Word reached Jane Lane in mid-October that the Council of State had got wind of her involvement in the king’s escape, having interrogated a prisoner who had named her as one of two guilty parties. Its officers had then written to one of its military commanders in Stafford: ‘The enclosed examination being sent to us, we desire you to send for and examine the persons therein mentioned, as to concealing and carrying away Charles Stuart and the Duke of Buckingham, and secure such of them as you think fit, and transmit their examinations, as also a copy of the former examination sent to us, concerning those two persons that were taken, and afterwards allowed to pass, about [Stafford’s governor, Captain Henry] Stone.’10
Jane showed her customary resourcefulness, slipping away from Bentley Hall before the Parliamentarians arrived to arrest her on charges of treason. Disguised as a peasant woman, she walked nearly 200 miles across England, to the port of Yarmouth in Norfolk. From there she crossed to France, joining the Royalist court in exile, where she was celebrated as the heroine of the magnificent escape story. On seeing her, Charles is supposed to have greeted her with the words, ‘Welcome, my life.’
Major General Edward Massey had been so badly wounded before Worcester that he had been unable to keep up with the Royalist band fleeing with the king from the battlefield. When he had parted from the king near Droitwich, Charles had bade Massey farewell with tears in his eyes, not expecting him to survive. But Massey had ridden on to Broadgate in Leicestershire, home of the Earl of Stamford and his son Lord Grey of Groby, a leading regicide and Parliamentary general. Massey had served with Stamford earlier in the Civil Wars, but any hope he may have had that the family’s loyalty was greater to him than to the Parliamentary cause was quickly dashed. Massey was sent as a prisoner to Warwick Castle as soon as he could be moved, a month after the defeat at Worcester.
He was still ‘in a very weak condition’, but remained proud, an eyewitness noting that he rode from Leicester to imprisonment in Warwick ‘as if he not much cared for Life, nor feared Death’. Massey had, however, not given up hope of freedom, and galloped away from his guards, but his horse was not fast enough. He was transferred to the tighter security of the Tower of London. Within a year he managed to escape from there, after clambering up the inside of a chimney. He then joined Charles in the Netherlands.
Another of the king’s great helpers on his escape took rather less time to arrive on the Continent. Major William Careless had left Charles’s side as the king set off with the Penderel brothers and the second Francis Yates from Boscobel House to Moseley Hall. Careless had eventually managed to get to safety overseas, arriving in the Netherlands after several weeks of trying, not long after Charles had arrived at Fécamp. In late October 1651 he made it to Paris, where he had audiences with Charles and with Louis XIV, and his role in the great escapade was celebrated to the full.
Charles’s Knight of the Garter sash and jewellery also joined him in France. Colonel Thomas Blague, who had taken them from the king for safekeeping at Whiteladies early in the escape, never made it out of Staffordshire. Soon after leaving Charles, he was pinned down by the enemy in Blore Pipe House, near Eccleshall. Knowing that capture was inevitable, he just had time to bury the medal ‘under a pile of chips and dust’ before he was taken prisoner.
Blague had a friend secretly retrieve the garter, and this man smuggled it to him in the Tower of London. Blague, meanwhile, managed to convince his captors that he was a low-risk prisoner, the Calendar of State Papers for 30 December 1651 noting that he should be allowed to ‘have the Liberty of the Tower’, rather than being kept under constant guard. This comparative freedom gave him the chance to escape. After crossing the Channel in disguise, he handed the insignia back to the delighted king in person, fully justifying Charles’s choice of him as the right man to protect his most prized possession.
In an age when God’s hand was seen in every event, some Parliamentarians asked what sort of message the Lord was sending, in letting the chief malignant evade their righteous clutches. They had celebrated Worcester as the latest proof that God was on their side, but he had deprived them of the ultimate prize. The startling news of the escape of the erstwhile King of Scotland challenged the notion that divine favour rested solely on Parliament’s side.
It was particularly galling to read the gloating taunts coming from the Royalists’ printing presses. On 17 October the Council of State recorded that Colonel William Purefoy, one of Charles I’s regicides, had ‘moved the House that the Act for suppressing scandalous pamphlets may be revived’. Four days later the attorney general ordered the prosecution of the author, printer and publishers of the book Lingua Testium: wherein Monarchy is Proved, and other works celebrating royalty. Two years earlier the Levellers had urged that England’s printing presses be free from censorship. But the Commonwealth, despite its astonishing victory on the battlefield, realised that it still needed to keep the enemy’s words under control.
To counter what was being written by Parliament’s foes, and to set down forever its account of the truth, the Council of State ordered five of its most prominent citizens, including Oliver Cromwell and Major General Harrison, ‘to be a committee to consider of some fit person to write the history of these times, and to take care and oversight thereof, and to consider likewise of a fit encouragement for the person or persons so employed, and how it may be raised and paid’.11
Meanwhile Parliament took its propaganda battle beyond the confines of England. A thousand copies of the official narrative of the battle of Worcester were sent by the attorney general, via post express, to the governor of Edinburgh Castle and the commissioners at Dublin, with a further 100 copies earmarked for New England.
The Royalists celebrated the deliverance of their champion long and hard. John Evelyn recorded in his diary for 12 November 1651 – the first Sunday that Charles attended chapel after his escape – how the priest, Dr Clare, took as his text, from the book of Genesis: ‘And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God: And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth [part] unto thee.”’12
Evelyn also noted how, on Christmas Day, Wilmot was the first nobleman to follow Charles and the Duke of York into church. He was the great hero of the piece. This was difficult for Sir Edward Hyde, who disliked Wilmot because of his debauchery and his generally bad influence on Charles. Hyde scoffed at how Wilmot, ‘in making his journeys … departed very unwillingly from all places where there was good eating and drinking’.13 It was true. Apart from on his first, hair-raising, day on the run, Wilmot had steered a zigzag course from one substantial house to another. Somehow his luck had held.
One account of the king’s escape marvelled at the miracle of it all. That Charles should have got away from his pursuers was such a highly unlikely ending to the tale that the writer could only conclude, in awe: ‘Let it therefore suffice and content us, that it pleased the Divine Wisdom and Goodness to protect and defend our most gracious Sovereign in all dangers and places and conditions whatsoever, in that his encumbered passage through his own rightful dominions, and without the least umbrage of his suspicion, to convey him out of the hands of his bloodthirsty traitorous enemies, who thought themselves sure of him, That so killing the Heir, the Inheritance might be theirs.’14 Two years later the Earl of Loudon wrote that ‘it pleased God to preserve the King, and so miraculously to give him a way of escape to France’.15
But, despite Charles’s astonishing escape, Worcester and its aftermath seemed still to guarantee the Crown’s enemies a successfully established republic. Colonel John Jones, one of those who had sent the late king to the scaffold, wrote: ‘The total overthrow of [the] Scots Pretender and all his forces, not in a blow (which might be ascribed to chance by those that have no other God t
o attribute to) but in a series of successes that his purpose might be seen (who disposeth of all powers) [seem certain] to make this the time of finishing our troubles, in England and Scotland.’16
This belief, that the God of Battles had spoken, spread from Parliament to parish. In Essex, the Reverend Ralph Josselin, who saw God’s hand in all earthly matters (he had partly attributed the death of his baby son in 1647 to his own sin of ‘unseasonable playing at chess’), wrote in his diary for 24 January 1652: ‘All the threats of our enemies ended in the ruin of the Scotch design at Worcester, and the flight of the King into France.’17
Sir Edward Hyde, who had advised the king so firmly against his Scottish adventure, was in Antwerp when he received news of Charles’s and Wilmot’s arrival in Paris, and wrote to the king congratulating him on his escape.18 Meanwhile he noted: ‘God, by subjecting the King to these dangers, has instructed him in much knowledge which could not have been purchased, but at that price; his own fate, and that of his three kingdoms, depends now on his own virtue.’
As Charles’s bravery and ingenuity were celebrated, he seemed the model of the perfect prince. Hyde wrote to Sir Edward Nicholas: ‘If the King be improved as much as is reported, all will have comfort in following him; if not, he is yet ripe for deliverance.’19
Suffering terribly from gout, Hyde set off to serve the king, who, he hoped, would no longer be deaf to his sound advice, and would be prepared to wait for the right moment to secure his throne, should that opportunity ever arise. Never again could he seek to gain the English throne with the help of foreign invaders. Hyde reached Paris at the very end of 1651, and was delighted to find that he seemed to have the young king’s complete trust. He joined a select royal council of four, which also included Wilmot.
Meanwhile Henrietta Maria lost influence as a result of the fiasco at Worcester. Charles had been encouraged by his mother and her Louvre group to undertake a risky venture, assisted by allies that his father had rejected out of hand. He had subsequently been humiliated by the Scots, trounced by Parliament, and forced to flee for his life from a victorious enemy. Having acted on his mother’s bad advice, it was easier to blame her than to accept that his impulsive and reckless advance south into England had set the seal on his fate.
At the end of 1651, Charles’s escape was the single bright spot in the gloomy Royalist firmament. Robert Jordan, governor of Richmond Island in New England, received from a friend in Plymouth, England, a pithy summary of the situation: ‘There is little news. The Scots are totally routed. Ireland almost subdued. Scilly, the Isle of Man, Jersey, all reduced except one castle in Jersey. The Scots’ King [is] in France, but little hopes to recover.’20
Two years later, in September 1653, the Earl of Loudon would look back and recall: ‘After the defeat at Worcester there was such a general despondence of spirit and faintness of heart seized on most of men, as there was no hope of doing any good for the King or Country from people in such a distemper.’21
When Charles returned to the court in exile, Lucy Walter hoped to re-establish her relationship with him. During his absence, not knowing if she would ever see him again, she had continued her reliance on wealthy lovers. These had included Henry Bennet, the future Earl of Arlington, and Theobald Taaffe, an Irish lord. One of these two, probably Taaffe, had fathered Lucy’s daughter Mary, who was born during Charles’s time away.
James II’s biographer recorded of Lucy that ‘she lived so loosely, that when [Charles] returned from his Escape at Worcester into France, and she also coming thither in hopes of continuing in her former post, his Majesty would have no further commerce with her, though she made use of all her little arts, with the help of friends, to reingratiate herself’.22 On 30 October he informed her that their relationship was over.
Lucy found this impossible to accept, and for the next four years she would be a loud embarrassment to the king in exile, claiming that she and Charles had married. But she weakened her credibility by being kept by other notable admirers, including Sir Henry de Vic, whom she considered marrying, and Thomas Howard, brother of the Earl of Suffolk.
In 1656 Charles tried to buy his way out of the problem, agreeing to pay Lucy a pension, and to give her a pearl necklace, on condition that she and her two children went to live in England. She agreed, and with one of her brothers and Thomas Howard, found lodgings in London. But her position became desperate when Howard left her, and Charles failed to pay her the promised pension.
At first, Parliament was suspicious of Lucy’s presence in London. Apart from her known association with Charles, she came from a Royalist background: Roch Castle, her Welsh birthplace, had stood against Parliament until its capture in 1644. Lucy was arrested, the lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke recording that ‘The officers found a grant, when she was apprehended, signed Charles R., by which she had an annuity, or yearly pension, of 5,000 livres, granted to her for life, with an assurance to better the same, when it should please God to restore him to his kingdoms.’23 She was kept in the Tower, and interrogated. But her captors were soon satisfied that she was neither a spy, nor any threat to the new regime at all. Her greatest use, it became clear, was as a continuing embarrassment to Charles. Cromwell had her dropped back across the North Sea, in Flanders.
Lucy returned to her protests, using Charles’s fathering of her son James as a bargaining chip. The king tried to abduct James in December 1657, but the attempt was botched. Three months later one of Charles’s spymasters succeeded in kidnapping the boy, allowing Charles to negotiate from this position of strength for custody of his son. In March 1658 the nine-year-old James was given as a tutor William Crofts, one of Charles’s favourites, and was moved to Paris. That was where Lucy – the beautiful courtesan, used by a succession of powerful men – died, in the autumn or winter of that same year. She was twenty-eight years old, destitute, and ravaged by venereal disease.
Before she died, Lucy gave a confession of her life to Dean John Cosin, a leading churchman who was chaplain to some of the royal family in exile. She claimed that she and Charles had indeed married, and that she had the proof. This was supposedly contained in a black box entrusted to Cosin, and passed to his son-in-law Sir Gilbert Gerard on Cosin’s death. If it ever existed, it has never come to light.
Sir Edward Hyde watched a series of false dawns come and go during the mid-1650s. In early 1656 Charles obtained a promise of support from Spain, provided English Royalists secured a port through which men and arms could be funnelled. The lessons of five years earlier were not lost on Hyde, who wrote: ‘If the King were to land tomorrow in England with as good an army as can be hoped for, he would be overpowered as he was at Worcester while men sit still and wait for the effect of the first battle.’24
It was the unexpected death of Oliver Cromwell, on 3 September 1658 (the seventh anniversary of the battle of Worcester), that kicked away the cornerstone of the Commonwealth. Eighteen months of increasing instability brought about what Hyde had always hoped for: the need of the English people to seek the return of a king, to settle the nation. But the decision to revert to royalty was uncertain for much of that time. In March 1660 a vote in Parliament rejected a return to Stuart rule in favour of a continuation of Commonwealth government.
Just two months later, though, matters had spun decisively in favour of restoration. In May 1660 Charles returned to England in triumph, his reception as tumultuous as any in the nation’s history. The last time he had been on English soil he had skulked in the shadows, desperate for any opportunity to flee to safety overseas. Now he was fêted as the great hope of a people who had become heartily disillusioned with their eleven-year experiment with a republic.
18
Rewards
Oct. 1651. The 14th day of this moneth King Charles the Second went from our towne out of Mr. Smiths house and was taken abroad by Nics: Tetersoale [&] carreyed by him to Fraunce, etc. And retorned [h]ome & landed at Dover againe the 29th of May 1660.
Adam Cartwright, town clerk, wr
iting in the parish register of Brighton
The Cavalier Parliament met for the first time in May 1661, and sat for nearly three-quarters of Charles II’s twenty-five-year reign. It became known as ‘the Pensioner Parliament’ because of the number of awards granted by the king to those who had supported him during his time waiting for the throne. As Colonel Gunter commented, when comparing the dire days of the autumn of 1651 with the subsequent prospects of rich prizes: ‘So few friends then had his Sacred Majesty in his distresses, now so numerous in expectation of reward.’1
Those who had any claim at all to compensation for their services or their loyalty to the Crown came forward. Among them were the truly worthy, such as Mary Graves, who had helped to supply the king’s army in Worcester during the run-up to the battle, and had also sent Charles two fine horses for his own use, and ten mounted fighting men for his army. After supporting a failed Royalist uprising in 1659 she had suffered the confiscation of all her property. She now sought £30,000 from the king.
George Paterick had served both Charles I and II in the army and the navy for sixteen years, and had consequently been imprisoned on several occasions by Parliament. A former waterman who ferried passengers across the Thames for a fee, he now asked for the honour of a place as an oarsman on the royal barge.
Katherine de Luke had suffered repeatedly and terribly for the Crown. She lost her husband to battlefield wounds, and a son to indentured slavery. After being caught smuggling secret letters she was sentenced to imprisonment, with the added punishment of a whipping every other day. She was tortured on various occasions, with lit matches applied to her body to try to get her to betray fellow Royalists.
To Catch a King Page 24