The Escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester, by Richard Ollard (Robinson, £7.99)
The disguised king who wanders incognito among his people is a familiar device of myth and fiction. The Duke in Measure for Measure who witnesses the corruption of Vienna dressed as a friar is Shakespeare's variation on a standard theme that includes Alfred burning the cakes and Odysseus's return to Ithaca. The extraordinary thing about the tale of Charles II's escape, aged 21, after the army he had raised in Scotland suffered its second defeat at Worcester in 1651, is that the fundamentals of it are true.
Standard histories may dismiss his experiences - he was smuggled from Catholic safe-houses via inns and even convenient treetops to a hired boat at Brighton - in a sentence or two. But Richard Ollard's book, first published in 1966 and now reissued, makes a case for those adrenalin-fuelled six weeks as "crucial to the formation of his character and the development of his political principles". First and foremost, they make for a great, scarcely credible story.
Remarkably, Charles's right-hand man, the experienced operative on whom his survival might have depended, seems to have been a buffoon. He was Henry Wilmot, later the first Earl of Rochester, and father to the poet who was to become Charles's favourite after the Restoration. Ollard's Wilmot "provides the strongest argument for the theory, early advanced and long maintained by pious royalists, that the King's preservation can only be explained on the hypothesis of direct divine intervention. He was stupid, he was careless, he was forgetful, he was indiscreet." Certainly, while Charles had his hair cut, donned servant's clothes, walked miles in ill-fitting shoes or helped a blacksmith shoe a horse, Wilmot, as Charles recalled when he had his story ghostwritten by Samuel Pepys, "I could never get... to put on any disguise, he saying he should look frightfully in it, and therefore did never put on any".
As Charles travelled in this dangerous company, trying to avoid detection by government forces who had put a price of £1,000 on his head, he must have made a better acquaintance with his future subjects than any of his successors. His most frequent hosts were royalist recu sants, Catholic families whose loyalty to the monarchy was unshaken by years of persecution, many of whose houses had the practical advantage of being equipped with priest-holes. Later, Charles made sure that almost everyone who had been of any assistance in his time of greatest need was rewarded.
Ollard's book is vividly told, and meticulously researched among the accounts that Charles and his accomplices gave after the Restoration. The most dated aspect of the book is Ollard's readiness to pass judgment on the figures in his narrative. The fact that the most recent secondary source for the work was published in 1909 might, in a more general history, also give cause for concern. But Charles's escape is such a one-off that it can usefully be viewed out of context. It is worth reading about, less for its picture of mid-17th-century politics than for its insight into character. As Ollard argues, Charles's keen memory of the episode indicates that "these six weeks saw him at his best and he recognised this".
