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

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СКАЧАТЬ a secret meeting between the young duke and his would-be rescuer. By way of credentials Bampfield showed James the letter of instruction he had received from the king. He told James that the escape plan would involve the wearing of a disguise, and measured the boy’s height and waist with a ribbon.

      James was thrilled at the prospect of possible freedom, and readily obeyed the colonel’s directions. These involved his joining his little sister and brother in games of hide and seek in St James’s Palace each evening after dinner throughout the following week. There needed to be carved out from James’s day an apparently innocent sliver where his absence did not immediately raise suspicion. The children’s games provided that cover.

      The household, including its guards, quickly became used to James’s skill at hiding. Consequently, when on the night of 20 April 1648 the duke could not readily be found, nobody thought much of it. It was assumed that he would be discovered somewhere nearby soon enough, as he had been on the previous six evenings.

      But this time, James had made a break for it. After tricking a gardener into lending him a key, he had dined with his younger sister and his little brother before challenging them to their nightly entertainment. Now it was that he went down a staircase to a gate that gave access to the surrounding parkland, triple-locking it behind him with the key he had sweet-talked the trusting gardener into giving him.

      Bampfield was waiting on the other side. He wrapped a cloak around the boy, and put a wig on his head, before whisking him away in a coach that carried them to a waiting boat. This was rowed towards a house near the Tower of London where the colonel’s lover, Anne Murray, waited.

      To keep herself occupied that evening, and assuming that a boy of James’s age might well be hungry, Anne busied herself preparing food for the duke. She had a lady’s tunic with her for James to wear as a disguise. ‘It was,’ she would recall, ‘a mixed mohair of a light hair colour and black, and the under-petticoat was scarlet.’12 Anne’s tailor had been mystified by the surprisingly unfeminine measurements she had submitted to him, saying that this unseen client had to be the shortest woman with the largest waist that he could remember cutting for.

      As time passed, Anne waited with mounting anxiety for the colonel and the duke. Bampfield had warned her that if he and James had not arrived at the steps of London Bridge by ten o’clock, she must assume that the risky plan had failed. If that were the case, she would be in mortal danger of discovery, and must flee for her life.

      When she heard church bells chime ten, and the lookout said there was still no sign of the boat, he asked her what they should do. Anne said she must stay, just in case her lover and the boy were running late.

      She later admitted that she had in fact assumed the pair had been captured, and that she would soon pay the price for being part of a failed treasonous conspiracy. ‘And,’ she recalled, ‘while I was fortifying myself against what might arrive to me, I heard a great noise of many as I thought coming up the stairs, which I expected to be soldiers to take me, but it was a pleasing disappointment, for the first that came in was the Duke, who with much joy I took in my arms and gave God thanks for his safe arrival. His Highness called, “Quickly, quickly – dress me!”; and, putting on his clothes, I dressed him in the women’s habit that was prepared, which fitted his Highness very well.’ Indeed, she could not help noticing that he ‘was very pretty in it’.13

      James ate the food Anne had prepared for him. She then gave him a treat for his journey: a Wood Street cake – a fruit cake that was as light in yeast as it was thick with icing. It was a speciality of a neighbourhood of the City of London, and she knew it to be one of the duke’s favourites.

      James and Bampfield then ran back to the barge, where their oarsmen took advantage of the favourable wind and tide to head towards a waiting Dutch ship, twenty miles away at Gravesend. Before they could reach it, though, the wind turned, convincing Bampfield that they would be blown back to the shore. James urged: ‘Do any thing with me rather than let me go back again!’ At last the wind came right once more, and they made it to their ship.

      Back at St James’s Palace, relaxation at James’s assumed skill at hide and seek had first turned to mild concern, before spiralling into panic. The Earl of Northumberland was informed that the duke appeared to be missing, and immediately ordered a meticulous search of the entire palace. When it was found that James was clearly absent, he sent a messenger to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons, saying that he feared James had escaped, but that he had no idea how.

      Northumberland, his many former offices including a stint as lord admiral of England, insisted that the Speaker immediately send a dispatch to the great seaports of Kent and Sussex, barring any vessel from leaving for abroad until it had been thoroughly searched.

      There was chaos in the speaker’s office as the clerks bickered over how best to carry out Northumberland’s order. They struggled to construct the correct words to help block the flight of the most eminent prisoner in England. Serjeant at Arms Norfoulke, a witness to this clerical pandemonium, later reported that a dozen orders were written out, then rejected, before all were happy with the wording of the final version. By the time the dispatch finally reached its recipients, the duke was gone.

      He landed at Middleburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland, on 22 April 1648, before being carried to The Hague on his brother-in-law’s yacht. James had been forced to leave two siblings behind in captivity, but he had gained a third. He was now warmly welcomed into his bravely-won freedom by his older sister Mary, Princess of Orange. At their reunion she threw royal stiffness to the wind, running towards her brother and hugging him tight.

      When Prince Charles heard of his brother’s daring rescue, he was overjoyed. He of course had no idea that it would one day fall to him to be the next member of his family to attempt a getaway from England. While his mother’s escape had been relatively simple, and those of his brother and sister had been both bold and clever, his would be of an entirely different order, for it would be set against almost impossible odds, and the knowledge that capture would result not in imprisonment, but death.

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       A Question of Conscience

      Continue the same endeavours for Prince Charles as thou hast done for me, and [do] not … whine for my misfortunes in a retired way, but, like thy father’s daughter, vigorously assist Prince Charles to regain his own.

      Charles I to Henrietta Maria, 22 April 1646

      The regicides – those few dozen men who had found brief common cause in January 1649 to rush through the judgement and execution of the king – found, after the royal beheading, that they had little to unite them. They immediately broke up into ill-defined factions, sharply divided over the best direction for the newborn republic.

      On one side was Oliver Cromwell, the God-fearing East Anglian gentleman who had risen to become second-in-command of the New Model Army. The might of this Parliamentary military machine had been chiselled from the professionalism and religious conviction of its Puritan veterans. Cromwell, having delivered up great victories, had the army’s overriding support.

      He and his tight knot of political supporters, many of whom were his relatives, hoped that Charles I’s execution would be the final act of the English Civil War, bringing to an end a conflict that had claimed the life of one in twenty Englishmen. Cromwell looked now for conciliation and reform, while remaining ready to stamp out further Royalist resistance with СКАЧАТЬ