Then the attendant courtiers began undressing the King.  They took off his buff-coat, and put on him a ‘noggon coarse shirt,’ and a green suit and another doublet—­Richard Penderell’s woodman’s dress.  Lord Wilmot cut his sovereign’s hair with a knife, but Richard Penderell took up his shears and finished the work.  ‘Burn it,’ said the king; but Richard kept the sacred locks.  Then Charles covered his dark face with soot.  Could anything have taken away the expression of his half-sleepy, half-merry eyes?

They departed, and half an hour afterwards Colonel Ashenhurst, with a troop of Roundhead horse, rode up to the White-Ladies.  The King, meantime, had been conducted by Richard Penderell into a coppice-wood, with a bill-hook in his hands for defence and disguise.  But his followers were overtaken near Newport; and here Buckingham, with Lords Talbot and Leviston, escaped; and henceforth, until Charles’s wanderings were transferred from England to France, George Villiers was separated from the Prince.  Accompanied by the Earls of Derby and Lauderdale, and by Lord Talbot, he proceeded northwards, in hopes of joining General Leslie and the Scotch horse.  But their hopes were soon dashed:  attacked by a body of Roundheads, Buckingham and Lord Leviston were compelled to leave the high road, to alight from their horses, and to make their way to Bloore Park, near Newport, where Villiers found a shelter.  He was soon, however, necessitated to depart:  he put on a labourer’s dress; he deposited his George, a gift from Henrietta Maria, with a companion, and set off for Billstrop, in Nottinghamshire, one Matthews, a carpenter, acting as his guide; at Billstrop he was welcomed by Mr. Hawley, a Cavalier; and from that place he went to Brookesby, in Leicestershire, the original seat of the Villiers family, and the birthplace of his father.  Here he was received by Lady Villiers—­the widow, probably, of his father’s brother, Sir William Villiers, one of those contented country squires who not only sought no distinction, but scarcely thanked James I. when he made him a baronet.  Here might the hunted refugee see, on the open battlements of the church, the shields on which were exhibited united quarterings of his father’s family with those of his mother; here, listen to old tales about his grandfather, good Sir George, who married a serving-woman in his deceased wife’s kitchen;[3] and that serving-woman became the leader of fashions in the court of James.  Here he might ponder on the vicissitudes which marked the destiny of the house of Villiers, and wonder what should come next.

That the spirit of adventure was strong within him, is shown by his daring to go up to London, and disguising himself as a mountebank.  He had a coat made, called a ‘Jack Pudding Coat:’  a little hat was stuck on his head, with a fox’s tail in it, and cocks’ feathers here and there.  A wizard’s mask one day, a daubing of flour another, completed the disguise it was then so usual