How best to use such remarkable sources? Unlike the king’s version of what had happened during the six weeks, the other contributors, of course, concentrated on what they remembered from their own few days or so in the core of the narrative. It is obvious that nothing else in their lives came close to the excitement of being involved in their king’s survival. As a result, extraordinary details are remembered – the opening of a bottle of sherry releasing two hornets from its neck; the way the king cooked his collops of lamb; the sight of his battered and bloody feet.
Equally understandable would be the embellishment of tales over time, and the exaggeration of services rendered. I have weighed up the likelihood of things happening as recalled, the closeness of the witness to the action, and the inevitability of human foibles clouding the picture, as best I can. There remains one imponderable, which I try to deal with even-handedly: the competing accounts of Captain Alford and William Ellesdon as to what upended the escape attempt at Charmouth. At least one of them has to be lying, but both had supporting witnesses, so it is hard to draw a conclusion either way.
Charles II himself’s memory of events seems to have been accurate, the day-to-day order of events apparently seared into his mind. For a man of hearty appetites, the recall of when and if he was fed, and what with, seems to have been a perpetual concern: when he first spoke to Pepys, he was feasting on pease-pudding, and two different types of roast meat. On the other hand, Charles chose not to deal with fears, or other emotions, in his account. This is a great shame for the modern reader. Perhaps admitting to what might, in the late seventeenth century, have been perceived as weaknesses, was considered a little much.
Those mistakes that Charles makes in his recollections seem to me to be understandably human: he was, for instance, wrong to think that one of his collaborators, Thomas Whitgreave, had the surname of ‘Pitchcross’, or ‘Pitchcroft’. That was, in fact, the name of the field to the north of Worcester where the Royalist troops had mustered before the dismal defeat that brought about his need to run. If anything, such an error simply suggests that Charles’s recollections came direct from his memory, rather than from written notes.
Intriguingly rich sources aside, I have also sought, more than many others who have written on this subject before me, to set the narrative in its wider context. The battle of Worcester is pretty much forgotten, even in England. This is something that two future American presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, condemned when they insisted on visiting the battlefield in 1786. Adams wrote:
Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as scenes where freemen had fought for their rights. The people in the neighbourhood, appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester that I was provoked and asked, ‘And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where Liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbours and your children that this is holy ground, much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill, once a Year.’
Adams had, I believe, a point.
In England we may pass one of the more than 400 pubs called the Royal Oak, and be briefly reminded of the most lyrical part of this tale. But my conclusion at the end of writing this book is that Charles’s escape attempt was not some jolly adventure, but a deadly serious race against an enemy eager to spill fresh Stuart blood on an executioner’s block.
In the final analysis, this is a tale of grit, of loyalty, and of luck.
PART ONE
1
Now all such calamities as may be avoided by human industry arise from war, but chiefly from civil war, for from this proceed slaughter, solitude, and the want of all things.
Thomas Hobbes, ‘De Corpore’, 1655
Charles, Prince of Wales, witnessed the English Civil War up close from its outbreak till its end. He was present at the battle of Edgehill, in October 1642. This was the first major engagement of a conflict that erupted over differences between the Crown and Parliament, concerning the limits of the king’s power, and clashing religious beliefs. Nine years later he would command an army at Worcester, the final action in the most bloodstained chapter in British history. By that time the Civil Wars in England, Ireland and Scotland had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the three kingdoms.
At Edgehill Prince Charles, then a twelve-year-old honorary captain in the King’s Horse Guards, had proved to be a handful. It had been hard to stop him from leading a charge against the rebel cavalry. At another point he and his younger brother James, Duke of York, were nearly captured, and had to take cover in a barn packed with wounded soldiers.
The boys had spent part of that clear autumn afternoon at Edgehill in the care of their father’s elderly physician, Dr William Harvey, the English authority on anatomy. It was Harvey who had, in 1628, been the first to write about the circulation of blood in the body. The distinguished doctor took the pair of princes to shelter under a hedge, where he hoped to divert them from the violent bloodshed taking place all around them by reading a book. This distraction did not go to plan, Harvey telling his biographer John Aubrey that ‘he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station’.1
Despite the dangers, King Charles I remained keen to keep his eldest son by his side during the first two and a half years of the conflict. Towards the end of 1644 he gave the fourteen-year-old prince the title ‘first Captain-General of all our Forces’, although such duties were in reality performed by the king’s nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
In early 1645, as Parliament began to gain a decisive upper hand in the war, Charles I decided to prevent the possibility of his being caught or killed at the same time as his heir. Keen ‘to unboy’ his son, ‘by putting him into some action, and acquaintance [him] with business out of his own sight’,2 he sent him away to his own, separate, command. The prince was created general of the Royalist forces in the west of England, with real responsibilities. On 5 March 1645 he parted from his father for what would prove to be the last time, riding out of Oxford into a ferocious rainstorm.
With the prince went an escort of 300 cavalrymen. He was safely delivered to Bristol, but it could easily have ended otherwise. On their return journey a large force of Charles’s guards were ambushed near Devizes, in Wiltshire. Forty of them were killed, while twenty officers were among the many captured Cavaliers.
A handful of advisers, hand-picked by the king, rode with Charles to Bristol. Prominent among them was Sir Edward Hyde, who had long been involved in the prince’s life. In early 1642 he had looked after Charles while his French mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, had sailed to the Continent to raise funds and forces for her husband. It was the start of a relationship that would run the gamut of service, trust, disappointment, triumph, rejection and disgrace.
Twenty-one years older than the prince, Hyde was at heart a traditional patriot who believed in political stability. He had hoped for a peaceful resolution to the tensions between Crown and Parliament, believing a compromise was both possible and desirable. But there was too much fear and suspicion on both sides for reason and sense to prevail.
As civil war became increasingly likely, Hyde’s hopes for order gradually turned him from being a critic of Charles I into a Royalist. When the king finally declared war, raising the royal standard at Nottingham in August 1642, Hyde was by his side. After that he lent his fine brain and brilliant oratory to Charles I’s cause. Hyde was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, the king justifying the promotion with a rather downbeat endorsement: ‘The truth is,