8
While we were in this tree, we see soldiers going up and down, in the thicket of the wood, searching for persons escaped, we seeing them now and then peeping out of the wood.
Charles II’s memories, as shared with Samuel Pepys
Even after escaping from Worcester, Charles would not accept defeat. In the first few hundred yards of his flight from the city he kept halting his horse, pleading with his senior officers to turn with him and try to retrieve the day. But they had no time for the dangerous delusion of the young king. Recognising utter defeat for what it was, they told him to gallop away from the enemy as fast as he could.
Charles pulled up at Barbourne Bridge, less than a mile north of Worcester, and called for his attendants to gather round. He was just beginning to accept the calamity that had overtaken his army and his cause. That day had started with him as a reigning king, and commander-in-chief of a large army. It was ending with him in catastrophic crisis, his Scottish crown effectively lost in a few hours, his English one further from his grasp than ever.
He now found himself in the evening gloom, in countryside he barely knew, facing a journey across land whose inhabitants had rejected him when he had had a chance of victory, and who would certainly shun him now he was without hope. At this time of grave danger his main duty must be to obey the central instruction in his father’s letter from Hereford of six years earlier: he must keep himself alive. That could only be achieved through escape. But there was no point in simply fleeing – there needed to be a plan.
Convinced that all routes back to Scotland would soon be stopped by the enemy, Charles’s first thought was to race for London. He hoped somehow to arrive in the capital before news of his trouncing was heralded to the world. There he could lie low for a while, just one more person in a city whose population exceeded 350,000, before slipping overseas.
But when he proposed London as a goal, his courtiers and generals appeared not to hear him. Instead they continued an argument among themselves over the wisdom of an immediate retracing of the 200 or so miles back to Scotland. It was immediately clear to the king that the Royalist high command was dizzy with defeat.
Only one man heard his bold London plan with approval. This was Lord Wilmot, the high-spirited figure from his exiled mother’s court who had helped to facilitate the prince’s affair with Lucy Walter.
Henry Wilmot was, at thirty-eight years of age, already a military veteran, having fought for the Dutch as a young man in the Thirty Years War, and then against the Scots in the Bishops’ Wars. He had been among the first to swear allegiance to Charles I on the outbreak of civil war, and quickly rose to become one of his more effective generals. The king rewarded him with command of the cavalry, and the title of Lord Wilmot.*
Tough and hard-living, adored by his men but envied by some of his colleagues, Wilmot had been wounded three times in battle, and once in a duel. The king realised that his best chance of escape lay in pairing up with this unflappable adventurer, whose company he enjoyed, and whose calmness stood out in the general confusion.
Charles felt the consultation at Barbourne Bridge had gone on long enough. He needed to be on his way – as soon as Worcester was fully secured and pillaged, he was sure that the victors would move on to the business of gathering up the defeated. He turned to Lord Talbot, who had joined him just before the battle, and called on his local knowledge, asking him to point them all northwards. Talbot beckoned forward one of his men, Richard Walker, who had operated as a spy in the area, and told him to act as their guide.
They had not gone far when Major General Massey called out. The grapeshot wounds he had received six days earlier at Upton Bridge were causing him great pain, and he was unable to ride without support. Now the rattling speed of the king’s flight made his agony unbearable.
Knowing that he could not keep up with the required pace, Massey declared himself an intolerable handicap, and urged Charles to carry on without him. The king was seen to have tears running down his cheeks as he said, ‘Farewell, my dear and faithful friend – the Lord bless and preserve us both!’1 He then kicked his horse on into the darkness, compelled to leave Massey behind to his fate.
His instinct for self-preservation told the king he must shed the defeated rabble that was still clinging to his side. In a bid to have them scatter for safety, and leave him be, he was heard to shout, ‘Shift yourselves, gentlemen! Shift for yourselves!’2
Charles had managed to rid himself of most of his unneeded companions after passing Hartlebury, a village ten miles north of Worcester whose main feature was its thirteenth-century castle, which stood in ruins. It had been torn down by Parliament five years earlier, after its Royalist garrison surrendered to the New Model Army without a shot being fired.
As the fugitives spurred their horses on through the landscape of defeat, the focus of many of them never deviated from Scotland as the only possible sanctuary. The whereabouts of their king became a secondary consideration as they continued northwards. Charles was relieved to soon find himself accompanied by just sixty men, picking out side routes of increasing obscurity in order to avoid detection.
They had reached Kinver, nineteen miles north of Worcester, and seventeen miles west of Birmingham, when Walker, the guide, confessed that he was lost. Charles now realised how exhausted he was after a day of fighting, and announced to his companions that all he really craved was somewhere safe to rest for a few hours.
The Earl of Derby proposed Boscobel House, where he had hidden after his recent defeat at Wigan Lane, as a possible haven for the king. Derby listed Boscobel’s many attractions: it was tucked away in thick woodland; the people he had encountered there were very much to be trusted; and the owners were Roman Catholics who had built hiding places for their priests.
Roman Catholics had been persecuted during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Although England became a Protestant nation in 1559, anti-Catholic legislation had only grown later, as a result of fears for the Crown’s safety. It was given particular impetus by a localised uprising in the north of England in 1569, and in response to a plot to assassinate Elizabeth that was unearthed in 1586.
Catholic priests were liable to arrest for high treason. Those who harboured them were considered felons, and risked imprisonment. As a result, ‘Catholic houses’ such as Boscobel were accustomed to hiding not only their inhabitants’ religion, but also those who dispensed it. The king immediately understood that the Roman Catholics offered him a chance of safety: ‘I chose to trust them,’ he would later say, ‘because I knew they had hiding places for priests that I thought I might make use of in case of need.’3
Lord Talbot heard Derby and the king’s plan, and pointed out that, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, the owner of Boscobel House was among their number that night. He went to find him, and brought him forward to speak to the king.
Charles Giffard came from a family with a long history of royal service. His ancestor Gautier Giffard (the surname derived from the Norman French word for ‘chubby cheeks’) had been standard-bearer to William the Conqueror in the eleventh century – William had ridden to Giffard’s aid when he fell from his warhorse during the battle of Hastings. Six centuries on, the Giffards remained loyal to the Crown: a cousin, Andrew Giffard, had given his life fighting for the late king. Now Charles Giffard did not hesitate to offer Charles secluded Boscobel House as a hiding place.
Giffard introduced Charles to Francis Yates, one of ten armed men sent to fight at Worcester by Mary Graves, an ardent Royalist who had also supplied the king with the charger he had ridden in battle, as well as the horse he was riding now. Yates was a husbandman, a small farmer, who had been born in Brewood, near Boscobel House. Giffard commended him as the man to get Charles to the house quickly and safely, using little-known byways to avoid detection by the enemy.
Yates set the royal party on its new course, the first leg of which was due east from Kinver. After five miles they approached Stourbridge. This town, a little more than twenty miles north of Worcester, was known for its glassmaking, and French Protestant refugees formed a key part of its skilled workforce. The Royalists seem to have been aware of this Huguenot presence, for they agreed to speak French to one another while passing through the town. This ruse appears to have stopped them from being challenged as they went: they later discovered that Stourbridge had contained a detachment of enemy cavalry on the night they passed through, but it did not confront them.
There had been no time to eat during the day of intense fighting, and the Royalists were ravenous. They had ridden a mile north from Stourbridge when they stopped briefly outside a house and asked its hard-up inhabitants for food. They could only offer Charles a crust of bread and some beer. He consumed both in the saddle.
As they moved off again, Charles quizzed Colonel Roscarrock, who had recently hidden there with the Earl of Derby, about Boscobel House. Everything Roscarrock told him sounded encouraging.
It was while heading north for Boscobel – through Himley, Wombourne and Wrottesley Woods – that Charles learnt that 3,000 of his cavalry had been seen nearby. These were, for the most part, those Scots under Lieutenant General Leslie who had refused to join in the fighting at Worcester. Excited by this news, the royal entourage assumed that the king would rush to join with this force at once, and fight his way back to Scotland. But this was a notion, Charles would recall, ‘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.’
He rode on with the small party of soldiers, courtiers and servants that included Lord Wilmot, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Lauderdale, and his childhood friend the Duke of Buckingham. At some point during their ride, Yates decided to lead the king and his comrades not to Boscobel, but to another Giffard property that was even more promising as a hiding place.
Whiteladies stood half a mile further inside the dense woodland of Brewood Forest than Boscobel. The half-timbered property was so remote that its lands were used as a safe burial place for the many Roman Catholics who lived in the area. It stood among the ruined walls of an old Cistercian convent that Henry VIII had forcibly confiscated for profit. Local legend had it that when the last abbess had been pulled, screaming, from the doorway in 1536, she had vowed that her nuns would return one day. Nobody could have foreseen that a king, let alone one fleeing for his life, would get there first.
They reached Whiteladies at three o’clock in the morning of Thursday, 4 September, the day after the battle. They had ridden forty miles or so, but because of the period early on when they had lost their way, they were only twenty-six miles from the battlefield.
The varied occupants of Whiteladies were woken by the loud arrival of the fugitive band. Among them was Frances Cotton, a widow who was a Giffard by birth: her father, John Giffard of Chillington, had built nearby Boscobel House. She lived in the family wing of Whiteladies used by Charles Giffard and his wife when they visited.
In two other sections of the house lived Mistress Anne Edwards, Edward Martin, and a boy called Bartholomew Martin. Another inhabitant of this part of Whiteladies was William Walker, an elderly Roman Catholic priest. Walker secretly administered to the three households, and to the surrounding poor who practised his faith, sometimes with the assistance of colleagues in the area. Whiteladies’ straggling footprint was that of a small commune, rather than a conventional home.
The gate to the property was watched by George Penderel, one of Whiteladies’ servants. The youngest of five surviving brothers† whose loyalty to Charles would soon be tested to the full, he had fought for the late king at Stow-on-the-Wold, the last battle of the First Civil War.
Recognising Charles Giffard and Francis Yates (who was married to his sister Elizabeth), George opened the gate, asking the pair how the battle had gone. While he heard the first dismal reports of the great defeat, Charles and his entourage pushed past into the hallway, with the king’s fine horse being led in to join them inside.
The Royalists immediately set about assessing the options that lay before the king. As they did so, George warned that there was a Parliamentary force stationed just three miles from where they stood, in the village of Codsall. It was commanded by Colonel Ashenhurst, a veteran Roundhead.
Derby asked for George’s eldest brother, William, to be sent for from Boscobel House. It was William and his wife Joan who had hidden him and Roscarrock there, and tended their wounds, after the reverse at Wigan Lane. Derby had formed a high opinion of William during his time in his care, and invited him and George to join him and the king in a conference in a side room. Charles ate biscuits and drank sack (sweet sherry) while they talked. Introductions were to the point. ‘This is the king,’ Derby told the brothers. ‘Thou must have a care of him as thou didst me.’4 William and George must have been utterly amazed to meet the king under these circumstances, but they swore they would do all they could for him.
It was agreed that they needed to know what was happening in the immediate area of Whiteladies before committing the king to an escape plan. William asked George to visit the nearby village of Tong, to find out if any other Royalist fugitives were nearby, and to discover how close the pursuing enemy was.
George returned with the news that nobody from either army had yet been spotted nearby. He brought with him his and William’s middle brother Richard, the tenant of Hobbal Grange, a farm near Tong, where he lived with the brothers’ widowed mother Jane. Francis Yates used Richard’s nickname, ‘Trusty Richard’, when introducing him to the king.
The first priority was to disguise the extremely tall king with clothes that fitted. Given his uncommon height of six feet two inches, at a time when few men were taller than five foot six, the costume ended up being a composite drawn from the wardrobes of the various people to hand. Charles Giffard told the lankiest of the Penderel brothers, William, to bring his spare clothes to be tried on by the king. These were a tunic, breeches of a rough green cloth, and a deerskin leather jerkin, which replaced Charles’s buff coat, inset with rich bands of gold lace, and fine doublet. The Penderels gathered up the king’s cast-off attire, and later buried it in a safe place.
Young Bartholomew Martin produced a bristly hemp shirt, known in the local vernacular as a ‘hurden’ or ‘noggen shirt’. Humphrey Penderel, the second-youngest brother, who operated Whiteladies’ mill, provided Charles with suitably rustic headgear: a battered grey hat with a raised brim, of a sufficiently generous girth to cover the king’s broad head. Another man, William Creswell, offered up his very basic, but flimsy, shoes.
The king’s hairstyle was also worked on. Lord Wilmot started on it, but was making such a mess of lopping off Charles’s flowing Cavalier locks with a knife that Richard Penderel took over, wielding a pair of farmer’s shears with a skilled and practised hand. The king thanked him for doing such a fine job, and particularly for undoing Wilmot’s clumsy efforts. The haircut transformed Charles, giving him a simple peasant’s plainness. Charles wiped his hands in the coal dust at the back of the fireplace, and rubbed it onto his face as a final addition to his disguise. As one who witnessed the change later recorded, ‘Now his Majesty was à la mode the woodman.’5
It was time for the king to bid farewell to his entourage. He gave the gold coins from his purse to his servants, and Wilmot received his watch. He entrusted his prized blue ornamented sash and its accompanying jewellery, worn as a Knight of the Garter, to Colonel Thomas Blague.
Blague was a fervent supporter of the Crown who had served Charles I, and who named his eldest daughter Henrietta Maria, after his queen. He was also a famously ferocious soldier, who doubled as a royal courtier. Someone who witnessed the colonel’s cavalry troop caught in an enemy ambush remembered how he ‘behaved himself as manfully with his sword as any man did, slashing and beating so many fresh Rebels with such courage and dexterity’6 that his men were able to retreat with surprisingly few casualties. If anyone could protect the king’s most precious possessions in such bleak circumstances, and hopefully return them one day, it was Blague.
The Royalists departed reluctantly, deeply troubled that they were leaving their king alone in such danger. To do so was against their code. Realising that they themselves might soon be captured, they insisted that he keep whatever escape plans he might have to himself: none of them wanted to live with the infamy of being the man who betrayed his king, if captured and interrogated.
The Earl of Derby in particular wanted to stay by his master’s side, but was forced to accept that the presence of another well-known escapee alongside the king would increase the already great difficulty of smuggling Charles to safety.
These Royalists headed off to join Leslie and his 3,000 men, recently seen at nearby Tong Castle, on their trek to Scotland. Charles’s assessment that the spirits of the Scottish cavalry had been shattered was very soon proved correct: Leslie’s force was so jittery that it was scattered by the sight of a small detachment of Parliamentary militia under the command of Colonel Benjamin Blundell. The Royalist forces’ morale was broken, and it was, from this point on, a case of every man for himself.
Day was breaking on 4 September. It was the morning after the great defeat. The king had just said goodbye to all his familiar followers: Buckingham, who had shared his childhood; the loyal men who had followed him from the Netherlands to Scotland; and those who had joined him on the ill-fated march south. These men of note, who were his natural attendants and companions, knew they could offer him no help in his desperate situation. He would have to fend for himself for the first time in his life, relying on the area’s Roman Catholics’ expertise in concealing hunted men, and the resourcefulness and local knowledge of the humble Penderels.
Richard Penderel led Charles out of one of Whiteladies’ secret doors. The king was weighed down by a woodman’s bill, a heavy tool for cutting branches, which he carried unsteadily as he walked. They headed into the most remote part of Spring Coppice, a wood half a mile from Whiteladies, where the king was to hide from his pursuers.
Humphrey, George and William Penderel spread out across the neighbourhood, scouting for news so they could warn Charles and Richard of any approaching danger. The brothers were in a habitat they knew well. All of them lived in these woods, tending smallholdings, supported by grazing rights, while supplementing their subsistence farming with the chopping and guarding of timber.
While still within view of the road, Charles saw a troop of enemy cavalry ride by, mopping up men from his broken army. But the redcoats did not enter Spring Coppice. Charles believed this was because they were put off by heavy localised rainfall over that area of the forest.
A short time after Charles had set off, a detachment of Colonel Ashenhurst’s Parliamentary troops arrived at Whiteladies, and asked the occupants if they had seen the king or any other Royalist fugitives. People from the nearby village told them that a large body of the king’s men had ridden past three hours earlier. They said they thought Charles could well have been among them, but the Royalists had not stopped, so they could not be entirely sure. This information sent the Roundheads heading off in eager pursuit, Whiteladies soon well behind them. Everyone wanted the glory of capturing the king.
Charles lay low in the wood for many hours that day, as thick rain fell. He used the time to pick Richard’s brains. It quickly became clear that the idea of travelling to London was going to need to be reconsidered. Richard knew of a loose network of people loyal to the Crown, but it was limited to the surrounding area, and did not extend towards the capital. If he was to escape, the king accepted, he would need to modify his plan.
The country-dwellers protecting the king were soon under no illusion as to the softness of their royal charge. Charles would later recall that he spent the day without eating, in the wet. But others remembered that, because the rain was heavy and the king was in the open, they took special care of him.
The Francis Yates who had guided the king to Whiteladies had galloped off with the rest of the fleeing Cavaliers earlier that morning. There remained a second Francis Yates, who like his namesake had married one of the Penderel daughters, Margaret. The couple lived near Boscobel, at Langley Lawn. Margaret Yates arrived in the coppice carrying a blanket that she placed under a tree for Charles to sit on. She also brought him a black clay cup which contained a mixture of milk, eggs and sugar, and apples.
Margaret’s arrival was unexpected, and Charles was startled when he saw her approach. He asked her suspiciously, ‘Good woman, can you be faithful to a distressed Cavalier?’ She replied without hesitation, ‘Yes, sir, I will rather die than discover you.’ Delighted with this reply, the king used a pewter spoon to dig into the food she had brought with her. When he was full, he passed what remained to George Penderel to finish off.
The second Francis Yates realised that the woodman’s bill was too weighty an implement for the king to lug around. He swapped it for his broom hook, a lighter option for shoulders unaccustomed to manual labour.
Yates and the Penderels now set to work educating the king in the simple ways of the countryman: he needed to change his outward characteristics, particularly his tone and bearing, if he was to have a chance of remaining at large. He was first given the alias of ‘William Jones’, a travelling woodcutter. His protectors were pleased at the ease with which he picked up the Worcestershire accent. Charles was a good mimic, and had enjoyed trying out the various regional accents he had encountered on his march down from Scotland.
But it was his way of walking that was the real problem. A lifetime of being on show, of parading at court, and of ingrained haughty deportment, had to be exchanged for the unassuming gait of the simplest of country-dwellers. Charles found this part of his disguise extremely tricky to master, and even harder to remember. He kept falling back into his accustomed stride, which jarred terribly with his rustic appearance. Throughout his time with them his companions gave him repeated hushed reminders to walk like a peasant, not a prince. To fail in this, in front of a perceptive enemy, would render the rest of the masquerade useless.
Yet, despite his life depending on it, this was never a side of things that Charles could master for long – it went too much against his nature. A Royalist colonel who helped the king later in his escape attempt noted: ‘In very deed, the King had a hard task, so to carry himself in all things that he might be in nothing like himself, majesty being so natural unto him, that even when he said nothing, did nothing, his very looks (if a man observed) were enough to betray him.’7
With the road to London closed to him, Charles considered his options. He asked Richard for details about Royalists who could be relied on. When Richard mentioned an elderly Catholic Royalist friend of his called Francis Wolfe, who lived in the Shropshire town of Madeley, a few miles to the west of where they were, Charles felt that this could be a potential escape route.
Another twenty-five miles on from Wolfe, and they would arrive at the Welsh border. Wales had proved one of the most loyal areas to the Crown throughout the Civil Wars, providing its army with thousands of recruits. Because of his active engagement in the war, Charles had become acquainted with several influential Welshmen during the preceding turbulent decade. He hoped these men would help him if he arrived at their door in his state of dire need.
He also felt that heading towards Wales would be such an unlikely direction for him to have chosen that it would outfox his pursuers. Surely their attention would be taken up with blocking all roads leading north to Scotland. If he could cross the River Severn and then proceed to Swansea or another busy Welsh port, his plan was to find a ship and cross to France or Spain.
In the late afternoon of Thursday, 4 September, Charles went with Richard, Humphrey and George Penderel, and the second Francis Yates, from Whiteladies to Richard Penderel’s house at Hobbal Grange. They arrived there around five o’clock. The king delighted Richard and his wife Mary by the charming ease with which he played with their small daughter Nan (a pet name for Anne), dandling her on his knee as they prepared him a bacon and egg fricassee. After eating alone for a while, Charles again invited Richard to join him. ‘Sir, I will,’ Richard said. ‘You have a better stomach than I,’ the king teased, ‘for you have eaten five times today already.’8
After dinner, Jane Penderel appeared. The brothers’ widowed mother was plainly mystified as to why her family had been chosen to help the king at this dark time, but she thanked God for the great honour bestowed upon them, and gave her blessing to the distinguished guest.
Francis Yates offered the king thirty silver shillings to help fund him while he was on the run, but Charles took just ten. The assembled family group took their leave of the king on their knees, kissing his hand, expressing loyal good wishes for his escape, and calling on God to protect him. He and Richard then set off into the fading evening light, for Wales.
* When his father died in 1644, Wilmot succeeded to his Irish title as Viscount Wilmot of Athlone.
† A sixth Penderel brother, Thomas, seems to have been killed at the battle of Edgehill in 1642.