Gunter set off home, again into a stormy night, this time on a horse borrowed from Lawrence Hyde – his own was exhausted by all the recent frequent journeys along the south coast of England looking for a way out for the king. He himself was also extremely tired, but once again he only had time for a couple of hours’ sleep before he was back on the road to Chichester.
On Friday, 10 October the colonel met up with Mançell, and lent him a horse. At two o’clock that afternoon they rode into Brighton, whose population of 4,000 made it the largest town in Sussex. Its transformation from a small village with a few dozen boats in the previous century, to a significant town at this time, had arisen from its long history as a fishing centre, and its growing importance as a port. By the mid-seventeenth century it had a thriving business in wine, coal, salt and stone, yet it would still be small enough in the 1730s for the surrounding cornfields to draw admiration from visitors.
Brighton was a place of commerce, that chose not to be burdened by politics. It was happy to be a major centre of carriage for Parliament, and the previous year ships protecting the town’s fishing fleet had captured a Royalist crew after being attacked. The people of Brighton were equally content to defy the authorities, taking part in clandestine, but lucrative, work for Royalists.
Mançell found that the man he usually dealt with in Brighton, Nicholas Tattersall, was out of town, having gone to Chichester’s Sloe Fair. But he soon heard that Tattersall was only four miles away, in Shoreham. Mançell sent a message asking Tattersall to come and see him as soon as he could, because he had an interesting proposal to put to him.
The Royalists’ luck seemed at last to have turned. Tattersall revealed that he had an active licence for his ship, the Surprise, allowing departure from Shoreham for Poole in Dorset with a cargo of coal. Gunter left it to Mançell to make the deal with the ship’s captain. Tattersall insisted on knowing who the men were that he was to carry before he would agree to anything. Mançell repeated the tale that he believed to be true – that the stowaways were two friends of the colonel’s who had been involved in a duel, and who needed to get away quickly and secretly before being held to account. This was acceptable to Tattersall, and by two o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, 11 October his fee of £60, to be paid in advance, was agreed. For a further £50 he agreed to be ready to sail at an hour’s notice, since Gunter and Mançell could not yet tell when the two duellists would make it to Shoreham.
Colonel Gunter, exhaustion battling with exhilaration, rode to tell Lord Wilmot that the plan was in place. Wilmot was with Lawrence Hyde, Colonel Phillips and Thomas Gunter at the house of Anthony Brown, a tenant of Hyde’s, and a brother-in-law of Thomas. On hearing the news, Phillips told Colonel Gunter, ‘Thou shalt be a saint in my almanac forever!’ Gunter then went to where Wilmot was hiding, saluted his senior officer, and gave him a full account of everything that had occurred since their last meeting. Wilmot could not have been more delighted.
Gunter was then told he must sleep, while Phillips was entrusted with going the next day to inform the king that he must immediately come to Lord Wilmot and Colonel Gunter, in preparation for a voyage to France.
Meanwhile, in London that same day, the Council of State composed an urgent directive to be sent to the customs officers of all the ports in England:
Council has informations inducing probabilities that Charles Stuart is still in England, as also the Duke of Buckingham, obscured and under disguise, expecting a fit time to pass into foreign parts. Have a special care of that which is otherwise your duty, and use your utmost diligence to make a strict search, and take due consideration of all such as attempt to pass beyond the seas from your port, or any creek, and suffer none to pass whom you may have cause to suspect to be Charles Stuart or the Duke of Buckingham, or any other such person of quality. We need not put you in mind that Parliament has appointed £1,000 to be given to him or them that shall apprehend the leader of the late invading army. For your better discovery of him, take notice of him to be a tall man, above two yards high, his hair a deep brown, near to black, and has been, as we hear, cut off since the destruction of his army at Worcester, so that it is not very long; expect him under disguise, and do not let any pass without a due and particular search, and look particularly to the bye creeks of embarkation in or belonging to your port.
16
Surprise Ending
I need not tell you, that we were lately upon a fear, of having oppression renewed upon us, and to have had those to rule over us, whose little finger would have been heavier than our former oppressor’s loins. I need not tell you of an enemy that came like an overflowing flood, that would even have swallowed us up quick.
From the sermon of Joseph Caryl at the service of thanksgiving for the victory at Worcester, 2 October 1651
We must now go back a few days, to reconnect with the king’s progress during the period when Colonel Gunter was working so hard with Wilmot to find a ship. On Monday, 6 October Charles had set off from Trent House with Juliana Coningsby, Wyndham’s servant Harry Peters, and Colonel Phillips. They had ridden for forty miles, over back roads, towards Heale House, the home of Katherine Hyde, near Salisbury. En route they passed through Wincanton, and lunched at the George inn at Mere. Charles was quietly amused when the innkeeper, Christopher Philips, raised a glass to toast the king.
Heale House, in Nether Woodford (as the village of Middle Woodford was then known), was a few miles north of Salisbury. The large and beautiful house had been built in the previous century by William Green, on a bank of the River Avon, above a stretch rich with trout. The Hyde family had suffered several recent losses: in 1641 there had been the death of Heale House’s seventy-nine-year-old owner Sir Lawrence Hyde, a respected lawyer who had been attorney general to Charles’s grandmother, Anne of Denmark; Sir Lawrence’s heir, another Lawrence, had also died, and his widow Katherine now occupied Heale.
In 1650, Katherine’s brother-in-law Sir Henry Hyde had paid for his loyalty to the Crown with his life. Sent to Turkey to try to gain support for Charles’s cause, he had been intercepted, arrested and handed over to Parliament. Imprisoned in the Tower of London, he was condemned to execution. On the scaffold he kissed the blade of the axe that then beheaded him.
Katherine Hyde welcomed Charles as he arrived at Heale at dusk. He was introduced to her merely as Phillips’s friend, but she was not fooled. Charles did not know it, but she had seen him several years earlier, near Salisbury, when he had been a prince riding in his father’s Civil War army, and she had not forgotten him.
At Mrs Hyde’s table that night sat the king, Phillips, Frederick Hyde – whose father-in-law had been hanged for helping a Royalist plot in 1643, but who seems not to have participated in the Civil Wars himself – and his widowed sister-in-law, and Dr Humphrey Henchman, who Charles had asked to meet him there.
During dinner, Charles was aware of Mrs Hyde and Frederick looking intently at him. After everyone had finished eating, he took Mrs Hyde aside and told her who he truly was. It came as no surprise to her. She assured him that she could keep him safe, but warned that she trusted nobody in the household except her sister. She advised him to leave the house temporarily the next day, because there was a fair in Salisbury then, which she could allow all her servants to go to. Charles and Colonel Phillips, and Juliana Coningsby and Harry Peters, should pack up their things, and appear to depart from Heale for good, before the staff left to enjoy their day off. The pair would then secretly return to the house while it was free of servants, and hide before their return.
Charles left with Phillips the following morning to spend the day riding on Salisbury Plain while Mrs Hyde saw her plan through. They made their way to view ‘the great wonder of that country’, Stonehenge. It was even more of a mystery then than it is now. Charles’s grandfather, James I, a man with a keen intellect, had sent his Architect General, Inigo Jones, to study the stones, and establish what they were, and who had built them.
For more th
an 300 years, from the early twelfth century, the common belief was that the wizard Merlin had placed them there. From the fifteenth century, the mythical theory was replaced by one based on actual history, the assumption being that the ancient Britons were responsible for the monument.
Inigo Jones felt that the structure would have been too sophisticated for woad-daubed savages to have designed. He believed, rather, that the stones were the remains of a massive hexagonal building designed by the Romans during their occupation of Britain. Following that proposition through, and studying the designs listed by the Roman architect Vitruvius, he asserted that what visitors to Salisbury Plain witnessed were the remains of a Roman temple dedicated to Caelus, the sky god who was the equivalent of the Greek deity Uranus. Other seventeenth-century observers believed them to be the work of the Druids.
Charles, who had a keen scientific mind – this was a man who later chose to sleep with a dozen clocks in his bedroom because of his fascination with their inner workings – would remember that he ‘stayed looking upon the stones for some time’. That time stayed with Colonel Phillips too. He noted that he and the king ‘took a view of the wonder of that country, Stonehenge, where they found that the King’s Arithmetic gave the lie to the fabulous tale that these stones cannot be told alike twice arising’.1
After their morning visiting Stonehenge, Charles and Phillips rode back towards Heale in the afternoon. Dr Henchman was waiting to greet the king in a nearby field, and escorted him to the house. After handing the king over to the priest’s care, Colonel Phillips led Charles’s horse away with him, so as to leave no clue of his return. When Charles reached the house, he found that Juliana Coningsby and Harry Peters had already returned to it.
Charles went into the priest hole at Heale for several days, hoping that luck might finally go his way. Mrs Hyde and her sister took it in turns to bring him food in his hiding place. Meanwhile, Colonel Phillips rode off to find out from Gunter what progress he had managed to make.
Gunter greeted him with the good news that Tattersall had contracted with Mançell to take the fugitives, and that they would be departing from Shoreham on Tuesday, 14 October. While Tattersall’s vessel, the Surprise, had permission to sail for Poole with its shipment of coal, the plan was for the ship to divert to France before resuming its legitimate voyage. Gunter explained that Tattersall was unaware that one of the men he would be carrying was the king.
Colonel Phillips reached Salisbury on Sunday, 12 October, and transmitted the plan to Dr Henchman, who then brought the promising update to the king. Because the journey to Shoreham was eighty miles, Phillips insisted that the party set off as soon as possible. He arranged to be outside Heale, with the king’s horse in hand, at three o’clock the following morning. But Charles’s mount seems to have panicked on entering a meadow, snapping its bridle before charging off into the darkness. ‘After some time, with no small trouble’, the colonel caught it and knotted the leather together again.
While waiting for the king, Lord Wilmot, Colonel Gunter and Captain Gunter rode to visit Colonel Gunter’s sister at Hambledon, which was halfway between Heale and Brighton. On reaching her house, they decided to keep themselves active before Charles’s anticipated arrival. They borrowed two greyhounds from her, and went to join in the hare-coursing that was taking place that day on the Downs.
After the hunting, Colonel Gunter set off to join up with the king and Colonel Phillips. He came across them outside Warneford, near Winchester. In case anyone was watching, he rode past them without a second glance, and stopped to smoke his pipe and drink some beer in the George and Falcon inn. He then went back the way he had just come, and caught up with Charles and Phillips. He bowed to the king, then led the way, as he had already established the safest route for them to take.
When they got to Broad-Halfpenny Down, near Hambledon, Charles asked Colonel Gunter, ‘Canst thou get me a lodging hereabout?’ Gunter told him that he had arranged for his cousin, Lawrence Hyde, to take him in. ‘Know you no other?’ Charles asked. For some reason he preferred not to stay at Hyde’s house, despite knowing it to be very safe. ‘Yes,’ replied Gunter. ‘I know divers yeomanly men where for a night we may be welcome. And there is one who married my sister, whose house stands privately and out of the way.’ ‘Let us go there,’ Charles said.
Colonel Gunter led the king, Wilmot and Phillips to his sister and brother-in-law’s home by a back route, while Captain Gunter and Robert Swan scouted the neighbourhood for any possible hazards. Dismounting by the front door of the modest house, Charles told Phillips to walk before him, saying, ‘Thou lookest the most like a gentleman, now.’ They were welcomed in by Colonel Gunter’s sister, Mrs Symonds, who Phillips would remember as ‘a most hearty loyal gentlewoman’. She was certainly a generous hostess. The fire was roaring, and as night closed in they sat and enjoyed wine, ale and biscuits together before dinner.
Thomas Symonds, the owner of the house, arrived home as the group sat down to eat. He had spent a long time in the nearby inn, and his manners were dulled by alcohol. He met the sudden infusion of uninvited guests with a distinct lack of charm. ‘This is brave,’ he said. ‘A man can no sooner be out of the way, but his house must be taken up with I know not whom.’ Before he could embarrass himself or his guests further, he suddenly recognised Colonel Gunter.
‘Is it you?’ he asked his brother-in-law. ‘You are welcome; and, as [for] your friends, so they are all.’ He now surveyed the visitors with delight, till his gaze fell on the tall, dowdily dressed man with the plain haircut who stood out so starkly from the group of Cavaliers. Symonds looked suspiciously at Charles, and challenged him with: ‘Here’s a Roundhead.’ He then turned to Colonel Gunter and said, ‘I never knew you [to] keep Roundheads’ company before.’
The colonel reassured him that his pudding-bowled friend was no supporter of Cromwell: ‘’Tis no matter; he is my friend and, I will assure you, no dangerous man.’ Relieved, Symonds took Charles cheerily by the hand, and jokingly toasted him as ‘Brother Roundhead’.
Charles decided that the best way to navigate the situation was to go along with it. He pretended to be a Puritan, and chided his host whenever he swore with little tellings-off, such as ‘O dear brother, that is a ’scape: swear not, I beseech you.’ Meanwhile, with the drunken Symonds pouring ever more generous measures of spirits and beer, Charles relied on his companions to whisk away his own cup, whenever their host was not looking, in order to spare him from an excess of alcohol. Colonel Gunter wrote later of how impressed all of those accompanying Charles were with his poise, good grace and fine acting during his ordeal by drunken host.
Knowing that the king was only halfway through his long journey to Shoreham, Gunter felt that he needed to extricate him from this awkward situation. He achieved this by appealing to his brother-in-law’s debauchery. ‘I wonder how thou shouldest judge so right: he is a Roundhead indeed, and if we could get him to bed, the house were our own, and we could be merry.’ In this way, Charles was able to slip away to bed, with Colonel Phillips lying nearby to guard him. Wilmot, able to roister as well as any man, stayed downstairs with Symonds, happily matching him drink for drink.
The royal party left in the morning, Gunter bringing two ox tongues along for provisions. They had only got to Arundel Hill when they saw ahead of them the careering figure of Colonel Herbert Morley, who was, in Colonel Gunter’s words, ‘full-but, hunting’. He was so distracted by his pursuit that he did not take closer notice of the group of men passing nearby.
Morley came from a prominent, wealthy Sussex family whose home was at Glynde Place. He had been brought up by Puritan guardians from the age of sixteen, following the death of his father, and had subsequently sided with Parliament, commanding a cavalry regiment during the First Civil War. He had been appointed one of Charles I’s judges twenty-one months earlier, but had refused to take part in the trial. He was now governor of Arundel Castle, which had been taken from the Royalists eight years earlier after
a siege. Colonel and Captain Gunter had both served in the force that had surrendered the castle to Morley.
The king’s party all dismounted and led their horses down a steep hill to avoid this influential enemy, whose duties included raising Parliamentary troops and confiscating Royalist estates in Sussex. ‘The King being told who Morley was,’ Colonel Gunter remembered, ‘replied merrily: “I did not like his starched mouchats [handkerchief].”’
After this close shave, the party repaired to an inn at Houghton Bridge, where they ordered drinks and bread, with which they enjoyed the pair of ox tongues that Colonel Gunter now produced from his pockets.
Afterwards they came to Bramber, where they saw ahead of them a large number of enemy soldiers on both sides of the street. They realised that the rebels had seen them first, and Wilmot’s immediate reaction was that they should turn back. But Colonel Gunter argued, ‘If we do, we are undone. Let us go on boldly, and we shall not be suspected.’ Charles nodded in agreement: ‘He saith well.’ Gunter led the party through the enemy troops, who, they overheard, were off duty after a night’s guarding nearby Bramber Bridge.
The king and his companions had not gone far when they heard horse hooves pounding towards them: it was thirty or forty of the troops they had passed, galloping in their direction. The Royalists, realising that flight was impossible, dropped their pace, but the Roundheads pushed past them, and sped off into the distance, oblivious of the great prize they had twice let slip through their fingers in quick succession.
Colonel Gunter had arranged for Charles to be hidden in the home of a Mr Bagshall, in the small village of Beeding (now called Upper Beeding). But Wilmot, unsettled by the recent close brushes with the enemy, felt that this was no longer safe enough, and ‘carried the King out of the road, I know not whither’, Gunter remembered.2 The colonel himself rode on to Brighton, to await a summons from Wilmot when he was required.
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