Rochester Large Print

It was night when at last the Penderel brothers brought a ladder and the King of England came down from his tree. One of his few friends, a certain Colonel Careless, had been hidden with him all day in the branches; another, the Lord Wilmot, lay at a house some miles off. The remainder of the army, which three days before had been utterly defeated at Worcester, was either prisoner to Cromwell or fugitive through the countryside. Priests' holes were occupied in manor-houses; forgotten paths through the woods were retrodden. The Parliamentary horse searched roads and woods; about all the villages went rumours of the whereabouts of captain and colonel, and of the dark, tall, humorous creature of twenty-one, who stood now at the bottom of the ladder among his peasant saviours, the proclaimed public enemy, Charles Stuart. The tree and the darkness, the descent and the subsequent flight, are the picturesque properties of a romantic tale. The scattered figures, escaping through the western counties, are the climax of defeat. They disappear along the roads, into London, into scattered manors, into small ships in remote harbours, and every way into obscurity. It is nine years before they, or their sons and inheritors, return. As again they approach, from foreign places, from statelier ships, from restored manors, a gaudier light abolishes the dim landscape of the forest of the flight. The palaces of Whitehall and St. James expand to receive them. Time and the world have changed.