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

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 made contact with James through one of the palace’s attendants, who engineered 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.

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