In later life Charles II became something of a bore on the subject of his military campaign of 1650–51 and his subsequent escape from England. Whenever he had the chance he regaled company with anecdotes about the dreadful behaviour of his Scottish hosts, the reasons for his lost battles and his hairsbreadth deliverances from enemy patrols. The fact that he had been able to cock a snook at the regime that had put a price on his head enabled him to look back on his kingdom’s rejection of him as some kind of victory. The reality was that he tried his hand at political negotiation and military leadership and, not entirely because of his own shortcomings, he failed.
What was important for his own development – and therefore the development of British monarchy – was that he once again came into close contact with ordinary men and women to whom he owed his safety and, probably, his life. Unlike any monarch before him, Charles possessed the common touch. The only possible exception was Elizabeth, who also came to the throne after a period of personal insecurity and suffering during which she had come to appreciate the loyalty of servants who aided her with little prospect of reward. But her much publicised love for her people was, in some measure, a carefully developed political ploy. She understood the needs of the commonalty and was careful to identify with them in her public utterances. But such moving set pieces were definitely de haut en bas. She developed, or allowed her councillors to develop, around her the Gloriana aura. The concept of being at one with her people – married to them – and at the same time an object of distant adoration was unique and never to be repeated. Charles absorbed the common idiom into himself and was happy in the company of those without money or power. He seldom stood on ceremony and had no desire to make his court a rarefied domain set somewhere between earth and heaven, after the pattern of his father’s. If there was any political calculation behind all this it was that he believed his people would warm to him if they felt he was one of them. Elizabeth never allowed familiarity to breed contempt. The same could not be said of Charles.
The terms offered by the Scots to Charles at Breda were clear, uncompromising and humiliating: he would be recognised as King of Scotland if he accepted Presbyterian church order, rejected the aid of Irish Catholics and all political and religious moderates and signed the Covenant to this effect. The extremists, led by Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll, wanted to glue the Crown firmly to their own cause, against other Scottish factions, against England and against all non-Calvinist Europe. In return they were prepared to make no substantial concessions, not even pledging their assistance in helping Charles recover his English throne. Argyll hoped to enhance his personal position and bind the king even more tightly to his cause by marrying his own daughter to Charles.
The more staid royal councillors advised strongly against this total capitulation. Even Henrietta Maria realised that her son was contemplating too high a price for his return to real power. But for Charles and the young bloods who, for reasons of principle and personal advancement, were eager for the king’s restoration this was the only game in town. The choice lay between accepting the role of puppet king at the hands of a Scottish aristocratic faction or continuing a shadow existence living on the charity of foreign princes and wealthy royalist exiles. The one ace that Charles had in his very poor hand was that, however reluctant Argyll and his friends might be to go to war with the neighbouring Protestant state, recognising the Stuart claim would lead inevitably to conflict.
The king may have thought that much of what he had signed up to was, if not mere formality, at least something from whose rigours time and opportunism would deliver him. His hosts were quick to disabuse him of any such hope. The sombre Presbyterian clergy and their allies were determined that Charles should live up to the solemn promises he had made. They intended that he should be a beacon of righteousness, a leader converted from his earlier licentious ways to blaze forth as a shining protector of the true faith. It was an attitude the king’s father would have understood even if he rejected the theology behind it. The Covenanters were fully aware of the mammoth task before them and so, from the moment in mid-June that Charles arrived in Scotland, they undertook his education and reformation. They debarred all his frivolous companions except Buckingham (a strange concession) from waiting upon him and carefully monitored his activities.
They placed other servants of all conditions about the king but principally relied upon their clergy, who were in such a continual attendance about him that he was never free from their importunities, under pretence of instructing him in religion: and so they obliged him to their constant hours of their long prayers and made him observe the Sundays with more rigour than the Jews accustomed to do; and reprehended him very sharply if he smiled on those days and if his looks and gestures did not please them, whilst all their prayers and sermons, at which he was compelled to be present, were libels and bitter invectives against all the actions of his father, the idolatry of his mother and his own malignity.69
To all outward appearances Charles had the trappings of kingship. He was well attended. He dined in state. He was provided with good horses for travelling and hunting. ‘The king’s condition seemed wonderfully advanced and his being possessed of a kingdom without a rival, in which there was no appearance of an enemy, looked like an earnest for the recovery of the other two.’70 The inner reality was that Charles not only presided over a court devoid of gaiety but that he also lacked any political power. The parliament in Edinburgh took all the important decisions and did not even trouble to inform him of their agenda. He was, to all intents and purposes, a prisoner. The result was to cast him into an uncharacteristic melancholy. He was permitted no gambling and no dancing. He was obliged to be agreeable to his hosts and also diplomatically to stall over the issue of his possible marriage to Lady Anne Campbell. But what he found hardest to bear, as he afterwards affirmed, was the absence of female company. Months of enforced celibacy imposed an enormous strain on a red-blooded male in his sexual prime who had but recently enjoyed the ministrations of a delectable mistress and been developing his own venereal techniques in the company of emotionally immature roistering companions who regarded wenching as normal behaviour, in a society which was free and easy. No wonder that, in October 1650, he made an abortive attempt to escape from his gilded confinement at Perth. He managed to put a mere forty miles between himself and his ‘hosts’ before being tracked down in a wretched hovel. The effort was spirited but it only reinforced the unwelcome fact that no subjects were ready to rush to his aid in defiance of the Covenanter leaders.
The real angel of his deliverance was his family’s arch-enemy, Oliver Cromwell. Fresh from the subjugation of Ireland, the general had been sent north at the end of the summer to face the new threat. Of all his campaigns this was the one he embarked upon most unwillingly. He loathed the thought of fighting fellow Protestant zealots and tried all the arts of diplomacy and persuasion to avoid a bloody outcome. His plea to the bigoted kirk leaders has become his most oft-quoted statement: ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’71 But such detached self-analysis was beyond the Covenanter leaders and their obduracy paved the way for what many claim to be Cromwell’s greatest tactical victory. Exhausted by long marches over a wasted country, his force had fallen back on Dunbar where they were confronted by an army twice the size of their own. David Leslie, the Scottish commander, had expected the English to fight a defensive action while trying to get as many of their men as possible away by ship but, before dawn on 3 September, Cromwell had launched a surprise frontal attack on the besiegers. The Scots were routed and 10,000 were taken prisoner.
In the ensuing atmosphere of confusion and mutual recrimination the unity of Charles’ hosts disintegrated and he was, for the first time, able to take his place as one of the leading players in the game. He set himself to prise Argyll, royalists and religious moderates away from the extremist kirk party and form an army under his own leadership which would cross the border and advance on London, being swelled as it went by bands of his English supporters. He would be further assisted by troops sent over by his brother-in-law. Such was the plan. It was flawed from the start. On 6 November 1650, the twenty-four-year-old William of Orange died of smallpox. His widow was immediately engulfed in acrimonious debate with the States-General about the regency of her infant son. No help would be forthcoming from that quarter. Recruitment in the Highlands went quite well, but while Charles could find many clansmen ready to support the establishment of a strong Scottish monarchy, discovering any who were prepared to invade England was another matter altogether. Argyll’s support was based on self-interest. Charles managed to string him along by sending an emissary to Paris to consult with his mother over the proposed marriage but when the marquis realised that nothing was likely to come of this and that the king only wanted his backing for a campaign in England he withdrew his support.
As Charles went about during the first half of 1651 to assemble a motley army and put heart in them he seemed to be in his element. He had broken out of the prison house of Calvinist righteousness. He had turned his back upon canting pietists and was back in the world of men of action. He rode before his troops on a fine horse, wearing a buff jerkin proudly displaying the Garter insignia as his father had done. In several places the local populace turned out to cheer him enthusiastically. It was true that Cromwell held Edinburgh and the surrounding Lowlands but he was still reluctant to resort to a pitched battle and, in any case, had been seriously ill throughout much of the winter. The king had the encouragement of being joined by a few detachments of English royalists and news reached him of landowners south of the border who were ready to support him. There was much to encourage him but he was sufficiently canny by now not to be carried away by brave displays of loyalty. About the Scots he wrote, ‘the truth is, they seek themselves and their own interests too much to be a solid aid, or to be totally relied upon’.72 The royal host did not swell as much as he had hoped. Nor was he universally popular. While brave and adventurous spirits rallied to his standard, inspired by pipe and drum and by his regal person, the more religious citizenry could not bring themselves to give wholehearted support to a man whose morals were not above reproach and who was known to consort with Catholics. There was more than one alarming report of plots to hand the king over to his enemies. Charles might conclude, as a result of his experiences of the sober kirkmen, that ‘Presbyterianism is not for gentlemen’, but the earnest Calvinists just as openly believed that Charles Stuart was no Christian king.
It was partly due to divisions among the king’s generals that his army made no definite move before midsummer. This allowed a recovered Cromwell to grasp the initiative. At the beginning of July he crossed the Firth of Forth, came between the contingents commanded by Charles and Leslie and moved on Perth, where Charles had his headquarters. The king rode out of the town the day before Cromwell entered it and joined up with his general. Leslie, a veteran of the Civil Wars who had earlier served under the great Gustavus Adolphus, now counselled facing the English in battle on ground of the king’s choosing. Charles ignored this advice. He saw, or thought he saw, a now-or-never opportunity to strike into England. He would head southwards, outrun Cromwell and link up with his expected English reinforcements. Mournfully, David Leslie yielded to the king’s orders.
As soon as the army crossed the Esk, Charles was in a Catch-22 situation. Without the Presbyterian Scots, the invasion would not have been possible. With them, it could not succeed. When they were some days into the march, Charles came alongside his commander, asking why, riding at the head of such an impressive body of men, he looked so glum. Leslie replied in the king’s ear that ‘he well knew that [the] army, how well soever it looked, would not fight’.73 It was true enough: with every mile away from their homeland the Scots became more restless. The detachments of eager English royalists did not materialise. The noblemen and gentlemen of the northern shires resented Charles’ taking of the Covenant and had no intention of placing themselves under the command of a Scottish general. The king’s army was harried repeatedly by parliamentary forces and had to abandon the plan of a direct march on London. As if all this were not bad enough, Charles’ officers were afflicted by that disease which seemed to infect all royalist military endeavours: bitter rivalry. At one stage Buckingham pointed out to the king that the English captains resented taking orders from Leslie and that, therefore, Charles should appoint Buckingham himself to replace the Scottish general. To his credit, Charles did not give in to his favourite’s demand. At first he tried to shrug off the suggestion but when the duke pressed him further Charles told him straight that he was too young and inexperienced for such a responsibility. Buckingham sulked for days.
In two weeks of rapid marches the royal army made its way down the western side of the country, arriving, weary and dispirited, in Worcester on 22 August 1651. It was a good place to recoup and to take up a defensive stance. It had been the royalist headquarters in the West from 1642 to 1646 and had capitulated only after a two-month siege. Yet the defenders must have understood before many days had passed that their position was desperate. Attempts at recruitment had produced disappointing results and Charles’ garrison numbered no more than 13–14,000 men. In a few brief skirmishes around the country bands of royalists had been easily routed and Cromwell had the leisure to assemble a besieging force of 30,000 with which to invest the city. However unpopular republican government might be with many Englishmen, few were sufficiently motivated to take up arms against it. They had had their fill of civil war and desired only that their menfolk would now be free to stay at home, tend their fields and shops and care for their families.
The main government assault came on 3 September, the anniversary of the battle of Dunbar. A two-pronged attack from the south-west and southeast in the late afternoon forced the front-line royal forces back within the walls but there was no immediate, unspirited capitulation. Watching from the cathedral tower and seeing that Cromwell had weakened his own force to go to the aid of Colonel Charles Fleetwood, forcing his way across the Teme, the king ordered an attack on the main government lines. But this successful manoeuvre only delayed the inevitable. Even as enemy troops fought their way up to the city gates in the gathering gloom of evening, Charles refused to concede. Contemporary accounts acknowledge his personal courage and commitment:
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, and leading them on upon service with all the encouragements (calling every officer by his name) which the example and exhortation of a magnanimous general could afford.74
Only when all the exits from the city except St Martin’s Gate were in enemy hands did the king make his escape.
Throughout the next forty-two days he was on the run. The details of Charles’ adventures during those days rapidly became the stuff of legend. What Hyde referred to as a ‘miraculous deliverance in which there might be seen so many visible impressions of the immediate hand of God’ was first blazoned in broadsheets and popular ballads. These fanciful accounts more than made up in dramatic incident what they lacked in accuracy. After the Restoration a Catholic lawyer, Thomas Blount, wrote an account but it was rejected by the king and subsequently disavowed by its author. Charles preferred to record his own version and dictated it to Samuel Pepys. This narrative remained in manuscript for over a century. The king, having left for posterity an accurate account of the events of 1651, did not sanction its publication. While he was prepared to bore the pants off his courtiers with his anecdotes, he declined to give them wider circulation. In the same way he abandoned earlier plans to establish an exclusive Order of the Royal Oak for those who had played a part in his deliverance. Gratitude and self-advertisement, it seems, gave way to prudence. The restored king deliberately discouraged displays of triumphalism which might have bestowed on party feeling an unwelcome longevity. This, however, did not prevent some of the people who had aided the king in his wanderings from going into print with their own stories. Hyde, who was usually so careful about his sources and had access to the king and other leading players in the drama of the great escape, notoriously got this part of his narrative very muddled. Eventually, it was left to Sir Walter Scott and the romanticists and antiquarians of the nineteenth century to create the fully rounded myth of a monarch, ‘brought in contact, man to man, with the humblest of his subjects, in situations calculated to draw forth the good qualities, and show the undisguised feelings of both parties’, and one who ‘bears his part manfully amid the dangers and perplexities occasioned by his sojourn, and even sets the example of decision and presence of mind to his preservers’.75
The romance of Charles II’s post-Worcester meanderings lay in their later recollection and recounting rather than their on-the-spot reality. Within the space of a few months the king had exchanged the humiliation of a supplicant, itinerant princeling for the joyless conditions imposed by religious bigots, followed by the sense of failure attendant upon an inglorious military campaign. Now, to fill the cup of his woes, he was obliged to skulk about England, with a £1,000 price on his head, fearing daily betrayal and totally dependent on subjects who risked their life for him and whom he was in no position to reward. Living on humble fare, dressed as a servant, sleeping in verminous beds and putting other people’s lives at risk were not experiences he enjoyed.
With a handful of companions, Charles rode through the night into Shropshire where, the party having split up, he found temporary refuge with members of the Penderel family. These well-to-do Catholic yeomen rented a house at Boscobel which had been built by a recusant ancestor and contained several priest-holes. For four days the weary fugitive was concealed here, either curling his long limbs into the cramped secret compartments in the house or perched among the soaking foliage of the celebrated Boscobel oak. Here, he exchanged his own clothes for a woodsman’s garb and had his hair cropped.
Despite all these precautions, it is unlikely that he could have long avoided capture by relying on his own wits and the native cunning of his humble hosts. He was a royal personage and had never been without advisers and attendants to oversee the details of his daily existence. He needed someone to plan an escape route and to put that plan into operation. The man who fulfilled this role was Henry Wilmot. He remained in the vicinity, seeking out safe lodgings for the king and trying to discover a means of conveying him to the coast where he might find a ship to carry him to the continent. But not for the proud Wilmot the discomforts of hiding-holes or the indignity of coarse artisan’s clothes. He stayed with friends or put up at comfortable inns. He refused to wear a disguise and he was often to be seen riding with his falcon on his wrist. But he was active among his contacts in the area and it was he who arranged the longest leg of the king’s escape route.
Somehow Charles had to be conveyed down the Severn to a point where he could be smuggled aboard a ship, but the river and bridges were closely watched so the journey would have to be made by road, past enemy garrisons and checkpoints. Wilmot confided his problem to a dedicated royalist, Colonel John Lane, who lived at Bentley Hall, near Wolverhampton. He had staying with him his unmarried sister, Jane, and she was in possession of a permit to travel to Abbot’s Leigh, near Bristol, to visit her pregnant friend, Mrs Norton. Wilmot devised a plan which would cost him dear: the sacrifice of his own dignity. He would accompany Jane in the guise of her servant in order to find a captain prepared to undertake the risky business. In the event, Wilmot’s amour propre was protected. A sudden crisis enforced a change of plan. Government hounds were on the king’s scent and it would be unsafe for him to remain several days in the area waiting on Wilmot’s negotiations. Thus, it was Charles who arrived under cover of darkness at Bentley Hall to be transformed into William Jackson, the Lanes’ retainer. Before dawn he was supplied with appropriate raiment and given a crash course in how to comport himself as a servant. Then, he helped his ‘mistress’ on to her horse before himself mounting the saddle in front of her and setting off on the long journey to safety. The plan was as clever as it was bold. No one would expect a woman to expose herself to such danger nor the king to humiliate himself by dancing attendance on a woman.
The following week brought many alarums and excursions. Near Stratford the travellers encountered a troop of horse, and two of Jane’s companions fearfully turned aside. But the lady and her man rode on as calmly as they could and attracted no attention. On an occasion when they were staying at the house of some friends of Jane, Charles was sitting with the servants in the kitchen. The cook asked him to wind the roasting jack, a request which flummoxed him completely. All he could think of to cover his ignorance was to claim that his poor family rarely enjoyed the luxury of meat and that when they did they never used a jack to turn the spit. When they arrived at Abbot’s Leigh, one of the Norton servants recognised Charles because he had once been employed in the royal court. He had to be taken into the secret. In order to avoid further discovery William Jackson took to his bed, ostensibly suffering from a fever. But the most unpleasant shock was the one brought by Henry Wilmot, who had travelled by another route and spied out the situation at Bristol dock. He reported that the port was closely watched and that there was no chance of obtaining a berth for Charles, whatever disguise he might put on. It seemed that the journey had been in vain.
The plan was now to convey the king to some smaller haven on the south coast. For this new stage of the expedition more trustworthy friends would have to be found. Fortunately, there lived at Trent, near Sherborne, a member of a family that had served the Stuarts ardently in peace and war. Colonel Francis Wyndham was the brother of Sir Edmund Wyndham and Charles had complete faith in his loyalty. So it was decided that William Jackson and his mistress should ride to Trent to pay their respects. But now a sad – and inconvenient – occurrence threatened to throw a spanner in the works. Mrs Norton, that same night, suffered a miscarriage. How could Jane Lane possibly leave her seriously ill friend, who now needed her more than ever? But how could her servant make a sudden and unexplained departure without her? With government troops patrolling the area and spies everywhere, each day the king spent at Abbot’s Leigh increased his danger. There had to be another drastic change of plan.
It seems to have been Charles himself who suggested a solution. Jane was to be seen to receive a message that her father was gravely ill and that she was needed urgently at home. She and her servant would then make an abrupt departure, apparently for the North but in reality for Trent. The proposal seems callous and self-interested. It is only partly excused by the knowledge that natal complications were extremely frequent in the seventeenth century. Among the higher orders of society 75 per cent of first marriages which came to an end within ten years did so because of the death of the wife, and most of those deaths were connected with childbirth. Everyone at Abbot’s Leigh seems to have agreed that the king’s safety was more important than the nursing of Mrs Norton back to health. Thus, on 16 September, Jane and her servant set out for Trent and arrived there the next day. Having been prepared by Wilmot for their surprise guest, the Wyndhams welcomed him and pledged themselves to his safety. And Jane made her way back to Bentley.
But her association with the king was by no means at an end. Within weeks it was the turn of Jane and her brother to adopt disguises and flee for their very lives. Rumours were running round the countryside about the king making his escape as a lady’s manservant and Colonel Lane thought it prudent to get his sister away to safety before snooping government agents arrived to interrogate her. Had the Lanes been unmasked, they would have faced charges of high treason, with their appalling attendant penalty. Dressed as peasants the two of them walked all the way to the coast, were conveyed to the Isle of Wight and, in early December, obtained passage across the Channel from Yarmouth. They sent word to Paris of their arrival and immediately set out for the queen mother’s court. Charles and Henrietta Maria hastened from the city to meet the Lanes on the road and to greet them with that warmth that was no more than their due. Jane and her brother thus swelled the ranks of dispossessed royalists who had given up everything for the cause they believed in and expected some recompense at the hands of the Stuart exiles. After a while John Lane thought it would be safe to return home where he was needed by his aged father. Unfortunately, he misjudged the persistence of England’s new rulers. In 1655 the family at Bentley Hall were interrogated and both men were thrown into prison, though for how long we do not know. Thousands of men had risked their lives for the king and many had died on the field of battle or in captivity but few women had placed themselves in the same category by aiding the escape of the government’s arch-enemy and thus provoking the wrath of the new regime. Charles recognised his obligation to the woman he called his ‘life’ and, as far as was in his power, he honoured it. Jane was feted at the French court and then escorted to the Hague, where she entered the service of Princess Mary.
There, to all intents and purposes, the story of Charles Stuart and Jane Lane is generally considered to end. There exist only a few scraps of later correspondence and evidence of the king’s generous remembrance of his rescuer and her family after the Restoration and chroniclers have been happy to take at face value the simple account of a loyal subject risking life and fortune for a king who, as soon as he was able, gratefully rewarded her. But is that all there was to it? Knowledge of Charles’ character and the motivations of other individuals who clustered round him suggest that there may have been more to this relationship. There are also a couple of other facts which sit uneasily with the received version of events.
It would be fascinating to know what passed between Jane and her ‘man’ in those long, anxious hours on the road from Bentley to Trent. They faced a common danger and were in close physical proximity, Jane actually clinging to her companion as she rode behind him. Charles, who felt keenly his fifteen-month deprivation of female company, found himself in an emotionally charged situation with a spirited young woman who was obviously devoted to him. Jane, for her part, was alone with her king and actively involved in saving his life. What hopes, dreams, fantasies that might have awakened in her, especially if the two at some point became lovers. Leaving this possibility aside for the moment, we need to look more closely at the master/servant relationship and its implications in the mid-seventeenth century. Charles had to consent to being ‘bossed about’ by his ‘mistress’. Whenever strangers were around Jane would have spoken to him curtly, given him orders and, possibly, let him feel the sharp edge of her tongue when he got things wrong. And Charles enjoyed the masquerade. He had always been surrounded by strong-minded women and he adored them. Submission to dominant females was a fixture of his psyche, to the increasing despair of his advisers over the years.
It was something that ran counter to the divine order of things for men to be under the power of women. The word ‘mistress’ has many nuances but at its root is the idea of a woman who exercises rule, control, influence or guidance. It was by provoking sexual desire that young beauties most obviously exerted power over their admirers – a sovereignty that contemporary poets both celebrated and resented.
In losing me, proud nymph, you lose
The humblest slave your beauty knows;
In losing you, I but throw down
A cruel tyrant from her throne.
So wrote Sir Charles Sedley when he had been given the brush-off, and other rhymesters, as we shall see, could be much more bitter about the lovers who held them in thrall. But, in common parlance ‘mistress’ more normally implied control of a household or business establishment. Women could also be a dominant influence in the lives of their menfolk by means of family connections or strength of personality or intellect. The presence of powerful women made most men nervous and it was particularly worrying when female companions appeared to be influencing kings. We shall see what vicious satires and libels were written about Charles’ mistresses in later years. After the Restoration the account of the king’s escape disguised as a woman’s body servant was suppressed. The same nervousness about acknowledging female power over the king surfaced in early ballads about Charles’ escape. In the song ‘The Last News from France’ quoted at the beginning of this section of the book, the ‘heroine’ who aided Charles’ escape is not Jane Lane but a royalist gentleman in drag. Many supporters of the Stuart cause would probably not have relished the idea that the words ‘the king himself did wait on me’ related to a real woman.
But did the relationship between Charles and Jane go beyond that of an amusing and arousing role reversal and did it reach the point at which Jane might feel she had a special place in the king’s affection and a strong hold over him? A tantalising sentence in the journal of a brilliant young scholar who spent the winter of 1651–2 in Paris suggests that we might need to examine the relationship more closely. John Finch was the twenty-five-year-old son of Lord Finch, one of the most hated of royal justices, who had fled into exile as early as 1640. John, a graduate from both English universities, was on his way to Padua to study medicine and stayed for several months, presumably with his father, who was high in favour with Henrietta Maria. On 4 March he recorded, ‘Mrs Lane came to Paris and is called the King’s mistress.’76 Finch may have been noting mere gossip, based on nothing more than the warmth of the reception Jane always received from the Stuarts. On the other hand, he did have entrée to the court and knew what was being discussed by those closest to the king. What the medical student’s eleven words underline is the intimate nature of the relationship between Charles and Jane. Perhaps he also had the evidence of his own eyes. It is not difficult to read the body language of couples in love.
Then there is the evidence of the correspondence. That Charles wrote to Jane at all is an indication of his affection, for he was always a reluctant correspbndent. Yet, throughout the years of exile he was frequently in touch with her. They met whenever Jane attended his sister on visits to the king’s court and in the intervals they maintained written contact. In November 1652 he excused his earlier lack of response to her letters:
I have hitherto deferred writing to you in hope to be able to send you somewhat else besides a letter and I believe it troubles me more that I cannot yet do it than it does you … [when my fortunes improve] you shall be sure to receive a share, for it is impossible I can ever forget the great debt I owe you, which I hope I shall live to pay in a degree that is worthy of me. In the meantime I am sure all who love me will be very kind to you, else I shall never think them so to your most affectionate friend.fn1
Charles R77
Mistress Lane did at other times complain of neglect but Charles was swift to reassure her:
I did not think it necessary I should ever have begun a letter to you in chiding, but you give me so just cause by telling me you fear you are wearing out of my memory, that I cannot choose but tell you I take it very unkindly that after 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 occasion to your advantage. Which I assure you I shall, and hope before it be long I shall have it in power to give you those testimonies of my kindness to you which I desire.
Jane had passed on the distressing news that her aged father and her brother, who had returned to England, had been arrested and thrown into prison. Charles sympathised and added, ‘I am the more sorry for it since it hath hindered you from coming along with my sister [to Cologne], that I might have assured you myself how truly I am, your most affectionate friend, Charles R.’78
Between the lines of another letter we read something even more surprising which has never been picked up by historians and biographers: Charles and Jane discussed important political matters and she offered him confidential advice on affairs which his ministers and attendants would have considered to be none of women’s business. We know this because she became indignant when it appeared that the king had betrayed her trust, something he was at pains to deny:
… for that which Mr Boswell is pleased to tell you concerning your giving me good counsel in a letter and my making it public in my bed chamber, is not the first lie that he has made, nor will be the last, for I am certain there was never anything spoken in the bed chamber in my hearing to any such purpose, nor, I am confident, when I was not there … Your cousin will let you know that I have given orders for my picture for you and if in this or in anything else I can show the sense I have of that I owe you, pray let me know it and it shall be done by
Your most assured and constant friend,
Charles R.79
This relationship had become so close that Jane felt at liberty to discuss matters of moment with the king. This is precisely the kind of contact that Charles’ councillors complained of with regard to royal mistresses and it would seem that Boswell and other close attendants of the king found it risible or even objectionable that Jane should offer her sovereign ‘good counsel’.
Now we come to the king’s treatment of the Lanes after 1660. Charles was true to his word in rewarding Jane and her brother but the extent of his bounty was remarkable. Like others who had aided the king’s escape, Jane was awarded by parliament a standard payment of £1,000 to buy herself a commemorative jewel. But Charles added to this out of his personal income a pension of £ 1,000 p.a. which was enough for her to set herself up in considerable style. He also gave her a gold watch with the request that it be passed down the female side of the family as a permanent reminder of Jane’s services. Other ad hoc payments were made over the years and Jane also received further mementoes which were long cherished by her descendants. This was the way Charles habitually behaved towards lovers and ex-lovers, for whom he felt a particular kind of obligation. Jane’s rewards bear no comparison to the profusion lavished on established post-Restoration mistresses but they are on a par with the gifts the king made to other women who had shared his bed.
John Lane also benefited hugely from a grateful king. He received £500 a year, £1,000 marriage portions for each of his daughters and a later grant of £2,000. Even more remarkably, when he died, the government paid for a funeral monument to be erected in St Peter’s church, Wolverhampton. But this relatively humble country gentleman was also offered another singular mark of royal favour, and one usually associated with the families of royal mistresses. Charles proposed to raise John Lane to the peerage. John declined the honour and we are left asking ourselves ‘Why?’ It may have been a becoming modesty or Lane may have felt that he lacked the means to sustain such a position in society. But was there more to it? Did he think that acceptance would be an open acknowledgement of his sister’s shame?
We have one more piece of evidence to consider and it is the most intriguing of all. After the Restoration Jane commissioned a portrait of herself. In it she was depicted as holding the royal crown with a veil over it. The symbolism is obvious: it depicts her as hiding the king from his enemies. But, in the picture’s top left-hand corner she had painted a scroll with a Latin legend upon it – and its meaning is far from obvious to the casual observer. The words are sic sic iuvat ire sub umbra and they are an almost precise quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid. In translation they read, ‘thus, thus it pleases me to go into the shadows’.
Is this the humble affirmation of a loyal servant who, having played her part in the king’s preservation, was thereafter content to retire into obscurity? Her correspondence with Charles during the 1650s suggests otherwise. Then it was Jane who took initiatives to keep the relationship alive. Knowing Charles well enough to realise that out of sight could well mean out of mind, she obviously feared that, once he had made provision for her in his sister’s household, he might forget her. She was determined not to let that happen. After what they had shared, she was not going to let Charles avoid his obligations. But what had they shared?
Here we have to seek Virgil’s help. The words Jane chose to quote from the Aeneid come at the dramatic climax of the story of Dido and Aeneas. The Trojan hero arrives in Carthage where Queen Dido falls passionately in love with him. She begs him to stay and share her throne but he secretly makes plans to sail away. She discovers his perfidy and, failing to dissuade him, stabs herself and has her body placed on a funeral pyre. Her final words express her own resignation but also her curse upon her inconstant lover. As she twice plunges the knife into her breast she exclaims, ‘Thus, thus it pleases me to go into the shadows [of death]. Let the cruel Trojan’s eyes drink in these flames from over the ocean and let him take with him the ill omen of my death.’
It is inconceivable that Jane did not know the context of the words she quoted and that, knowing it, it did not have meaning for her. Dido’s dying words are the complaint of a woman who has fallen in love with a wandering prince and been betrayed by him. Aeneas, like Charles, travelled on in search of a crown. When Charles found his crown he quickly married and busied himself with another mistress. He did not summon Jane to court. He merely paid her off handsomely. Did she expect more? Did she believe she deserved more? The behaviour of Jane and her brother suggests that their pride at having been of service to the Stuart cause was richly mingled with resentment.
Jane’s after-story reveals a woman who, like the king’s resident mistresses, loved luxury and took a pride in living up to her income (hence her occasional need of royal subsidies). She married Sir Clement Fisher, a Warwickshire neighbour who had also been involved in the king’s escape. By him she had no children and made a point of leaving no fortune when she died in 1689. She is reputed to have told her friends that ‘her hands should be her executors’. It was an attitude Charles would have approved of.
Now we resume the story of the king’s escape from the point of his arrival at Trent. It was written by Francis Wyndham soon after the Restoration and presented to the king. He secreted it for twenty years and only permitted Anne Wyndham, the colonel’s widow, to publish it in 1681. It is not difficult to see why Charles suppressed the offering in the early days of the reign when the country was by no means united in rejoicing at his return. Wyndham did not mince his words:
… the Almighty so closely covered the king with the wing of his protection, and so clouded the understanding of his cruel enemies, that the most piercing eye of malice could not see, nor the most barbarously bloody hand offer violence to his sacred person; God smiting his pursuers (as once he did the Sodomites) with blindness, who with as much eagerness sought to sacrifice the Lord’s anointed to their fury, as the other did to prostitute the angels to their lusts.80
The author was at pains to pay back the Bible-bashing Puritans in their own coin and those who considered themselves the chosen instruments of God’s wrath against the lascivious and heretical Stuarts would not have appreciated being likened to the unnatural inhabitants of the cities of the plain who were punished for their lusts. Charles, on the other hand, had a country to run and peace to establish throughout the land. The last thing he needed was inflammatory narratives that harked back to the past and kept alive old divisions.
But there was another reason for the compilation of this tract. We would expect that the Wyndham narrative would present the family in the best possible light but in a throwaway sentence the author reveals another motive: ‘The reproaches and scandals by which some envious persons have sought to diminish and vilify the faithful services which the colonel, out of the integrity of his soul, performed unto his majesty shall not be mentioned.’81 The Restoration court was a crowded arena of thrusting, trampling, elbowing royalist clans desperately competing for places close to the king. Everyone wanted to prove that they had served the Stuarts valiantly in battle or during the years of exile and that their neighbours’ claims were spurious. Wyndham’s tract has to be seen against this background of bickering. The fact that emerges clearly from it once the obscuring heroics have been cleared away is that the Wyndhams failed in their efforts to smuggle Charles out of the country.
The masquerading which was a marked feature of the king’s journey through the shires took on a more elaborate nature at Trent. Wyndham rode to Charmouth, near Lyme Regis, under the assumed name of Captain Norris to seek out some coastal vessel whose owner would take a group of passengers across the Channel. The party was supposed to consist of an eloping couple and their attendants. Wilmot was to be the ardent lover, Wyndham’s kinswoman, Juliana Coningsby, his trembling bride and Charles the groom in charge of their horses. A loyal shipman called Limbry was located and admitted to the secret. He agreed to assist the king and it was arranged that the party should wait at the Queen’s Arms until summoned to go aboard during the night. The escapees were comfortably lodged and they waited. Hours passed and their anxiety rose. When day broke with no sign of Limbry the king and his guardians sped away to Bridport. What had gone wrong? According to Limbry (or according to Wyndham) the mariner’s wife, suspicious that her husband had been hired by fleeing royalists, was petrified of his bringing down the government’s wrath upon them and so locked him in his bedroom. It reads like a very slender excuse and the truth may have been that, on mature reflection, Limbry himself had decided not to risk his own life in order to save the king’s. That, of course, would not have served the propaganda purpose of the tract, which wished to create a picture of a nation of devoted royal supporters of all classes ready to stand together against the republican tyranny.
The next incident presents the king in the guise of a seventeenth-century Scarlet Pimpernel. Still posing as a groom, he was in the stable yard of the George Inn at Bridport when a group of soldiers came in. Charles calmly entered into their conversation and cunningly extracted from them the government plans for the invasion of the Channel Islands. The king and Wilmot next went by a roundabout route back to Trent, but not before they had spent another anxiety-ridden night sharing the hospitality of a small village inn with a troop of billeted cavalrymen.
Charles remained for another fortnight as guest of Francis and Anne Wyndham while Wilmot spied out alternative routes to safety. This part of the narrative is fleshed out with anecdotes of the perturbations and sufferings of various members of the family as bands of soldiers, acting on the advice of spies and informers, scoured the countryside. Sir Hugh Wyndham (whose loyalty had been called in question at Barnstaple) was represented as having suffered the indignity of a thorough search of his house at Pilsdon, near Bridport: ‘They took the old baronet, his lady, daughters and whole family, and set a guard upon them in the hall, whilst they examine every corner, not sparing either trunk or box. Then taking a particular view of their prisoners, they seize a lovely young lady, saying she was the king disguised in woman’s apparel’, and took great pleasure in putting their theory to the test.82
Charles was anxious to be on the move but enquiries through the royalist grapevine produced only the mournful assessment that there was little chance of reaching any of the Dorset or Hampshire havens undetected. The king’s restlessness grew by the day, so when a Colonel Phelips of Salisbury reported that he might be able to arrange a passage from some point further along the coast, he grabbed the opportunity to move on. Anne Wyndham informs us that her husband begged to be allowed to accompany his royal master but that Charles very firmly refused the offer on the grounds that ‘it was no way necessary and might prove inconvenient’. On 6 October he took a warm farewell of the Trent family but one gets the distinct impression that he was not all that sorry to be leaving them. Accompanied by Wilmot and a succession of local gentlemen who knew the country, he travelled eastwards along the line of the present A303, having exchanged his menial’s attire for clothes befitting a gentleman of modest means. Skirting Salisbury, he came by byways to Brighton on the 14th. His latest guardian had arranged with a merchant to transport out of the country a group of young bloods who were in trouble for duelling. In the small hours of Wednesday, 15 October 1651 the king went aboard a brig in Shoreham harbour. The following day he landed at Fecamp. The name of his ship was the Surprise. In 1660 he gave permission for it to be rechristened the Royal Escape.
fn1 ‘Friend’ was a word he often used for ladies who were certainly more than that.