation and ignorance of a

pilot”.

The duke accepted no

responsibility and denounced the

pilot for “mistaking both his course

and distance”. From Edinburgh he

wrote that Ayres had been saved “by

one of the yachts-boats, which had I

then known, I had caused him to

have been hanged immediately,

according to the custom of the sea,

but now he must receive his doom by

a court martial, so soon as I shall

arrive in England”.

The events leading up to the

shipwreck are also disputed. The

evening before there was a

protracted argument among the

various officers over the best route to

clear the north Norfolk sandbanks.

James Ayres was an experienced

navigator familiar with the Norfolk

coast, “a person esteemed to be one

of the best and ablest men to the

northward”. He was “greatly valued”

by the duke, who had granted him

200 acres of land in Antigua in

recognition of his service.

Ayres advocated sailing between

the coast and the sandbanks, the

so-called “Colliers Road” favoured by

coal-carrying vessels. The ship’s

master, Benjamin Holmes, favoured

the deep-sea passage taken by large

ships, well clear of the sandbanks.

The duke, however, preferred a

A

t dawn on May 6, 1682, in
blustery weather, a
50-gun frigate of the
Royal Navy collided with
a sandbank off the
Norfolk coast. Aboard was James,
Duke of York, younger brother of
Charles II and heir to the throne,
and an array of notables.
The ship sank within the hour and
between 135 and 250 people
drowned. The duke survived
and went on to become
James II, the disastrous
Catholic monarch
overthrown in the
Glorious Revolution
of 1688.
The discovery of
HMS Gloucester on
the Norfolk sea bed
will shed new light
on life and death at
sea in 17th-century
Britain. But more
than that, the
shipwreck should
draw attention to a
notorious miscarriage
of justice, a story that
has also been obscured by
the sands of time.
The person held responsible
for the disaster was the ship’s pilot, a
Scottish seaman named James Ayres
(or Aires), who was swiftly court-
martialled. The diarist Samuel Pepys,
who witnessed the sinking from a
nearby ship, believed Ayres should
have been hanged.
Yet the man chiefly responsible for
the catastrophe was James himself,
the future king, who made Ayres the
scapegoat for his own blunder.
James’s naval voyage to Edinburgh
to collect his pregnant wife — a
procession of four royal yachts and
six warships — was intended to be a
triumph, reinforcing his status as heir
to the throne.
Among those invited to
accompany him were John Churchill,

later Duke of

Marlborough, as

well as notable

scientists, lawyers,

businessmen and

nobles, hence the

presence of Pepys. An

orchestra provided

musical entertainment.

The Gloucester was

sailing at a speed of six

knots when it struck the

sandbank 28 miles off Great

Yarmouth. The shipwreck was an

instant political controversy: the

duke’s enemies claimed that his

hesitation in boarding the only

lifeboat had cost many lives, because

none could abandon ship before

royalty. Others accused him of

saving only his favourite courtiers,

his Catholic priest and his pet dog,

leaving the rest to perish. But his

supporters painted his survival as an

act of divine providence.

Certainly there were ugly scenes:

one witness described how those

who had found safety in James’s small

rescue boat drew their swords and

severed the hands of people in the

water clinging desperately to the sides.

The Duke of York, later King James II, was travelling to Scotland when the Gloucester sank off Norfolk

People clinging to the

sides of the boat had

their hands severed

Ben

Macintyre

@benmacintyre1

with pictures of all her 14 prime

ministers round the outside and the

names of her current cabinet inside

the lid, so future historians will have

proof that yes, these people really did

once run this country.

Elsewhere, the shocking news that

Priti Patel’s Rwanda flights are

struggling to take off suggests she

has sub-contracted the policy to

easyJet. Nadine Dorries is busy

telling Channel 4 it needs to

stop relying on public money.

In short, she wants Channel 4

to be more like Channel 4.

The Brexiteers have also

long admired James Dyson,

which inspired them to

remove the old-fashioned

vacuum that was Theresa

May and replace her with a

big unit that really sucks.

This week, to mark what the

No 10 grid decreed was

“health week”, the prime minister

gave a speech about um ... olive oil,

bananas and reviving the corpse of

Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy by

promising benefit claimants they

could save for a mortgage — a policy

which combined the economic sense

of Lehman Brothers with the eye for

detail of the Chuckle Brothers.

Johnson keeps talking about

“delivering” for the British people.

But he is just an undersexed teenager

ripping around on a noisy moped

with nothing in his foil-lined bag.

Politics by Deliveroo.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are

the WH Smith of public life, once a

formidable, dominant mainstay, now

gaffer-taping down the carpet under

which it’s swept all its problems,

presenting shelves of

underwhelming fiction while trying

to flog you one last shop-soiled

Toblerone before you cash out.

Johnson’s

ripping about

on his noisy

moped but

the Deliveroo

bag is empty

W

hen Boris Johnson
was caught saying he
wanted to “f***
business” it was
assumed he was just
dismissing the concerns of our
leading industrialists. Turns out he
wants to do the business with
business. Government, apparently,
should be more like some of our
least-loved firms.
Sajid Javid, who quit the cabinet
when he faced losing his advisers but
not when losing his principles, told
fellow ministers this week: “We have
a Blockbuster healthcare system in
the age of Netflix”. In the sense that
the NHS used to be quite good and
the only thing that came out of it in
a box was a copy of Hot Shots! Part
Deux, but these days you have to pay
more to a provider crippled by debt
and churning out horror stories.
The influence of business is

everywhere. Stephen Barclay, whose

arrival in February as the PM’s chief

of staff thankfully ended all that

chaos and trouble, told the

Commons that for the troubled

Passport Office “businesses like

Amazon are showing exactly what

technology can deliver”. So the next

time you need to renew your Big

Blue Brexit Book to go abroad, you

can expect it to be thrown over your

neighbour’s fence. And you’ll open it

to find it is a Chinese knock-off that

falls apart in your hands.

Now The Times reports that one

minister is going round likening

Johnson to Gerald Ratner, who

famously explained that he could sell

cut-glass sherry decanters for £4.95

“because it’s total crap”, trashing his

brand in an instant. But even Ratner

would have drawn the line at the

government’s jubilee “gift” to the

Queen. A bright yellow music box

Matt Chorley

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