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

to survive infancy.

      The queen had long suffered from ill health. A month earlier her doctor, Theodore de Mayerne, had judged her so fragile that he concluded ‘her days would not be many’.1 Henrietta Maria was left in such a weak state by the delivery that she felt obliged to request a favour of the enemy commander, the Earl of Essex, asking him to guarantee her safe passage to Bath, where she wished to take to the restorative mineral-rich waters. She immediately followed this with a second request, to be allowed to continue on to Bristol after her stay in Bath. Bristol was the most important English port after London, and was held by the Royalists.

      Essex could only suspect that, once she was well enough, the queen planned to set sail from Bristol and disappear overseas. He therefore replied that he would be delighted to give her safe conduct, but only if she would go to London – he pointed out that that was, after all, where the best medical advice in the country lay, and added that it would be his honour and pleasure to attend her on her journey to the capital. As for Bath or Bristol, he expressed his regret that he was unable to allow her to travel to either city without Parliament’s direction.

      Despite the exquisite sheen of the earl’s manners, the subtext was clear: Parliament would never contemplate the queen’s move to Bath or Bristol, while Essex would do what it took to bring her into his custody, where she could be detained to the advantage of the Crown’s enemies, as a highly valuable hostage to be used against the king.

      Henrietta Maria was aware that many in Parliament hated her. They correctly guessed that the French princess had only been allowed to marry their Protestant king because Pope Urban VIII wanted to ‘procure the reign of popery’ in England.2 Her attachment to her faith had been so unswerving that she had refused to take part in her and her husband’s coronation, because it would involve being crowned by a Protestant prelate. Since then she had established ornate Roman Catholic chapels in royal palaces throughout the kingdom, and had formed ties with all manner of apparently dangerous foreigners, including papal envoys. Given this bitter history between queen and Parliament, as soon as Essex refused her request to travel to Bath, Henrietta Maria contemplated her options.

      Four weeks later, feeling her health had slightly improved, the queen sailed out of Falmouth harbour for her native France. She was carried on a Flemish man-of-war that had, along with the ten vessels accompanying it, been ‘fresh tallow’d and train’d’ in order to give her the best chance of outrunning Parliament’s roving patrols. She hoped to slip through their blockade on a favourable wind, but a barge with sixteen oarsmen accompanied her ship, ready to spirit her away to safety if the weather calmed.

      On the day chosen for the voyage the wind filled the Royalists’ sails, and the queen’s flotilla sped towards Brest. A rebel frigate fired its cannon at the fleeing ships, but her shots passed wide.

      It was all very reminiscent of the queen’s arrival in Yorkshire, nearly a year and a half before, in February 1643. Henrietta Maria had spent the early months of the English Civil War in Europe, pawning and selling off her jewels in order to secure soldiers, weapons and money for her husband’s cause, at a time when Royalist supplies were dangerously low. After two attempts at crossing to England, during one of which the ship carrying her horses, grooms and coaches had sunk, she managed to land at Bridlington Bay, north of Hull. Four Parliamentary vessels had tailed her, commanded by the same William Batten who would try to capture Prince Charles on the Isles of Scilly in 1646.

      The captain of one of the rebel ships had established where the queen would be staying onshore. At four o’clock the next morning, while it was still dark, he and his comrades sailed into the bay and opened fire on Henrietta Maria’s lodgings. ‘Before I could get out of bed, the [cannon]balls were whistling upon me in such style that you may easily believe I loved not such music,’ the queen gamely wrote to her husband.3 The enemy fire killed some of her attendants, one of her sergeants being cut in two while standing just twenty feet from her. Henrietta Maria only found safety after running through the snow partially dressed, and flinging herself into a ditch that was shielded by a slight rise in the ground. She risked her life again when returning under fire to recover her lapdog, Mitte. The enemy guns blazed away at her for two hours, until a Dutch admiral who had helped escort her to Bridlington insisted that Batten’s men cease fire, or suffer the consequences.

      The Bishop of Angoulême would chastise the rebels for ‘having no respect either to [the queen’s] person, or yet to her sex … nor yet regarding her long sickness, which had brought her even within two fingers of death’.4 But there was little remorse in London for an attack on a lady whose military efforts saw her celebrated by the Royalist side as the ‘she-generalissima’. Besides, because she had refused to take part in the coronation, why should this Roman Catholic Frenchwoman not be treated as just another subject?

      When Henrietta Maria made it safely to France, she did so without her infant daughter, having felt compelled to leave Princess Henrietta behind because of the baby’s delicacy. She had entrusted her to the care of a godmother, Lady Dalkeith, a noted beauty among Henrietta Maria’s courtiers. Anne Dalkeith promised that she would do all in her power to reunite mother and child at the earliest possible opportunity.

      Charles I arrived in Exeter to visit his infant daughter in the wake of his wife’s successful getaway, and soon after he had personally led the Royalists to victory at the battle of Cropredy Bridge in Oxfordshire. He was determined that the princess be received into the Church of England, and Henrietta was christened in Exeter Cathedral when five weeks old. Her father then rode off again, to lead his side to further success over the Parliamentarians in the south-west. It was the only time father and daughter would ever meet.

      Exeter fell to Parliament in April 1646, when Henrietta was twenty-two months old. The victors decided that the young princess must join her sister, Princess Elizabeth, and brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as prisoners in London’s St James’s Palace. Honouring her promise to the queen, Lady Dalkeith refused to comply, instead keeping her charge with her at Oatlands Palace in Surrey.

      By the end of July 1646 Lady Dalkeith realised that Henrietta would soon be forcibly removed from her care. She therefore dressed the toddler as a ragamuffin boy, and disguised herself as a beggar woman, scrunching up a cloth under her clothes to give her the appearance of having a hunchback. Two members of the household were also included in the plan, a man who pretended to be the child’s father, and a maid, Elinor Dyke, who was there to help look after the princess throughout the escape.

      Lady Dalkeith left a letter behind at Oatlands, begging those remaining there not to let anyone raise the alarm over the princess’s absence for three days. She then hoisted Henrietta onto her shoulders and set off by foot with her small party for the port of Dover, nearly 100 miles away.

      It was an escape made somewhat harder by the young Henrietta’s insistence on telling bemused strangers that she was not, in fact, a boy but a princess. But nobody paid much attention to the scruffy child’s claims, and eventually she was brought to Dover, where she and her godmother boarded a ship for France. Arriving there, Lady Dalkeith made good her promise to the queen, returning her daughter to her in Paris, before fainting from exhaustion.

      Princess Elizabeth’s experience as royal victim was somewhat different.

      Princess Mary, Charles I and Henrietta Maria’s eldest daughter, was nine years old when she was married in London to the fourteen-year-old William, Prince of Orange, in early May 1641. He was the heir to the Dutch Republic’s senior hereditary figure, and part of the marital contract involved a strong expectation that the Netherlands would support the Stuarts in their imminent war.

      The next year the queen accompanied her daughter across the North Sea, to settle the girl into her new life, and to help find further support for her husband’s cause. They left behind Princess Elizabeth, the king and queen’s next oldest daughter. She was seven. She would never see her mother or sister again.

      Elizabeth and her younger brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, were taken