To Catch A King: Charles II's Great Escape

But a last-minute storm made engagement impossible. After six fruitless weeks at sea Charles returned to The Hague in September 1648, leaving the Royalist fleet under the command of Prince Rupert of the Rhine. It seems probable that he then resumed his relationship with Lucy Walter. The scandalous liaison had taken place while Sir Edward Hyde, the adviser who sought to make the prince a worthy monarch-in-waiting, was still absent in Jersey. With his moral guardian away, Charles spent time with the more dissolute members of his mother’s entourage, including Lord Wilmot.

Hyde would characterise Henry Wilmot as ‘A man proud and ambitious, and incapable of being contented; an orderly officer in marches and governing his troops. He drank hard, and had a great power over all who did so, which was a great [many] people.’24 Wilmot gained Charles’s friendship through their shared sense of what comprised a good time. He also won the prince’s gratitude by being a willing helper in his romance with Lucy Walter: Wilmot put his carriage at her disposal so she could travel to and from the prince’s side with ease.

Hyde was reunited with Prince Charles at The Hague in mid-September 1648, after more than two years’ separation. He found his young protégé not only expecting to become a father, but surrounded by a court in exile that was turned in on itself in despair at the recent failure of the Second Civil War. The Scots had been crushed by Cromwell at the battle of Preston, and English resistance to the New Model Army had been firmly stamped out.

In his first speech in the prince’s council Hyde voiced his continued deep opposition to future alliances with any powers that were hostile to the Church of England. He delivered his fatalistic view: ‘It may be God hath resolved we shall perish, and then it becomes us to perish with those decent and honest circumstances that our good fame may procure a better peace to those who succeed us than we are able to procure for them, and ourselves shall be happier than any other condition could render us.’25 Continued loss of power was, for Hyde, infinitely preferable to a sacrifice of principles. Nobody worthy of the English Crown, he believed, could lower himself to a shameful alliance with the enemies of the Anglican religion. Anyone who claimed a throne in such circumstances could only keep it for the briefest of times, before inevitable overthrow. If Charles found himself without viable foreign allies, then he must await a turn in fortunes, either through his own becoming better, or those of the rebels deteriorating. Hyde hoped that the Commonwealth’s politicians and soldiers might turn against one other, and pull the republican regime apart.

Henrietta Maria and her supporters ridiculed Hyde for choosing to wait for miracles. They preferred to actively plot a return to royal power, and were prepared to contemplate all possible means of doing so.

In the meantime the Royalists of both factions watched in impotent disbelief and despair during January 1649 as their king was taken to London to be tried by a hastily created court, of highly questionable credentials. Prince Charles was determined to have his father released, whatever the cost. He sent a blank sheet of paper to Charles I’s captors, to which he had applied only his signature and his seal. This ‘carte blanche’ signified that there were no terms that he would reject in return for his father’s liberty.

When he learnt that his great gesture had failed to save his father from execution, Charles was reduced to terrible, violent sobbing, while, Hyde recalled, ‘all about him were almost bereft of their understanding’.

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