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

      King Charles II had a favourite story. It was about the six weeks when, aged twenty-one, he had been on the run for his life. Those hunting him down had included the regicides – those responsible for his father’s trial and beheading – who feared him as a deadly avenger; the Parliamentary army, who viewed him as the commander of a defeated, foreign, invasion; and ordinary people, because upon his head sat not the English crown of his birthright, but a colossal financial reward.

      This brief period of Charles II’s life stood alone for many reasons. While there were many other times when the bleak reality of his situation fell well short of any reasonable princely expectations, it marked the low point of his fortunes, both as man and royal dignitary. It was uniquely exhilarating for him, in a way that only a genuine life-or-death tussle could be. And it showed off personal qualities that were not always evident in an individual whose self-indulgence and sense of entitlement could infuriate even his most loyal devotees. In his hour of greatest danger, he was proud to note, had arisen within him a quickness of wit, an adaptability, and a hard instinct for survival, that had saved his neck.

      In the spring of 1660 Charles returned to England, to claim his throne, on a ship whose figurehead of Oliver Cromwell had hastily been removed, and whose name had been changed from the Naseby (the battle that had been his father’s most punishing defeat) to the Royal Charles. Samuel Pepys was a fellow passenger, and wrote in his diary for 23 May 1660 of how: ‘Upon the quarterdeck he [Charles] fell into discourse of his escape from Worcester, where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through, of his travelling four days and three nights on foot, every step up to his knees in dirt, with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on, and a pair of country shoes that made him so sore all over his feet, that he could barely stir.’

      In the subjects of the kingdom that he had been allowed suddenly and unexpectedly to gain, Charles had found a fresh audience for his pet tale. They would hear repeatedly of their new young king’s exploits. Not that Pepys complained, for the retelling of events that had taken place when he had been a young man of eighteen, six months into his first year at Cambridge University, particularly intrigued him. They awoke, in this most famous of English diarists, the tracking instincts of an investigative journalist. He decided to check how much of the king’s recollections of the six weeks’ adventure were true, and to what extent they had been seasoned by royal fancy, or compromised by forgetfulness.

      Two decades later, during one of the royal court’s stays in Suffolk for the horse-racing on Newmarket Heath, Pepys managed to obtain an audience with the king. In his scratchy shorthand (his eyesight had been failing for more than a decade) he took down what Charles remembered of the most electrifying time of his life. Riveted by what he had heard, Pepys quickly secured a second session, his manuscript revealing additions where he included fresh details that Charles had forgotten the first time round.

      Meanwhile Pepys resolved to trace those still alive from the motley bunch that had helped the king on his journey from shattering defeat to miraculous delivery. An exceptionally busy man, being at different times a Member of Parliament for two constituencies, and Chief Secretary to the Admiralty, Pepys had hoped to piece together the whole, correct, version of the astonishing tale of escape, and present it as the definitive account. It appears that he had completed almost his entire collection of relevant documents by December 1684, two months before Charles’s sudden death at the age of fifty-four, for that was when he had it bound. A few additions were kept with this volume, including Colonel George Gunter’s report, which arrived at some point during the first seven months of 1685.

      There is a paragraph, near the start of Colonel Gunter’s offering, which underlines the way in which those intimately involved in Charles’s escape attempt felt they had been chosen, for whatever reason, to be participants in an event whose eventual outcome had been determined by God. Gunter wrote:

      Here, before I proceed in the story, the reader will give me leave to put him in mind, that we write not an ordinary story, where the reader, engaged by no other interest than curiosity, may soon be cloyed with circumstances which signify no more unto him but that the author was at good leisure and was very confident of his reader’s patience. In the relation of miracles, every petty circumstance is material and may afford to the judicious reader matter of good speculation: of such a miracle especially, where the restoration of no less than three kingdoms, and his own particular safety and liberty (if a good and faithful subject) was at the stake.1

      Pepys was not in awe of royalty to anything like the same degree as Colonel Gunter. He had been in the crowd at the beheading of Charles I on 30 January 1649, and it is clear that he had some sympathy with the ruthless Parliamentary justice meted out that day. During his time as a naval administrator he never shirked from locking horns with Royalists if, in his view, they were holding back the progress of the service. His disagreements with Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the poster boy of the Crown’s cause in his youth, and Lord Admiral of England in middle age, show a lack of deference to those of the highest birth if he judged them to be wrongheaded, and therefore dangerous to the nation. Pepys was a loyal patriot, but not a fawning one. He therefore makes for an appealing midwife in the delivery of the king’s tale.

      There was a great appetite for this unique royal story during the king’s lifetime, even amongst his most intimate circle. James, Duke of York, wrote to Pepys in the middle of 1681, saying he wanted to read for himself his elder brother’s description of his time on the run after the defeat at Worcester. It was his second time of asking this favour of Pepys. Even though the duke promised not to take a copy of the account, Pepys dared to set out that this was a journalistic project that was still very much in progress, and one that he felt especially protective of: ‘My covetousness of rendering it as perfect, as the memory of any of the survivors (interested in any part of that memorable story) can enable me to make it,’ he wrote, ‘has led me into so many and distant enquiries relating thereto, as have kept me out of a capacity of putting it together as I would, and it ought, and shall be, so soon as ever I possess myself of all the memorials I am in expectation of concerning it. Which I shall also (for your Royal Highness’s satisfaction) use my utmost industry in the hastening.’2

      He eventually sent the transcript to the duke, while mentioning that he was still awaiting the key testimony of Father John Huddleston, a Roman Catholic priest who had taken a prominent role in the tale of royal derring-do. Pepys received this in March 1682 from Lady Mary Tuke, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, who forwarded it to him on Huddleston’s behalf.

      Pepys died in 1703, never having completed his task of stitching together the threads that he had gathered together so painstakingly. Perhaps the death of the central figure in the tale made the undertaking one that seemed less pressing.

      Whatever the reason, the testimonies he had assembled, and which he left behind in one place, are invaluable to those that have followed. Indeed, the accounts of Charles II himself, as well as those of Father Huddleston, Thomas Whitgreave and Colonel Phillips, are priceless testimonies to a factual tale that reads like fiction. All four have long been recognised as the key first-hand records of one of the greatest escapes in history.

      Thomas Blount provided another sparkling contemporary account of the getaway. Blount was a Roman Catholic, and a Royalist, who gloried in the miracle of the tale, and so might have been tempted by his predispositions to stray from the truth. But he was also a lexicographer and an antiquarian, who studied law. His intellectual discipline, when compiling dictionaries of obscure words or studying the distant past, set a standard for his painstaking research in this field of recent royal history. In his introduction to Boscobel Blount assured his readers: ‘I am so far from that foul crime of publishing what’s false, that I can safely say I know not one line unauthentic; such has been my care to be sure of the truth, that I have diligently collected the particulars from most of their mouths, who were the very actors in this scene of miracles.’

      Nearly all of Blount’s sources were still alive at the time of Boscobel’s completion. Far from disputing his version of events, they were happy to contribute further