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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
The escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester presents the historian of priest-holes with an unfamiliar and agreeable problem. Instead of there being too little evidence, there is if anything too much. The Boscobel Tracts (Hughes's convenient title for the various printed and manuscript accounts of the affair) are together as long as Gerard's Narrative and Autobiography; and they describe a period of only six weeks instead of eighteen years. From them it is possible to plot the complicated movements of the King and of the other characters in the story, not merely day by day but often hour by hour. The Boscobel episode, like the Battle of Hastings and Guy Fawkes, is familiar to everybody; for three hundred years the sign of the Royal Oak has been a common one in English towns and villages, however remote from the course of the young King's wanderings. But despite that, curiously little has been written about the hides to which Charles owed his safety at Boscobel, Moseley, Trent and Heale, although the Tracts furnish a good deal of useful, if discreetly-worded, information about them.
(1) The most recent continuous account is Ollard's.
(2) Fea, Flight of the King, pp. 318–320.
(3) Squiers, p. 171.
(4) See Ollard, pp. 149–154.
(5) By Matthews in Charles II’s Escape from Worcester.
(6) Squiers, Moseley Old Hall (J. & J. Wiggin, Bloxwich, Walsall, 1950).Google Scholar
(7) Ollard, p. 153; After Worcester Fight, pp. 232–3
(8) Matthews, pp. 145–6.
(9) Matthews, pp. 162–4.
(10) This coincidence was first pointed out by Christopher Hussey in Country Life, 4 August 1944. Fr John Brownlow (for whom see Recusant History, April 1975, p. 20) records that the villagers of Chaddesley Corbett attacked the fleeing Scots a mile further north, ‘just beyond Barnet Hill, at the junction of the Yieldingtree lane with the public highway; and the dead bodies were buried on the right-hand or eastern side of the way’: Coughton Court, Throckmorton MSS, History of Chaddesley Corbett and Harvington (1855), p. 105. The grid ref of the site is 130: SO 893776.
(11) Nearer, if Bate is correct in saying that he passed through Bromsgrove, but on this see my note in Worcestershire Recusant 29 (June 1977).
(12) Flight of the King, p. 19.
(13) Blount, pp. 72–4.
(14) Blount, pp. 56–8.
(15) Blount, p. 57.
(16) Foley, 5, pp. 228, 433–6; Roberts, F.G., ‘The Society of Jesus in Staffordshire’, Staffs. Catholic History 3, p. 10;Google Scholar Narrative, p. 87.
(17) Salt Society (Staffordshire Record Society) 10, part 2, p. 30; Foley 2, pp. 230–3; C.R.S. 57, pp. 333, 392.
(18) King, pp. 42–3; Narrative, p. 89; Blount, p. 76.
(19) The History of his Sacred Majesty's most Wonderful Preservation, in Broadley, A.M., The Royal Miracle (1912), p. 76.Google Scholar
(20) Blount, pp. 74–5.
(21) King, pp. 44–7. According to Blount (p.90), it was Mr Wolfe who suggested that the King should ‘rather go to Boscobel House, being the most retired place for concealment in all the country, and to stay there till an opportunity of a farther safe conveyance could be found out’.
(22) Narrative, pp. 87, 91.
(23) Ibid.; King, pp. 48–9.
(24) Staffordshire Historical Collections N.S. 5, pp. 168, 200.
(25) Flight of the King, pp. 19, 205–6.
(26) Blount, p. 57.
(27) Weaver, O.J., Boscobel House and White Ladies Priory (H.M.S.O., 1965), pp. 38–9.Google Scholar
(28) Recusant History, October 1976, pp. 266–7 and Plates 1–2.
(29) Recusant History, October 1972, pp. 286–9; October 1973, pp. 110–112; 113, 116; January 1974, pp. 173–4, 186–7; April 1975, pp. 30–35; October 1976, p. 255.
(30) For a plan, see Recusant History, October 1976, p. 274.
(31) Squiers, pp. 271–2 and photograph facing p. 256.
(32) Weaver, Boscobel (n. 27), pp. 34–5.
(33) See my accounl in Worcestershire Arch. Soc. Trans. N.S. 41, pp. 27–8.
(34) Though, as Squiers commented, ‘the closet floor… must have been the first place any pursuivant would learn to search’: Squiers to me, 6 September 1956, on the one at Harvington.
(35) Flight of the King, pp. 35–6 (no source given).
(36) William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (1776 ed.), 1, p. 60, quoted in Flight of the King, p. 37.
(37) Squiers, p. 39.
(38) Squiers, p. 116.
(39) Reproduced in Weaver, Boscobel, pp. 16–17.
(40) Squiers, p. 169.
(41) Ibid.
(42) Flight of the King, p. 37; cf n. 36.
(43) Narrative, p. 94. The passage continues: ‘Thither they let the King down, where he slept very incommodiously, with little or no rest, for that the place was not long enough for him, and therefore the next night they laid him a sorry bed upon the Staircase, as they used to do for strange Woodcutters, that the meanness of his lodging might secure him from suspicion’.
(44) Blount, p. 95.
(45) Blount, p. 113.
(46) As for n. 16.
(47) Ollard, p. 45.
(48) ‘The King was then [Tuesday afternoon] laid down upon Mr Huddleston's bed, but Mr Whitgreave presently secures his Royal guest in the Secret place’: Blount, pp. 103–4, cf p. 106. ‘His Majesty spent most part of this day in Mr Hodleston's chamber, reposing upon his bed and diverting himself with him in the window of a closet in the next room, just over the porch of the door which enters the hall’: Huddleston, p. 109.
(49) Kingston, H.P., The Wanderings of Charles II in Staffordshire and Shropshire after Worcester Fight (1933), p. 20,Google Scholar quoting the will of Henry Pitt of Bushbury Hill (1602); ef pp. 10, 54–69.
(50) Whitgreave, p. 164.
(51) Squiers, Moseley Old Hall, p. 23.
(52) King, p. 18.
(53) Narrative, p. 199. Whitgreave quotes Wilmot's remark in an even more extravagant form: ‘I having shown his Lordship a privacy in my house, formerly made in times of persecution, and in which, after the late unfortunate war, I secured myself against the violent strict search of Captain Stone's troop, his lordship so approved of it for his security that he wished he had given 100, 000 friends of his were with him [sic]’: Whitgreave, p. 118.
(54) Squiers, p. 48.
(55) Squiers, Moseley Old Hall, p. 11.
(56) Squiers, p. 41.
(57) Anthony Munday, A Brief Discourse of the Taking of Edmund Campion, quoted in Pollard, A.F., Tudor Tracts (1903), pp. 462–3.Google Scholar
(58) Fea, After Worcester Fight, p. xxxiii.
(59) Whitgreave, p. 121.
(60) Recusant History, January 1974, pp. 188–192.
(61) Squiers, p. 49,
(62) Recusant History, October 1576, pp. 256–8.
(63) John, Gerard, Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 38.Google Scholar
(64) Recusant History, April 1975, p. 35 and Plate 6.
(65) Squiers, p. 175; photograph in Recusant History, October 1972, between pp. 298–9.
(66) Squiers, pp. 48–9.
(67) Recusant History, April 1975, pp. 42–3 and Plate 10.
(68) Bede, Camm, Forgotten Shrines (1910), p. 297.Google Scholar
(69) Whitgreave, p. 122.
(70) John Gerard, p. 42; Huddleston, p. 104.
(71) Whitgreave, p. 121.
(72) Anstruther 2, p. 163.
(73) Whitgreave, p. 122.
(74) Ibid.
(75) King, p. 78.
(76) Whitgreave says explicitly that on the Friday night after the battle (5 September), Colonel Lane invited Wilmot to stay at Bentley, ‘as far more safe’, and that Wilmot declined because of the hide which Whitgreave had shown him on Thursday night (n. 53 above): Whitgreave, pp. 117–8.
(79) For the details, see Michael, Wilson, The English Chamber Organ (1968), pp. 9, 58–9.Google Scholar But the builder was not Richard Bridge but Thomas Parker: Charles Lines in Birmingham Post, 21 November 1970.
(80) Information from the Earl of Aylesford, the present owner, cf V.C.H. Warwks. 4, p. 181.
(81) Recusant History, January 1974, pp. 182–3.
(82) Squiers, pp. 54–55, 61, 90, 105, 172–3.
(83) John Gerard, pp. 164–9.
(84) Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, p. 244.
(85) Squiers, p. 54. But the first priest mentioned there by Foley was Michael Alford from 1629 to 1640: Foley 2, pp. 300, 307.
(86) Nicholls, History of Leicestershire 2, pp. 718, 725, 729; Squiers, pp. 54–7.
(87) Wyndham, pp. 180–1. At that time, Lady Wyndham was only nineteen: Fea, After Worcester Fight, p. 104.
(88) C.R.S. 57, pp. 23, 139.
(89) Wyndham, p. 182.
(90) Wyndham, pp. 182–3. Anne Wyndham mentions, among other arrangements made overnight, that ‘a safe place is provided to retreat unto, in case of search or imminent danger’: Wyndham, p. 185. The phrase recalls Whitgreave's about the hide at Moseley ‘being already prepared’: Whitgreave, p. 120.
(91) Squiers, p. 233. The present red damask lining of the walls is a modern reconstruction, and the space behind it is now entered from the bedroom, not from the passage outside.
(92) Blount, p. 137.
(93) Fea, Flight of the King, pp. 98–101, with illustrations.
(94) Squiers, pp. 239–240.
(95) Wyndham, pp. 206–7.
(96) Wyndham, p. 206. The date is given by the mention of Peters’ return from Salisbury on 25 September (p. 204) and of Colonel Edward Philips’ arrival on 28 September (p. 208).
(97) Recusant History, October 1973, pp. 108–110 and Plates 1–5.
(98) Wyndham, pp. 188–9.
(99) ‘Mr Ellesdon's Relation of the King's Escape from Lyme’, in Fea, After Worcester Fight, pp. 223–4.
(100) Blount, p. 134.
(101) Wyndham, p. 200.
(102) Wyndham, p. 203.
(103) Country Life, 19 October 1961, p. 883; Philips, p. 140.
(104) Humphrey and Richard Pakington, The Pakingtons of Westwood (privately printed, 1975), pp. 19–26.Google ScholarPubMed
(105) Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A.16, f. 360.
(106) Squiers, p. 230.
(107) Squiers, p. 228.
(108) Ibid.
(109) Squiers, p. 229.
(110) Fea, Flight of the King, p. 134, and Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places, p. 164.
(111) Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Wiltshire (1963), pp. 386, 392.
(112) Country Life, 19 October 1961, p. 884.
(113) Squiers, p. 230. The Wiltshire V.C.H. records a tradition that the hide in the summer-house is ‘said to have been the refuge of the Duke of Monmouth after the Battle of Sedgemoor’! V.C.H. Wilts. 7, p. 78.
(114) Roger, North, Examen: or, An Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History (1740), p. 382.Google Scholar
(115) John Gerard, p. 42.
(116) C.S.P.D. Charles II, July-September 1683, p. 309.
(117) Rupert, C. Jarvis, Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings (1972), 2, pp. 311–312,Google Scholar quoting S.P. Domestic George II 75/4.
(118) Fea, Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places pp. 230–1.
(119) Philips, p. 140.
(120) Blount, p. 136.
(121) Wyndham, p. 208.
(122) Philips, p. 141.
(123) King, pp. 66, 67.
(124) King, pp. 68, 69.
(125) Blount, p. 141. Heale House ‘cannot have been the actual structure which sheltered Charles II, but if the chimneys of the earlier house were left in position at the rebuilding, it is possible that a cupboard which flanks one of them represents, as is claimed, the closet in which he was concealed’: V.C.H. Wilts. 6, p. 224.
(126) Gounter, p. 150.
(127) Ibid.
(128) Blount, p. 72.
(129) Quoted by Fea, After Worcester Fight, pp. 36–7; cf Flight of the King, p. 250.
(130) Cf. Squiers, p. 57.
(131) T.B., Trappes-Lomax and Cuthbert, Fitzherbert, The Taylor Treasure (privately printed, 1971), pp. 20–21,Google Scholar quoting Wiggens, W.R., Esh Leaves, being Drafts upon the Memory of an Old Parishioner (1914).Google Scholar
(132) In The Taylor Treasure.
(133) Information from Dr David Carrick.
(134) Pevsner, The Buildings of England: North Lancashire, p. 37.
(135) Pevsner, Worcestershire, pp. 193–4.
(136) Hoskins, W.G., Local History in England (1959), pp. 2, 106–7, 119.Google Scholar
(137) Squiers, pp. 67, 159. Elmley Castle House was in process of demolition when James Lees-Milne was writing the Shell Guide to Worcestershire (1964): see p. 36. Apart from the hide, it contained ‘a splendid Queen Anne staircase and some early Georgian ceilings’.