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affections in order to affect Council proceedings. It was her influence, wrote Hyde, that persuaded two members of the Prince’s entourage, Sir Charles Berkeley and Robert Long, to demand to join the Council proper – positions to which they had no right because it was actually the King’s Council (in the West) not the Prince’s. 6
    So the petty feuds proliferated.
    Elsewhere in England a revolutionary war machine, the NewModel Army, was being assembled by the King’s enemies. Charles in the West devoured local specialities, such as cherry pie and cream, with relish; he also struggled to play some kind of useful political part, for all Hyde’s strictures, in a situation which was rapidly becoming swamped by the rising tide of Royalist failure. At Bridgwater on 2 June he received a petition from that strange body of protesters known as the Clubmen. The aims of the Clubmen were out of the mainstream of the time: wishing to live in peace in their lands, but sometimes using force to bring about peace, they suffered at the hands of both Royalists and Roundheads. On this occasion they were petitioning against the ‘intolerable rapine’ committed against them by Goring’s horse.
    Charles on his own initiative behaved with both sympathy and wisdom. He wrote a shocked letter to Goring. He also tried to persuade the Clubmen not to take the law into their own hands.
    On 14 June the New Model Army clashed with the King at Naseby, in Northamptonshire: this, their paramount victory, extinguished his military hopes. Not only that, but the King’s secret papers, revealing his ‘treacherous’ Irish dealings, were discovered. For all the successes of Montrose in Scotland, the Royalist cause in England was virtually lost. A month later, to complete the pattern of disaster, Goring, that bird of ill omen, was totally defeated by Fairfax and the New Model Army at Langport not far from Bridgwater.
    The Prince by this time had moved back to Bristol, and then after an outbreak of plague out again to ‘fine sweet’ Barnstaple. But he was clearly no longer as safe as he had formerly been in the West. He wrote an official letter to the Parliamentary general Sir Thomas Fairfax: ‘We have so deep a sense of the present miseries and calamities of this kingdom, that there is nothing that we more earnestly pray to Almighty God than that He would be pleased to restore unto it a happy peace.’ 7 But at this stage there was very little that anyone on the Royalist side, let alone a fifteen-year-old prince, could do. Once Prince Rupert had surrendered Bristol after a fierce siege, the question was not so much whether the Prince of Wales should be evacuated, butwhen he should go. Above all, it had to be resolved in which country he should take refuge.
    It was a decision of some moment. And it dominated the Prince’s councils, as well as his correspondence from his father, for the next six months. Should the Prince of Wales be sent to friendly France – where his mother had taken refuge, and was now living at the expense of her relations with his baby sister Henriette-Anne? Or to Scotland? Or to Ireland? Or even to Denmark – where Charles had another relative on the throne?
    More was at stake than Charles’ own safety. France, roughly speaking, represented the foreign Catholic interest, and the influence of Queen Henrietta Maria. Scotland stood for Presbyterianism (and therefore some kind of compromise on behalf of the Anglican King), but also for the British interest, since there it could legitimately be argued that the Prince of Wales was still on British soil. The problem of Ireland was that it was beset by so many different factions at this date, most of them represented by military forces of one size or another, that it was difficult to know whose interests would be served by the arrival there of the Prince of Wales. Perhaps distant Denmark was the best solution.
    At first the King himself took the line that ‘France must be the place, not