King Charles II (22 page)

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.

‘King Charles the Second in the Oak near Boscobel, makes as Heroical Figure as in any Part of his Reign.’

A
fter Worcester there seemed very little hope for the survival of Charles
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as a free man. As one narrative ghoulishly described the situation, ‘The ashamed sun had blushed 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
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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.
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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
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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.