11
‘Tomorrow I will begin to try the bar: & at night I will begin to give you some account of it.’
Charles I to Henry Firebrace, 23 April 1648
If earnest words were a measure of firm intentions, and the stirrings of a restless kingdom any guarantee of solid support, the spring of 1648 still bore certain signs of hope for Carisbrooke’s royal prisoner. In the country at large, as high taxation, food shortages, censorship, sequestration and religious upheaval showed no prospect of abating, there was growing dissent. All the while, from the confines of his bedchamber, the king talked fervidly of escape. The vain attempt in March was casually dismissed and the factors which frustrated it conveniently downplayed. ‘I pray you,’ Charles wrote to Titus in early April, ‘thinke wch way I shall remoue the Bar out of my Window, without noise and unperceaued; and what time it will take me to doe it.’ Nor was it long before he himself had found the apparent solution and was urging Firebrace to acquire the necessary equipment. Last time, he wrote, ‘the narrowness of the Window was the only impediment for my escape; & therefore … some instrument must be had to remoue the bar; wch, I believe, is not hard to gett; for I have seene many, & so portable, that a man might put them in his Pocket.’ This gadget – which he referred to as ‘the endless screw’ or ‘the grat Force’ – would, he ardently believed, be the key to his freedom. Guards, walls and ditches – no less, of course, than informers and the unwavering watchfulness of Governor Hammond – were to be lightly discarded, just as the subsequent success of his Scottish allies was to be taken as read. For the Scots, along with their Royalist English counterparts, would surely carry the day, as their king, freshly hatched from confinement, swept all before him to assume once more his rightful place upon the throne.
The architect of the previous scheme, meanwhile, had lost no time in concocting new plans. Indeed, immediately after his previous failure, Harry Firebrace had ‘sent for Files and Aqua Fortis [nitric acid] from London’ in an effort to make the king’s passage through his barred window ‘more easy’. His agent, as usual, was to be Jane Whorwood, working through the astrologer William Lilly, who not only set out to obtain the necessary acid but also, according to his own account, enlisted a certain G. Farmer – ‘a most ingenious locksmith’ who ‘dwelt in Bow Lane’ – ‘to make me a saw to cut the iron bars in sunder’. Neither saw nor acid had arrived by mid-April, however, and as the urgency for action increased, so the king’s misgivings grew. Writing to Titus on 10 April, he wondered ‘whether I shall haue tyme anufe, after I have Supt & before I goe to Bed, to remoue the Bar; for if I had a forecer, I would make no question of it; but hauing nothing but fyles; I much dout that my tyme will be too scant’. The very next day, he was still preoccupied with the same issue, noting now that the bar would have to be cut in two places and worrying about the problem of hiding ‘the leade that tyes the Glasse’. Still he bemoaned the lack of a forcer, though now he wondered whether a fire-shovel might be used instead.
By 12 April, meanwhile, Charles was sounding out Titus about the possibility of suborning his guards:
The difficultie of remouing the Bar, hath made my thoughts runne much upon the later Designe: it is this: since for my goeing out at Window, it is necessary that an officer or two be gained; will not they, as willingly, & may they not, more easily, helpe me out at the Dores? And truly in my judgement there can be nothing of lesse hazard then this last Desygne, if any one Officer can be ingaged in it; for then, any Disguyse will make me passe safly through all the Guards; wherefore I pray you thinke well upon it, for I am most confident that I am in the right; yet, for God’s sake make your objections freely to what I haue said; or if you do not understand me, tell me in what, & I hope, that I shall satisfie you: howeuer, I pray you lett me haue your Opinion of this, as soone as you may, whether to be Pro, or Con: if this Desygne be resolued on, we need not stay for Darke Nights.
But the nagging doubts and constant pendulation continued, as he returned next day to the pitfalls of files, observing to Titus that ‘I know not how fyling can be, without much noise, & time’, before declaring that ‘I absolutly conceaue this to be the best way’.
In this letter of 13 April, moreover, there was an almost touching reference to Charles’ unerring conviction that ‘no Cipher of myne hath miscarried’, notwithstanding the fact that Cromwell’s message to Hammond of one week earlier had specifically mentioned that ‘there is Aqua Fortis gone down from London’. The king, it seems, had been prodigal too with secrets of other kinds, as the following extract from a letter to the Earl of Lanark, written by an unknown source on 11 April, makes all too clear:
I receaued a letter very latly from the King … and I hope ane occasion will be afforded him to escape out of the Castle … There are foure seruants about him, who are interested to designe and assist in this attempt. There is ane engyne made to pull out the barre of his chamber windowe and so to get out ouer the wall, hauing two gentlemen Islanders of his only to carey him away to his ship.
Worse still, Lilly too had been venting details of his secret mission to the locksmith in Bow Lane, so that within days the Derby House Committee was fully apprised of the details by one of its network of informers. Indeed, in a letter to Hammond of 15 April, the committee’s secretary was able to specify not only methods but names and intended escape routes out of the castle. Firebrace, Titus and Burroughs were all mentioned – the last being ‘either gone into Sussex, or about to go, to lie ready there at a place appointed’ – and there was further reference to ‘a boat of four oars’, which was to be used to transport Charles from the island. Most striking of all, however, was the final passage, which confirmed once more how hopelessly the plan had been compromised:
The king hath a bodkin, with which he will raise the lead, in which the iron bar of the window stands, to put in the Aqua Fortis to eat out the iron. Then being got out, he will from the Bowling Alley cast himself over the works and so make his escape.
Henceforth, the plot could be monitored at leisure, and as the days ahead unfolded, a steady stream of intelligence flowed from London to Hammond’s lodgings at Carisbrooke. ‘There is yet a design for the King’s escape,’ Hammond was warned on 18 April. ‘Whensoever he shall attempt it, he will be assisted by Harrington. Of the way we know nothing, nor have assurance, that this is true; but are only so informed.’ There was also news at one point of another scheme ‘to fire the Castle, by firing a great heap of charcoal that lies near the king’s lodging’, but it was Firebrace’s scheme that particularly exercised the thoughts of the king’s captors, and on 21 April, an altogether more detailed letter arrived in cipher from Westminster:
The Aqua Fortis was spilt by way of accident; but yesterday, about 4 o’clock, a fat plain man carried to the King a hacker, which is an instrument made here, on purpose to make the King’s two knives, which he hath by him, cut as saws. The time assigned is May Day at night for the King’s escape; but it may be sooner, if opportunity serves. He intends to go first to a gentleman’s house at Lewes, in Sussex, who is thought to be a Parliament man. The man, that brings this hacker and dispatches, will go to Newport; and on Saturday morning, or about that time, Dowcett, Harrington, or some confidee, will go out to the man, and bring in all to the King. Therefore, if some occasion be taken to search them, all will appear.
As altered information emerged, so it was passed on without delay, for within twenty-four hours another ciphered letter was supplying Hammond with further news on the movements of ‘the fat plain man’:
We have now from the same hand, that the same fat plain man comes no farther than Portsmouth, and from thence sends over his business by some fisherman, or some other such person, which will be received from him by some of the persons above-mentioned.
Yet, as Charles himself continued to demur over the bar to his window, Firebrace opted for a simpler, cheekier escape plan, involving disguise, deception and the inattentiveness of Carisbrooke’s guards. Exploiting the number of people still crowding into the castle to be touched for the ‘King’s Evil’, it was proposed that a suitable volunteer might enter the castle among the throng of sufferers, dressed so strikingly that his image would be indelibly impressed upon the guards. Sporting ‘a fals beard’ and a perriwig, along with a white cap, ‘a country gray, or blew coate, a pair of coullered fustian drawers to come over his breeches, white cloth stockings, great shooes’ and ‘an old broad hatt’, the individual concerned would then be greeted loudly by Firebrace’s servant, Henry Chapman, who would embrace him as a friend before taking him off for a drinking session within the castle, making sure throughout that his garishly attired guest was noticed by any soldiers on hand.
In the meantime, another outfit of identical clothes was to have been made ready in the king’s bedroom for him to put on as soon as he had finished his supper. After waiting for a signal from Chapman that it was safe to leave his room once more – presumably with the connivance of one of the ‘conservators’ attending his door – the king was then to hide in a small room upstairs, which is likely to have been one of those in the Montacute Tower at the southern end of the great hall. From here, as the other visitors to the castle made their way to the main gate, the would-be escapee was to join Chapman, who was on friendly terms with the soldiers, and simply stroll through the walls to freedom, where horses had been saddled at some distance. With a trial run beforehand, which the king insisted upon, and the abandonment of the false beard, which was another bone of contention after his undignified scuttle from Oxford, all was expected to be plain sailing. Indeed, in a letter of 13 April, Charles informed Firebrace that he liked his ‘new Desygne … extreamly well’, regardless of the fact that Titus was ‘not fully satisfied’ with it: something that Firebrace was instructed to ‘take no notice of’.
Once again, however, it was not long before the Derby House Committee caught wind of this plan too, and on 22 April, a ciphered letter warned Hammond of a porter:
who useth to carry up coals for the King’s chamber presently after dinner and supper, who is to carry the King a disguise, which the King is to put on, and also the porter’s frock, and to lock the porter into his chamber, and come down himself, whilst the servants are at supper; and so pass away.
The porter concerned, though not mentioned by name, was almost certainly that self-same ‘little crumpling old man’ mentioned by Sir Philip Warwick, and it was his involvement, more than anything else, perhaps, that might have proved the final straw for Hammond. Plainly, the king’s household was rotten with subterfuge on a scale that even he had failed to appreciate, and equally plainly, therefore, the prisoner would have to be moved to more secure accommodation in the north curtain wall, where he could be lodged next to the officers’ quarters in another barred bedroom, 10ft from the ground, which was to be patrolled by sentries on the bank outside.
For the time being, however, neither guards nor bars were the main constraints upon the king, but the constant flow of information to his enemies, which was now becoming common knowledge within the royal circle itself. On 21 April, the Derby House Committee told Hammond that they had seen a letter from the king in which he had written ‘that, although Firebrace and Titus be discovered, yet D. is fast to him, and will do the deed’. ‘D’, in the committee’s view, was likely to be Dowcett, though Firebrace soon got news of the message which had been sent to Hammond, and only two days later was able to inform the king:
You keepe intelligence with somebody that betrayes you, for ther is a letter of yours sent to the G [Governor]: from Derby House, (in Carracters) where in you expresse [in] words at length that though they do remove Titus, Dowcett and Firebrace, yet you dispair not of your busines (or to that purpose). Therefore pray think to whome you writ such a tie and be carefull God knowes what hurt this may do.
The result was a profession on Charles’ part that while he could not actually recall writing such a letter, there was still a distinct possibility that his letters to the queen were being diverted to Derby House by ‘the roague Witherings’ at the Post House.
Thomas Witherings, who is commemorated today by a postage stamp issued in his honour, was in fact a merchant by background who had been appointed Postmaster of Foreign Mails by Charles in 1632 before establishing three years later what would become, in effect, the Royal Mail letter service after receiving instructions to ‘settle a pacquet post between London and all parts of His Majesty’s dominions, for the carrying and recarrying of his subjects letters’. It was to run ‘day and night between Edinburgh and Scotland and the City of London’, and establish post offices throughout the country, aided by the creation of six ‘Great Roads’. Henceforward, Witherings had boasted, ‘anie fight at sea, anie distress of His Majestie’s ships (which God forbid), anie wrong offered by anie nation to anie of ye coastes of England or anie of His Majestie’s forts … the newes will come sooner than thought’. It was this same service, employing staging posts at intervals of about 12 miles, that Hammond usually employed to send not only his own routine dispatches, but also those written non-clandestinely by the king.
Whether, of course, Witherings merited the king’s suspicions remains unknown, and it was no small irony that he would be accused of Royalist sympathies in both 1649 and 1651, suffering imprisonment and loss of property, indeed, on the first occasion. But the king’s distrust is well documented and also, for that matter, makes his readiness to dispatch his letters to Henrietta Maria by that means all the more curious, perhaps. For the bulk of his correspondence, he certainly employed his own secret couriers like Major Bosvile, who had nearly walked into Hammond’s trap in February, and Thomas Brookes, whose regular route lay between the Isle of Wight and the English court in France. There was also, moreover, at least one other undercover courier – possibly the ubiquitous ‘fat plain man’ – who, according to the following Derby House letter of 22 April, was entrusted to pick up some letters from the king at Portsmouth and take them to Scotland:
If therefore you cannot intercept those letters in the Isle of Wight, if you can send a faithful man, confident and discreet, to Portsmouth, who may be there on Sunday night, and diligently observe and enquire for such a man, who hath also a horse under him worth £30 or £40 (the colour we know not) and continue there till Thursday, he will certainly find such a man coming out of the town with all the King’s letters, whom he is to apprehend; and you are to send up all the said letters.
But the fact that their movements and contacts were so well known renders even Witherings’ possible disloyalty largely irrelevant. On 4 May, for instance, the committee told Hammond that ‘the messenger, who last came, was so hard put to it by our intelligence, and your vigilance, that he was forced to leave his sword and pistol behind him, and durst not bring his letters to town’, though ‘one Doctor Frazier met him about Windsor, and took the letters of him’. As if the indiscretions of the king, not to mention the shenanigans of Lady Carlisle and the treacherous Mr Low, were not enough, even those whose intentions could not be doubted were occasionally careless with their trust. Harry Firebrace, for example, sometimes confided injudiciously in the Earl of Lanark, and Richard Osborne, Gentleman Usher in Daily Waiting on the King, is known to have complained on one occasion how Mrs Wheeler was using unreliable couriers in her letters to him. Personal names, moreover, were represented in messages by a code of single letters that remained uniform to all the king’s correspondents, and the complex numbering system for key words meant that, unless Charles himself was gifted with a truly phenomenal memory, he was having to keep a code key in his possession that was always liable to discovery.
Even more significant than the random indiscretions of the king and his circle, however, was the remorselessly watchful espionage network at the government’s disposal. The replacement of the Committee of Both Kingdoms by the Derby House Committee, after the breach between the Scots and Parliament in January 1648, had led, amongst other things, to the creation of an altogether more elaborate security system, supervised by members of both Houses of Parliament, and Independents and Presbyterians alike. Henceforth, the committee would meet at 3 p.m. every day of the week, including Sundays, supplied continually by its secretary, Walter Frost, with an abundant stream of information from a varied array of anonymous agents, whose numbers were so considerable that their expense accounts would eventually become a serious financial issue. Mingling in streets, taverns, post-houses and army camps, these nameless figures were all too often disconcertingly well-informed, and almost certainly assisted in their activities by at least one informer from within Carisbrooke Castle itself, for the size of the royal household made it easy to infiltrate, and its day-to-day intimacy rendered secrets hard to conceal.
Yet, notwithstanding the king’s removal to more secure accommodation, preparations for his second escape attempt continued to proceed steadily, so that on 13 April, Titus was asked ‘to make good tryals and giue me good instructions’, regarding the ‘cheefe instrument’ to be used in the venture: namely, one of the files that had already been smuggled to him. Charles still knew not, according to the message, how the filing could be done ‘without much noise, & tyme’, and Titus was to arrange, too, ‘the prouyding of a Ship’ to carry the escapee ‘beyond the water’, regardless of the fact ‘that many of my frends thinkes London the fittest place’. The only other considerations, it seems, were matters of fine detail, for on 21 April, Firebrace was asked to provide his master with ‘a paire of gray Stockings, to pull over my Bootehose, when tyme shall serve for our great Business’. Indeed, when Charles contacted Firebrace one day later, the stockings appeared to have become his main preoccupation. ‘I haue the Aqua fortis,’ he declared, ‘but I can find no stockings, wherefore doe not forgett to give me them to Morrow.’
Plainly, the more serious business of breaching his window and reaching the castle walls was to be left mainly to the ingenuity of others, and it was for this reason that on or about 23 April, Firebrace penned the following message relating to the king’s new accommodation:
In the backstaires window are two casements, in each two barrs, one of the barrs in that next the door shall be cutt, which will give you way enough to goe out I am certaine. The top of the hill comes within a yard of the casement, soe that you may easily step out and creep close to the wall, till you come to a hollow place (which you may observe as you walke tomorrow) where with ease you may go downe and so over the outworkes. If you like this way it shall be carryed on thus. Hen. C. [Chapman] shall cutt the barr and doe up the gap with wax or clay soe that it cannot be perceiv’d. I have already made it loose at the top, soe that when you intend your busines, you shall only pull it and t’will come forth, you must supp late and come up so soone as you have sup’t, put of your Geo: and on your gray stockings, and upon notice to be given you by H.C. come into the backstaire and soe slip out, we shall meet you, and conduct you to your horses and from there to the boate. I have tould him of it and hee’l undertake it, therefore leave some of your files that he may try too morrow when you are at bowles. If you intend to try this way I think it not necessary to tell any of it beside Z [Worsley].
That Firebrace saw fit to add the last comment was no doubt further testament, of course, to his master’s fatal proclivity to reveal his secrets, and there was more than a little irony in Charles’ decision to repeat the self-same warning to Firebrace in his reply, which was left as usual in the chink used by both men for communication. ‘Let none know of this way but only Z’, he wrote in a less than convincing effort to maintain the appearance of directing events, adding the further order that Firebrace ‘must be sure that horses be reddy on the other side of the water’.
By now, however, the king’s indiscretions were beyond concealment, and the intensity of his denials served only as further proof, it seems, of that unhappy fact. In the aftermath of the Derby House Committee’s message to Hammond, informing him of the interception of ‘a letter in the king’s hand’ and citing Firebrace, Titus and Dowcett as his assistants in an escape plan, he had protested his innocence rather too loudly. ‘As they tell it,’ he declared to Titus, ‘I will take my Oath it is a lye.’ His profession to Firebrace had been nothing short of passionate. ‘Be as confident of my discretion as honnesty,’ he wrote, ‘for I can justly brag that neither man nor woman ever suffered by my Tongue or Pen, for any secrett that I have ever been trusted withall.’ The alleged letter, he claimed, had only been concocted in the first place ‘to make the fair pretence’ of dismissing Titus and Firebrace.
Yet the accuracy of the information now lodged at Derby House ‘by an honest man’ – probably Mr Low – who had allegedly read ‘4 or 5’ of the king’s letters, was beyond dispute, and the only remarkable consequence was that Firebrace and Titus continued to labour so diligently on his behalf when their own departure from Carisbrooke was by now imminent. Far from abandoning him, indeed, every effort was being made to expedite the king’s escape in the limited time remaining, and all attention now focused upon the backstairs window that Charles would be able to access at night, with the collusion, he hoped, of pliable guards. At only a yard from the ground, as a result of the slope of the earth mound around the curtain wall, as opposed to the 10ft of the bedroom window, the advantages of this particular route were obvious even to the king himself, who now sent files to Firebrace in order that ‘I may be sure not to stick’. Even the hazard of sentries on the bank outside might, it seemed, be surmounted by studying the rota of guards each night and bribing the most amenable.
Charles, in fact, seems to have taken a personal interest in identifying suitable candidates among the soldiery, and on 23 April sent the following message to Firebrace:
I hope this day at diner, you understood my lookes, for the souldier I towld you of, whose lookes I lyke, was then there, in a whyte Night-cap; &, as I thought you tooke notice of him.
And before long a payment of £100 had indeed been made by Dowcett to each of three soldiers on the understanding that they would turn a blind eye when the moment for action finally arrived. There was the prospect, too, of pardon for any officers that might assist, as Charles made clear to Titus, who was in overall charge of this particular aspect of the operation:
Cap: Titus Let those Officers, you tould me of, know, that as my necessity is now greater than euer; so what seruice shall be done me now, must haue the first place in my thoughts, when euer I shall be in a Condition to requite my Frends, & pitty my Enemies: I comand you (when you can doe it, without hazard either to yourself or them) that you send me, in particular, the names of those who you thus finde sensible of their duty, & resolued to discharge the parts of true Englishmen; Lastly, asseure euery one, that, with me, present Seruices wipes out former faults.
But Titus’ departure was actually to occur the very next day, and on 26 April, as Firebrace, too, finally received his marching orders, there was one last hasty exchange of notes all round. Firebrace, for instance, was urged to ‘harten’ Dowcett, whom Charles found ‘somewhat fearefull in your absence’, and there was a further request that he should take the opportunity to ‘inquyre well, whether, or no, Witherings hath plaid the knave’. ‘Exact Secresie’, Charles urged, was to be maintained at all costs, and horses made ready on ‘the othersyde of the Water … for it were a wofull thing to loose an opportunitie heere, for falt of preparations there’, while every effort was to be made to ensure that Osborne, who was remaining behind, ‘rightly understand the Desygne of the Backestaires window, as lykewais that other of my window; that I may leaue or chuse as I shall for occasion’. Plainly, the king was even now maintaining some semblance of control over proceedings on the eve of the projected escape bid, for, as he informed Titus, ‘we are hammering upon a way … wch if it hit, we shall be sooner ready, then, it may be, you can imagen’.
Four messages were, in fact, sent to Titus on four consecutive days, and the ‘promiscuous frequency’ of Charles’ letters says much about the man who wrote them, since writing gave the feeling of doing, as he himself half-admitted to Titus. ‘I importune you with papers having little to say,’ he confessed, as he fussed over detail and refused either to delegate or determine. Only Jane Whorwood, it seems, enjoyed his unalloyed confidence, though even she had tested his devotion by apparently ‘applying herself’ on his behalf to Lord Howard of Escrick who was soon to join the Derby House Committee. Asking Titus to reassure her that ‘I am in no ways disgusted with anything I have heard concerning her’, he assured him, too, of his confidence that Jane, who was now being referred to as ‘715’ as well as ‘N’, ‘will not deceive your trust’. Trust, as she herself confided, was at an especial premium at this time. ‘I could wish I had an hour’s discourse with you to discover the villainies I have lately met with,’ she had informed Firebrace before urging him to ‘take my counsel and act upon it’. ‘None,’ she declared, ‘is worthy of that high trust but ourselves.’
By 27 April, however, the king had hidden in his bedchamber a surprisingly impressive escape kit, including files, nitric acid and the key to a new and difficult cipher devised by Firebrace himself. Though Dowcett and Osborne now remained his only reliable allies within the castle, preparations outside continued to proceed smoothly. Firebrace, for instance, was at first allowed to bide a few more days in Newport to arrange the forwarding of letters, while Titus took lodgings in Southampton and proceeded to arrange the relays of horses necessary for the king’s escape. For the time being, according to Firebrace’s account, the king ‘did not want constant intelligence as before’, but he continued nevertheless to pass out dispatches ‘with the like good success as formerly’, and John Newland was on standby, as before, with a small boat. Almost inevitably, moreover, on 30 April, Jane Whorwood appeared, as arranged, aboard a ship at Queenborough in the Isle of Sheppey, intent upon carrying Charles from the Medway to safety in Holland. Risking all as usual, she probably chartered the vessel in London, and now, like her counterparts, stood poised for what was set to be the ultimate triumph.
Yet on 2 May, as the last pieces of the plan clicked snugly into place, a courier from London was riding post-haste to Carisbrooke with a message from the Derby House Committee informing Governor Hammond of ‘an intention to get the King away to-morrow at night or Thursday morning’, since a ship ‘is fallen down from hence to Queenborough, whereabouts she rides to waft him to Holland’. Nor was this all, for the dispatch also contained the following detail:
A merchant is gone from this town last night or this morning to acquaint the King that all things are ready: four horses lie in or near Portsmouth to carry the King by or near Arundell and from thence to Queenborough. A Parliament man or one that was one who liveth near Arundell, is to be the King’s guide. The man is supposed to be Sir Edward Alford. The merchant that is come down to the King at Portsmouth is a lean spare young man. The place by which the King is to escape is a low room through a window, or a window that is but slightly made up. He hath one or two about him that are false.
Even alternative plans of escape, which may well have been discussed by Firebrace and Charles, were mentioned:
Have a special care of the King’s bowling, lest he be suffered to escape under cover of bowling; which is the next plot. If this be prevented they will then have a ladder set up to the wall against the bowling alley and horses and a boat ready; and try that way.
As Parliament monitored the situation with increasing vigilance, so the king himself was struggling more and more with the window bars that had already, it seems, foiled a planned escape on 2 May and another on 4 May. As he reported to Firebrace, the space in his new window was no wider than that in his old bedchamber:
I have now made a perfect tryale, and find it impossible to be done, for my Boddy is too thicke for the bredthe of the Window; so that unless the midle Bar be taken away I cannot get through: I have also looked upon the other two, and fynde the one much too little, and the other so high that I know not how to reach it without a Lether [ladder]; besydes I do not believe it so much wyder than the other, so that it will serve: wherefore it is absolutely impossible to doe anything tomorrow at Night: But I comand you harteley and particularly to thanke in my name A: C: F: Z: [Cresset, Legge, Dowcett, Worsley] and him who stayed for me beyond the workes; for their harty and industrious endeavours in this my service, the which I shall alwais rem[em]ber to their advantage; being lykewais confident that they will not faint in so good a worke; and therefore expect their further advyces herein.
It was Dowcett, in fact, who later testified that he had waited in vain ‘almost three hours under the new platform’, and, notwithstanding the impact on his already threadbare nerves, there had been further progress almost a fortnight later when, after a consultation with Osborne, the king wrote thus to Titus:
Now as for our great businesse I desire you to begin to wait for me on Monday next and so after, every night for a week together, because one night may faile and accomplish it, being both troublesome and dangerous to send often to you. And for the time here, you must know that it is my chamber window by which I must descend (the other being so watched) that it cannot be cut, wherefore I must first go to bed so that my time of coming from my chamber may be about eleven at night. For the rest, you with Worsley must compute how soon I can be with you … also where I shall take boat and where land, likewise you must give me a pass word that I may know my friends in the dark.
In the meantime, Jane Whorwood found herself stranded on board ship at Queenborough, still awaiting ‘the good houre of meeting with our Friends’, and apparently uninformed of the abortive escape attempts of 2 and 4 May, since she expressed ‘griefe and wonder’ that no one had yet come. Marking time in the tidal mudflats of Swale, she had become unwell either from a rogue oyster or the sea itself, and found herself cut off from the king’s message by an outbreak of violence across Kent and in the fleet. But while Jane remained composed, the patience of her ship’s captain, a certain J. Browne, was wearing increasingly thin. For he had already been arrested and imprisoned twice by town mayors at Hull and Northampton in 1647, and was understandably wary of a third confinement, if the following message, squeezed into a 6in square note before being countersigned by Jane and sent to Firebrace on 15 May, is any guide:
We doe very much wonder yt in all this weeke, wee haue heard nothing from you; all ye time past, we haue been in readines to depart; but now lye under a contrary winde; & some suspicon hauing neglected a faire winde; therefore wee could not omitt to give you notice yt wee intend to remoue into Margarett (Margate) Roade, & therefore haue sent upp the bearer heerof, that if they bee not come out before this arriues you, you may let them know itt, yt soe they may come to the Reculuers, or Birchington where I shall not faile to meete them; but, in case they should bee come forth before you receiue this then I shall lye at one ferry comeing into this Isleland, & ye bearer att his return atte another, soe to prevent theire comeing hither & to guide them to ye other place. I haue nothing else but to intreat yt you faile not to send word punctually how yr busines stands, & what speed hath been since their departure by this bearer who is faithfull & honest & will be heere too morrow night, and to remain.
The plan now, then, was that the fugitives should meet the ship at either the Reculvers or Birchington, which stood at respective distances of 9 and 4 miles from Margate, or alternatively at what is likely to have been Elmley Ferry, a spot connecting Sittingbourne with the Isle of Sheppey. Yet two days later, Browne’s ship remained at Queenborough, and it was still there on Monday, 22 May, by which time it had already fallen under the suspicion of William Cooke, acting captain of the forty-two-gun Henrietta of the ‘Thames and Medway guard’, which had the task of guarding against smugglers of fullers earth, gunpowder, illegal oyster hauls and treasonable correspondence hidden in coal. Cooke, as luck would have it, was, like many in Kent and in his fleet, suffering from divided loyalties. Though he had served for more than forty years, he appears to have been amenable to turning a blind eye to what was plainly a nefarious enterprise.
Yet what Jane Whorwood referred to as ‘our late contest with Captain Cooke’ had demonstrated all too clearly the growing danger of delay. She was still sick, it seems, for the letter she wrote to Firebrace at this time was not only smudged and completed with a blunt quill, but written in lines that sloped uncharacteristically. The treacherous Mr Low had, it seems, once again been asking searching questions and encouraging her ‘to sift’ Firebrace, with the result she had been forced to trail a false scent in a letter to her husband, sent through Low’s own courier, which she knew would be opened and read. ‘I left a letter for [my] bedfellow sufficient to satisfy [Low]’, she informed Firebrace, and although its contents are unknown, it is likely that she wrote to suggest that she was heading for Holland after a delay through sickness. But her message to Firebrace also contained another attempt to ‘lay an importunity’ on him ‘of hastening on the business’. ‘Pray make all the speed you can,’ she urged, ‘for I lie at very great charge and am in more discontents and fears through this prolongation.’ However, she added too that he was to be confident, as ever, ‘of no fail in N’.
The same, however, was not to prove true of the man upon whose liberty all efforts now centred, not to mention those assisting him within Carisbrooke itself. Charles had finally informed Titus on Monday, 22 May, in fact, that he would at last be ready two nights later, since the suborned sentries were set to be on duty at that time:
As you haue advised, Wednesday next may be the first night I shall endeavour to escape; but I desyre you (if it be possible) before then to assure me that you will be ready by that night, and send me a pass word, wch you have not yet done.
And though the Derby House Committee was, as ever, closely on the trail, they remained uncertain at least of the precise date chosen for the attempt, as Walter Frost’s letter to Hammond on 23 May makes clear:
The design, of which I last wrote, still goes on. The ship lies in the Isle of Sheppy. I have again written to Col. Rainsborough of it. The time is to be Thursday, Friday or Saturday night next, if opportunity serve them right, or about the 4th of June: the ways as formerly resolved on, of which you have.
Nor did a rescheduling of the guard duty roster, whether by accident or design, represent any insurmountable problem in its own right, for although the three bribed soldiers found their sentry duty altered from Wednesday, 24 May, to Sunday, 28 May, they were all kept together, and as soon as the king heard of this he merely asked Titus to inform Jane Whorwood that he would now be arriving at the ship on 29 May. On all other fronts, in fact, the escape attempt seemed to be unfolding to plan, as Titus made ready his first relay of horses at Titchfield on Southampton Water, and a fishing boat took up position in ‘a private creek’ near Wootton Park. As the appointed hour arrived, moreover, Edward Worsley and Richard Osborne were waiting just beyond the castle’s outworks with two horses, ‘bridled and saddled’, while just to the east of the castle, in a large marl pit, a further party of horsemen stood ready to conduct the king through Wootton Park on the first stage of his journey. The bar in the bedchamber window had, indeed, been eaten away by nitric acid – notwithstanding the fact that the first consignment from London had, as the Derby House Committee correctly reported at the time, been ‘spilt by way of accident’ – and Abraham Dowcett was duly on hand, as arranged, to lower the king down from his bedroom window and guide him to the waiting horses. By the time Dowcett had led him to the waiting horses, the worst, it seemed, would already be over, though the route to Queenborough through Arundel, Lewes, Tonbridge and Maidstone was choked with soldiers from Fairfax’s army.
All was set for midnight, and, as the king waited, the tension was palpable. Though he was well and had been playing bowls daily, he was continuing to betray signs of change and lassitude. ‘Mr Herbert and Mr Harrington, his privy chamber men, are weary of their places,’ reported A Perfect Diurnall on 22 May, ‘for their duty is great.’ Still Charles refused to cut his hair, though he had received a case of ‘very dainty instruments’ for the purpose, and by now it was very long. He had maintained, too, his ban upon incoming dispatches, feeling perhaps that the outside world had less good news than ill to offer. Whether, indeed, he had any inkling that failure at this juncture would mark the end of his escape efforts and initiate a steady decline into fatalism and resignation is unknown. But he had now been dogged by failure for many long months and the prospect of final frustration now was bound to drain his already limited resources of natural optimism further – especially if failure was spawned by betrayal of the kind that now occurred.
For it was at 11 or 11.30 p.m. that two of the three sentries involved in the plot went to Hammond’s chief officer, Captain Rolph, and confessed. Only two days earlier, uneasy about the island’s security, Hammond had requested that Rolph be promoted to the rank of major. There were still, after all, only two companies in the castle garrison, and the Governor clearly felt the need to spread some of the burden that fell upon him personally, particularly with news of mutiny in the fleet and rumours that some of its members had sailed away to join the Prince of Wales in Holland. Describing Rolph as ‘an honest faithful and careful man’ and one ‘who taketh a great deal of pains, and deserveth encouragement’, Hammond saw him, in fact, as the extra pair of eyes and ears that he needed so desperately. This opinion was fully vindicated when Rolph now ‘dealt with’ the bribed sentries and brought them before his superior without delay. The response, as Hammond made clear in his subsequent message to the Speaker, was to allow events to unfold and thereby apprehend as many of the culprits as possible in one fell swoop:
[T]he design had long been in hand, and kept from me until yesterday when two of the soldiers who had been dealt with came to me and acquainted me with the whole business (which I am confident, though I had no knowledge of it, they would have had some difficulty in effecting); I suffered and advised them to carry it on as if I had not known it, that so I might discover the whole business with the less pretence of excuse to those unworthy men who were to assist the King in this escape.
And though accounts of what followed are confused, it was a ploy that worked to near perfection. One correspondent in the castle suggested a final loss of nerve on Charles’ part. ‘The rope falling,’ he wrote, ‘the Kinge attempted itt noe further.’ According to Clarendon, however, the king was actually leaving his window at midnight, when ‘he discern’d more Persons to stand thereabout than used to do, and thereupon suspected that there was some discovery made; and so shut the Window, and retired to his bed’. More credible still is Hammond’s own account, which suggests a blunder on Dowcett’s part that led to his arrest and that of Floyd, the third sentry who had kept his engagement with the king:
But being over cautious in securing all places in more exact manner than formerly, Mr. Dowcett, by happening on an unusual guard, who at the first apprehended them to be of his own party, but upon examination finding other answer than he expected, made a discovery, which so soon as I understood immediately I secured Dowcett and a soldier who was the chief instrument in this design.
As Dowcett was marched off to the guardroom, a pell-mell pursuit of Worsley and Osborne now ensued, as a manuscript account drawn up by the former, and later employed by George Hillier, makes clear. Though ‘they received unhurt’, according to Hillier, from ‘the fire of a party of musketeers’ that were ‘supposed to have been placed in ambush by Hammond himself’, Worsley and Osborne finally reached the waiting fishing boat only to find that ‘the master refused to let them embark’, since they had come without the king. ‘On this,’ the account continues, ‘they were compelled to conceal themselves in the adjacent woods for several days, and procure sustenance in the night by the assistance of a kinsman of Mr. Worsley, who eventually provided a vessel to take them from the South side of the island.’ The troopers who had first pursued them to the beach had seen their riderless horses and the retreating fishing boat, and wrongly assumed their quarry had got away. As Firebrace suggests in his Narrative, the pair would ultimately make their way to London, where he himself ‘obscured and preserved them’.
In a volume of topographical notes collected in 1719, however, the author suggests that Charles himself may have had a luckier escape then either Clarendon or Hammond suggested. ‘As the king was getting out,’ the account states, ‘a sentinel unluckily espied him, and fired and waked the watch, and so he was prevented; but the sentinel who fired was afterwards accidentally shot, no person can tell how.’ Whether the account is wholly reliable remains more than a little doubtful, in fact. But Hillier suggests that a stone near the south porch of Carisbrooke Church formerly marked the burial place of a different sentry – none other than Floyd – who appears to have been shot for his efforts on the king’s behalf. If so, he was the only individual to pay the ultimate price, for Titus made his way to London, and while John Newland was arrested upon his return to Newport, we nevertheless find his name mentioned subsequently in Carisbrooke’s accounts in connection with the supply of biscuit and sea-coal for the castle garrison. Plainly, there was no suppressing the entrepreneurial instincts of a good businessman.
Jane Whorwood, by contrast, was still at Queenborough with the ship on 31 May when she wrote to Firebrace:
I received on the 29th a note from W: [Titus] that he would that day be with mee (he and I faine would have understood the other partyes being at the despatch thereof at Tunbridge in Kent) but this faile thereof hath put me into great perplexities; pray send this enclosed away instantly; and informe mee of all occurrents in relation to our Mr. [Master] more particularly what you conceive to be the occasion of this delay. For longer than one week it will not be possible to abide here without manifest and impatible inconveniences.
However, it was not until 1 July that Charles finally wrote to Titus, asking him to tell Jane ‘that I was and am very much grieved’ that ‘I did not wait on her according to my promise’. Thereafter, it seems, she was left to return to London to nurse her disappointment in the company of the little band of royal servants who now found themselves finally shorn of all options, as Governor Hammond savoured his victory. For his diligence in thwarting the king’s plans, Parliament would eventually award Hammond £100, but in the immediate aftermath of the plot, he had entered the royal bedroom, offered his sovereign a bow and examined the window that had foiled his escape. Finding the window bar, in his own words, ‘to be cut in two in the middle with aqua fortis’, he shook his head in studied perplexity until Charles could stand the silence no longer. ‘How now, Hammond,’ Charles asked, ‘what is the matter, what would you have?’ ‘May it please your Majesty,’ came the reply, ‘I am come to take my leave of you, for I hear you are going away.’
Yet the Governor’s smugness still belied and may even have resulted in part from his own ongoing problems. The Isle of Wight, after all, as he himself reported, remained vulnerable, with ‘only one ship guarding the island and that about to re-victual’. But it was accusations from Richard Osborne regarding Major Rolph that were soon marring the lustre on Hammond’s recent triumph. For in a letter to his old patron Lord Wharton, dated 1 June, Osborne detailed incriminating conversations that he had allegedly had with the major in the officer’s room at Carisbrooke, in which there had been talk of plans to assassinate the king without the knowledge of either Hammond or the Derby House Committee:
He informed me that to his knowledge the Governor had received several letters from the Army, intimating the King might by any means be removed out of the way, either by poison or otherwise, and that at another time the same person persuaded me to join with him in a design to remove the King out of that Castle to a place of more secrecy, proffering to take an oath with me, and to do it without the Governor’s privity, who he said would not consent for losing the allowance for the house, his pretence to this attempt was, that the King was in too public place from which he might be rescued, but if he might be conveyed into some place of secrecy, he said we might dispose of his person upon all occasions as we thought fit, and this he was confident we could effect without the Governor’s privity.
This plot to do away with the king was in fact the reason, or so Osborne claimed, for Charles’ escape attempt in the first place, and although Hammond, out of apparent self-interest, had allegedly steered clear of involvement, the charge was serious enough for Rolph to be called before the Commons on 23 June. He brought with him, furthermore, a long letter from the Governor stating that, ‘though through weakness he be unfit to travel’, he had nevertheless been sent to London, to inform the House of the great untruths told by Osborne. There was a denial, too, of the Governor’s own ‘inhumane abusing the person of the king’ and another request that he might be relieved of his:
intolerable burden (which God and a good conscience only supports a poor weak man to undergo) either by a removal of his Majesty’s person from hence when to your wisdoms it shall seem safe and fit or by better providing for it by a person or persons more able to undergo it.
‘Neither Osborne, Dowcett nor any other’, Hammond claimed, had suggested that the king’s life was in danger, the whole thing being evidently ‘a device’ of Osborne’s own making ‘to inflame the people’.
But in spite of a pamphlet published on 18 July, entitled ‘His Majesty’s Declaration’, which had been fraudulently manufactured by a Roundhead propagandist named Tobison, Osborne’s accusations would not be lightly dismissed. Published to quieten the people of London after the accusations against Rolph were made public, Tobison’s pamphlet suggested that the king had at no stage experienced concerns about his safety, either from poison or any other design. On the contrary, he was so confident of Governor Hammond’s honesty, in particular, that he considered himself as safe in his hands, as if he were in the custody of his own son – a claim which eventually led Charles to make the following declaration to Firebrace on 1 August after he had been sent a copy:
As for Tobison’s report, it is such a nonsence; noboddy can beliue it; for although the king does not suspect the Governor would Murther him; must it therfor follow, that he likes his basse Imprisonment, certainely he hath not beene bred up, in such a Cedentary lyfe, that he lykes to be Coopt up; nor is he of so indifferent a disposition, as to be content to have noboddie about him that he can with anie reason, trust.
In the meantime, when he appeared before the Lords on 27 June, Osborne had defended his accusation, and after requesting that Worsley and Dowcett be called as witnesses, was bailed at the sum of £5,000. Even more significantly, Dowcett’s eventual testimony, delivered in writing on 3 July from the Peter House prison where he was incarcerated, not only corroborated Osborne’s claims, but was deemed convincing by the committee of the Lords examining it. Dowcett testified:
My Lords, I am ready to make an oath, that Mr. Richard Osborne told me the King’s person was in great danger, and that the said Rolph had a design on foot for the conveying his Majesty’s person to some place of secrecy, where only three should go with him, and where they might dispose of his person as they should think fit; which information from Mr. Osborne, and the assurance I had of his Majesty’s intention forthwith to come to this Parliament, was the cause of my engagement in this business.
2. I am ready likewise to depose that the said Rolph came to me when I was a prisoner in the Castle, and in a jeering manner asked me ‘why the King came not down according to his appointment?’ and then with great indignation and fury said, he waited almost three hours under the new platform, with a good pistol charged to receive him if he had come.
On these grounds, the House saw fit to impeach Rolph for high treason, and he was accordingly taken from his lodgings, where he was now lying ill, and lodged in the Gate House Prison. Thereafter, a petition presented by his wife, which was recommended by the House of Commons, came to be rejected by the Lords, and although Rolph’s impeachment was cancelled, he found himself, nevertheless, committed for trial at the Winchester assizes on 28 August. It was only after a strong declaration on his behalf by the presiding judge, moreover, that Rolph was finally acquitted and released on 9 September. Returning to Carisbrooke, he at once resumed his duties as Hammond’s chief officer, though the sum of £150 compensation, agreed by MPs, was blocked by the Lords.
Even today, the initial suspicions surrounding Rolph and his subsequent rough treatment remain a matter of some dispute. Clarendon, for example, described him as follows:
[A] captain of a foot company, whom Cromwell placed there as a prime confident, a fellow of low extraction, and very ordinary parts, who, from a common soldier, had been trusted in all the intrigues of the army, and was trusted as one of the agitators inspired by Cromwell to put anything into the soldiers’ minds upon whom he had a wonderful influence.
As a former shoemaker from Blackfriars, Rolph typified, in fact, the kind of individual cast up into seniority by the vagaries of a new kind of war, in which established norms and the entire social order were being challenged on a day-to-day basis. Thrusting, enthused, irreverent and deeply disillusioned with the status quo, such men were more than capable, when occasion required, of considerable ruthlessness. Clarendon, like the Committee of the House of Lords itself, was therefore readily satisfied that Rolph had indeed been determined that ‘the King might be decoyed away, as he was from Hampton Court, by some letters from his friends, of some danger that threatened him, upon which he would be willing to make an escape; and then he might easily be dispatched’. In Clarendon’s view, Osborne had informed the king of this and been ordered ‘to continue the familiarity with Rolph and to promise to join with him in contriving how his Majesty should make his escape’, before making Rolph’s villainy the means of getting away.
Yet Osborne, too, had his detractors, as a letter of July 1648, evidently written by a member of the Carisbrooke garrison, makes abundantly clear:
His carriage and language saintlike when he was in the company of religious men, but when associated with vain persons he was as vain and foolish as they, spending his precious time in tippling, singing and unprofitable discourses …
No man inveighed more against the King’s actings and interests than he, insomuch that he was blamed by some, and suspected by others (well affected) upon this ground, as conceiving that a man may be faithful to his trust, and conscientiously discharge his duty, without bitter reflections upon the adverse party.
His expression in the praise and commendation of the army and their late acting and proceedings were hyperbolical, as if he had been one of their greatest friends; whereas, it appears he was one of their most malicious enemies.
From this, it seems, Osborne was inclined to over-act his double game. Yet there is little doubt that Rolph was wholly taken in by his ploy and may very well have confided to him the designs of the army to seize the king’s person, notwithstanding the fact that Charles himself made no mention in letters prior to 28 May of being in any danger, as was certainly the case at Hampton Court. When Charles was quizzed by Hammond on Osborne’s claims, moreover, he appears to have remained non-committal, because, as Osborne himself put it, ‘his maxim is never to cleare one man to the prejudice of another’. In the event, both accuser and accused were left at liberty to nurse their consciences, the former heading to Holland, where he would eventually receive a personal recommendation to the Prince of Wales from the king. ‘If Osborne (who has been in trouble for me about one Major Rolphes business) comes to you,’ wrote Charles, ‘use him well for my sake.’ The letter was dated 6 November, and it was a typically generous gesture from a man who, by then, had little else to offer former servants than kindly worded testimonials. For in the tumult and confusion of the preceding summer, both his cause and his options had finally faltered irrevocably.