The Castle Hill, to the immediate south-west of Worcester, had a fort on it. Close and to the south-east lay the so-called Fort Royal (now a tasteful municipal park), whose top put an observer on a level with the cathedral itself. Perry Wood and Nunney Wood were situated beyond the Fort Royal. Bunns Hill lay roughly between the two high points, with Cromwell stationed below it. There the King could see the bridge of boats being towed up the Severn by Fleetwood, with the men milling around over it. Further away still, his own Scots, under Sir William Keith, guarded the Powick Bridge; they were determined to hold it valiantly.
It was the sight of the boats which inspired the King to his next move. Cromwell with most of his cavalry had crossed the Severn in support of Fleetwood. Determined as he was not to sit down under the certainty of defeat, the King concluded that this departure must have considerably weakened the main Commonwealth force to the south-east. He therefore ordered his own men to charge immediately out of the Sidbury Gate and attack them. And he himself promptly joined in the fray.
At first this brave essay was successful. The Royalists, covered by their own artillery, attacked up hill, and for three hours conducted themselves with an unparalleled energy and venom. Their King was there with them, on foot, fighting at their side, cheering them on. Once their meagre ammunition was exhausted, they still went on at push of pike, butting with their muskets where they were too closely engaged to use pikes. It was here that the gallant Duke of Hamilton fell, mortally wounded.fn3 Some of the enemy’s artillery was captured, and for a brief moment their troops fell back.
It has been proposed that, if the Scottish infantry south-west of the city had been supported at this juncture, victory might have been grasped. When Leslie was created Baron Newark after the Restoration, there was someone with a long enough memory to observe that he should have been hanged instead.23 It is possible that Leslie failed to order support out of a general malaise, product of the dejection which had overcome him since his defeat at Dunbar. His subsequent behaviour at Worcester demonstrates that he was in no mood to believe victory possible and thus seize an unexpected initiative. Nevertheless, one cannot genuinely believe that the King had a chance at this stage, Leslie or no Leslie. The Parliamentary forces were superior in every respect – and numerically by this point nearly tripled those of the King.
As it was, Cromwell, when he took in what was happening outside the Sidbury Gate, immediately recrossed the Severn. The Commonwealth counter-attack was all too potent. It was with the greatest difficulty that the King, amongst others, got back to the Sidbury Gate at all: Charles had to crawl through the wheels of an upturned wagon. The oxen which had been pulling it lay dead in his path.
The loss of Fort Royal was disastrous. Now the Scots’ own guns could be turned upon them with impunity; and Fleetwood was fast approaching the city from the west. Chaos outside the various gates of Worcester grew apace. And inside the city too doubts were mounting as to how long the city itself could be held. The Scots, let it never be forgotten, were far from home. At some point Leslie’s nerve certainly collapsed: he was glimpsed in the mêlée ‘as one amazed or seeking to fly he knew not whither’.24
One man however who kept his head and his courage to the last was the King. There were many tributes to Charles’ valour on that dreadful ‘black and white day’, as a contemporary narrative called it, when the King’s men were ‘ravished at Worcester by numerous overpowering force’.fn4 A nameless Royalist officer, subsequently imprisoned at Chester, described him charging again and yet again: ‘Certainly a braver Prince never lived, having in the day of the fight hazarded his person much more than any officer of his army, riding from regiment to regiment.’ Charles was able to call every officer by name, and if God Himself had not preserved him, so the account ended, ‘he must in all human reason needs have perished that day’.26
Once having beaten his way back into the city via the Sidbury Gate, the King stripped off his armour. To his disgust, he saw that some of the soldiers in the city streets were already throwing down their arms. Calling for a fresh horse, he rode amongst them, urging, pleading and commanding them to stand and fight.
‘I had rather you would shoot me!’ he cried. ‘Rather than let me live to see the consequences of this day.’
It was too late. The cavalry were finished. ‘Neither threats nor entreaty’ would persuade them to make a fresh charge. Charles could not even get them to shut the gates of the city.27
Even so, it was not until several hours later, hours spent in vicious hand-to-hand fighting in blood-soaked streets whose gutters ran red with slaughter, that the King himself even contemplated escape. Afterwards, Cromwell, a man who did not exaggerate, described the Battle of Worcester to Parliament as ‘as stiff a contest as ever I have seen’. Much of the vigour of the last resistance came at the initiative of the King himself.
All the evidence, both of his courage and of his carelessness of his own safety, indicates that the King was prepared to perish in the attempt. He told the Scottish soldiers cheerfully in high summer that he had only one life to lose. Now that the day was turning so heavily against him, and the last throw was failing, he might even have welcomed death. Both his brothers were safe in Europe. The succession would not end with him.
It was towards dusk, when over two thousand of his own men – compared to two hundred odd of the enemy – had been killed, that Charles at last consented to listen to the advice of those who wanted him to withdraw. The exact details of his escape from the town are obscure, partly because the King himself omitted them from the account of his flight which he gave to Pepys – no doubt they merged into the general confused horror of the day. We know that Charles left by St Martin’s Gate, to the north of the city. Possibly he paid a last visit to his lodging before he went, leaving by the back door and narrowly missing the Parliamentary commander who was searching for him at the front. Such at any rate is the legend.
But if he had been prepared to lay down his life earlier in the struggle, Charles was now quite clear where the duty of a sovereign lay. He must escape. A dead king might be a martyr, a captive king would be a pawn.
Nine thousand of the Scots had already been taken. The rest of the roaming, hopeless men were easily harvested.
Worcester itself, like the surviving Royalists, had to wait for the Restoration for its reward, a Latin motto: Civitas in Bello in Pace Fidelis – A City Faithful in War and Peace. The petitions of those who had helped Charles on the day would also be numerous and poignant. (Although another point of view was put by an account at the Guildhall: ‘Paid for pitch and resin to perfume the hall after the Scots – 2s’.)28
The Royalist cause was in ruins.
It remained only to scoop up the person of the fugitive King.
1 Somehow King Charles II managed to pass on his own dislike of Scotland to generation after generation. He ordered the refurbishment of Holyrood Palace but never went to inspect the results. No reigning monarch visited Scotland again until 1822 – a gap of nearly two hundred years. Since the reign of Queen Victoria, of course, the royal family of Great Britain have more than atoned for this neglect.
2 Still to be inspected today, but now converted into a restaurant.
3 This expatriate Scot was buried under the high altar of the cathedral, where he lies to this day.
4 We may discount the usual sneer from Bishop Burnet, who was not of course an eye-witness of the battle and wrote many years afterwards. Extreme courage is the verdict of all those present – with the exception of Buckingham.25 But then Buckingham was still gravely displeased at being denied command.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Heroical Figure
‘King Charles the Second in the Oak near Boscobel, makes as Heroical Figure as in any Part of his Reign.’
John Oldmixon, History of England, 1731
After Worcester there seemed very little hope for the survival of Charles II as a free man. As one narrative ghoulishly described the situation, ‘The ashamed sun had bl
ushed in his setting and plunged his affrighted head into the depths of the luckless Severn, and the night, ready to stain and spot her guilty sables with loyal blood, was attiring herself for the tragedy.’1 It seemed that the King’s fortune was at its nadir. By our judgement, he was about to enter his finest hour.
To most people ever since, the amazing tale of his escape is one that does not diminish with time, nor with constant repetition – the only exceptions were the courtiers of Charles II who grew bored with the King’s recital of his adventures. Nevertheless it is a truly extraordinary story; and the yawns of the complacent wits after the Restoration do them less honour than the King’s conduct at the time did him. ‘Read on and wonder,’ wrote Thomas Blount in his introduction to Boscobel, published in 1660, one of the most accurate of the early accounts.fn1
It was only natural that the King himself should feel a nostalgic middle-aged affection for this ‘History of Wonders’. He was aware that in the forty days following Worcester he had been stripped of the last vestiges of his kingly prerogatives. His character, not his office, was tested in the crucible. His first dictation of the story was to Pepys on board the royal yacht as it approached the shores of England on the eve of the miraculous Restoration; later he elaborated it, so that the version in which Pepys finally handed it down to us dates from a session at Newmarket races in 1680. He also commissioned one of his favourite artists, Robert Streater, to paint two of his obscure refuges as a practical record of his experiences.
There are of course many other sources for the order and detail of events – some of them slightly contradictory, as is ever the case with synoptic accounts, from the Gospels downwards.fn2 But Pepys had preserved the King’s own view of his tribulations. It gains importance as a unique piece of self-revelation coming from an otherwise secretive man.2
From the accounts of all the survivors, Charles emerges as a paladin. The combination of resource, intelligence and sheer courage which he showed fully justifies the verdict of John Oldmixon in his early eighteenth-century history of the Stuarts: ‘King Charles the Second in the Oak near Boscobel, makes as Heroical Figure as in any Part of his Reign.’3
As the King vanished through the northern gate of Worcester, on that tragic night of 3 September, he was attended by only a few gentlemen. But they included some of the most notable figures in his entourage – the egregious Buckingham, the powerful Earl of Derby and the Scottish Lauderdale, less recognizable in England but an equally desirable prize for the Commonwealth to capture.
In fact, the royal party soon found themselves quite lost in the darkness. They knew that they were somewhere north of Worcester – but that was about all, since the trooper who was supposed to know the district proved alarmingly ignorant. It was at this point that Lord Derby suggested that the King should continue to head north and try to hide out in the Brewood Forest. He also mentioned the name Boscobel – a name shortly to become associated above all others with the saga of the King’s escape, but up till now the highly obscure possession of the moderately obscure family of Giffard. Derby was however in a position to recommend Boscobel, since he had hidden there himself after the disastrous rout at Wigan: he knew the people living there to be kind, hospitable and, above all, loyal.
They were also Catholics. The position of Catholics in England at this date was both melancholy and irksome. Officially, their religion was forbidden: those who did not attend Church of England services were termed recusants and heavily fined. Their priests in particular were in danger of death if apprehended. During the Civil War the Catholics had suffered from the assumption that they must inevitably be supporters of the King. Over sequestration, for example, a Catholic had to prove that he was not a monarchist; whereas an ordinary citizen had to have guilt proved against him. Yet, except where a magnate such as the Marquess of Winchester acted as a focus, the Catholics were more concerned to preserve the practice of their precious religion in private than to take any part whatsoever in organized resistance.4 Bitter experience had taught them that they inevitably lost in such a situation.
Nevertheless, a sort of Catholic underground continued to exist, which handed the forbidden priests from hiding-place to hiding-place. It was an odd chance which brought King Charles II in touch with this underground while on the run himself. This secret world was so very different from the kind of Catholicism which Charles had known before – the foreign confessors of his mother, the French, Spanish and even Irish Catholics of the Continent. He discovered for himself that the English Catholics were then (as now) a very special breed in whom national loyalty was far from being extinct. In time he would wish to act upon this knowledge.
For the present however it was more a case of what the Catholics could do for their King. It transpired that Charles Giffard, the owner of the Boscobel estate, was actually amongst the little body of gentlemen still with the King. Giffard recommended not Boscobel itself (which was let to a Catholic family of yeoman farmers named Penderel) but another house close to it, Whiteladies, so-called because it was the site of a former Cistercian priory.fn3 This safe house was reckoned to be about fifteen miles further. The decision was taken to press on there, and although the exact route taken is uncertain because of the general confusion of the journey, it is known that the royal party passed through Kidderminster. And they decided to speak French while passing Stourbridge, to avoid detection – a somewhat odd notion. For, if they had been overheard, the question of what a party of French soldiers were doing late at night in a remote corner of the West Midlands must inevitably have arisen.
The King reached Whiteladies at dawn. There is now little to be seen of the pleasant house of moderate size where he was welcomed except grass, ruins, and, appropriately enough, a few upturned Catholic gravestones. Even today it is difficult to find: in the seventeenth century Whiteladies was exceptionally isolated. That alone made it a welcome refuge for the exhausted Royalists. It had been a long – and appalling – twenty-four hours since the King saw the day break over Worcester.
Revived with some much-needed bread and cheese, the King quickly resolved that he needed to get rid of two things which were encumbering him. The first was his well-publicized clothing. He had taken off his George on first entering, and given it to a member of his party, Colonel Blague. (The George would enjoy adventures almost as strange as its owner’s, being buried under a heap of refuse, and finally smuggled out to France by the faithful Colonel.) Now the King emptied his pockets of gold and gave it to the servants. It was off with the buff coat and the red sash, in which he had vainly tried to rally the men at Worcester. The plan was for Charles to disguise himself in country clothes belonging to William Penderel, who was the tallest brother – a green jerkin, grey cloth breeches, leather doublet and greasy soft hat. ‘And now his majesty was à la mode the woodman.’
The King’s only remaining possessions were his socks, and those had their embroidered tops torn off. The trouble was that the new woodman – whose name was to be Will Jones – had enormous feet, to scale with his height, and even the pair of shoes found for him, torn in bits to give more room, chafed and rubbed his feet almost intolerably. On his subsequent journeys Charles’ only real moment of despair came over the agonies of his footwear.fn4 It was much less of a sacrifice to have his famous thick black love-locks shorn. Afterwards the King instructed that all his own clothes should be flung ‘into a privy-house’ to prevent the risk of discovery.
The second potentially dangerous encumbrance of which Charles decided to rid himself was his entourage. He must survive, and he would only survive alone. He was quite clear about this in his own account to Pepys. Nor would he consider trying to join Leslie and his men, rumoured to be close at hand and making for Scotland: ‘which I thought was absolutely impossible, knowing very well that the country would all rise upon us, and that men who had deserted me when they were in good order, would never stand to me when they have been beaten’.
One of the King’s attendants was Lord Wilmot, later created
Earl of Rochester (and father of that dissolute Earl who would cut a swathe through the Restoration court). Wilmot was a man of considerable style – he refused to disguise himself during the escape, saying ‘he should look frightfully in it’, a point of view which compels one’s admiration and irritation in equal parts. The only concession he eventually made was to wear a hawk on his wrist, a gentlemanly form of disguise.
Nevertheless, Wilmot, presumably because he was a much less conspicuous figure than the rest of the lords, was the only one entrusted with the King’s secret decision. He would head for London, rather than the Welsh ports or Scotland; this would be all the safer for being unexpected.
The King agreed with Wilmot on an address where they might meet there. The secrecy was made easier by the fact that the other lords, far from pressing for information, begged not to be told, ‘because they knew not what they might be forced to confess’. Indeed, very shortly afterwards nearly all the lords except Buckingham were captured. The Duke, born under a lucky star, made his way to France. But Derby was condemned to death, on the grounds that, being an Englishman, he had acted as a traitor by joining the Scots; Lauderdale, for being a foreigner and knowing no better, was let off with imprisonment.
Meanwhile the sun was up. The house was no longer safe from search. The King stole out of Whiteladies by the back door and took refuge in a nearby wood, the Spring Coppice. John Penderel went off to find a more secure hiding-place, depositing Lord Wilmot at Brinsford. Penderel’s search was fruitless, but it was on the way back, by an extremely lucky chance, that he met someone whom he recognized as the chaplain in secret attendance on another local Catholic gentleman, Thomas Whitgreave of Moseley Old Hall. This was Father John Huddleston. Penderel tested the temperature of the water. Would Whitgreave be prepared to harbour the fugitive King? The answer was encouraging, although it is an indication of the isolation of this particular piece of country that Huddleston actually thought the King had gained the day at Worcester until Penderel disillusioned him.