Historical Tales Volume Iv Part 24

"Give me your hand," he said, returning. "There's no danger of drowning in this water."

Leading his guide, he soon stood on the safe side of that river the pa.s.sage of which had given him so many anxious minutes.

Towards morning they reached the house of a Mr. Whitgrave, a Catholic, whom the prince could trust. Here he found in hiding a Major Careless, a fugitive officer from the defeated army. Charles revealed himself to the major, and held a conference with him, asking him what he had best do.

"It will be very dangerous for you to stay here; the hue and cry is up, and no place is safe from search," said the major. "It is not you alone they are after, but all of our side. There is a great wood near by Boscobel house, but I would not like to venture that, either. The enemy will certainly search there. My advice is that we climb into a great, thick-leaved oak-tree that stands near the woods, but in an open place, where we can see around us."

"Faith, I like your scheme, major," said Charles, briskly. "It is thick enough to hide us, you think?"

"Yes; it was lopped a few years ago, and has grown out again very close and bushy. We will be as safe there as behind a thick-set hedge."

"So let it be, then," said the prince.

Obtaining some food from their host,--bread, cheese, and small beer, enough for the day,--the two fugitives, Charles and Careless, climbed into what has since been known as the "royal oak," and remained there the whole day, looking down in safety on soldiers who were searching the wood for royalist fugitives. From time to time, indeed, parties of search pa.s.sed under the very tree which bore such royal fruit, and the prince and the major heard their chat with no little amus.e.m.e.nt.

Charles light-hearted by nature, and a mere boy in years,--he had just pa.s.sed twenty-one,--was rising above the heavy sense of depression which had hitherto borne him down. His native temperament was beginning to declare itself, and he and the major, couched like squirrels in their leafy covert, laughed quietly to themselves at the baffled searchers, while they ate their bread and cheese with fresh appet.i.tes.

When night had fallen they left the tree, and the prince, parting with his late companion, sought a neighboring house where he was promised shelter in one of those hiding-places provided for proscribed priests.

Here he found Lord Wilmot, one of the officers who had escaped with him from the fatal field of Worcester, and who had left him at Whiteladies.

It is too much to tell in detail all the movements that followed. The search for Prince Charles continued with unrelenting severity. Daily, n.o.ble and plebeian officers of the defeated army were seized. The country was being scoured, high and low. Frequently the prince saw the forms or heard the voices of those who sought him diligently. But "Will Jones," the woodman, was not easily to be recognized as Charles Stuart, the prince. He was dressed in the shabbiest of weather-worn suits, his hair cut short to his ears, his face embrowned, his head covered with an old and greasy gray steeple hat, with turned-up brims, his ungloved and stained hands holding for cane a long and crooked thorn-stick.

Altogether it was a very unprincely individual who roamed those peril-haunted shires of England.

The two fugitives--Prince Charles and Lord Wilmot--now turned their steps towards the seaport of Bristol, hoping there to find means of pa.s.sage to France. Their last place of refuge in Staffordshire was at the house of Colonel Lane, of Bently, an earnest royalist. Here Charles dropped his late name, and a.s.sumed that of Will Jackson. He threw off his peasant's garb, put on the livery of a servant, and set off on horseback with his seeming mistress, Miss Jane Lane, sister of the colonel, who had suddenly become infected with the desire of visiting a cousin at Abbotsleigh, near Bristol. The prince had now become a lady's groom, but he proved an awkward one, and had to be taught the duties of his office.

"Will," said the colonel, as they were about to start, "you must give my sister your hand to help her to mount."

The new groom gave her the wrong hand. Old Mrs. Lane, mother to the colonel, who saw the starting, but knew not the secret, turned to her son, saying satirically,--

"What a goodly horseman my daughter has got to ride before her!"

To ride before her it was, for, in the fashion of the day, groom and mistress occupied one horse, the groom in front, the mistress behind.

Not two hours had they ridden, before the horse cast a shoe. A road-side village was at hand, and they stopped to have the bare hoof shod. The seeming groom held the horse's foot, while the smith hammered at the nails. As they did so an amusing conversation took place.

"What news have you?" asked Charles.

"None worth the telling," answered the smith; "nothing has happened since the beating of those rogues, the Scots."

"Have any of the English, that joined hands with the Scots, been taken?"

asked Charles.

"Some of them, they tell me," answered the smith, hammering st.u.r.dily at the shoe; "but I do not hear that that rogue, Charles Stuart, has been taken yet."

"Faith," answered the prince, "if he should be taken, he deserves hanging more than all the rest, for bringing the Scots upon English soil."

"You speak well, gossip, and like an honest man," rejoined the smith, heartily. "And there's your shoe, fit for a week's travel on hard roads."

And so they parted, the king merrily telling his mistress the joke, when safely out of reach of the smith's ears.

There is another amusing story told of this journey. Stopping at a house near Stratford-upon-Avon, "Will Jackson" was sent to the kitchen, as the groom's place. Here he found a buxom cook-maid, engaged in preparing supper.

"Wind up the jack for me," said the maid to her supposed fellow-servant.

Charles, nothing loath, proceeded to do so. But he knew much less about handling a jack than a sword, and awkwardly wound it up the wrong way.

The cook looked at him scornfully, and broke out in angry tones,--

"What countrymen are you, that you know not how to wind up a jack?"

Charles answered her contritely, repressing the merry twinkle in his eye.

"I am a poor tenant's son of Colonel Lane, in Staffordshire," he said; "we seldom have roast meat, and when we have, we don't make use of a jack."

"That's not saying much for your Staffordshire cooks, and less for your larders," replied the maid, with a head-toss of superiority.

The house where this took place still stands, with the old jack hanging beside the fireplace; and those who have seen it of late years do not wonder that Charles was puzzled how to wind it up. It might puzzle a wiser man.

There is another story in which the prince played his part as a kitchen servant. It is said that the soldiers got so close upon his track that they sought the house in which he was, not leaving a room in it unvisited. Finally they made their way to the kitchen, where was the man they sought, with a servant-maid who knew him. Charles looked around in nervous fear. His pursuers had never been so near him. Doubtless, for the moment, he gave up the game as lost. But the loyal cook was mistress of the situation. She struck her seeming fellow-servant a smart rap with the basting-ladle, and called out, shrewishly,--

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCENE ON THE RIVER AVON.]

"Now, then, go on with thy work; what art thou looking about for?"

The soldiers laughed as Charles sprang up with a sheepish aspect, and they turned away without a thought that in this servant lad lay hidden the prince they sought.

On September 13, ten days after the battle, Miss Lane and her groom reached Abbotsleigh, where they took refuge at the house of Mr. Norton, Colonel Lane's cousin. To the great regret of the fugitive, he learned here that there was no vessel in the port of Bristol that would serve his purpose of flight. He remained in the house for four days, under his guise of a servant, but was given a chamber of his own, on pretence of indisposition. He was just well of an ague, said his mistress. He was, indeed, somewhat worn out with fatigue and anxiety, though of a disposition that would not long let him endure hunger or loneliness.

In fact, on the very morning after his arrival he made an early toilette, and went to the b.u.t.tery-hatch for his breakfast. Here were several servants, Pope, the butler, among them. Bread and b.u.t.ter seems to have been the staple of the morning meal, though the butler made it more palatable by a liberal addition of ale and sack. As they ate they were entertained by a minute account of the battle of Worcester, given by a country fellow who sat beside Charles at table, and whom he concluded, from the accuracy of his description, to have been one of Cromwell's soldiers.

Charles asked him how he came to know so well what took place, and was told in reply that he had been in the king's regiment. On being questioned more closely, it proved that he had really been in Charles's own regiment of guards.

"What kind of man was he you call the king?" asked Charles, with an a.s.sumed air of curiosity.

The fellow replied with an accurate description of the dress worn by the prince during the battle, and of the horse he rode. He looked at Charles on concluding.

"He was at least three fingers taller than you," he said.

The b.u.t.tery was growing too hot for Will Jackson. What if, in another look, this fellow should get a nearer glimpse at the truth? The disguised prince made a hasty excuse for leaving the place, being, as he says, "more afraid when I knew he was one of our own soldiers, than when I took him for one of the enemy's."

This alarm was soon followed by a greater one. One of his companions came to him in a state of intense affright.

"What shall we do?" he cried. "I am afraid Pope, the butler, knows you.

He has said very positively to me that it is you, but I have denied it."

"We are in a dangerous strait, indeed," said Charles. "There is nothing for it, as I see, but to trust the man with our secret. Boldness, in cases like this, is better than distrust. Send Pope to me."

The butler was accordingly sent, and Charles, with a flattering show of candor, told him who he was, and requested his silence and aid. He had taken the right course, as it proved. Pope was of loyal blood. He could not have found a more intelligent and devoted adherent than the butler showed himself during the remainder of his stay in that house.

But the attentions shown the prince were compromising, in consideration of his disguise as a groom; suspicions were likely to be aroused, and it was felt necessary that he should seek a new asylum. One was found at Trent House, in the same county, the residence of a fervent royalist named Colonel Windham. Charles remained here, and in this vicinity, till the 6th of October, seeking in vain the means of escape from one of the neighboring ports. The coast proved to be too closely watched, however; and in the end soldiers began to arrive in the neighborhood, and the rumor spread that Colonel Windham's house was suspected. There was nothing for it but another flight, which, this time, brought him into Wiltshire, where he took refuge at Hele House, the residence of Mr.