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

the guardianship of the Earl of Pembroke that October, and were kept at St James’s Palace, where the princess had been born and christened during the peaceful years of her father’s reign.

      Princess Elizabeth had a rare intelligence, astonishing her tutors with her ability in five foreign and ancient languages before she turned eight. When the House of Commons suggested trimming her and her brother’s household, early in their gilded imprisonment, the seven-year-old wrote a protest in her own hand that was persuasive enough to convince the House of Lords to overrule the lower house, and leave things as they had been.

      1643 was largely a year of convalescence for Elizabeth, after she badly broke a leg. Daily life involved submission to the intense religious programme of her captors, with endless sermons that were meant to win over her soul, but instead numbed her mind. The princess won approval, though, for the natural modesty of her behaviour, and earned the nickname of ‘Temperance’, a Puritan virtue.

      In the summer of 1644 she and Henry were moved to Danvers House in Chelsea, and put in the care of the twice-widowed Sir John Danvers, a disgruntled sixty-year-old courtier who in his youth had been considered one of the best-looking men in England. Danvers’s extravagant love for architecture and Italianate gardens ensured the royal children were accommodated in style.

      A succession of other aristocrats sympathetic to Parliament took part in overseeing the royal children. The constant in all these changes was the Countess of Dorset, who had been Prince Charles’s governess from the age of one, and who now performed that duty with Elizabeth and Henry until her deteriorating health took its toll.

      In the spring of 1645, with the countess retired, the princess and Henry were placed in the custody of the Earl and Countess of Northumberland. They were moved to Syon House in Isleworth, Middlesex. After the surrender of the Royalist capital, Oxford, in June 1646, James, Duke of York, was brought to join them there.

      The king and queen were left miserable by their inability to rescue their three middle children, Henrietta Maria writing to Prince Charles: ‘Yet my real afflictions do not make me forget your brothers, and that unfortunate Elizabeth. Oh! If before my death, I could see her out of the hands of the traitors, I could die content. To this, at least, I will exhort you, to employ every force, to use every artifice, to withdraw so dear a part of my own heart, this innocent victim of their fury, your worthy sister, from London. Do it, I pray and conjure you, by the spirit of the king, my lord and your father.’5 But Prince Charles was as powerless to help his siblings as his father had been before him.

      Charles I had made overtures to the rebels, and planned kidnap attempts, in the hope of getting Elizabeth and Henry to him at Oxford. But when, after his defeat, the king was imprisoned at Hampton Court, he delighted in travelling the six miles to the Earl of Northumberland’s private palace, to visit his three captive children there.

      At the end of January 1649, Elizabeth and Henry were taken to say a final goodbye to their father on the day before his execution. Elizabeth’s vivid account of this heartbreaking meeting demonstrates an astonishing gift for recall, particularly given the depth of emotions swirling in the fourteen-year-old’s mind at such a terrible moment.

      She wrote of how her father put eight-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester, on his knee, then told him, ‘“Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head.” And Gloucester looking very intently upon him, he said again, “Heed, my child, what I say: they will cut off my head and perhaps make thee a king. But mark what I say. Thou must not be a king as long as thy brothers Charles and James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.” At which my brother sighed deeply, and made answer: “I will be torn in pieces first!”’

      Elizabeth would remember her father’s words of comfort as he turned to her: ‘He desired me not to grieve for him, for he should die a martyr, and that he doubted not the Lord would settle his throne upon his son, and that we should all be happier than we could have expected to be if he had lived.’6 The next day, the king was beheaded, just as he had warned Elizabeth and Henry he would be.

      Princess Elizabeth petitioned to join her surviving family on the Continent, but three months later these hopes were dashed. Keen to get her and her brother away from London, ‘that they may not be the objects of respect, to draw the eyes and application of the people towards them’,7 Parliament ordered that Elizabeth and Henry be sent to live with the Earl and Countess of Leicester at Penshurst in Kent. Their hosts were under instruction not to acknowledge the duo’s royal blood. Their titles were not to be used, any special treatment was banned, and they were to eat with the Leicesters’ children.

      Elizabeth’s dignity in the wretched role of royal hostage impressed many. John Quarles, an exiled Royalist poet, dedicated Regale lectum miseriae, his lament for Charles I, ‘To that Patroness of Virtue and most illustrious Princess, Elizabeth, The sorrowful daughter to our late Martyr’d Sovereign, Charles, King of England’. Elizabeth was, to Quarles and many others, the embodiment of the continuing tragedy of the Stuart cause.

      On their brother Charles’s landing in Scotland in 1650, to assume the crown there, Elizabeth and her brother were removed to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. This was where their father had been kept secure by Parliament from November 1647 until September 1648, before his journey towards trial and execution in London. It was also as far from Scotland as could be: having the royal children cooped up there stopped them from becoming figureheads for any who might be planning a Royalist uprising in mainland England.

      Elizabeth pleaded that her health was too poor for her to be transported from Penshurst to the Isle of Wight, but Sir Anthony Mildmay, who had been part of the king’s trial, persuaded the Council of State, the nation’s chief executive body, that the security of the nation must come first. On being moved, Elizabeth’s delicate health deteriorated. She caught a cold, then consumption. That is the disease that she died of, in Carisbrooke Castle, on 8 September 1650.

      Two days later news reached the Isle of Wight that permission had finally been granted by Parliament for the princess and her younger brother to depart for the Netherlands, where they were to be handed over to the care of their older sister, Mary. Instead, Elizabeth’s next journey was to an unmarked grave, its whereabouts signalled by her initials, ‘E.S.’, on a nearby church wall.

      Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was told that his older sister had died of a broken heart, because of their brother Charles’s submission to the Scots’ extreme brand of Protestantism. The Royalists also used Elizabeth’s death for propaganda purposes, claiming that she breathed her last while her face nestled on a Bible that Charles I had given her at their final meeting.

      James, Duke of York, was taken into Parliamentary hands in June 1646, when the Royalist capital of Oxford fell to Parliament. He was forced to join his siblings, Elizabeth and Henry, in St James’s Palace, where he had been born and christened thirteen years earlier. His godparents had been the Queen of Bohemia, the Elector Palatine, and the Prince of Orange. The first two of these had lost their thrones, and the grandson of the third would one day depose James from his. But at the time of his birth the royal family of England was seemingly secure, as well as happily detached from the bloody wars that brought mayhem to swathes of Continental Europe for fifteen years before, and fifteen years after, James’s appearance in the world. Soon after his baptism James was given the title of Duke of York and Albany. Aged five, he was appointed lord high admiral of England’s expanding navy.

      By 1646, James’s life had been turned upside down. His father was militarily defeated, unsure of the future, but clinging to his belief that he was central to whatever settlement his war-ravaged kingdoms would reach. His siblings were either captive, fled overseas, or watching in despair from the foreign courts into which they had been married off.

      The three royal children confined to St James’s Palace were in the care of the 10th Earl of Northumberland, one of the grandest noblemen to stand against the Crown in the English Civil War. Northumberland