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

might cling to in the face of humiliating setbacks.

      It was at this point, with his liberty and life in real danger, that Charles produced the letter his father had sent to him from Hereford ten months earlier. He realised that its terms were precisely relevant to the peril he now faced. In the letter the king had insisted that Charles must never surrender on dishonourable terms, or do anything to undermine the concept of regal authority. This must be the case even if his father’s life (or his own) were at stake. Equally, the prince must not risk death, because on him rested the future hopes of the Crown. It was clear that the preservation of Charles’s life was the priority now, with the enemy closing in fast.

      When the Parliamentary fleet sent to capture the prince on St Mary’s was scattered in a timely two-day storm, Charles took the opportunity to flee to Jersey. He arrived there on 17 April 1646, as the sun was going down, the pilot of his frigate mistakenly steering a course that would normally have guaranteed shipwreck. The royal party was luckily spared, thanks to an abnormally high spring tide covering the rocks below. ‘God be praised,’ Lady Fanshawe wrote, ‘his Highness, and all of us came safe ashore through so great a danger.’11

      It was a silent entry into the harbour. There was no salute of cannon fire, from land or sea. Everyone knew that this visit, far from being part of some triumphant royal progress, was instead uncomfortable proof that the king’s cause in England was in a calamitous state. Charles was coming to Jersey as a forlorn refugee.

      But the largest of the Channel Islands was a relatively safe place for him to find himself in. Jersey had a good-sized Royalist force, and a network of established defences. The granite Mont Orgueil Castle, on the east coast, had been the site of fortifications since Roman times, and the two wards of Elizabeth Castle, which Sir Walter Raleigh had improved while Jersey’s governor at the start of the century, added solid assistance from their rocky islet. There was a further tower at the entrance to St Aubin’s harbour that had recently been freshly fortified, and half a mile off the coast of Guernsey, Castle Cornet stood in distant support.

      Sir George Carteret, from the ancient Jersey family of de Carteret, was the island’s bailiff and lieutenant-governor. Samuel Pepys described this larger-than-life character as ‘the most passionate man in the world’. It was a world that Carteret, a seafarer since boyhood, had seen plenty of. Before the Civil Wars he had served with distinction against the Barbary pirates of North Africa, rescuing Christian captives from Salé in modern-day Morocco. In 1643 Carteret captured Jersey for Charles I, ejecting the island’s Parliamentary garrison within a month of landing. Two years later, by now a Royalist vice-admiral, he was knighted. Soon after Prince Charles’s landing on Jersey Sir Edward Hyde noted that Carteret was perhaps ‘the best seaman of England’, and certainly ‘a worthy and most excellent person, of extraordinary merit towards the crown and nation of England’. Carteret was determined to keep the prince safe.

      The neighbouring Channel Island, Guernsey, had a strong Puritan element, and was keenly supportive of Parliament. With this enemy lying less than thirty miles away, Carteret insisted that all of Jersey’s regular soldiers and militia publicly profess their loyalty to the Crown. He had an open Bible placed on a drumhead, and as he watched, ten men at a time stepped forward, each placing a hand on the canvas, before being led by a priest through an oath of commitment to the king of England.

      Carteret also equipped ten frigates to prey on Parliamentary shipping. This man, who had made his name fighting against pirates, now oversaw a network of privateers, operating in the name of the king. They caused consternation to the enemy at sea, and provided prizes that were sold to fund increased defences and supplies on land.

      Anticipating that Parliament would soon send a task force to try to recapture Jersey and seize Charles, Carteret stocked and secured his strongholds. Their stores were filled with salted fish, corn, peas, biscuit and beef. His reserves were so plentiful that he filled the church at Castle Cornet with them, while stripping back its roof to form an additional artillery platform. Further cannon were placed along the island’s coast at all likely landing points.

      Sir George had two new cisterns, capable of holding more than eighty tons of water, installed in the upper ward of Elizabeth Castle. He established his headquarters there, and had the prince stay with him as his guest. Despite the military threat, and the visiting prince’s reduced circumstances, the show of royal ceremony was painstakingly maintained.

      We know, from a diarist living on the island, that at dinnertime Charles would hear grace bareheaded, before putting his hat on to eat. He would then sit alone at the head of the table, where silver cutlery had been laid out for him. A priest would stand to his right, while his lords and courtiers remained bareheaded and on their feet behind him while he ate. As he waited for his food to arrive, a kneeling pageboy would help him to wash and dry his hands.

      Dinner was offered in a succession of silver serving dishes, containing selections of meat, fish and game, which were placed before him. Food that Charles liked the look of was taken to a carvery, where a taster tested it. Sliced up, it was returned to the prince on a silver platter.

      Two pages waited, on bended knee, while he ate. One was constantly ready with a silver dish containing slices of bread. The other was the cupbearer. When Charles beckoned this servant forward, he held the goblet to his master’s lips with one hand, while with the other he positioned a second cup to catch any drops before they could splash onto the prince’s clothes. There was no stinting on pomp for the prince even when his court was minute, he was effectively in exile, and his dominion was a dot of an island.

      Charles remained under Carteret’s protection on Jersey from April till June 1646. Already tall, and with the tufts of a moustache sprouting, the prince seems to have had an affair with the lieutenant-governor’s daughter Marguerite, who was five years older than him. A key subplot of Charles’s life, his pursuit of women, continued as the First Civil War reached its conclusion, and progressed steadily from this point on.

      Henrietta Maria was insistent that her eldest son should come to her in France. There she hoped to keep him safe, and under her control, while her husband continued his increasingly hopeless resistance in England. This was very much against the wishes of Sir Edward Hyde and the other conservative advisers travelling with the prince. They wanted to keep him out of the orbit of France, because it was the historic, Roman Catholic, enemy of England. Hyde believed that what the queen was asking Charles to do breached ‘the fundamental rules of policy’.12

      Hyde had planned to be an Anglican priest, until the death of an elder brother left him as his father’s potential heir. Becoming a lawyer and a Member of Parliament instead, he remained wedded to the strictest principles of the Church of England. These made him pious in some eyes, but priggish to others. In many ways he seems to have seen himself as the keeper of his young master’s conscience.

      Furious that her instructions were being ignored, Henrietta Maria sent a delegation to Jersey to insist on Charles’s removal to France. It was led by her great favourite, Henry, Lord Jermyn. The distrust of Hyde and his allies for the queen’s judgement, and for her inner circle’s trustworthiness, was intense. Hyde had developed a particular dislike of Jermyn on a number of grounds, ranging from his promotion of the plan to take the prince to live in France, to his having impregnated a beauty at court and then refusing to marry her. Jermyn was also the hereditary governor of Jersey, and there were strong suspicions that he was planning to sell the island to France.

      To the traditional supporters of the Crown, such as Hyde, Jermyn epitomised the sort of insufferable and devious character that the queen liked to surround herself with. ‘The English about Her Majesty, most favoured and consulted by her,’ recorded one observer, ‘were generally subjected to betray her counsels, and were too well known to have little regard to virtue, or to be acted by any settled principle of religion or honour. The old cavaliers did not care to trust any of them, and when they confided their sentiments, advices, & measures to Sir Edward Nicholas [a leading Royalist in exile, who was often at odds with the queen], they positively insisted that he should not communicate any of them to those confidants of Her Majesty, nor even to the Queen herself, who