‘Remember Thy End'

Charles fully shared Sir Edward Nicholas’s concerns for the future of his crown and country. From the greening of the summer, when the army treated him with unwanted respect, and parliamentarians, colonels and covenanters courted him with such deference that Charles persuaded himself that they could not survive without him, the king’s hopes browned and fell with the leaves of autumn. Once again he decided to escape from the unbearable conditions of his captivity at Hampton Court. ¹ Having reached the decision in late October, he complained to Colonel Edward Whalley, the commander of the Hampton Court garrison, that the noise of his guards walking their beats at night disturbed his daughter, Elizabeth, who had come to stay with him for a few days. Whalley promised to tell the soldiers not to make so much noise, but the next morning Charles said it had made no difference. So the colonel agreed to post his men further away from the king’s rooms. A few days afterwards Charles told his servant, John Ashburnham, to withdraw his parole, which prompted Whalley to dismiss him, and gave the king an excuse to retract his own promise not to escape in protest. Whalley did not, however, return the sentries to their original beats. A little later, on about 3 November, Charles told Sir William Legge, a gentleman of the bedchamber, to go and tell John Ashburnham and Sir John Berkeley to arrange the king’s flight. After a couple of sessions at an inn in Thames Ditton, and a late night meeting with the king himself in the Long Gallery at Hampton Court, they agreed to make the break on Thursday, 11 November to take advantage of Charles’s practice of retiring early to his room on Mondays and Thursdays to write letters. Leaving by a back stairway Charles slipped out of Hampton Court, through the gloom and rain of an early winter evening to Thames Ditton, where a boat waited to row him across the Thames. On the south bank Ashburnham and Berkeley were ready with horses; together they disappeared into the night.