5 Pounds - Elizabeth II The Mary Rose

The Mary Rose sank in 1545 during an engagement with a French invasion fleet in the Solent, watched by Henry VIII from the shore. The cause remains debated — sudden heel, open gun ports, an overwhelmed crew — but the ship took most of her complement with her. She was raised in 1982 after a salvage operation that became one of the most technically complex underwater recoveries ever attempted in British waters, and the Tudor artefacts recovered from the sealed anaerobic silt rewrote understanding of 16th-century maritime life.

Guernsey issued this commemorative as part of the broader wave of Royal Navy heritage coinage that followed the Mary Rose Trust's museum developments in Portsmouth.