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

found court life complicated. It was hard for him to negotiate a landscape that was pitted with factions, and where insincerity and self-interest were the perpetual themes. Meanwhile a supreme confidence in his own views made it challenging for him to accommodate those of others when they differed.

      He brought this inflexible mindset on campaign, when he accompanied Prince Charles as he took up his command in the west. Hyde hoped to bring order to the Crown’s resistance there, but his prickly attitude, perhaps fired up by the raging gout that often dogged him, instead diminished what remained of morale in this corner of England. It was a sphere of the war that was going as poorly for the Crown as any other, not helped by the king’s leading generals in the region being at odds with one another. One, Sir Ralph Hopton, was a man of sobriety and religion, who once refused to join battle until his men had finished hearing divine service. Another, Lord Goring, was remembered even by his fellow Royalists as the epitome of the hard-drinking, roistering Cavalier. A third, Sir Richard Grenville, had been condemned as ‘traitor, rogue, villain’ by Parliament after switching allegiance to the Crown. Grenville, grandson of a great Elizabethan naval hero of the same name, had a violent temper and a reputation for ruthlessness in the field. He refused to serve under Goring or Hopton, and would be imprisoned for his disobedience.

      Prince Charles arrived in Bristol in early April to find apathy among the area’s leading Royalists, and plague erupting in the city. He decided to move thirty-two miles south-west to Bridgwater, a town whose castle was believed to be impregnable, and whose governor, Sir Edmund Wyndham, he knew. Sir Edmund’s wife, Christabella, had been Charles’s wet-nurse and assistant governess from when he was one until he turned five.

      Christabella Wyndham was noted for her great beauty, and for her bossiness. Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that she ‘governed’ Charles ‘and everything else … as [if she were] a minister of state’.4 Sir Edward Hyde dismissed her as ‘a woman of great rudeness and a country pride’.5 But she had her charms. Christabella, in her late thirties, and Charles, yet to turn fifteen, became lovers during his stay in Bridgwater Castle in 1645. Afterwards, far from exercising discretion, Christabella appalled the prince’s advisers by being shamelessly familiar with him, showering him with kisses in public. When Charles proved unable to concentrate on matters of state, thanks to Christabella’s distracting influence, his advisers moved him on from Bridgwater as quickly as they could.

      That summer Parliament’s New Model Army arrived outside Bridgwater in huge numbers, to test its impregnability. Hearing that Oliver Cromwell, the rebel force’s second-in-command, was examining the town’s defences from the far side of its imposing moat, Christabella Wyndham decided to act. As an insult to the enemy, and as a reminder of her previous role as royal wet-nurse, she is reported as having exposed one of her breasts, picked up a loaded musket, and fired. The shot missed Cromwell, but killed his sergeant-at-arms.

      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