Elizabethan Priest–Holes: VI–The Escape Of Charles II

Abstract

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.