SOURCE: Jaeckle, Daniel. “From Witty History to Typology: John Cleveland's ‘The King's Disguise’.” In The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, p. 71-80. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Jaeckle analyzes Cleveland's “The King's Disguise” typographically and as a historical record of the flight of Charles I from Oxford, deeming it Cleveland's best political poem.

At three in the morning on April 27, 1646, Charles I fled from Oxford. It was a difficult moment for the king. At Naseby in the previous year the New Model Army had defeated the Royalist forces, and now Fairfax's legions were moving to surround the king's stronghold at Oxford. Fearing his capture and desperate for a new strategy, Charles cut his hair, trimmed his beard, put on the clothing of a servant, and left town disguised as an attendant of one of...