Worcester city by Saint Martin's Gate, in the
midst of Lesley's cavalry, from which,
however, his Majesty separates soon afterwards
at Barbum's Bridge, about a mile on the road
towards Kidderminster. Accompanied from
that point by nearly sixty of his principal
adherents, a gorgeous retinue, including
among them dukes, and earls, and other high
patrician soldiers, the stripling monarch
presses onward until some half-a-dozen
miles from our Brummagem Brussels; when,
drawing rein suddenly at Kinver Heath, the
whole royal party halted, bewildered in the
darkness as to their whereabouts. Thence it
is that a certain stalwart cavalier, one Charles
Giffard, Squire of Chillington, undertakes to
conduct the king towards a secluded
tenement of his, an abode already favourably
known to his Majesty, by repute, as the
recent hiding-place of his valiant servant, the
Earl of Derby, now a prisoner in the hands
of the victorious republicans—to wit, the old
wood lodge of Boscobel. An after-thought
of precaution, however, slightly alters the
direction taken by the fugitives. Having
passed stealthily about midnight through the
sleeping and shuttered town of Stourbridge
—unnoticed even by a troop of Roundhead
cavalry then stationed there—the king and his
jaded escort arrive, towards daybreak on the
following morning, Thursday, the fourth of
September, at another little property of the
Giffard family in those parts, the now famous
house of White Ladies, so called from having
been formerly a monastery of nuns
belonging to the white-robed order of the
Cistercians.

For safety's sake, the horse Charles rides
is led clattering into the hall at White Ladies,
and there, assisted to alight, the king takes
leave at length of his devoted and disconsolate
followers. Monarch now no longer—
his last vestige of a court dispersed—the
anointed fugitive finds himself committed by
Squire Giffard to the care of a handful of his
humble retainers, a family of poor labourers,
mere woodwards, earning their daily bread by
toiling with bill-hooks in the sylvan demesne
of Boscobel. Previously to this judicious
departure and dispersion of his splendid retinue,
however, have I not remarked the unfortunate
sovereign ridding himself in all haste of the
dangerous symbols and evidences of royalty?
Hurriedly, he has divested himself of his
buff-coat with its emblazoned star, the cuffs
and bosom crusted over with heavy
embroidery. He has unbuckled the garter with
its device in brilliants. He has doffed the
blue ribbon, and unslung from his neck the
radiant George of diamonds. The George he
has committed to the care of Colonel Blague;
his gold he has distributed among his grooms
and equerries; his jewelled watch he has
given into the safe keeping of Henry, the
Lord Wilmot, afterwards better known in
one sense, and worse in another, as the gay
and licentious Earl of Rochester. And now
—vanished the king, scattered his court—
enters (after a pause) into the hall
at White Ladies, where there are still
visible the miry hoof-prints of the steed
his Majesty has just ridden from
Worcester, a very different figure indeed
from that of the youthful sovereign—
Charles Stuart no more: but simple Will
Jones, another of the woodmen of Boscobel,
a plain country-fellow. Altogether, about
the squalidest figure well presentable. His
flowing hair has been cut off any-how.
He has rubbed his hands upon the back of
the chimney in the little room which has been
the scene of this singular and impromptu
transformation, and afterwards has smeared
his sooty fingers over his face by way of
effectually completing his disfigurement. His
dress is of the poorest and the raggedest. A.
green cloth jerkin, or jump-coat, so worn
and bare that the threads here and there
appear actually whitened. A pair of ordinary
green cloth breeches, so long at the
knees that the ends of them hang down
below the garters. Over the threadbare
jerkin, an old sweaty leathern doublet with
pewter buttons; under it, a coarse noggin
shirt—or, as the village-folk thereabout call
them, hogging shirts—frayed at the collar
and patched at the wrists; a garment
supplied from the wardrobe of one Edward
Martin, a lowly menial at White Ladies.
Will Jones retains still upon his feet his
Majesty's white flannel boot-stockings, the
tops of them snipped off, for being gold-corded
and clocked with rare embroidery. But over
the decapitated boot-stockings are cunningly
drawn a footless pair of green yarn
stockings, darned at the knees, and other-
wise disgracefully dilapidated. Besides all
these disguises, woodman Jones has for
shoes the oldest and rustiest procurable—
slashed at the sides for ease, but destined
through those comfortless gashes to let in the
mud and gravel abundantly. For head-
covering he wears a very greasy old grey
steeple-crowned hat, unadorned with either
band or lining, the brims turned up, the
battered circumference marked to the depth
of two inches with perspiration. In the
girdle of this lamentable spectre of a man
there is thrust a wood-bill—token of his
craft. In his filthy hand he carries an ugly
thorn-stick, crooked three or four ways, and
altogether perfectly well suited to his own
distorted and miserable appearance. Looking
askance at this wretched figure, I don't
wonder in the least (though I have no
admiration whatever for the gentleman
himself), when I hear my charming familiar,
Mistress Anne Wyndham, exclaiming
dolefully, in allusion to King Charles's arrival,
even in somewhat improved apparel, a
fortnight or so afterwards, at Trent, that there
"The passions of joy and sorrow did a while
combat in them who beheld his sacred person:
for what loyal eye could look upon so