[Footnote 1:  For the history of the king’s escape, see Blount’s Boscobel, with Claustrum Regale reseratum; the Whitgrave manuscript, printed in the Retrospective Review, xiv. 26.  Father Hudleston’s Relation; the True Narrative and Relation in the Harleian Miscellany, iv. 441, an account of his majesty’s escape from Worcester, dictated to Mr. Pepys by the king himself, and the narrative given by Bates in the second part of his Elenchus.  In addition to these, we have a narrative by Clarendon, who professes to have derived his information from Charles and the other actors in the transaction, and asserts that “it is exactly true; that there is nothing in it, the verity whereof can justly be suspected” (Car.  Hist. iii. 427, 428); yet, whoever will compare it with the other accounts will see that much of great interest has been omitted, and much so disfigured as to bear little resemblance to the truth.  It must be that the historian, writing in banishment, and at a great distance of time, trusted to his imagination to supply the defect of his memory.—­See note (E).  See also Gunter’s narrative in Cary, ii. 430.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1651.  Oct. 17.]

after his defeat at Worcester they were agitated with apprehensions for his safety.  He had now eluded the hunters of his life; he appeared before them with fresh claims on their sympathy, from the spirit which he had displayed in the field, and the address with which he had extricated himself from danger.  His adventures were listened to with interest; and his conduct was made the theme of general praise.  That he should be the heir to the British crowns, was the mere accident of birth; that he was worthy to wear them, he owed to the resources and energies of his own mind.  In a few months, however, the delusion vanished.  Charles had borne the blossoms of promise; they were blasted under the withering influence of pleasure and dissipation.

But from the fugitive prince we must now turn back to the victorious general who proceeded from the field of battle in triumph to London.  The parliament seemed at a loss to express its gratitude to the man to whose splendid services the commonwealth owed its preservation.  At Ailesbury Cromwell was met by a deputation of the two commissioners of the great seal, the lord chief justice, and Sir Gilbert Pickering; to each of whom, in token of his satisfaction, he made a present of a horse and of two Scotsmen selected from his prisoners.  At Acton he was received by the speaker and the lord president, attended by members of parliament and of the council, and by the lord mayor with the aldermen and sheriffs; and heard from the recorder, in an address of congratulation, that he was destined “to bind kings in chains, and their nobles in fetters of iron.”  He entered[a] the capital in the state carriage, was greeted with the acclamations of the people as the procession passed through the city, and

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1651.  Oct. 12.]