The King's Revenge Read Free

their watch on the city by night. Ludlow
     knew it was risky to frequent the city but he was anxious to keep in touch with events and in contact with his family and
     those who could help him.
    To decide upon his future, Ludlow risked convening a meeting of close friends and relatives at a house in Westminster. ‘A
     friend and kinsman’ advised him that he should ‘withdraw out of England … assuring if I stayed I was a dead man’. Ludlow was
     told he would only have to go abroad for a short while and that ‘he supposed within three or four months the hate and rage
     would be over’. 4
    Ludlow hoped that some form of the pre-restoration Parliament might be re-established, but ‘not believing that it was yet
     a tyme to expect deliverance, I resolved to hasten my departure.’ 5 His wife and friends arranged notes of credit to be sent ahead to France, and guides and accomplices to get him out of the
     city and across the Channel to Dieppe.
    On the appointed night, his wife and some other relations arrived at his safe house with a coach. They crossed London Bridge
     and made through Southwark to the church of St George the Martyr. Here a guide was waiting with two horses to take the fugitive
     statesman to the coast.
    ‘I tooke my leave of my deare relations, my poore wife and another friend accompanying me,’ wrote Ludlow. 6 His old life was over for good. He and his guide rode through the night along the least frequented roads to Lewes, where
     a merchant loyal to the parliamentary cause was expecting him. For three days he ‘lay as privately as Icould’ until word came that a ship was ready at the coast. Stormy weather delayed the boat’s departure and Ludlow was almost
     apprehended when searches were carried out among ships waiting to leave. Fortunately, he was hidden on a craft which the agents
     thought not worth searching as it lay aground on a sandbank.
    The next day he got away to Dieppe and afterwards made his way to Paris, then Lyons, and ultimately towards Geneva, all the
     while trying to evade the royalist spies who watched out for him through Europe. Only when he arrived at Geneva – ‘Calvin’s
     City’ – did he feel safe. Finally, he moved to a small, out-of-the-way town on the shores of Lake Geneva.
    Years before, Charles II and Ludlow had faced one another in battle, though neither realised it at the time. It was on 23
     October 1642, at the first pitched battle of the Civil War at Edgehill in Warwickshire. Twelve-year-old Charles, then Prince
     of Wales, was present with his father, Charles I, and his younger brother, James. Edmund Ludlow was twenty-five and a member
     of the life guard of the parliamentary army’s commander-in-chief, the 3rd Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux. The earl bore a
     famous name – that of Elizabeth I’s one-time favourite. Unlike his flamboyant and headstrong father, the 3rd Earl was a dour
     fellow, a cuckold and a laughing-stock at court.
    Both sides expected the action at Edgehill to be the deciding action of the war. The king, confident of victory, had brought
     his sons along to watch. Up to this time, the princes had lived in pampered comfort. As heir to the throne, Charles had his
     own court at Richmond quite separate from the establishments of his parents at Whitehall. Since the age of eight he had been
     in the care of a series of aristocratic lords who acted as his governors. The first had been the unutterably grand Earl of
     Newcastle, who had little or no interest in looking after someone else’s boy, prince or otherwise. Newcastle was a cultured
     man and a fine horseman whose idea of instructing the prince seems to have consisted of a series of didactic letters interspersed
     with short visits for a spot of archery or hunting.
    In the earliest letter that has come down to us, the prince writes to his governor, ‘I ride every day, and am ready to follow
     any other directions from you. Make haste to return to him that loves you.’ 7 According