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

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 his troops, should it surface.

      John Bradshaw was prominent among those regicides with a very different view of how things must now be. A lawyer plucked from obscurity to become lord president of the impromptu court that had sent the king to his doom, Bradshaw saw the execution of a tyrannical ruler as a thrilling act that should be celebrated, and then built upon. While Cromwell hoped the king’s death would demark a full stop, Bradshaw saw it as a mere comma in the unfurling script of England’s electrifying new story.

      Those who had overseen Charles I’s execution dominated the Council of State, the executive body established the month after the king’s death. A replacement for the Privy Council, it was responsible for domestic and foreign policy, as well as the security of England and Wales. Eighteen of its forty-one councillors had been among those to sign the royal death warrant.

      All of the councillors and the other regicides could agree on one thing: that the fledgling republic needed to be sustained. But there were others who felt that a unique opportunity for constitutional change had been lamentably mismanaged. They had suffered in the fight against the king, and now expected their aspirations to be honoured. Among them was a radical group known to its detractors as ‘the Levellers’.

      The Levellers were still working on their manifesto, which they had begun two years earlier, at the time of the king’s death. An Agreement of the People was intended to be the blueprint for a written constitution, stating the inalienable rights of all Englishmen, and detailing the contract between them and their elected representatives. It demanded equality for all before the law, and that the vote be open to all men over twenty-one, other than Royalists, servants and beggars. England’s New Chaines Discovered, published immediately after the establishment of the Council of State, was a protest that these hopes had been ignored. The Levellers accused the new government of seizing power from the people. Their leaders were arrested for their effrontery.

      But this movement, based on principle, remained dangerous in the months following the execution of the king, and it had support in the army, which had suffered so greatly in the cause against the Crown. Richard Lockier, one of the Levellers’ leaders, was captured, then executed by firing squad outside St Paul’s Cathedral in late April 1649. This stoked up a wider military mutiny. There were many in the army who had been inspired by Leveller ideas, and who were also furious at arrears in their pay, while being frightened at the prospect of being sent to fight in the graveyard of disease-ridden, boggy Ireland. Cromwell defeated the main mutineer force, in a night attack at Burford in Oxfordshire. While 300 of them were pardoned, three of the ringleaders were shot in the village’s churchyard. Even though Cromwell could declare the Leveller threat in the army over by the end of May 1649, there was still much for the new regime to settle before it could consider itself established. A myriad of hopes had been raised by the toppling of the Crown, and not all of them could be satisfied.

      Six weeks after Charles I’s beheading, kingship was abolished, Parliament declaring: ‘The office of a King in a nation, and to have power thereof in a single person, was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people, and therefore ought to be abolished.’1

      In a further dramatic break with the past, the Royal Seal in the House of Commons was smashed into pieces by a hammer-wielding labourer. Its replacement contained the text: ‘In the First Year of Freedom, by God’s Blessing Restored.’ Ancient liberties, notionally lost under centuries of kingship, were being celebrated and reinstated under the new regime: the Commonwealth.

      John Bradshaw’s allies included two men who were responsible for the twin struts of the new regime’s printed propaganda. The great poet and man of letters John Milton, who now championed the regicides in written duels with their European detractors, was given the title of Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

      Meanwhile Milton’s friend Marchamont Nedham – a journalist and pamphleteer who had supported Parliament, then sided with the king, before getting firmly behind the new republic – oversaw the influential weekly newsbook Mercurius Politicus from June 1650. He took on this important journalistic role at a key moment in the Commonwealth’s campaign to make the republic more devout. The Puritan leadership felt this was required in order to secure God’s continuing favour. In May 1650 Parliament passed an Act condemning those guilty of incest, adultery and fornication. The incestuous and adulterous could expect the death penalty, ‘without clergy’ being in attendance at their end. Fornicators received a three-month prison sentence for their first offence. A few months later, the blasphemous joined the swelling ranks of outlaws.

      Mercurius Politicus produced journalism of the