Gillian Bagwell: Jane Lane and the Royal Miracle.

The defeat of Charles II by Cromwell’s forces at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651 set off one of the most astonishing episodes in British history—Charles’s desperate six-week odyssey to reach safety in

Portrait of Lady Jane which is hung at Mosely Old Hall.

France. It came to be known as the Royal Miracle because he narrowly eluded discovery and capture so many times.

One of the players in the astonishing tale was Jane Lane, an ordinary Staffordshire girl who risked her life to help the 21-year-old king escape. She had a pass allowing her and a manservant to travel the hundred miles to visit a friend near Bristol—a major port where the king might board a ship.

In a story that sounds like something out of fiction, Charles disguised himself as Jane’s servant, and she rode pillion (sitting side-saddle behind him while he rode astride) along roads traveled by cavalry patrols searching for him, through villages where the proclamation describing him and offering a reward for his capture was posted, and among hundreds of people who, if they had recognized him, had every reason to turn him in and none—but loyalty to the outlawed monarchy—to help him.

It was an improbable scheme. Charles was six feet two inches tall and very dark complexioned, not at all common looking for an Englishman of that time. But time after time he rode right under the noses of Roundhead soldiers without being recognized.

If he had been caught, he would certainly have been executed, and it is an open question whether the monarchy would have been restored as it eventually was after the death of Oliver Cromwell. What Jane did took great bravery, and she risked not only her life but the lives and lands of her family, as the fugitive king had been proclaimed a traitor, and anyone who helped him would be executed for treason.

To research The King’s Mistress, my novel about Jane Lane, I wanted to retrace the path she had taken in her travels with Charles, and my friend Alice and I set out from London on October 26, 2009, making our way to Worcester, the site of the battle, from which Charles had fled to Staffordshire, where Jane became involved in his desperate flight.

Charles’s travels covered more than 600 miles before he was finally able to sail from Shoreham near Brighton on October 15. After he was restored to the throne in 1660, he told the story to many people, including Samuel Pepys, and others who helped him escape also recorded their parts in it, so that the route of his travels is well known. The Monarch’s Way footpath can still be followed.

Some of the sites associated with Charles’s adventures are well preserved. It was thrilling to visit Boscobel House and Moseley Hall and to see the actual priest holes into which the young king hid from Cromwell’s

Gillian at Worcester Cathedral.

cavalry patrols. These lovely houses are beautifully maintained by English Heritage and the National Trust respectively, and we enjoyed very informative tours. Whiteladies, where Charles arrived and was hidden at about three a.m. on the morning after the battle, is now a ruin, but is only a short walk from Boscobel, and easily found. Jane’s home, Bentley Hall, is unfortunately no longer standing, but thanks to directions from the staff at Moseley, we were able to find the site.

Following the path of Charles’s travels with Jane Lane, and in particular finding the places where some of the events on the journey had taken place—the inn and the smithy where Charles had to have a horse re-shod, for instance—was a little more complicated. Contemporary accounts provided their general route, through Bromsgrove, where Charles’s horse threw a shoe; to Stratford-Upon-Avon, where they had to ride among enemy soldiers crowding the street; and down to Long Marston, where they stayed at the home of Jane’s cousins John and Amy Tomes. They spent the next night in Cirencester, and reached Abbots Leigh near Bristol the following evening.

Finding that no ship would leave Bristol for France or Spain in less than a month, Charles and Jane then made their way southward to Castle Cary and then to Trent, in Dorset, where they stayed at the home of the Royalist Wyndham family.

When Alice and I weren’t sure about the location of some of we had very good success by popping into a pub to ask the locals, and in this way we were helped by the staff and patrons of the Red Lion in Bromsgrove, the Crown in Cirencester, and the George in Castle Cary.

Jane left Charles at Trent and returned home when it appeared that he would shortly be able to find passage on a boat from the southern coast of England. As it turned out, Charles spent another month in England

Back view of Mosely Old Hall.

before he was able to make his way to France, traveling to Charmouth, back to Trent in Dorset, then spending several days near Salisbury before sailing from Shoreham. But that part of his ordeal takes place offstage in The King’s Mistress and very little is known about what happened to Jane after she parted from Charles.

From the research I had done before embarking on my trip to England, I learned that when Jane’s part in helping Charles escape was discovered, she fled with her brother and walked to Yarmouth, hoping to reunite with Charles in France. As one book identified Yarmouth as a small town on the south coast near the Isle of Wight, I believed that her travels took her through much the same country through which she had journeyed with Charles.

It was only when I got home to California that I learned to my dismay that she had probably sailed from another Yarmouth—on the east coast, and so in a completely different direction and through vastly different

Gillian inspecting one of the priest holes.

country than where I thought she had walked. This part of her story was very important, and I needed to know what she had experienced. But it just wasn’t possible for me to go back to England.

I would have to reconstruct Jane’s journey some other way. From a book on historical maps, I learned that in 1686 John Ogilby had published a book of road maps of England—35 years past Jane’s date, but close enough that not much would have changed. I found a 1939 facsimile of the book, which shows the routes between major cities, laid out on parallel strips across the page. It’s a little hard to get used to looking at a map like that, but it gave me an idea of much of the route that Jane would likely have traveled to get from Staffordshire to Yarmouth, and just as wonderfully, depicted the roads and the country surrounding them in great detail, showing the kind of terrain, and features such as villages, bridges, and even large houses and windmills.

But the book didn’t provide guidance about some of the routes Jane must have taken. Google Maps and Google Earth to the rescue! I used Google Maps to ask for directions from one major town on Jane’s route to the next, and then zoomed in close enough to discover the names of the roads, which are frequently still called simply by where they lead. So, for instance, Norwich Road leading out of King’s Lin was likely the route that Jane took to reach Norwich. Then I could soar along above the road to see what the landscape was like, much of the countryside hasn’t changed substantially from what it had been like in 1651.

So miraculously, I was able to write the long sequence in which Jane and her brother walk from Bentley to Yarmouth accurately describing what they would have seen on their travels.

I was able to use up-to-the-minute technology in another way, too. When I thought I was near the site of Jane’s home Bentley Hall but wasn’t sure, I used my iPhone to Google “Bentley Hall Staffordshire.” Up popped Michael Shaw and Danny McAree’s article “The Rediscovery of Bentley Hall, Walsall,” which confirmed that I was standing near where Jane had lived. I gazed at the horizon that would have been familiar to her and felt the cool October breeze she would have known in that spot. Not as much fun as traveling for research, but as Jane might have said, “Needs must when the devil drives!”

Gillian Bagwell’s novel The King’s Mistress, the first fictional accounting of Jane Lane’s adventures with the young King Charles, was released in the U.K. on July 19. (It was published in the U.S. in 2011 as The

A portrait of Charles II found in a snuff box given to Jane by Charles.

September Queen). Her first novel, The Darling Strumpet, based on the life of Nell Gwynn, is a finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA award for Best First Book. Her third novel, Venus in Winter, about the formidable four-times widowed Tudor dynast Bess of Hardwick, will be published in the U.S. in July 2013. Please visit Gillian’s website, www.gillianbagwell.com, to read more about her books. Gillian’s blog Jane Lane and the Royal Miracle www.theroyalmiracle.blogspot.com recounts her adventures researching the book and the daily episodes in Charles’s escape after Worcester.

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Laura

I’m Laura. I started Novel Kicks in 2009. I wanted a place to post my writing as well as give other writers like me the opportunity to do the same. There is also a monthly book club, a writing room which features writing prompts, book reviews, competitions, author interviews and guest posts.

I grew up by the sea (my favourite place in the world) and I currently live in Hampshire. I am married to Chris, have a cat named Buddy and I would love to be a writer. I’m trying to write the novel I’ve talked so much about writing if only I could stop pressing delete. I’ve loved writing since creative writing classes in primary school. I have always wanted to see my teacher Miss Sayers again and thank her for the encouragement. When not trying to write the novel or writing snippets of stories on anything I can get my hands on, I love reading, dancing like a loon and singing to myself very badly. My current obsession is Once Upon a Time and I would be happy to live with magic in the enchanted forest surrounded by all those wonderful stories provided that world also included Harry Potter. I love reading chick lit. contemporary fiction and novels with mystery.