To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape

The Roundheads, outnumbering the garrison by eight to one, attacked Bridgwater soon afterwards. With victory rapidly assured, the Parliamentary commander Sir Thomas Fairfax invited Sir Edmund Wyndham to recognise the hopelessness of his position and surrender. Lady Wyndham scoffed at the suggestion: ‘Tell your masters,’ she told the Parliamentary herald, ‘that the breast which gave suck to Prince Charles shall never be at their mercy. We will hold the town to the last!’ But Bridgwater was soon ablaze, strong winds whipping flames along as the enemy pushed forward, and Wyndham was forced to capitulate.

The fall of Bridgwater was part of a summer of heavy Royalist losses. After the worst of these, at Naseby, the king wrote a letter to his eldest son from Hereford. It contained a handful of strict instructions that were to remain secret unless the prince’s closest advisers absolutely needed to know them. Until that moment, the letter’s contents must remain between father and son.

The defeats continued into the autumn of 1645 and beyond. After the surrender of Bristol in September, the young prince was forced to move ever westwards, the demoralised Royalist forces in Devon no match for the rampant New Model Army. Bad luck played a small part in bringing forward the Crown’s inevitable downfall in the county. At the siege of Tiverton in October, a cannonball struck and severed the chain holding up the garrison’s drawbridge, sending it thudding to the ground in slack-jawed surrender. At the battle of Torrington, in February 1646, a spark found its way into a church where the king’s men had stored eighty barrels of gunpowder. The huge explosion that followed brought an end to the engagement, as well as to the lives of the Parliamentary prisoners being held in the church. Now the remaining Royalists withdrew from Devon to Cornwall, the most westerly county on the English mainland.

Lord Colepeper, one of Charles I’s leading advisers, warned that, with nowhere else to go, the prince had now entered ‘a very Cornish mousetrap’.6 The king sent instructions for his son to be taken to France for safety. Hyde and the prince’s other advisers questioned the call, though, claiming that abandoning England for another country would become ‘an argument against his Majesty’s sincere intentions’.7 They put forward the alternatives of the Scilly Isles or Jersey, both Crown dominions.

After continued pressure from the enemy Prince Charles was forced to abandon the English mainland. He sailed on the Phoenix to St Mary’s, the largest of the Isles of Scilly, landing there on 4 March 1646. This was only thirty miles from Cornwall, but Parliament’s dominance of the seas meant it was low on supplies, no food having reached it from England for six weeks.

Lady Fanshawe, the heavily pregnant wife of one of Charles’s retinue, noted on arrival: ‘Meat and fuel, for half the court to serve them for a month, was not to be had in the whole island. And truly we begged our daily bread of God, for we thought every meal our last.’8 The king’s followers grew sick of the taste of salted fish, one of the islanders’ main products.

St Mary’s was soon realised to be as militarily vulnerable as it was poorly provisioned. Despite the recent arrival of 300 Irish troops, the garrison was unable to defend the sprawling coastline. Lord Colepeper was sent to France to tell Henrietta Maria that reinforcements must be sent immediately.

Parliament, aware of the prince’s vulnerability in his new island surroundings, tried to lure him into captivity. A silky letter was delivered by a rebel trumpeter in early April:

Sir,

The Lords and Commons assembled in the Parliament of England, being informed that your highness is lately removed into the Isle of Scilly, have commanded us, in their names, to invite you to come forthwith into their quarters; and to reside in such place, and with such council and attendants about you, as the two houses shall think fit to appoint.9

Charles waited, and then composed a reply laced with equal insincerity. He thanked his enemies for their kindness, and promised to continue to correspond with them, adding how much he looked forward to any further advice that they might choose to send him.

It was inevitable, the prince’s advisers realised, that Parliament would now attack St Mary’s, to seize Charles and take him to England as a prisoner in all but name. Even before they had got round to sending the prince’s reply, a fleet of two dozen ships had been dispatched to the Scilly Isles under Vice-Admiral William Batten, with instructions to bring him in. With Batten went Colonel Thomas Gollop, a Royalist who had recently surrendered the island and castle of Portland to Parliament. Gollop had promised his captors that he would help deliver the prince into their clutches.

As soon as Henrietta Maria learnt from Colepeper the danger that her son was in, she wrote to Hyde stressing her great concern at the inadequacy of the Scilly Isles as a safe haven for the talisman of the Royalist cause: ‘I need not remember [remind] you of what importance to the king, and all his party, the safety of the prince’s person is. If he should fall into the rebels’ hands, the whole would thereby become desperate.’10 Not for the last time, Charles’s freedom would be inextricably linked to any future hopes that the Royalist cause might cling to in the face of humiliating setbacks.

It was at this point, with his liberty and life in real danger, that Charles produced the letter his father had sent to him from Hereford ten months earlier. He realised that its terms were precisely relevant to the peril he now faced. In the letter the king had insisted that Charles must never surrender on dishonourable terms, or do anything to undermine the concept of regal authority. This must be the case even if his father’s life (or his own) were at stake. Equally, the prince must not risk death, because on him rested the future hopes of the Crown. It was clear that the preservation of Charles’s life was the priority now, with the enemy closing in fast.

When the Parliamentary fleet sent to capture the prince on St Mary’s was scattered in a timely two-day storm, Charles took the opportunity to flee to Jersey. He arrived there on 17 April 1646, as the sun was going down, the pilot of his frigate mistakenly steering a course that would normally have guaranteed shipwreck. The royal party was luckily spared, thanks to an abnormally high spring tide covering the rocks below. ‘God be praised,’ Lady Fanshawe wrote, ‘his Highness, and all of us came safe ashore through so great a danger.’11

It was a silent entry into the harbour. There was no salute of cannon fire, from land or sea. Everyone knew that this visit, far from being part of some triumphant royal progress, was instead uncomfortable proof that the king’s cause in England was in a calamitous state. Charles was coming to Jersey as a forlorn refugee.

But the largest of the Channel Islands was a relatively safe place for him to find himself in. Jersey had a good-sized Royalist force, and a network of established defences. The granite Mont Orgueil Castle, on the east coast, had been the site of fortifications since Roman times, and the two wards of Elizabeth Castle, which Sir Walter Raleigh had improved while Jersey’s governor at the start of the century, added solid assistance from their rocky islet. There was a further tower at the entrance to St Aubin’s harbour that had recently been freshly fortified, and half a mile off the coast of Guernsey, Castle Cornet stood in distant support.

Sir George Carteret, from the ancient Jersey family of de Carteret, was the island’s bailiff and lieutenant-governor. Samuel Pepys described this larger-than-life character as ‘the most passionate man in the world’. It was a world that Carteret, a seafarer since boyhood, had seen plenty of. Before the Civil Wars he had served with distinction against the Barbary pirates of North Africa, rescuing Christian captives from Salé in modern-day Morocco. In 1643 Carteret captured Jersey for Charles I, ejecting the island’s Parliamentary garrison within a month of landing. Two years later, by now a Royalist vice-admiral, he was knighted. Soon after Prince Charles’s landing on Jersey Sir Edward Hyde noted that Carteret was perhaps ‘the best seaman of England’, and certainly ‘a worthy and most excellent person, of extraordinary merit towards the crown and nation of England’. Carteret was determined to keep the prince safe.

The neighbouring Channel Island, Guernsey, had a strong Puritan element, and was keenly supportive of Parliament. With this enemy lying less than thirty miles away, Carteret insisted that all of Jersey’s regular soldiers and militia publicly profess their loyalty to the Crown. He had an open Bible placed on a drumhead, and as he watched, ten men at a time stepped forward, each placing a hand on the canvas, before being led by a priest through an oath of commitment to the king of England.

Carteret also equipped ten frigates to prey on Parliamentary shipping. This man, who had made his name fighting against pirates, now oversaw a network of privateers, operating in the name of the king. They caused consternation to the enemy at sea, and provided prizes that were sold to fund increased defences and supplies on land.

Anticipating that Parliament would soon send a task force to try to recapture Jersey and seize Charles, Carteret stocked and secured his strongholds. Their stores were filled with salted fish, corn, peas, biscuit and beef. His reserves were so plentiful that he filled the church at Castle Cornet with them, while stripping back its roof to form an additional artillery platform. Further cannon were placed along the island’s coast at all likely landing points.

Sir George had two new cisterns, capable of holding more than eighty tons of water, installed in the upper ward of Elizabeth Castle. He established his headquarters there, and had the prince stay with him as his guest. Despite the military threat, and the visiting prince’s reduced circumstances, the show of royal ceremony was painstakingly maintained.

We know, from a diarist living on the island, that at dinnertime Charles would hear grace bareheaded, before putting his hat on to eat. He would then sit alone at the head of the table, where silver cutlery had been laid out for him. A priest would stand to his right, while his lords and courtiers remained bareheaded and on their feet behind him while he ate. As he waited for his food to arrive, a kneeling pageboy would help him to wash and dry his hands.

Dinner was offered in a succession of silver serving dishes, containing selections of meat, fish and game, which were placed before him. Food that Charles liked the look of was taken to a carvery, where a taster tested it. Sliced up, it was returned to the prince on a silver platter.

Two pages waited, on bended knee, while he ate. One was constantly ready with a silver dish containing slices of bread. The other was the cupbearer. When Charles beckoned this servant forward, he held the goblet to his master’s lips with one hand, while with the other he positioned a second cup to catch any drops before they could splash onto the prince’s clothes. There was no stinting on pomp for the prince even when his court was minute, he was effectively in exile, and his dominion was a dot of an island.

Charles remained under Carteret’s protection on Jersey from April till June 1646. Already tall, and with the tufts of a moustache sprouting, the prince seems to have had an affair with the lieutenant-governor’s daughter Marguerite, who was five years older than him. A key subplot of Charles’s life, his pursuit of women, continued as the First Civil War reached its conclusion, and progressed steadily from this point on.

Henrietta Maria was insistent that her eldest son should come to her in France. There she hoped to keep him safe, and under her control, while her husband continued his increasingly hopeless resistance in England. This was very much against the wishes of Sir Edward Hyde and the other conservative advisers travelling with the prince. They wanted to keep him out of the orbit of France, because it was the historic, Roman Catholic, enemy of England. Hyde believed that what the queen was asking Charles to do breached ‘the fundamental rules of policy’.12

Hyde had planned to be an Anglican priest, until the death of an elder brother left him as his father’s potential heir. Becoming a lawyer and a Member of Parliament instead, he remained wedded to the strictest principles of the Church of England. These made him pious in some eyes, but priggish to others. In many ways he seems to have seen himself as the keeper of his young master’s conscience.

Furious that her instructions were being ignored, Henrietta Maria sent a delegation to Jersey to insist on Charles’s removal to France. It was led by her great favourite, Henry, Lord Jermyn. The distrust of Hyde and his allies for the queen’s judgement, and for her inner circle’s trustworthiness, was intense. Hyde had developed a particular dislike of Jermyn on a number of grounds, ranging from his promotion of the plan to take the prince to live in France, to his having impregnated a beauty at court and then refusing to marry her. Jermyn was also the hereditary governor of Jersey, and there were strong suspicions that he was planning to sell the island to France.

To the traditional supporters of the Crown, such as Hyde, Jermyn epitomised the sort of insufferable and devious character that the queen liked to surround herself with. ‘The English about Her Majesty, most favoured and consulted by her,’ recorded one observer, ‘were generally subjected to betray her counsels, and were too well known to have little regard to virtue, or to be acted by any settled principle of religion or honour. The old cavaliers did not care to trust any of them, and when they confided their sentiments, advices, & measures to Sir Edward Nicholas [a leading Royalist in exile, who was often at odds with the queen], they positively insisted that he should not communicate any of them to those confidants of Her Majesty, nor even to the Queen herself, who could conceal nothing from them, but consulted them in all affairs.’13

Eventually Charles was persuaded to obey his mother’s wishes and go to France with Jermyn. Only one of the councillors appointed by his father accompanied him to St-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, where Henrietta Maria resided. The rest refused to do so. The division in the senior Royalist ranks, between the ‘Louvre group’, who supported the queen and her French leanings, and those traditionalists who saw things in a narrower and more patriotic light, could hardly have been more starkly shown.

Hyde stayed behind in Jersey, where he began to write the early parts of The History of the Rebellion, his celebrated chronicle of the English Civil War. He knew that, for now, he had lost the battle for influence over the Prince of Wales to Henrietta Maria, and had to accept that, just like his father, young Charles was ‘irresolute’. This was Hyde’s polite term for being open to, and acting on, dangerously bad advice.

Charles left for France in June 1646. He was included in the activities of the French court at Fontainebleau that summer, his future value to the English Royalist movement attached to his liberty, and his eligibility as a royal bachelor.

Henrietta Maria hoped to engineer a marriage for him with her niece Anne Marie Louise of Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier. ‘Mademoiselle’, as she was known, was three years older than the prince, and not lacking in self-esteem. One of her pleasures was listing her many physical attributes in a journal. She relished the fineness of her height and figure, the glory of her auburn hair, the oval prettiness of her face, while not forgetting the finer details, from the coral bud of her lips, down to the daintiness of her feet: ‘There were not wanting those who complimented me on the beauty of my face and form’, she wrote, or ‘the fairness of my complexion, the brilliancy of my hair; no less admirable, they confessed, than all the riches which bedecked my person’.14

To Henrietta Maria, the good looks were a bonus. It was her niece’s vast inheritance and royal blood that made her an especially desirable daughter-in-law. But Mademoiselle was more interested in the idea of marrying the Holy Roman Emperor, who had been widowed that May, than in contemplating life with the gauche English prince, whose French was poor, and whose only conversation seemed to be about horses, hunting and dogs.

Besides, while she heard endlessly from Henrietta Maria how smitten Charles was with her, she saw little supporting evidence from her young cousin himself. Mademoiselle wrote: ‘Had he spoken for himself there is no knowing what might have been the result, but this I do know, that I was little inclined to listen to proposals in favour of a man who could not say anything for himself.’15

The gangly Charles was noticeably ill at ease at the various balls and entertainments that Henrietta Maria forced him to attend. His clumsy attempts to woo Mademoiselle, under maternal duress, soon made him an object of pity at court. Meanwhile, the duchess found him coarse. At a dinner where ortolans were offered up as the finest of delicacies (the tiny songbirds, drowned in Armagnac, were eaten whole, brains, beak, bones and all), Charles was believed to have let himself down by instead gorging on a shoulder of mutton and a side of beef. After eating, the other guests left the royal teenagers together to flirt. But, Mademoiselle would remember with dismay, Charles did not utter a word. After a quarter of an hour of silence, she gave up.

While Charles’s awkwardness was upending his mother’s matchmaking schemes, the queen in turn upset her son by continuing to treat him like a child. Henrietta Maria insisted that he carry on being bareheaded in her presence, an unusual protocol for a prince of his age and seniority. She also excluded him from important meetings, and insisted on receiving the pension paid to him by the French Crown, so that he was dependent on her for his allowance. Charles’s thoughts focused increasingly on getting away from France, and his mother, and doing what he could to fight for his father’s cause, as soon as the opportunity arose.

In the spring and summer of 1648 the Second Civil War crackled into life in England and Wales, the king’s cause spearheaded by a Scottish invasion from the north on his behalf. That July Charles went from France to The Hague, on the Netherlands coast, to lead a force of English ships that had mutinied against the Commonwealth and declared for the Crown. This fleet was urgently needed to support the Royalist uprising in southern and eastern England. While it prepared for deployment Charles spent time with his younger siblings, Mary, Princess of Orange, and James, Duke of York, who had recently arrived in the Netherlands after escaping from imprisonment in London. Also on hand were two of his first cousins, Princes Rupert and Maurice of the Rhine, who had served as leading Royalist generals in the Civil War.

It was during this month of family reunion and preparation for action at sea that Charles met, and fell for, Lucy Walter.

Lucy was the daughter of William and Elizabeth Walter. Her father was a minor landowner from Pembrokeshire, in south-west Wales, while her mother was from a similar social background, with a small injection of aristocratic blood. Theirs was a poisonous marriage, the diarist John Evelyn referring to both parents as ‘very mean creatures’.16 Taking accusations of her husband’s abusive behaviour and abandonment to the House of Lords, Elizabeth achieved a judgement against him in 1641. This ruling was overturned six years later, in February 1647, when counter-accusations against Elizabeth, including that of infidelity, held sway. Lucy refused to obey the Lords’ ruling that she and her two brothers return to their father’s household in Wales.

Lucy was a raven-haired, blue-eyed seventeen-year-old beauty, endowed with a shrewdness to match her striking looks. John Evelyn, who shared a carriage ride with the teenaged girl, marked her down in his diary as a ‘brown, beautiful, bold, but insipid creature’,17 while James II thought her ‘very handsome, of little wit, and some cunning’.18

What marked Lucy out for relentless male attention, from a young age, was a pulsating sexual magnetism. So many men desired her that she was quick to appreciate her exceptional bedroom value. It was the start of a livelihood that had Evelyn looking back on her as nothing more than ‘a beautiful strumpet’.19 She would become the kept woman of important and wealthy men, including two of the sons of Robert, Earl of Leicester.

The first of these was twenty-four-year-old Algernon Sidney, a dashing colonel in the rebel army who had been wounded in battle, and who would later declare the execution of Charles I to be ‘the justest and bravest act … that was ever done in England, or anywhere’.20 James II would maintain that Algernon had contracted for Lucy Walter’s services with forty gold coins. Others believed her favours had cost him fifty. Either way, it was a small fortune, especially given the brevity of the affair: Sidney was suddenly sent with his regiment to bolster the garrison of Dover Castle, leaving Lucy on her own.

Lucy then moved to the Netherlands, where she was pleased, though probably not surprised, to find herself surrounded by eligible Royalist exiles, wealthy enough to compete for the pleasure of her company. She was soon taken up by Algernon’s younger brother, Colonel Robert Sidney. He was a courtier to Prince Charles, with what was to prove the apt title of Groom of the Bedchamber: Robert was Lucy’s lover when Charles appeared in the Netherlands to prepare his ships for the expected foray against Parliament.

Some contemporaries believed that Charles was already aware of Lucy’s charms, having glimpsed them for himself when younger: ‘Her beauty was so perfect that when the King saw her in Wales, where she was, he was … charmed and ravished and enamoured,’ a French noblewoman claimed.21 However, it was Lucy who engineered the meeting with, then the seduction of, Charles in July 1648. At this time, aged eighteen, Charles was, according to an admiring Scot, ‘One of the most gentle, innocent, well-inclined Princes, so far as yet appear, that lives in the world [with] a trim person, and a manly carriage’.22 The account of Madame de Motteville, a French courtier, largely tallies with this generous description, recalling Charles at this time as ‘well-made, with a swarthy complexion agreeing with his fine black eyes, a large ugly mouth, a graceful and dignified carriage and a fine figure’. Whatever Charles’s physical characteristics, Robert Sidney realised that it would be unwise to compete with the heady attention of his royal master, and stood aside.

During the time the prince spent in The Hague that summer, awaiting the readiness of his fleet, Lucy became pregnant with the first of what would eventually be more than a dozen of Charles’s children by various mistresses. Their son, James, was born in Rotterdam on 9 April 1649, ten weeks after the execution of his grandfather Charles I, and nine months after the start of Charles and Lucy’s liaison. Gossips pointed out that there had been no discernible gap between the conclusion of Lucy’s relationship with Robert Sidney and the beginning of her affair with the prince, and rumours attached to Lucy’s son all his life that questioned whether he was in fact of royal blood. Charles, though, always accepted that James was his son, and publicly acknowledged the fact when giving him the title of Duke of Monmouth.

Meanwhile a shortage of funds kept Charles’s fleet at anchor, so that his efforts to help his father’s cause in the Second Civil War largely came to nothing. When he eventually sailed, his ships harassed and captured a few lesser vessels, before squaring up to the rebel navy in the Thames estuary in August 1648. In the preparations for the battle Charles impressed his men with his insistence on sharing their danger, the courtier Sir Robert Long reporting: ‘I must not forget to tell you, the Prince behaved himself with as much gallantry and courage in this business as ever you saw; for when his lords and all the seamen came to desire him to go down into the hold, under the decks, he would not hear of it, but told them his honour was more to him than his safety; and desired them not to speak of it any more.’23