To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  Returning from Wolverhampton towards Huntbatch’s house, still with no plan in place, John entered the village of Northcot. There he spied Mrs Underhill, a farmer’s wife who he knew, tending her garden. He started up a conversation with her, and told her that he desperately needed help in concealing some Royalist fugitives. Affronted and afraid, Mrs Underhill said she could not possibly assist him, both because her husband was away, and on account of the many Parliamentarians combing the area. She begged John to leave her in peace.

  Just as he was being sent on his way, John looked up to see the wiry figure of Father John Huddleston passing by. He knew Huddleston, a kind-faced man in his early forties, both as an ardent Royalist and as a visitor to Whiteladies, where he shared priestly duties with William Walker, joining him from time to time to say prayers and do holy offices for their fellow Roman Catholics.

  Huddleston had been educated at the English College in Douai, a Catholic seminary established in northern France in response to Queen Elizabeth’s persecutions. Despite his religious calling, it seems that he had taken up arms for Charles I in the Civil Wars.

  John followed after Father Huddleston, but the priest failed to recognise this countryman who seemed so annoyingly eager to engage him in conversation. John started by asking what he was carrying under his arm. It was, Huddleston replied, a parcel containing half a dozen shirts, the gift of a lady in Leamington Spa, kindly sent because he was tutor to her grandson.

  John then asked what news the priest might have heard recently. Huddleston responded that the only information he had learnt was very good: ‘That the King had got the day at Worcester.’ John replied, ‘’Tis clear contrary,’ and related the scale of the previous day’s defeat.

  Huddleston asked where he had heard such a terrible tale, and John explained that he had learnt it first hand at Whiteladies, which he had left that morning. He told the flabbergasted priest that he had seen the king and his leading men there, and added, ‘If I did not know you better than you seem to know me, I should not have been thus bold, for I had commands and cautions sufficient to be circumspect, both what to do and to whom I spoke.’

  He then reassured Huddleston, ‘I know you right well, for I have seen you very often with your good friend, my old master, Mr Walker, at Whiteladies, whom I left this morning in great trouble to see His Majesty and his friends in that sad and desperate condition – one whereof I have brought to a very near neighbour of yours, a person of quality I believe, for he’s a very brave gentleman. There I have left him exposed to all dangers; been at Wolverhampton, in hopes among friends thereabout to have found some place of more safety for him, but am disappointed at all [places] and [am] now going back to see how God hath disposed of him, for if he be not removed this night, he cannot escape.’2

  The two men talked further as they walked. As Huddleston listened with shock and despair to John’s account, the pair drew closer to Moseley Hall, the secluded late-Elizabethan building where Huddleston was secretly acting as chaplain to the Catholic household of its owner, Thomas Whitgreave. Whitgreave had fought for the Crown as a captain at the battle of Naseby in 1645, and had been wounded and captured there.

  Moseley Hall was a mile from the spot where John had accosted the priest, and six miles from Whiteladies. As they approached it across the fields, John asked Huddleston if he might persuade Whitgreave to take Wilmot in, and keep him safe for a while. Huddleston told him not to say any more on the subject until they could finish their conversation in private.

  Huddleston took John into the hall, and showed him to his room, where he told him to wait while he went to find Whitgreave. He caught up with Whitgreave outside, and repeated to him the astonishing news he had heard from John. Huddleston suggested that Whitgreave go with John to Huntbatch’s house at Coven, to see how he could help prevent Wilmot from being caught. Whitgreave immediately agreed to the plan.

  Whitgreave arrived to find Wilmot in a state of near disbelief that he was somehow still at large, given the closeness of his escapes in the brief period since the defeat at Worcester. He was clearly resigned to imminent capture unless he could somehow be rescued from this inadequate hiding place.

  Wilmot was equally despondent about the hopes of the king, and the rest of Charles’s right-hand men. He described to Whitgreave the beleaguered state Charles had been in when he had last seen him, and how the other Royalist grandees had scattered in the desperate hope of avoiding being taken, or cut down, by the victorious enemy.

  To a Royalist like Whitgreave, the news relayed to him by Huddleston and Wilmot must have been overwhelming in its awfulness. The young king was the great hope of their cause. He had come to reclaim the crown that had been taken so violently from his family. He was now, it was clear, totally defeated. It seemed highly likely that he must either already have been captured, or that, like Wilmot, he was on the point of being so. Either way, it seemed certain that there would very soon be another royal visit to the executioner’s block.

  Whitgreave promised to do all he could to help Wilmot. He told Huntbatch that he knew of a safe place for Wilmot at a friend’s house. He was careful not to give away that Wilmot would in fact be hidden in his own home. There was no benefit in Huntbatch knowing the truth: he might be careless with the secret, or he might be interrogated, and have it forced out of him by Parliament’s men.

  Whitgreave asked Huntbatch to bring Wilmot and his servant to a prearranged spot on his estate at midnight, when Whitgreave could be sure that his family and servants were all safely in bed. He told Huntbatch to keep to a route that only local people would know, to lessen the chances of detection.

  Whitgreave was at the rendezvous at the appointed hour, but to his increasing alarm there was no sign of Wilmot or Huntbatch. He returned home after a long and fruitless wait, convinced that something must have gone very wrong. He was therefore amazed, on reaching Moseley Hall, to find that Wilmot was already there, waiting for him. For some reason Huntbatch had decided to bring him directly there, and by a different route to the one that had been so carefully thought through and decided upon. Seeing the bewilderment on Whitgreave’s face, Wilmot was horrified that Huntbatch had inconvenienced his new host so unnecessarily, thoughtlessly and dangerously.

  Whitgreave welcomed Wilmot to his home and gave him something to eat before showing him to his bed. Wilmot decided that he would sleep in his clothes, in case he needed to dash for safety in the night, and handed over a purse of precious jewels, which he asked his host to hide with particular care: they were to fund his escape attempt. Wilmot’s servant Robert Swan settled down into a makeshift bed near his master’s while Whitgreave went outside to see that their horses were secured and their possessions hidden. Whitgreave then showed Wilmot Moseley Hall’s finest hiding place. It was a priest hole.

  Priest holes were constructed with the utmost secrecy, the normal practice being for the owner of the house and the builder of the hiding place to be the only ones to know where it was, and how it was opened. In Abbots Salford, a large gabled mansion built in Warwickshire in 1602, the priest hole was built at the very top of the building. Few who entered the dingy attic would notice the nondescript oak cupboard standing to one side. But, by pulling out a pin from under one of its shelves, a hidden door would be released, giving access to a four-foot-deep alcove. Once inside, the person hiding would slide a hefty bolt shut behind them.

  The most prolific constructor and architect of these ‘privacies’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was Nicholas Owen, a carpenter from Oxford. Owen was slight – his nickname was ‘Little John’ – and lame, after a horse rolled on him and crushed a leg. To the outside world he was a simple travelling joiner. He worked at regular jobs in the day, to add to the appearance of normality. But it was at night that he got down to his real role. For in reality, this man, who used the aliases of ‘Draper’ and ‘Andrewes’, was the invaluable helper of leading Jesuits. His prime responsibility was the building of places for hiding and
escape for persecuted priests. Owen worked across England in grand houses that formed the core of local Catholic underground networks. He took enormous care to make each hideaway distinctive in form and access, so that if one of his installations was discovered it would not help the royal, Protestant, authorities to root out the rest.

  Owen had a preference for working inside the interior walls of houses. He also had a gift for thinking in three dimensions, and employed curves in his intricate designs. ‘With incomparable skill, he knew how to conduct priests to a place of safety along the subterranean passages, to hide them between walls and bury them in labyrinths of a thousand windings,’ wrote Father Matthias Tanner, a historian of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century.3 It was difficult, and extremely painful, employment. Owen had accumulated many injuries to his body, brought about by his chiselling away in barely accessible holes, hewn out of thick masonry, while he lay contorted and exhausted, doing the work he believed his God required of him. He was constantly in pain, particularly because of a chronic hernia.

  Nicholas Owen was inspired to the heights of ingenuity through first-hand knowledge of what would happen if any of those he worked so hard to conceal were discovered. The authorities captured him in 1594. They knew he was Catholic, but did not realise that this prisoner was the constructor of so many priest holes. He was tortured nonetheless, refusing to give up the names of any of his associates, before a rich sympathiser bought his freedom for a large sum.

  Twelve years later, he and three other Jesuits were the subject of a relentless search of Hindlip Hall, in Worcestershire. This followed the Gunpowder Plot, the failure of which resulted in an exhaustive manhunt for all the Catholics connected to the conspiracy. Owen and a comrade had little warning of the search, and were forced to hide quickly in a priest hole in Hindlip’s long gallery. They eventually had to give themselves up after eleven days, having long since consumed the single apple they had taken into hiding with them some time before.

  On this occasion the authorities knew exactly how great a prize they had unearthed in Owen. Secretary of State Robert Cecil wrote excitedly: ‘It is incredible, how great was the joy caused by his arrest … knowing the great skill of Owen in constructing hiding places, and the innumerable quantity of dark holes which he had schemed for hiding priests all through England.’4 Eager to extract his many secrets, they took Owen from prison to the Tower of London for torture. Father John Gerard (whose eventual escape from the Tower some years earlier was probably assisted by Owen) has left his account of what he was subjected to, as a captured Jesuit priest:

  We went to the torture room in a kind of procession, the attendants walking ahead with lighted candles.

  The chamber was underground and dark, particularly near the entrance. It was a vast place, and every device and instrument of human torture was there. They pointed out some of them to me and said I would try them all. Then [the interrogator] asked me again if I would confess.

  ‘I cannot,’ I said.

  I fell on my knees for a moment’s prayer. Then they took me to a big upright pillar, one of the wooden posts which held the roof of this huge underground chamber. Driven into the top of it were iron staples for supporting heavy weights. Then they put my wrists into iron gauntlets and ordered me to climb two or three wicker steps.

  My arms were then lifted up and an iron bar was passed through the rings of one gauntlet, then through the staple and rings to the second gauntlet. This done, they fastened the bar with a pin to prevent it from slipping, and then, removing the wicker steps one by one from under my feet, they left me hanging by my hands and arms fastened above my head.5

  Father Gerard was suspended by the wrists from the ceiling for several hours, losing consciousness because of the agony tearing through his hands, arms, shoulders and chest, before being brought round by his tormentors. When he was awake, they forced him once more along the same pathway through physical anguish to oblivion. Gerard recalled going through this cycle eight or nine times in a day. He recognised the temptation to end the pain by giving up the information demanded. It was only his belief in God that kept him from doing so:

  Seeing my agony and the struggle going on in my mind, He gave me this most merciful thought: the utmost and worst they can do is to kill you, and you have often wanted to give your life for your Lord God. The Lord God sees all you are enduring – He can do all things. You are in God’s keeping.

  Interrogated in this same way, Owen told his torturers nothing they did not already know: the notes taken during his interrogations show the thin pickings he offered up, to the frustration of the inquisitors. They also underline Owen’s unshakeable resolve to shield his comrades’ anonymity, and so save them from similar suffering – the same consideration, in fact, that had made him determined to build the best hideaways he could possibly devise.

  Owen’s anguish was not over. He was stretched on the rack, his torturers binding his torso with a metal sheet to hold his hernia in. But eventually, a contemporary recorded, ‘his bowels gushed out, together with his life’. To blacken Owen’s name, and to downplay his heroism, the authorities falsely claimed that he had resorted to suicide, a mortal sin to Roman Catholics. They said he had ‘ripped up his own belly with a knife without a point’.6 This, despite his being bound and guarded at all times, and torture having left him incapable of holding anything in his hands. The thought of Owen having the strength or capacity to stab himself with a weapon is absurd.*

  Moseley Hall’s priest hole was a particularly fine one. It was so impossible to detect, Thomas Whitgreave boasted, that he had used it to hide successfully from a recent ‘violent strict search’ ordered by Captain Henry Stone, the governor of Stafford and a scourge of the area’s Royalists.

  The priest hole was accessed through a trapdoor in the floor of the small suite of rooms Lord Wilmot was shown to. The person hiding found himself in a space, bound with oak beams and brickwork, that lay behind the rear of the hall’s brewhouse chimney. There was a stone seat in the corner, and an inch-wide hole in the wall, set with a pin that could be popped out. Through this, water or broth could be poured through a pipe, to keep the person within alive in case a search was prolonged.

  On first being shown this safest of havens, Wilmot said, ‘I would give a world my friend were here,’ and swore that he would have paid £20,000 to make such a wish come true. As happy as he was to have found such a fine hiding place, he was tormented by not knowing what had happened to the king.

  On the evening of Thursday, 4 September, while Wilmot was preparing to set off for Moseley Hall, Richard Penderel led the king from his home at Hobbal Grange to start their night-time trek towards Wales. The going was tougher than Charles had anticipated, and for a man used to the finest footwear in the land, the coarse shoes he had borrowed from William Creswell were painful; the soft skin of his feet was soon rubbed raw.

  The cross-country route Richard had chosen meant the two men had to go slowly, but even so they were surprised by the thwack of low-hanging branches and by drop-away ditches, while stumps and ruts tripped them up with sudden violence. At one point, convinced that all was lost, and with his feet blistered and bloody, Charles threw himself to the ground in despair, saying he could not go on – he would rather stay where he was, and be discovered, than take another step. It was a moment reminiscent of his capture a year earlier at ‘The Start’, when he had been discovered hiding in a sorry state by the Covenanters’ men, ‘over-wearied and very fearful’.

  This time, though, he was fortunate to have a strong and unflappable companion who would not let him give up. Richard managed to talk him into continuing, alternating claims that there was not much further to go with promises that the terrain ahead would be less challenging. Charles stumbled on in the darkness, his chafed feet causing him increasing agony.

  The two men’s immediate goal was a ferry across the Severn between Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury. A little before midnight, after seven miles of excruciating progress, they approac
hed Evelith Mill, two miles from the market town of Madeley, by means of whose bridge they planned to cross the river.

  As they got nearer they could make out the miller, dressed in white, seated in his doorway. Richard suffered a moment of clumsiness when, after quietly opening the gate that led to the mill-bridge, he let it clap shut behind him. The miller spun round. Making out two figures in the dark, he barked the challenge, ‘Who goes there?’

  ‘Neighbours going home!’ Richard called back hopefully. But his reply failed to convince.

  ‘If you be neighbours, stand!’ the miller said. ‘Or else I will knock you down!’

  Richard urged the king to keep up with him as he broke into a run. The pair cleared another gate, the miller running after them, cursing ‘Rogues! Rogues!’ They could hear others spill out of the mill, and assumed that they had joined in the chase. Fleeing for their lives, the king and Richard waded through a brook, before scurrying along the thick, muddy furrows of a lane. Charles would recall that the only way he stayed close to Richard in the darkness was by following the rubbing noise made by his calfskin breeches as he ran.

  Eventually Charles shouted out, telling Richard to join him in jumping a hedge. For half an hour they lay still on the other side, hearts pounding, straining to hear if their pursuers were on their scent, until finally they were satisfied that there was nobody coming after them.