Anne

Anne was built at Chatham Dockyard under the shipbuilder Phineas Pett and launched in 1678. She was one of twenty large third-rate warships ordered in the rebuilding programme led by Samuel Pepys. With seventy guns and about 460 crew under Captain John Tyrrell, she joined an English and Dutch fleet opposing France during the war that followed the removal of James II and the crowning of William and Mary. The fleet met a larger French force off Beachy Head on 30 June 1690 by the English calendar, 10 July in the calendar now used. Old and new dates are both found in accounts, which explains some apparent disagreement over the day.

The allied commander fought under political pressure despite the French advantage. Anne took some of the heaviest English damage, lost her masts and began to sink as the beaten fleet withdrew east. Another vessel towed her, but she could not reach safety. Tyrrell had Anne run onto Pett Level near Rye at high water so the crew could leave across the shore when the tide fell. French fire ships were sent towards the helpless vessel. The English set Anne alight first, denying France a usable seventy-gun prize. A contemporary notice says she was burned on Saturday 5 July in the English calendar, several days after the main battle. Her guns and much reusable material were later recovered.

Anne entered the action with about 460 people. Beaching her at high water was a planned rescue: as the tide dropped, the crew could walk off rather than abandon a sinking ship in open water. The official wreck record does not give a dependable Anne-only total for men killed or wounded by French gunfire before that escape. It is therefore unsafe to claim either that all 460 survived or to borrow the large loss figures for the whole English and Dutch fleet. The secure human story is that the remaining crew got ashore before Tyrrell burned the vessel. Wider accounts of Beachy Head describe thousands killed, wounded or captured, but do not reliably divide them ship by ship.

The lower two metres of Anne form a ship-shaped spread of wood about 43.5 metres long in the sand at Pett Level. Frames, inner and outer planks and possible mast stumps survive on firm clay above an ancient drowned forest. Very low tides sometimes uncover the wreck, making it one of the few protected warships people may glimpse from land, but the site remains legally protected and the tide can make access dangerous. A mechanical dig in 1974 exposed and removed material before protection was rushed through. Breaking waves, wood-eating sea creatures and snagged fishing nets continue to loosen the timbers. Surveys, a small careful excavation and seabed checks have recorded parts without stripping the hull.

Anne is a rare survivor from the programme that rebuilt England's battle fleet in the late seventeenth century. Sister ships from the same order also lie as protected wrecks, allowing their standard design and different losses to be compared. The vessel connects Pepys's dockyard reform with the Battle of Beachy Head, France's greatest fleet victory of that war, and with a captain's hard decision to destroy his own ship after saving his people. Locally, Anne is not a distant mark offshore: its ribs can emerge beside Pett Level as the beach shifts. That closeness helped lead to damaging digging in 1974, but it also makes the wreck and the much older drowned forest beneath it an unusually direct piece of coastal history.