After various adventures, some of them attended with great danger, they arrived safely at the house of Mr. Norton, the king passing as the servant of Mrs. Lane. The next day while he was dining with the servants, one of them gave so accurate a description of the battle of Worcester, that Charles took him to be a soldier of Cromwell. He turned out, however, to have been a soldier of the royal army, and one of the regiment of guards. “I asked him what kind of man the King was, and he gave me an exact description of the clothes I wore at the battle, and of the horse I rode, adding that the King was at least three inches taller than I. I left the place hastily, being much alarmed to find that the man had been one of my own soldiers.” Charles learnt soon after that Pope, the butler, had recognised him, and having previously heard that the man was honest, and incapable of treason, he thought it best to confide in him, and accordingly mentioned his real name and rank. Pope at once put himself under his orders, and was of the greatest service to him.
Just at the very moment when the King was setting out for the house of one of his partisans, Mrs. Norton was taken with the pains of labour, and as she was cousin to Mrs. Lane, whose servant Charles pretended to be, that lady found it difficult to invent a pretext for quitting her. A letter written to announce that Mrs. Lane’s father was dangerously ill, however, answered this purpose, and the fugitives set out for the house of Frank Wyndham at Trent.
When they arrived there the bells were ringing merry peals, and inquiring the cause, they learned that one of the soldiers of Cromwell’s army had entered the town, boasting that he had killed the King. Wyndham, however, had provided a boat, and Charles, accompanied by that loyal gentleman and by Lady Coningsby, went to a place appointed for his reception. But as no vessel appeared, he set out for the neighbouring town. On arriving there he found the streets filled with red coats, the town being in possession of fifteen hundred of Cromwell’s troops. This sight somewhat alarmed Wyndham, “and he asked me,” says the King, “what we should now do? ‘We must go boldly,’ I said, ‘to the best inn, and ask for the best room,’ and we accordingly did so. We found the courtyard of the inn full of soldiers, and as soon as I alighted, I thought it would be best to walk boldly amongst them, and to take my horses to the stable. I did this, and they grew very angry at my rudeness.” When he arrived in the stable, Charles found himself confronted by a new danger. The ostler pretended to recognise him as an old acquaintance whom he had met at Exeter, but Charles had sufficient presence of mind to turn this to his own account. “True,” he replied, “I have been in the service of Mr. Potter, but I am just now in a great hurry, for my master is going straight to London; when he comes back we will renew the acquaintance over a mug of beer.” Shortly afterwards the King and his suite joined Lord Wilmot outside the city, but the master of the ship they had hired, yielding to the fears of his wife, refused to fulfil his engagement with them; Charles then once more took the Trent road.