To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape. Charles Spencer

three of their leaders being shot while on their knees, midway through their final prayers. Others were thrown to drown in the sea, or were cast to their death on the rocks below.

      When this effective but brutal soldier learnt that he was to march south, he must have hoped against hope that he would not be forced to fight Cromwell. Leslie had served under Cromwell at the decisive battle of Marston Moor in the First Civil War, where Charles I had lost control of the north of England in a day. The Parliamentary victory there was thanks in large part to Leslie’s timely courage and deft, soldierly, touch: the Scots’ cavalry charge had tipped the scales in favour of Cromwell’s squadrons, and guaranteed the defeat of the Royalist talisman, Prince Rupert. That day, it later became clear, Leslie had helped turn the tide not just of a battle, but of the whole war.

      The redheaded, pink-faced Scot, with his dandyish beard, knew as well as anyone, from his own observations on both sides of the battlefield, the supreme level of brilliance that Cromwell was capable of. While he had won with him at Marston Moor, he had lost against him at Dunbar. Leslie appreciated that the Lord General’s soldiers, drunk on their sense of godliness, never considered defeat a possibility. As the Commonwealth had boasted two years previously: ‘The great God of battle, by a continued series of providences and wonders [has] determined very much in favour of the Parliament.’2 They saw no reason for that pattern to change.

      Leslie had been against the invasion of England by his new king from the start, preferring to continue the attritional defensive war in his homeland. This style of fighting could be expected to provide a constant supply of reinforcements for the king, in a draining and hostile environment for the invading English. Charles’s new plan would reverse those favourable conditions.

      But Leslie’s voice was not loud enough to overturn the king’s impetuous urge to try to reverse a year of military disappointment by capitalising on the southern kingdom’s apparent vulnerability. Charles was determined to go south, and his impulsiveness trumped Leslie’s experience, knowhow, and feeling of impending doom.

      On 12 August Parliament passed an Act that noted that ‘Charles Stuart’ and his forces had been forced to leave Scotland after ‘finding their own weakness and disability to continue longer in that country’. The king’s army had not so much invaded Scotland, it was declared, but had rather ‘fled into England’. The Act stated that Charles had ‘been declared a Traitor to the Parliament and people of England’, and that anyone who communicated with him, or offered him support of any kind – ‘any victuals, provisions, arms, ammunition, horses, plate, money, men, or any other relief whatsoever’ – would be guilty of high treason, and ‘be condemned to suffer death’.3 It was understood by all that Charles, already declared traitor, would suffer the same fate if captured. But what if he succeeded?

      Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of a leading regicide, recorded the panic in the highest echelons of the Commonwealth as news of the Scottish advance reached them: ‘The Council of State … at that time were very much surprised at hearing that the King of Scots was passed by Cromwell, and entered with a great army into England. Bradshaw himself, as stout-hearted as he was, privately could not conceal his fear; some raged and uttered sad discontents against Cromwell, and suspicions of his fidelity.’ Eighteen months earlier these men had dared to judge and kill a king. Now that king’s son was heading south, with vengeance his spur.

      ‘Both the city and the country,’ Lucy Hutchinson recalled, ‘… were all amazed, and doubtful of their own and the Commonwealth’s safety. Some could not hide very pale and unmanly fears, and were in such a distraction of spirit as much disturbed their councils.’ Several of these meetings were, she recorded, punctuated with ‘raging and crying out’.

      Lucy’s husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, was an unflappable figure who had kept the Parliamentary cause afloat in Nottingham during the most challenging years of the First Civil War. He was not a man for surrender, or for flexible principles. Taken aback by his comrades’ panic, he urged them ‘to apply themselves to counsels of safety, and not to lose time in accusing others, while they might yet provide to save the endangered realm; or at least to fall nobly in defence of it, and not to yield to fear and despair’.

      Colonel Hutchinson set about rounding up all known supporters of the Crown in Nottinghamshire, to prevent them from joining the Scottish army. It was a procedure repeated throughout England and Wales. ‘Many gentlemen in the county of Monmouth, suspected not to be friends to the Parliament, are secured, and their horses seized on for the service of the State,’ the newsbook the True Informer reported.4 In Essex, the Reverend Ralph Josselin recorded in his diary for 29 August 1651 that there was an ‘Order to disarm and secure malignants in the County, and to raise volunteers for the security and defence of the same’.5 All known or suspected Royalists who were still at large had their weapons confiscated, and were forbidden to move more than five miles from their homes. While the threat from the north grew, the Council of State tightened its control throughout England by raising and reinforcing its local militia forces.

      There were fears that the Royalists might appear in other parts of England, in support of the Scottish land army. The east coast was seen as being particularly vulnerable. King’s Lynn, in north Norfolk, and Lowestoft, in Suffolk, were considered the most likely landing points, while Felixstowe was also ‘a place of great concern’.6 General Blake, in his forty-two-gun flagship Victory, was ordered to keep his fleet ready off the East Anglian coast to intercept any seaborne invaders.

      At the same time the Council of State wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Edward Salmon, governor of Hull, a city known to contain a large armoury: ‘We know that the Scottish army in England has a special eye upon Hull, and has long had designs upon it.’7 The number of phantom naval invasions keeping the Commonwealth on its toes demonstrates the deep concern that Charles’s progress had triggered.

      Reports of the king of Scotland’s advance into England were eagerly followed around Europe. Michiel Morosini, Venice’s ambassador to France, reported secretly to the doge and Senate: ‘Such favourable news comes from England that if there was not reason to fear that the queen [Henrietta Maria] announces it designedly, it might be possible to hope for the restoration of the monarchy. The king has entered England with 16,000 combatants, he defeated two corps of cavalry and is proceeding with growing prosperity, various towns have deserted for him, while his forces are augmented by the nobles who keep flocking to him.’ Morosini added one significant caveat to his dispatch: ‘But he is being followed by Cromwell, and here the Court prefers to hope rather than to fear.’8