Small boat to freedom
On the A35 just east of Bridport in Dorset the hubcap of a Skoda marked the spot where the future King Charles almost lost the plot. On the run, with a price on his head, he decided on the spur of the moment to hang a left up a road called Lee Lane. Good move for, so the story goes, not five minutes later a mob of angry Republicans clattered past, intent on clapping him in irons then depriving him of his head.
We’re talking Charles Stuart here – the future Charles II – not Charles Windsor, his nominal successor as monarch. But it’s a fair bet the new king identifies with the story of Charles II’s flight from Cromwell’s soldiers following his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in1651 – not least because as well as being deadly serious it’s funny and ridiculous, in a very British sort of way.
The story runs hand in hand with the journey – which took him from Worcester on September 3 to Shoreham on October 15 but not on a route endorsed by any satnav system – and both are minutely mapped. Charles II, who returned to England as king in 1660, described the dramas that unfolded to Samuel Pepys in 1680. Many others who were there (and some who weren’t) chipped in with their own accounts. As for the physical journey, in the 1990s a walker and guidebook writer named Trevor Antill revived it by stitching together rights of way between documented locations to create a new long distance footpath he called The Monarch’s Way – all 625 miles of it.
There is no obvious logic to the route taken by the 21-year-old Charles and his party. Dictated by the obstacles they encountered and their consequent changes of plan, it backtracked around the West Midlands, plunged down to the Dorset coast, crossed the South Downs and ended in a muddy creek west of Brighton where he finally boarded his lift to France, a fishing boat called Surprise.
But I found a serendipity to this muddle. The escape route passes through the village where I was born near Wolverhampton, and near my present home in Hampshire. It also touches on emblems of Englishness, notably Stonehenge (which Charles somehow found time to visit, putting his “Arithmetick” to the test in counting the number of stones) and Broadhalfpenny Down in Hampshire, which a century later became the spiritual home of cricket.
Charles was travelling with a buffoonish character called Lord Wilmot, who seems to have been more hindrance than help. For some of my forays onto the Monarch’s Way I enlisted the congenial company of retired Cheltenham accountant John Price, whose labour of love it has been to research and walk the route in its entirety (almost – he plans to complete the walk this autumn). Along the way he has built an impressive, exhaustive website, thefugitiveking.uk.
The modern-day long distance footpath, which features on OS maps and is waymarked on the ground with yellow (or mostly yellow) signs showing a tree, crown and ship, does not claim to follow in the precise footsteps and hoof marks of the escape party. Studying Google Earth John Price reckoned the ground that Charles II covered amounts to no more than 450 miles. “The Monarch’s Way goes all over the place in order to pick up scenic routes,” he explained.
But in certain places it touches history. Lee Lane, on the outskirts of Bridport, is one such. The fugitive hubcap lay near a stone memorial which declares that “King Charles II escaped capture through this lane Sepr XXIII MDCLI”.
It marked the start of a glorious day’s walking in which John and I took the scenic route to the village of Broadwindsor, over high tufted hills and onto one of Dorset’s giddiest roofs, the Iron Age hillfort of Pilsdon Pen with views of glittering ocean one way and misty Somerset the other (Charles’s party would have missed it out, taking the direct route to the village).
As we walked we mused on the “shambles” (John’s word) of Charles’s escape. “It reminds me of Blackadder series three, with Hugh Laurie as Charles, Rowan Atkinson as Lord Wilmot and Baldrick as Wilmot’s servant Swan,” he said. Charles travelled in disguise, wearing smelly hats and learning to lope loutishly (his accent apparently was not a problem as he was such a good mimic). However history has judged his reign, Charles II made a cool and classy fugitive.
Meanwhile the Parliamentarian forces tasked with finding him seemed convinced he was dressed as a woman. On the day he cut up Lee Lane, ending up that evening in the Castle Inn (now a private house) in Broadwindsor, an irate Captain Macy raided Pilsdon Manor a couple of miles away (we passed it on The Monarch’s Way) where he apprehended “a lovely young lady” and took some persuading she wasn’t him.
By this stage Charles had already endured the farcical no-show of the boat and skipper that had been arranged to pick him up from Charmouth beach, near Bridport, in dead of night. It turned out that as Team Charles stood around like lemons the boat skipper, one Stephen Limbry, had been locked in a bedroom by his wife who suspected he was up to no good. Thus another cunning plan bit the dust.
In the private households that were brave enough to stash him Charles was forever having to fold his six foot-plus frame into tiny crawl spaces where Catholic priests were usually bundled for safekeeping. There’s a famous example at Boscobel House in Shropshire, where he hid shortly after fleeing Worcester.
Boscobel is the house mostly closely associated with the flight of Charles II, mainly because of the famous oak tree (actually a descendant of the original, looking oddly like a baobab in its leafless winter state when I visited). This is the tree in which he spent the day hiding and dozing, with his head in the lap of a Major Careless – surely an ancestor of Captain Darling in Blackadder Goes Forth.
But the place where I felt closest to Charles was Moseley Old Hall, north of Wolverhampton, his next refuge after Boscobel. Encased in red brick, the house looks like an unremarkable if rambling Victorian vicarage from the outside. But the 19th-century exterior has preserved the spirit of the Tudor farmhouse that survives, like a wonky galleon, within.
Round the back is the same door, described by Charles II as being “three planks wide and heavily studded”, by which he entered the house. On the first floor is the lumpy four-poster where he slept fully dressed and, beneath a trapdoor in a cupboard, the “little ease” where he hid as Cromwell’s soldiers roughed up the hall’s owner, Thomas Whitgreave, outside. Today there were no curses and blows coming from the garden, just the muffled roar of the M54 beyond.
My final sampling of The Monarch’s Way was in Hampshire. The 13 miles I walked with my mate Clive between the villages of Warnford and Hambledon shadowed one of Charles’s last days on the run. On the way we saw three deer, two fighter planes and a dead badger, its pink mouth horribly agape.
The route crossed another Iron Age hillfort, this time one that Charles actually climbed, for it was on Old Winchester Hill that he met up with his latest local helper, a Colonel Gunter. Gunter recommended he stay that night in his brother-in-law’s house, which “stands privately and out of the way” on the edge of Hambledon.
The house no longer exists – in its place tangles of vegetation and a derelict single-storey cottage. The location is not on The Monarch’s Way but John Price had told me where to find it (on the east side of the B2150 beyond the Old Forge Tea Room). I was stumbling among the undergrowth, trying to imagine the goings-on of the night of October 13, 1651, when I spotted an old gate with a sign attached that said “Kings rest”.
Rest was hardly what he got that night. Gunter’s brother-in-law was on a drinking binge, swearing his befuddled head off and mistaking his young guest for “some round-headed rogue’s son”. Wilmot, of course, got drunk with him while Charles made his excuses. At daybreak the king’s party raided the larder and made an early start – heading east, almost free, with a couple of ox tongues for the road.
Published in the Daily Telegraph on May 3 2023
