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

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СКАЧАТЬ whose military efforts saw her celebrated by the Royalist side as the ‘she-generalissima’. Besides, because she had refused to take part in the coronation, why should this Roman Catholic Frenchwoman not be treated as just another subject?

      When Henrietta Maria made it safely to France, she did so without her infant daughter, having felt compelled to leave Princess Henrietta behind because of the baby’s delicacy. She had entrusted her to the care of a godmother, Lady Dalkeith, a noted beauty among Henrietta Maria’s courtiers. Anne Dalkeith promised that she would do all in her power to reunite mother and child at the earliest possible opportunity.

      Charles I arrived in Exeter to visit his infant daughter in the wake of his wife’s successful getaway, and soon after he had personally led the Royalists to victory at the battle of Cropredy Bridge in Oxfordshire. He was determined that the princess be received into the Church of England, and Henrietta was christened in Exeter Cathedral when five weeks old. Her father then rode off again, to lead his side to further success over the Parliamentarians in the south-west. It was the only time father and daughter would ever meet.

      Exeter fell to Parliament in April 1646, when Henrietta was twenty-two months old. The victors decided that the young princess must join her sister, Princess Elizabeth, and brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as prisoners in London’s St James’s Palace. Honouring her promise to the queen, Lady Dalkeith refused to comply, instead keeping her charge with her at Oatlands Palace in Surrey.

      By the end of July 1646 Lady Dalkeith realised that Henrietta would soon be forcibly removed from her care. She therefore dressed the toddler as a ragamuffin boy, and disguised herself as a beggar woman, scrunching up a cloth under her clothes to give her the appearance of having a hunchback. Two members of the household were also included in the plan, a man who pretended to be the child’s father, and a maid, Elinor Dyke, who was there to help look after the princess throughout the escape.

      Lady Dalkeith left a letter behind at Oatlands, begging those remaining there not to let anyone raise the alarm over the princess’s absence for three days. She then hoisted Henrietta onto her shoulders and set off by foot with her small party for the port of Dover, nearly 100 miles away.

      It was an escape made somewhat harder by the young Henrietta’s insistence on telling bemused strangers that she was not, in fact, a boy but a princess. But nobody paid much attention to the scruffy child’s claims, and eventually she was brought to Dover, where she and her godmother boarded a ship for France. Arriving there, Lady Dalkeith made good her promise to the queen, returning her daughter to her in Paris, before fainting from exhaustion.

      Princess Elizabeth’s experience as royal victim was somewhat different.

      Princess Mary, Charles I and Henrietta Maria’s eldest daughter, was nine years old when she was married in London to the fourteen-year-old William, Prince of Orange, in early May 1641. He was the heir to the Dutch Republic’s senior hereditary figure, and part of the marital contract involved a strong expectation that the Netherlands would support the Stuarts in their imminent war.

      The next year the queen accompanied her daughter across the North Sea, to settle the girl into her new life, and to help find further support for her husband’s cause. They left behind Princess Elizabeth, the king and queen’s next oldest daughter. She was seven. She would never see her mother or sister again.

      Elizabeth and her younger brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, were taken into custody by Parliament at the outbreak of civil war, later in 1642. They were placed under the guardianship of the Earl of Pembroke that October, and were kept at St James’s Palace, where the princess had been born and christened during the peaceful years of her father’s reign.

      Princess Elizabeth had a rare intelligence, astonishing her tutors with her ability in five foreign and ancient languages before she turned eight. When the House of Commons suggested trimming her and her brother’s household, early in their gilded imprisonment, the seven-year-old wrote a protest in her own hand that was persuasive enough to convince the House of Lords to overrule the lower house, and leave things as they had been.

      1643 was largely a year of convalescence for Elizabeth, after she badly broke a leg. Daily life involved submission to the intense religious programme of her captors, with endless sermons that were meant to win over her soul, but instead numbed her mind. The princess won approval, though, for the natural modesty of her behaviour, and earned the nickname of ‘Temperance’, a Puritan virtue.

      In the summer of 1644 she and Henry were moved to Danvers House in Chelsea, and put in the care of the twice-widowed Sir John Danvers, a disgruntled sixty-year-old courtier who in his youth had been considered one of the best-looking men in England. Danvers’s extravagant love for architecture and Italianate gardens ensured the royal children were accommodated in style.

      A succession of other aristocrats sympathetic to Parliament took part in overseeing the royal children. The constant in all these changes was the Countess of Dorset, who had been Prince Charles’s governess from the age of one, and who now performed that duty with Elizabeth and Henry until her deteriorating health took its toll.

      In the spring of 1645, with the countess retired, the princess and Henry were placed in the custody of the Earl and Countess of Northumberland. They were moved to Syon House in Isleworth, Middlesex. After the surrender of the Royalist capital, Oxford, in June 1646, James, Duke of York, was brought to join them there.

      The king and queen were left miserable by their inability to rescue their three middle children, Henrietta Maria writing to Prince Charles: ‘Yet my real afflictions do not make me forget your brothers, and that unfortunate Elizabeth. Oh! If before my death, I could see her out of the hands of the traitors, I could die content. To this, at least, I will exhort you, to employ every force, to use every artifice, to withdraw so dear a part of my own heart, this innocent victim of their fury, your worthy sister, from London. Do it, I pray and conjure you, by the spirit of the king, my lord and your father.’5 But Prince Charles was as powerless to help his siblings as his father had been before him.

      Charles I had made overtures to the rebels, and planned kidnap attempts, in the hope of getting Elizabeth and Henry to him at Oxford. But when, after his defeat, the king was imprisoned at Hampton Court, he delighted in travelling the six miles to the Earl of Northumberland’s private palace, to visit his three captive children there.

      At the end of January 1649, Elizabeth and Henry were taken to say a final goodbye to their father on the day before his execution. Elizabeth’s vivid account of this heartbreaking meeting demonstrates an astonishing gift for recall, particularly given the depth of emotions swirling in the fourteen-year-old’s mind at such a terrible moment.

      She wrote of how her father put eight-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester, on his knee, then told him, ‘“Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head.” And Gloucester looking very intently upon him, he said again, “Heed, my child, what I say: they will cut off my head and perhaps make thee a king. But mark what I say. Thou must not be a king as long as thy brothers Charles and James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.” At which my brother sighed deeply, and made answer: “I will be torn in pieces first!”’

      Elizabeth would remember her father’s words of comfort as he turned to her: ‘He desired me not to grieve for him, for he should die a martyr, and that he doubted not the Lord would settle his throne upon his son, and that we should all be happier than we could have expected to be if he had lived.’6 The next day, the king was beheaded, just as he had warned Elizabeth and Henry he would be.

      Princess СКАЧАТЬ