To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape. Charles Spencer

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СКАЧАТЬ the Continent, but three months later these hopes were dashed. Keen to get her and her brother away from London, ‘that they may not be the objects of respect, to draw the eyes and application of the people towards them’,7 Parliament ordered that Elizabeth and Henry be sent to live with the Earl and Countess of Leicester at Penshurst in Kent. Their hosts were under instruction not to acknowledge the duo’s royal blood. Their titles were not to be used, any special treatment was banned, and they were to eat with the Leicesters’ children.

      Elizabeth’s dignity in the wretched role of royal hostage impressed many. John Quarles, an exiled Royalist poet, dedicated Regale lectum miseriae, his lament for Charles I, ‘To that Patroness of Virtue and most illustrious Princess, Elizabeth, The sorrowful daughter to our late Martyr’d Sovereign, Charles, King of England’. Elizabeth was, to Quarles and many others, the embodiment of the continuing tragedy of the Stuart cause.

      On their brother Charles’s landing in Scotland in 1650, to assume the crown there, Elizabeth and her brother were removed to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. This was where their father had been kept secure by Parliament from November 1647 until September 1648, before his journey towards trial and execution in London. It was also as far from Scotland as could be: having the royal children cooped up there stopped them from becoming figureheads for any who might be planning a Royalist uprising in mainland England.

      Elizabeth pleaded that her health was too poor for her to be transported from Penshurst to the Isle of Wight, but Sir Anthony Mildmay, who had been part of the king’s trial, persuaded the Council of State, the nation’s chief executive body, that the security of the nation must come first. On being moved, Elizabeth’s delicate health deteriorated. She caught a cold, then consumption. That is the disease that she died of, in Carisbrooke Castle, on 8 September 1650.

      Two days later news reached the Isle of Wight that permission had finally been granted by Parliament for the princess and her younger brother to depart for the Netherlands, where they were to be handed over to the care of their older sister, Mary. Instead, Elizabeth’s next journey was to an unmarked grave, its whereabouts signalled by her initials, ‘E.S.’, on a nearby church wall.

      Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was told that his older sister had died of a broken heart, because of their brother Charles’s submission to the Scots’ extreme brand of Protestantism. The Royalists also used Elizabeth’s death for propaganda purposes, claiming that she breathed her last while her face nestled on a Bible that Charles I had given her at their final meeting.

      James, Duke of York, was taken into Parliamentary hands in June 1646, when the Royalist capital of Oxford fell to Parliament. He was forced to join his siblings, Elizabeth and Henry, in St James’s Palace, where he had been born and christened thirteen years earlier. His godparents had been the Queen of Bohemia, the Elector Palatine, and the Prince of Orange. The first two of these had lost their thrones, and the grandson of the third would one day depose James from his. But at the time of his birth the royal family of England was seemingly secure, as well as happily detached from the bloody wars that brought mayhem to swathes of Continental Europe for fifteen years before, and fifteen years after, James’s appearance in the world. Soon after his baptism James was given the title of Duke of York and Albany. Aged five, he was appointed lord high admiral of England’s expanding navy.

      By 1646, James’s life had been turned upside down. His father was militarily defeated, unsure of the future, but clinging to his belief that he was central to whatever settlement his war-ravaged kingdoms would reach. His siblings were either captive, fled overseas, or watching in despair from the foreign courts into which they had been married off.

      The three royal children confined to St James’s Palace were in the care of the 10th Earl of Northumberland, one of the grandest noblemen to stand against the Crown in the English Civil War. Northumberland was a kindly captor, whose own father had wondered what talents he might eventually reveal. The early evidence had not been promising: he had been a sickly child, with no great interest in anything.

      Northumberland had turned into a dutiful, dull, but principled man, who had been rewarded with many honours because of his high social standing, rather than through ability. Perhaps as a result, he developed a fanatical belief in the importance of hierarchy, particularly when it involved inherited rank. Sir Edward Hyde, Prince Charles’s key courtier, waspishly noted of the earl: ‘If he had thought the King as much above him as he thought himself above other considerable men, he would have been a good subject.’8

      Thanks to such an elevated sense of snobbery governing their captor, the princess and her brothers were treated with full reverence for their royal blood. Northumberland was meticulous about the details of their upbringing, and paid for part of its substantial expense out of his own pocket, since Parliament’s allowance was intentionally strict. He was aware that his prime responsibility was to keep his charges safely under Parliamentary control. This was never a side of his duties that he welcomed, but it had proved manageable when his royal prisoners had merely been two young children. The arrival of James, a youth who had been actively engaged in warfare for four years, was a different matter. Security had to be tightened. Northumberland dismissed all of James’s retinue, to the duke’s disgust and disappointment. He was particularly upset to lose the company of his favourite courtier, a dwarf.

      James, unburdened by humility at any stage of his life, was not an easy prisoner. When informed that his father the king had been taken prisoner, he was indignant, asking ‘how durst any rogues … use his father after that manner’.9 When one of those present at this outburst threatened to report his unguarded words to the Earl of Northumberland, James levelled his longbow at him, and might well have loosed off his arrow if he had not been quickly overpowered.

      King Charles had heard of plans by some in Parliament to bypass him and his eldest son, and to transfer the crown to James, who they hoped to turn into a puppet ruler. During his visits to his children, the king secretly urged James to do two things: as a guiding principle, to obey his elder brother; and, in the immediate future, to flee abroad. James agreed to his father’s instructions, but escape proved an extremely difficult proposition for an adolescent acting on his own. He was caught twice, at which point he was forced to give his word that he would never again try to get away.

      Princess Elizabeth encouraged her brother to continue in his attempts at freedom, telling him ‘that were she a boy she would not long remain a captive, however light or glittering might be the fetters that bound her’.10 Elizabeth has been credited with coming up with the ruse that led to James’s next escape attempt, but it was more likely the brainchild of an intriguing reprobate called Joseph Bampfield.

      Bampfield was a handsome charmer from the south-west of England who had been made colonel of a Royalist infantry regiment when only twenty years old. He had a reputation for resourcefulness, subterfuge and slipperiness, as well as a proven record in the art of escape. When he was made a prisoner of war, his enemies could only hold him briefly before he flitted to freedom. The king, who had used Bampfield’s talents as courier and spy during the Civil War, decided he was the best man to extricate his son from St James’s Palace, and then get him to safety overseas.

      The king wrote to the colonel, stressing the absolute importance to the future of the monarchy of getting the second in line to the throne out of Parliament’s control. He recognised that there would be great dangers along the way: ‘I believe it will be difficult, and if he miscarry in any attempt it will be the greatest affliction that can arrive to me,’ he conceded, ‘but I look upon James’s escape as Charles’s preservation, and nothing can content me more; therefore be careful what you do.’11

      Bampfield СКАЧАТЬ