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No. 190 Summer 2000 King Charles II and Augmentations of Honour [ continued from here ] From Trent it was hoped to journey to the south coast and embark from one of the sleepy ports of Dorset or Devon, but there were unaccustomed number of Commonwealth troops in the area due to a campaign against the Channel Island of Jersey. Thus, after fruitless and sometimes hazardous journeys to various possible embarkation points - Lyme, Bridport and others - the troops being alerted, and the hue and cry raised, Charles and his friends retreated to Broadwindsor and by 24 September, the king was back at Trent Manor. |
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Colonel Wyndham's wife, Anne, wrote later, the house was "the
Ark in which God shut him up when the floods of rebellion had covered
the face of his dominions."
On 6 October the king set out for Amesbury and the home of Mrs Hyde. He was there for some days and it was not until 13 October that he was refreshed enough to set out for the Sussex coast - sufficiently far from the dangers of Dorset - where the faithful Wilmot was seeking a vessel. Following an overnight stay at Hambledon in Hampshire Charles reached Brighton (or Brightelmstone to give it its seventeenth century name). There, a Colonel Gunter had arranged for a boat, with a merchant called Francis Mansell, for a fee of sixty pieces of silver. The boat, a brig, named Surprise under the command of Captain Nicholas Tattershall (or Tettersel), was duly boarded near Shoreham and, on Wednesday, 15 October at about four o'clock in the morning, the king left England in the company of the loyal Wilmot. Running before the wind, the ship made good time and Charles was finally carried ashore at Fecamp near Rouen. Of those who had helped him in the last stages of his adventure, Francis Mansell was granted a pension and armorial bearings: Or three maunches sable on a chief gules a lion of England gold, and for a crest Garter Walker allowed a ship with one mast sable under a sail argent flying the flag of St George at the masthead, bow and poop or charged on the stern with three royal crowns proper - a very grand gesture to a coal-brig with a crew of two. The captain, Tattershall, was not to be neglected, and was honoured with arms argent a ship in full sail on the sea in base proper on a chief azure a lion passant guardant or. It is perhaps a little surprising that some of his other subjects who had helped the king were not honoured, but his adventures had been both hectic and hazardous, and maybe he simply forgot their names. No doubt Gunter, Hyde, Wyndham and the others, a few of whose identities are lost to history, reconciled themselves in the knowledge that, for them, virtue was its own reward. |
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| John
Campbell Kease and John Ferguson
Notes and references Baron
Wilmot was created Earl of Rochester during the king's exile, but
died in 1659, before the Restoration. |
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