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

with his fine black eyes, a large ugly mouth, a graceful and dignified carriage and a fine figure’. Whatever Charles’s physical characteristics, Robert Sidney realised that it would be unwise to compete with the heady attention of his royal master, and stood aside.

      During the time the prince spent in The Hague that summer, awaiting the readiness of his fleet, Lucy became pregnant with the first of what would eventually be more than a dozen of Charles’s children by various mistresses. Their son, James, was born in Rotterdam on 9 April 1649, ten weeks after the execution of his grandfather Charles I, and nine months after the start of Charles and Lucy’s liaison. Gossips pointed out that there had been no discernible gap between the conclusion of Lucy’s relationship with Robert Sidney and the beginning of her affair with the prince, and rumours attached to Lucy’s son all his life that questioned whether he was in fact of royal blood. Charles, though, always accepted that James was his son, and publicly acknowledged the fact when giving him the title of Duke of Monmouth.

      Meanwhile a shortage of funds kept Charles’s fleet at anchor, so that his efforts to help his father’s cause in the Second Civil War largely came to nothing. When he eventually sailed, his ships harassed and captured a few lesser vessels, before squaring up to the rebel navy in the Thames estuary in August 1648. In the preparations for the battle Charles impressed his men with his insistence on sharing their danger, the courtier Sir Robert Long reporting: ‘I must not forget to tell you, the Prince behaved himself with as much gallantry and courage in this business as ever you saw; for when his lords and all the seamen came to desire him to go down into the hold, under the decks, he would not hear of it, but told them his honour was more to him than his safety; and desired them not to speak of it any more.’23

      But a last-minute storm made engagement impossible. After six fruitless weeks at sea Charles returned to The Hague in September 1648, leaving the Royalist fleet under the command of Prince Rupert of the Rhine. It seems probable that he then resumed his relationship with Lucy Walter. The scandalous liaison had taken place while Sir Edward Hyde, the adviser who sought to make the prince a worthy monarch-in-waiting, was still absent in Jersey. With his moral guardian away, Charles spent time with the more dissolute members of his mother’s entourage, including Lord Wilmot.

      Hyde would characterise Henry Wilmot as ‘A man proud and ambitious, and incapable of being contented; an orderly officer in marches and governing his troops. He drank hard, and had a great power over all who did so, which was a great [many] people.’24 Wilmot gained Charles’s friendship through their shared sense of what comprised a good time. He also won the prince’s gratitude by being a willing helper in his romance with Lucy Walter: Wilmot put his carriage at her disposal so she could travel to and from the prince’s side with ease.

      Hyde was reunited with Prince Charles at The Hague in mid-September 1648, after more than two years’ separation. He found his young protégé not only expecting to become a father, but surrounded by a court in exile that was turned in on itself in despair at the recent failure of the Second Civil War. The Scots had been crushed by Cromwell at the battle of Preston, and English resistance to the New Model Army had been firmly stamped out.

      In his first speech in the prince’s council Hyde voiced his continued deep opposition to future alliances with any powers that were hostile to the Church of England. He delivered his fatalistic view: ‘It may be God hath resolved we shall perish, and then it becomes us to perish with those decent and honest circumstances that our good fame may procure a better peace to those who succeed us than we are able to procure for them, and ourselves shall be happier than any other condition could render us.’25 Continued loss of power was, for Hyde, infinitely preferable to a sacrifice of principles. Nobody worthy of the English Crown, he believed, could lower himself to a shameful alliance with the enemies of the Anglican religion. Anyone who claimed a throne in such circumstances could only keep it for the briefest of times, before inevitable overthrow. If Charles found himself without viable foreign allies, then he must await a turn in fortunes, either through his own becoming better, or those of the rebels deteriorating. Hyde hoped that the Commonwealth’s politicians and soldiers might turn against one other, and pull the republican regime apart.

      Henrietta Maria and her supporters ridiculed Hyde for choosing to wait for miracles. They preferred to actively plot a return to royal power, and were prepared to contemplate all possible means of doing so.

      In the meantime the Royalists of both factions watched in impotent disbelief and despair during January 1649 as their king was taken to London to be tried by a hastily created court, of highly questionable credentials. Prince Charles was determined to have his father released, whatever the cost. He sent a blank sheet of paper to Charles I’s captors, to which he had applied only his signature and his seal. This ‘carte blanche’ signified that there were no terms that he would reject in return for his father’s liberty.

      When he learnt that his great gesture had failed to save his father from execution, Charles was reduced to terrible, violent sobbing, while, Hyde recalled, ‘all about him were almost bereft of their understanding’.

      2

       Royal Prey

      Indeed I think it not the least of my misfortunes that, for my sake, thou hast run so much hazard; in which thou hast expressed so much love to me, that I confess it is impossible to repay, by anything I can do, let alone words.

      Letter of Charles I to Queen Henrietta Maria, 1644

      Charles I had been judged and condemned by a court composed of his enemies. Many of them were military men who had witnessed the wars for themselves, and who had been persuaded that the king was personally responsible for the bloodshed. They tried him for this treason with no time for the formalities of kingship, referring to him as ‘Charles Stuart’, and cursing him as ‘that man of blood’. For his part, the king declined to accept the court’s authority to judge him. When he refused to plead ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ for a third time, the decision was taken away from him, and he was simply declared guilty. He was sent for beheading outside his London palace of Whitehall, on an icy day at the end of January 1649.

      The rest of the royal family also suffered terribly for its association with the king’s role in the Civil Wars. Prince Charles’s wanderings, punctuated by hopefulness and humiliation, with the enemy constantly snapping at his heels, represented just one part of the trials of the Stuart dynasty at this time.

      For all that Charles I adored his wife and doted on his children, once he had declared war on Parliament he exposed them to ever-increasing levels of personal danger. It was the taking of sides in a ferocious conflict, caused by profound political, religious and social tensions, that soon removed the princes and princesses from the supposed sanctuary of royal status. The pampered children of the years of peace became the pawns of war.

      The king and his eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales, put on armour, and led armies against the Crown’s foes. To those who fought against the Royalists, they had chosen to step down from their majestic pedestals, and elected to become merely key enemy personnel. Their death on the battlefield could therefore be contemplated as distinctly possible. It was a short step from that thought to one of actively seeking out royal prey.

      Meanwhile the Presbyterians and Puritans who dominated the House of Commons had long viewed the French-born queen, Henrietta Maria, with suspicion and distrust. She made no attempt to conceal her zealous Roman Catholicism, and it was clear to all that she exercised considerable control over the king. Yet it was not until 1641, the year before war broke out, that she had first felt in personal danger. Accusations that she was the king’s chief evil counsellor, and talk of her possibly being impeached as a consequence, persuaded her to put in place contingency plans for escape.

      On Sunday, 16 June 1644 Queen Henrietta Maria gave birth to Princess Henrietta, her eighth and last child, in Bedford House, the finest private