But it was the combination of Lyme Regis’s devout Puritanism and its maritime knowhow that truly saved the day. Twenty-four preachers encouraged the town’s defenders to stand firm against the king’s ‘malignant’ army, pointing out that a significant part of the Royalist force were Roman Catholics, from Ireland. This stiffened the townspeople’s resolve, whipping up their hatred to such a pitch that an Irish woman found wandering the beach after the Royalists had departed was butchered, and her body fed to the sea.
By the end of the eight weeks the Royalists had suffered 2,000 casualties, to the town’s 120. Parliament granted Lyme Regis an annual payment of £1,000 in grateful recognition of its stubborn resistance, which had sucked the impetus out of the Royalists in the south-west, while keeping hold of a crucial port.
It was this hotbed of Puritanism that Wyndham now hoped might save the king. While it transpired that one of the Lyme Regis sailors he had had in mind, Captain Gregory Alford, was on a voyage to Portugal, the other was on hand.
William Ellesdon was, as Captain Alford would recall somewhat disapprovingly, ‘newly married to a very rich but rigid Presbyterian’.7 Wyndham had no intention of sharing the king’s identity with Ellesdon, as he was very aware that Ellesdon’s brother John was one of the area’s many stalwart Parliamentarians. He therefore told him that his need was to get a couple of anonymous gentlemen across the water as quickly as possible, and implored him to sort out a merchant ship immediately. It must have the appearance of a working vessel, while its true purpose would be the smuggling of two men who needed to get to safety.
Ellesdon sent one of his staff to the customs house to see which captains had logged their vessels as being bound for France. The entry that stuck out was that of Stephen Limbry, an importer of wine who was one of Ellesdon’s commercial tenants. He was the master of a thirty-ton merchantman which was soon to set sail for the French port of St-Malo.
Ellesdon rode with Wyndham the mile and a half along a coastal path from Lyme Regis to the nearby village of Charmouth, where they found Limbry at home. They said they had something to speak to him about, and asked him to join them in the village’s inn.
Wyndham explained that they needed to get a pair of gentlemen across the Channel in secret. The exact destination was not important, Ellesdon explained – it could be anywhere in France. As to the reason for the men’s sudden wish to get overseas, Ellesdon said that it was to do with marriage and money: one of the gentlemen, ‘having married a great fortune, was troubled by her father and friends, and so they would go into France for some time’. Ellesdon promised to pay Limbry £25 on his vessel’s departure, and a further £25 once he had heard from the two gentlemen that they had made it safely to France. Limbry agreed to the deal.
All the arrangements were made, and a rendezvous was arranged at a spot that Ellesdon pointed out to Wyndham from the shore. ‘And indeed,’ Ellesdon wrote later, ‘a more commodious place for such a design could hardly be found, it lying upon the shore a quarter of a mile from any house and from any horse or footpath.’ He told Wyndham that Limbry would have his ship sail out of Lyme Regis at five o’clock that Monday evening, and that it would then pause at the allotted point so the two gentlemen could be rowed across a nearby creek, board and be on their way to safety.
Wyndham returned to Trent House with ‘hopeful tidings’ that passage to France was secured, and a plan was in place. After the previous disappointments, with neither London nor Wales proving to be possible exits overseas, it seemed that Charles was finally within touching distance of freedom. Many of his followers had not been so fortunate.
13
Processing the Prisoners
Such of them who in the battle escaped death lived but longer to die, for the most part, more miserably.
Thomas Blount, Boscobel
One of Charles’s first questions to Wilmot when they had been reunited at Moseley Hall had been what had happened to the other great men of his cause. While Wilmot had not been able to answer, the truth emerged as the two men moved between Royalist hiding places, and learnt more of what had been going on outside the bubble of their escape attempt. The news was dire indeed.
The Duke of Hamilton, one of the senior aristocrats of Scotland, with a potential claim to the English throne, was the most prominent Scot not to make it out of Worcester alive. His elder brother had been beheaded in 1649, after being captured fighting for Charles I the previous year. Now it was his turn to suffer the consequences of an ill-fated foray into an England protected by the professionalism of the New Model Army, inspired by the brilliance of Cromwell.
Leading a counterattack on Perry Wood, Hamilton was shot through the leg. He was then subjected to a grisly amputation, after which he lay in agony in the Commandery, the building that had been Charles’s headquarters during his twelve days in Worcester. Hamilton would join the long list of Worcester’s fatalities nine days after the battle. His followers were refused permission to remove his body, and he was buried under the high altar of Worcester Cathedral.
The city had paid dearly for welcoming Charles Stuart into its walls. It was violently looted on the night of victory. Those officials who had greeted the king so wholeheartedly on 22 August were soon identified, tried and hanged. As these men lost their lives, so the city lost its dignity, and its defensive lines. On 16 September the Council of State ordered that the walls of Worcester be torn down, and ‘laid so flat that they may not be in a posture to be again made defensible’.1
Now it became clear that Parliament had had various informants in place, transmitting information about Charles and his army from inside Worcester’s walls. On 6 September the Council of State gave rewards to those who had informed them of goings on in the Royalist stronghold in the run-up to the battle, sending particular thanks ‘to the little maid mentioned by Major Salway in his narrative to the House [of Commons]’.
Meanwhile the city had a shroud of death hanging over it. Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus gloated that Worcester had ‘indeed become a sad spectacle, and was very noisome by reason of the multitudes of dead carcasses, both of man and beast (for the fight was very fierce, and the slaughter of the enemy great) till care was taken for their removal (by God’s blessing) to prevent infection’.2 In the meantime the dead were laid out, John Aubrey hearing that ‘The penes of the dead stripped bodies 2 or 3 days were all erect.’3 ‘Death erection’, or ‘angel lust’, can occur in the corpses of men who have met a sudden and violent end.
Lady Fanshawe, who had noted the scarcity of provisions when she had accompanied Charles to the Isles of Scilly in the spring of 1646, now wrote to one of her children: ‘Upon the day of September following was fought the battle of Worcester, when, the King being missed, and nothing of your father being dead or alive for three days was heard of, it is inexpressible what affliction I was in. I neither ate nor slept, but trembled at every motion I heard, expecting the fatal news.’
While the king’s fate remained a mystery, she soon read the name of her husband, Sir Anthony, among a list of prominent prisoners of war in a Parliamentary newsbook. Later she was advised that he was being brought to London, and that she would be able to meet him before he was sent for imprisonment pending trial.
She waited in a room in Charing Cross on the agreed date. ‘At last came the captain and a soldier with your father, who was very cheerful in appearance; who, after he had spoke and saluted me and his friends there, said: “Cease weeping; no other thing on Earth can move me. Remember, we are all at God’s disposal.”’
Sir Anthony stressed that being taken prisoner was one of many things that could happen in times of war. He was proud that he had managed to burn his private papers before being taken, and was sure that this action would save ‘the lives and estates of many a brave gentleman’. After lunch with his wife he was escorted to Whitehall, where he was kept in solitary confinement in a small room overlooking a bowling green.
Ann Fanshawe worked out where he was being held. ‘
During the time of his imprisonment I failed not constantly to go, when the clock struck four in the morning, with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone and on foot, from my lodging in Chancery Lane … to Whitehall at the entry that went out of King’s Street into the bowling ground. There I would go under his window and softly call him … Thus we talked together; and sometimes I was so wet with rain that it went in at my neck and out at my heels.’4
Sir Richard Fanshawe was interrogated repeatedly. The combination of the grim conditions in his cell, and the exertions of the ‘cold and hard marches’ he had endured since his capture, meant that he became seriously ill, perhaps with scurvy. He was saved from death by Oliver Cromwell, who liked Fanshawe, and advised Ann to get a letter from a doctor explaining how sick he was. Cromwell used this document to persuade his comrades to release Fanshawe from captivity, on a bail of £4,000.
The foremost Englishman to be captured in the days immediately after the battle was not so fortunate. The Earl of Derby had been deeply reluctant to leave Charles’s side at Whiteladies. Derby had reached Newport in Shropshire, where he surrendered to Captain Oliver Edge, from Colonel Lilburne’s regiment, on the promise that his life would be spared. Edge received a reward for catching such a prized enemy, one of several he accumulated during Harrison’s mopping-up operation.
Derby was sent to Chester, and was held in Chester Castle. While there, he heard that the Council of State had written from London insisting that he should be ‘brought to trial, [and] made an example of’. Realising that his life would soon be taken from him, Derby wrote to his wife on 10 September: ‘I will not stay long on particulars, but, in short, inform you that the King is dead, or narrowly escaped in disguise; whether [one or the other is] not yet known.’ He outlined the utter destruction of the Royalist army, with all its noblemen killed or captured, and its rank and file imprisoned or sent overseas. There was little point, he assured her, in her continuing the defence of the Isle of Man in this hopeless, kingless, state.
The earl signed off his parting letter with love for his family, and revulsion at the cauldron of hate and destruction that his country had become: ‘God almighty comfort you and my poor children,’ he wrote, ‘and the Son of God, whose blood was shed for our good, preserve your lives; that by the good will and mercy of God, we may meet once more upon Earth, and last in the Kingdom of Heaven, where we shall be for ever free from all rapine, plunder, and violence; and so I rest everlastingly.’5
Derby was court martialled by a board of officers who had, to a man, fought against him during the Civil Wars. Proceedings began at the end of September. The first of the four charges brought against him was ‘That he had in a most traitorous and hostile manner, been aiding, abetting, to Charles Stuart, son of the late tyrant.’6 His attempt to rely on the mercy guaranteed him at capture by Captain Edge proved worthless. His judges decided that ‘Quarter for life belongs only to such as are … enemies, not to such as are … Traitors to their Country; The Earl is a Native of England, and therefore being taken fighting against England, cannot be accounted a competent enemy, nor in reason expect an exemption by Quarter.’7
Despite Cromwell requesting that his life be spared, Derby’s fate was sealed: he was sentenced to death. The place of his execution had been secretly decided before the court martial had even begun. He would be transported forty-five miles north-east of Chester, to Bolton. The officers of the court martial congratulated themselves on this choice, ‘wherein the just judgement of God upon this man is very remarkable, that in the same County where he first raised Arms, drew the first blood, and had done so much mischief, yea, and in the very same Town, where by his means so much blood had been spilt … it should be so brought about by his righteous providence, that he should now come to have his blood shed there upon a Scaffold before all the world, by the hand of a public Justice’.8 He was beheaded in Bolton on 15 October.
There can be no doubt that the death sentence would also apply to Charles on his being captured. Although commonly referred to as ‘the King of Scots’, he was, like Derby, a native Englishman. Furthermore, he was one who had already been declared traitor by name. In such circumstances, no trial would be necessary: the authorities would simply need to establish his identity. The only fit consequence for his sin, of breathing fresh life into the calamitous civil wars that had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, Scots and Irishmen, would be public justice in a fitting setting. Like his father he would be condemned as a ‘Man of Blood’, and like his father he would be publicly beheaded.
Charles’s good instincts kept him out of his enemies’ reach. His decision, on his ride from Worcester to Whiteladies, not to join his 3,000 men fleeing north, was sound. Parliamentarian newsbooks recorded scarcely credible victories by small bodies of their men against large units of defeated Royalists: ‘On Thursday last there marched by our town about 1,000 of the routed Scots, who rendezvoused on Congleton Moor, there taking up their quarters for the most part of that night, lying in their close order,’ ran one such report. There they were attacked by 300 irregular Parliamentary troops under a Major Gibson: ‘He fell on them with his men in their Rear, killed about 300 and took above 100 prisoners with little loss: for indeed so great is the spirit of fear amongst them, that 10 men will chase 100.’9 Judging by what happened to the 3,000, if he had joined them on the doomed trek back to Scotland, Charles would have been captured or killed; or, for that matter, captured and then killed.
One of those cavalry officers taken in the chaos of full retreat wrote from prison in Chester soon afterwards. He addressed the hectic period that started with the certainty of imminent defeat inside the cramped Royalist position in Worcester, and ended with his own capture, 125 miles north of the rout: ‘Towards the evening all things appeared very horrid, alarms being in every part of the city, and a report that the enemy had entered one end of the town, and we of the horse trampling one up against another, much readier to cut each other’s throat than to defend ourselves against the enemy. In this confusion we at last got out of the town, and fled as far as we could, our two Lieutenant Generals [Leslie and Middleton] being, as appeared the next morning, at our head. We had no guide, so we often lost our way, but yet reached Newport [in Shropshire], 30 miles this side of Worcester, the next morning, and there thought to have refreshed ourselves, and marched quietly for Scotland.’10
But this was no time for quiet. The Council of State’s pre-emptive decision, once it had become confident of victory at Worcester, to block up the ways back north to Scotland, had proved its worth. The imprisoned Cavalier recalled the relentlessness of the enemy, whether uniformed or not: ‘There wanted not considerable forces in every place to [con]front us, and we were so closely pursued, in the day by the army and garrison forces, and in the night by the country [folk], that from the time we came out of Worcester, until the Friday evening that I was taken prisoner seven miles from Preston, neither I nor my horse ever rested. Our body consisted of 3,000; in the day we often faced the enemy, and beat their little parties, but still those of us whose horses tired or were shot were lost, unless they could run as fast as we rode. In the night we kept close together, yet some fell asleep on their horses, and if their horses tarried behind, we might hear by their cries what the bloody country were doing with them.’11 Many were bludgeoned to death.
Leslie and Middleton were among those to lose their horses, most likely to exhaustion. They managed to buy fresh ones, but after that point they were suspected of abandoning their men, the anonymous prisoner in Chester recalling: ‘On [the] Thursday night [after the defeat] Lieutenant Generals Middleton and Leslie left us, or willingly lost us, but with all the haste they made, both of them, and Sir William Fleming, are here prisoners.’
Major General Harrison’s men held a steady and impenetrable net across northern England. The operation in which Leslie and Middleton were caught by 800 Parliamentary cavalry and dragoons was described in a jubilant report from Lancashire written by the commanding
officer, Colonel John Alured, another signatory of Charles I’s death warrant:
Sir,
It hath pleased the Lord to give a great mercy to us in the delivery up of a great many of the leaders, and chief of the Scottish forces into our hands. I marched on a dark rainy night, in rough and tedious way, to the town … called Ellel, where we had intelligence that most of the Scots commanders lay, which were found to be true, and have taken there these Prisoners, in this enclosed list, nominated …12
This list included the two Scottish lieutenant generals, two earls, five lords, and many other Scots of great note. As Mercurius Politicus gloated: ‘I believe now, all the nobility of Scotland that are at liberty may all sit upon a joint-stool.’13
The architects of the rolling victory saw this as a time to celebrate God’s blessing, and to reward those who had played a significant part in it. The Council of State would vote ‘£30 a piece to be paid to Lieutenant Robert Milnes, and Captain Lieutenant John Key, for their good service in taking Lieutenant General Leslie, and Lieutenant General Middleton, after the rout of the Scottish army at Worcester’.
That was considered quite a bounty. At the same time, it puts in context the £1,000 reward for catching the elusive Charles Stuart.
There were so many Royalists taken after Worcester – perhaps 10,000 – that the cities where they were first held were choked with them. The cathedral at Worcester was made into a pen to keep hundreds of Scottish prisoners under guard; after they were moved on, Parliament gave a grant for cleaning the place, to get rid of the terrible stench.
The New Model Army soon had prisoners of war in York, Chester, Lancaster, Stafford, Derby, Leicester, Shrewsbury, Nottingham, Warwick, Liverpool and Carlisle. In Chester there were so many detainees that once the castle and the church were full, private houses were converted into temporary jails.
To Catch a King Page 18