To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  Some other claims were, it has to be said, more tenuous. One man hoped for remuneration for having been in charge of Charles’s tennis shoes and ankle socks as a young man. A Robert Thomas expected reward for being the son of Charles’s childhood seamstress, even though she was dead. Another petitioner, Robert Chamberlain, trusted that the king would see fit to reward him because he was, he claimed, 110 years old. He seems to have confused the quality of loyalty with the luck of longevity.

  Elizabeth Elliot hoped for special treatment. She was the daughter of Christabella Wyndham, who had served as wet-nurse to Charles as a baby, and been his first lover when he was fourteen. Relying on her mother’s earlier role in the king’s life, Elizabeth referred to herself in her petition as ‘His Majesty’s foster sister’, and assured Charles that it was ‘the greatest happiness that could befall her, to suck the same breast with so great a monarch’.2 This was not to prove a strong enough bond for her to secure a rich reward.

  All those who were known to have helped the king on his famous escape were celebrated for their involvement in it. The new monarch wanted everyone to know about the adventure, and even planned to found an exalted new chivalric fellowship based on the most celebrated episode during his time as a fugitive: the Order of the Oak Tree. Meanwhile, 29 May, the day of Charles’s restoration, became Oak Apple Day, a public holiday that would serve as an annual celebration of the miraculous escape. With this desire to luxuriate in the tale came a necessity to reward its key players.

  Lord Wilmot did not live to see the Restoration. At the end of 1652 Charles had granted ‘his faithful and watchful attendant’, as Colonel Gunter would call him, the first peerage of his reign, making him the 1st Earl of Rochester.

  The new earl was sent on an embassy to the diet of the Holy Roman Empire at Regensburg, in Bavaria. Against the expectations of the demoralised court in exile, he managed to secure the promise of £68,000. When payment was delayed he circulated Germany, overseeing its collection with determination and charm. The money eventually raised by Rochester would pay Charles and his attendants’ expenses for three years.

  Less successful was a return to England in 1655, to instigate and oversee the northern part of a general Royalist rebellion, led by Colonel John Penruddock, whose other focus was in Salisbury. Cromwell’s spies were aware of Rochester’s presence from the moment he landed, but the Lord Protector chose to follow his progress closely, rather than seize the Royalist hero. This time Rochester did resort to disguises, one of them as a Frenchman with a blond wig. Another, which must have been more challenging for this caricature of a high-living Cavalier to carry off, had him dressing as a peasant farmer.

  Rochester spread the word of the impending uprising amongst Royalist sympathisers, meeting groups of them in bogus hunting parties. They were to meet at Marston Moor, scene of their crushing defeat eleven years earlier, and then march on York. Based on promises that had been made to him, Rochester counted on the support of 4,000 men, but only a tiny fraction of that number materialised at the appointed time and place, many having become confused about key details, including the date on which they were meant to muster.

  The result was, in a way, a repeat of Worcester, with cautious Englishmen remaining at home to see the outcome of the first encounter before venturing their lives in the king’s cause. When Rochester saw how few men had actually rallied, he decided to abandon the endeavour, and ordered everyone to stand down.

  On his way south afterwards he showed his customary disregard for his own safety, staying in a succession of inns rather than keeping off the beaten track, and even making a detour to inspect some of his wife’s property. His luck ran out when he was detained in Aylesbury, but he bribed his captor and got away to London. There he was on the point of being recaptured, but he was alerted to the danger by the regicide Colonel Hutchinson, and managed to ride on to Sussex, where he once again called on the assistance of Colonel George Gunter. This time Gunter and his old servant John Day were able to secure a small boat at Emsworth in Hampshire that took Rochester across the Channel to safety. He eventually reached Charles in Cologne.

  In 1656 Rochester led the English regiment that Charles had placed in Spanish service to fight the French, after France had allied with Cromwell’s England. Rochester was thus the first colonel of the Grenadier Guards, the senior infantry regiment of the British Army to this day.

  During the winter of 1657–58, conditions in camp were terrible. Rochester became ill, dying at Sluys in Flanders on 19 February 1658, at the age of forty-five, and was buried in Bruges. After the Restoration his body was moved to the family tombs in Spelsbury church, in Oxfordshire.

  His son John, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was born on 10 April 1647.* Addicted to women and wine, and famous for his lewdness and wit, young Lord Rochester became one of the more outrageous figures in Charles II’s hedonistic court. His verses included blatant digs at his partner in excess, Charles II. One reads:

  Here lies our sovereign Lord the King

  Whose word no man relies on.

  Who never said a foolish thing

  Nor ever did a wise one.

  Many of the other participants in the escape were still alive at Charles’s restoration, nine years after the escape from Worcester.

  Before the king left for Bristol disguised as Jane Lane’s servant, he promised to look after Father John Huddleston if he was ever restored to the throne. Some time after this Huddleston joined the Catholic order of the Benedictines of the Spanish Congregation. After the Restoration in 1660 he was invited to live at Somerset House in London, under the protection of Queen Henrietta Maria.

  In 1661 the General Chapter of the English Benedictines, held at Douai, elected Huddleston to the titular dignity of cathedral prior of Worcester, in recognition of his services to the Crown a decade earlier. After Henrietta Maria’s death in 1669 he was appointed chaplain to Queen Catherine, Charles II’s wife, with a salary of £100 a year and a pension of a further £100. On the accession of James II in 1685 Huddleston continued to stay with Queen Catherine at Somerset House. He died at the age of ninety, after a period of dementia.

  Charles had made a similar personal promise to the Penderels to reward them should he ever return to the throne. This was given when he thanked four of the brothers after they had safely delivered him to Lord Wilmot at Moseley Hall. It was immediately honoured. On 13 June 1660, when Charles had only been back in England two weeks, the five brothers and their mother Jane were summoned to come to see the king at Westminster. During this audience the family took great pleasure in reminding Charles of Humphrey’s line when leading his slow horse through the night from Boscobel House to Moseley Hall: ‘My liege, can you blame the horse to go heavily, when he has the weight of three kingdoms on his back?’

  ‘Trusty Richard’ received £200, to which a pension was later added, for him and his heirs in perpetuity. Richard died of a fever in February 1672, while visiting London. He was buried at St Giles-in-the-Fields, a church then on the outskirts of the capital, which had strong connections with Charles I and the Royalists.

  Elizabeth, the Penderel sister who was the widow of the Francis Yates who guided Charles II to Whiteladies, and who was later hanged at Oxford without revealing the king’s whereabouts, was given an annual pension of £50 ‘for her and her heirs forever’.

  Margaret, the Penderel sister who fed the king in Spring Coppice while the enemy was all around, was married to the Francis Yates who lent Charles ten shillings and helped to take him from Boscobel to Moseley. This Francis Yates knew immediately after the Restoration that he was dying, and it was noted ‘that the said Francis had lately died of grief, that he could not present himself to his Majesty’.3

  Another of the women from the family, Joan, the wife of William Penderel, had to wait for her reward for a key moment in the escape. The Calendar of State Papers records that on 10 July 1663 there was a warrant ‘for £100 for Joan Pendrel, the person who gathered sticks and diverted the horseman f
rom the oak His Majesty was in’.

  Humphrey, the fourth Penderel brother – the miller – lived till 1710. In 1673 he claimed that the pension he had been awarded was only being paid in part, and that he was consequently in debt. Seven years after that, Samuel Pepys noted that Humphrey was ‘still’ serving Queen Catherine as a footman in Somerset House.

  Major William Careless, having joined Charles in France after his own escape, returned to serve him in Flanders in 1656, fighting alongside other Royalist exiles, including Wilmot, in the English force that Charles put forward to fight the French. In May 1658 Charles marked Careless out for unique distinction, having the major change his name to ‘Carlos’, the Spanish version of the king’s Christian name. He also granted Carlos a coat of arms that would forever recall their most celebrated day together. The Letters Patent describe it as being ‘upon an oak proper, in a field or, a foss gules, charged with three royal crowns of the second, by the name of Carlos. And for his crest a civic crown, or oak garland, with a sword and sceptre crossed through it saltier-wise.’ This was a suitable honour for a man who, the king would inform the College of Arms, possessed ‘singular fidelity’ and ‘an ever generous heart’.

  After the Restoration Carlos was made the beneficiary of various petty taxes levied around London, involving horse feed and shipping supplies, and he received a pension as well. He was one of those who would have become a Knight of the Royal Oak, had that order come into being. He was buried near Boscobel House on Oak Apple Day, 1689.

  Once the story of Charles’s flight from Worcester became well known, the Boscobel oak became the most celebrated tree in England. It was a point of pilgrimage after 1660, with souvenir hunters pulling bits off it as relics of what was seen as a tale of divine intervention. Snuffboxes were made from it, and walking sticks carved from it. In 1680 a wall had to be built to protect it, but it could not be fully shielded, and by 1712 the oak was all but destroyed. Its acorns were harvested, and a descendant of the original tree thrived in much the same spot until it was badly damaged in a storm in 2000.

  Charles had got on very well with Anne, the widowed mother of Thomas Whitgreave, during his stay at Moseley Hall. On the Restoration he made sure she received the confiscated estate and house back in her name, something repeatedly denied to her during the years of Cromwell and the Commonwealth because of her family’s Royalism and Roman Catholicism.

  Francis Reynolds, one of the three boys tutored by Father Huddleston who had acted as lookouts at Moseley, was rewarded for having been ‘very serviceable in holding the king’s horses’ before he rode from Moseley to Bentley. Huddleston noted that Reynolds ‘received considerable kindness from the King since, by an office’ in the Royal Household,4 but he lost it during the enormous political instability in England in 1678, in the wake of the Popish Plot.

  This ‘plot’ was a fabrication put about by the Anglican priest Titus Oates, claiming that Roman Catholics were conspiring to kill Charles II. While this provoked a backlash against Catholics, Parliament voted that Major Carlos, Father Huddleston, Thomas Whitgreave, the Penderel family, and all the main Catholics involved in the king’s escape should ‘for their said service live as freely as any of the King’s Protestant subjects, without being liable to the penalties of any of the laws relating to Popish recusants’.

  Jane Lane had been a popular member of the court in exile since her arrival there at the end of 1651. John Evelyn would record proudly in his diary how he had met her: ‘Came to visit my wife Mrs Lane, the Lady who conveyed the King at his escape from Worcester to the seaside.’5 The dowager queen Henrietta Maria and Charles himself greatly enjoyed her lively company.

  In 1652, as Charles settled reluctantly back into a life of waiting – hoping – for a chance to reclaim his throne, he had found Jane a position in his sister Mary of Orange’s household in the Netherlands. That summer Jane wrote to Charles, saying that he had probably already forgotten her, while informing him that her elderly father, whose supposed grave illness had been so crucial during their travels, and her brother, Colonel John Lane, had been imprisoned by Parliament. Charles replied with playful affection, gratitude, and some concern:

  Mrs Lane,

  I did not think I should ever have begun a letter to you in chiding, but you give me so just cause by telling me your fear you are wearing out of my memory that I cannot choose but tell you I take it very unkindly that after all the obligations I have to you, ’tis possible for you to suspect I can ever be so wanting to myself as not to remember them on all occasions to your advantage, which I assure you, I shall and hope before long I shall have it in my power to give you testimonies of my kindness to you which I desire. I am very sorry to hear that your father and brother are in prison, but I hope it is of no other score than the general clapping of all persons who wish me well and I am the more sorry for it. Now it hath hindered you from coming along with my sister that I might have assured you myself how truly I am

  Your Most affectionate friend, For Mrs Lane,

  Charles R.

  Charles made good his promise eight years later. On his restoration to the throne he granted Jane £1,000 per year for life, and gave her a portrait of himself, as well as a gold watch and a lock of his hair. He also rewarded the Lane family as a whole, allowing them to incorporate the three lions of England into their coat of arms. Included in the design was the strawberry roan horse on which Charles had ridden to Bristol with Jane. It is seen carrying a crown, and the motto ‘Garde Le Roy’ – ‘Protect the king’. In the general celebration of Royalism that marked the return of the king to England, Parliament voted Jane a further £1,000, with which to buy a memento of her part in Charles’s escape.

  In December 1663 she married Sir Clement Fisher, who had hidden Lord Wilmot in his Warwickshire mansion when Wilmot had been on his way to join Jane and the king at Abbots Leigh. Sir Clement had other Royalist credentials, having been fined heavily for his service to the Crown. This loyal couple’s marriage was officiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. There would be no children. Jane lived an extravagant life, perhaps relying on the timely payment of her pension when it was, in reality, often delayed owing to hiccoughs in the royal finances. At her death in 1689 she left just £10.

  George Norton, Jane’s cousin, in whose home, Abbots Leigh, Charles had hidden till Ellen Norton’s miscarriage, was given a knighthood and a pension.

  Henry Lascelles, the cornet who accompanied Charles and Jane, died in or before 1662. On the back of her late brother’s service, his sister sought a place as laundress to the queen.

  The other woman to help Charles on his way on horseback, Juliana Coningsby, petitioned in 1665 for a pension that had been promised to her, and was eventually awarded £200 a year.

  Father Humphrey Henchman, so helpful in the final leg of the escape, was made the Bishop of Salisbury.

  Colonel George Gunter had died, in his late sixties, a year before the Restoration.

  His cousin, Captain Thomas Gunter, was made Clerk of the Crown for North Wales in 1661. He also received a bounty of £200 for his help in getting Charles away from Shoreham.

  Colonel Robert Phillips was arrested and committed to the Tower of London in 1653. He escaped and joined Charles in France. After the Restoration he was granted a pension of £500. A lawyer, he became an MP and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

  Colonel Francis Wyndham, of Trent in Somerset, had been imprisoned as a suspected rebel after Penruddock’s unsuccessful rising of 1655. At the Restoration the military ability of the brave defender of Dunster Castle was recognised when he was made a major in the Royal Horse Guards. His important part in the king’s escape was also acknowledged on 17 December 1660, when the speaker of the Commons thanked him on behalf of the House for ‘great and eminent service, whereby it pleased God to make you instrumental in the safeguard and preservation of his Majesty’s sacred person’. Wyndham was voted an annual pension of £1,000. He was also given a reward of £10,000 in 1670, and was creat
ed a baronet. As an MP he took particular interest in suppressing highwaymen. In 1675, when very ill indeed, he wrote from Bath: ‘I fear I shall not hereafter be capable to do His Majesty any further service than by my prayers for the long continuance of his prosperity and happiness.’ He died the following year, aged sixty-six, and was buried at Trent.

  Anne Wyndham, the colonel’s wife, was given a pension for life of £400, but its payment was delayed, and she only received it from 1667 onwards.

  Thomas Symonds, Charles’s well-oiled host at dinner in Hambledon, who had goaded the king for being a Roundhead, was rewarded at the Restoration with the fitting gift of a drinking cup.

  Francis Mançell, the French merchant, had been declared an outlaw by the Commonwealth and left penniless. After the Restoration he was granted a pension of £200. In 1667 he petitioned to have it honoured, since he had not received the money for four years.

  At the Restoration, the Surprise became a fifth-rate vessel in Charles II’s navy, and was renamed the Royal Escape. Her captain, Nicholas Tattersall, was given a pension of £100, a miniature of the king, and the rank of captain in the navy. This promotion was not a success, and he was subsequently dismissed. He died in the summer of 1674. On his tombstone was a fourteen-line verse that included a very full celebration of his part in the story:

  … In this cold clay he hath now taken up his station

  At once preserved ye church, ye Crown and Nation

  When Charles ye Great was nothing to a breath

  This valiant soul stepped between him and death …

  Which glorious act of his for Church and State

  Eight princes in one day did congratulate …6

  Lieutenant General David Leslie, Charles’s deputy in the Scottish invasion of England, who had held back his men from engaging at Worcester, and had then ridden north in the hope of escape, had spent the intervening eight and a half years in the Tower of London, where he took to drink.