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MULTIPLE CHOICES I
TEST 87 READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on
Questions 36-40
which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
To catch a king
Anna Keay reviews Charles Spencer’s book about the hunt for King Charles II
during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century
* Presbyterianism: part of the reformed Protestant religion
Charles Spencer’s latest book, To
Catch a King, tells us the story of the
hunt for King
Charles II in the six weeks
after his resounding defeat at the Battle
of Worcester in September 1651. And
what a story it is. After his father was
executed by the Parliamentarians in
1649, the young Charles II sacrificed
one of the very principles his father
had died for and did a deal with Scots,
thereby accepting Presbyterianism*
as the national religion in return for
being crowned King of Scots. His
arrival in Edinburgh prompted the
English Parliamentary army to invade
Scotland in a pre-emptive strike. This
was followed by a Scottish invasion
of England. The two sides finally
faced one another at Worcester in
the west of England in 1651. After
being comprehensively defeated on
the meadows outside the city by the
Parliamentarian army, the 21-year-
old king found himself the subject of
a
national manhunt, with a huge sum
offered for his capture, through a series
of heart-poundingly close escapes, to
evade the Parliamentarians before
seeking refuge in France. For the next
nine years, the penniless and defeated
Charles wandered around Europe with
only a small group of loyal supporters.
Years later, after his restoration as king,
the 50-year-old Charles II requested
a meeting with the writer and diarist
Samuel Pepys. His intention when
asking Pepys to commit his story to
paper was to ensure that this most
extraordinary episode was never
forgotten. Over two three-hour sittings,
the king related to him in great detail
his personal recollections of the six
weeks he had spent as a fugitive. As
the king and secretary settled down (a
scene that is
surely a gift for a future
scriptwriter), Charles commenced
his story: ‘After the battle was so
absolutely lost as to be beyond hope
of recovery, I began to think of the best
way of saving myself.’
One of the joys of Spencer’s book, a
result not least of its use of Charles
II’s own narrative as well as those of
his supporters, is just how close the
reader gets to the action. The day-by-
day retelling of the fugitives’ doings
provides delicious details: the cutting
of the king’s long hair with agricultural
shears, the use of walnut leaves to
dye his pale skin,
and the day Charles
spent lying on a branch of the great
oak tree in Boscobel Wood as the
Parliamentary soldiers scoured the
forest floor below. Spencer draws
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out both the humour – such as the
preposterous refusal of Charles’s
friend Henry Wilmot to adopt disguise
on the grounds that it was beneath
his dignity – and the emotional
tension when the secret of the king’s
presence was cautiously revealed to
his supporters.
Charles’s adventures after losing
the Battle of Worcester hide the
uncomfortable truth that whilst almost
everyone in England had been
appalled by the execution of his father,
they had not welcomed the arrival of
his son with the Scots army, but had
instead firmly bolted their doors. This
was partly
because he rode at the head
of what looked like a foreign invasion
force and partly because, after almost
a decade of civil war, people were
desperate to avoid it beginning again.
This makes it all the more interesting
that Charles II himself loved the
story so much ever after. As well as
retelling it to anyone who would listen,
causing eye-rolling among courtiers,
he set in train a series of initiatives to
memorialise it. There was to be a new
order of chivalry, the Knights of the
Royal Oak. A series
of enormous oil
paintings depicting the episode were
produced, including a two-metre-wide
canvas of Boscobel Wood and a set
of six similarly enormous paintings
of the king on the run. In 1660,
Charles II commissioned the artist
John Michael Wright to paint a flying
squadron of cherubs* carrying an oak
tree to the heavens on the ceiling of
his bedchamber. It is hard to imagine
many other kings marking the lowest
point in their life so enthusiastically, or
* cherub: an image of angelic children used in paintings
indeed pulling off such an escape in
the first place.
Charles Spencer is the perfect
person to pass the story on to a new
generation. His pacey, readable prose
steers deftly
clear of modern idioms
and elegantly brings to life the details
of the great tale. He has even-handed
sympathy for both the fugitive king
and the fierce republican regime
that hunted him, and he succeeds in
his desire to explore far more of the
background of the story than previous
books on the subject have done.
Indeed, the opening third of the book
is about how Charles II found himself
at Worcester in the first place, which
for some will be reason alone to read
To Catch a King.
The tantalizing question left, in the
end, is that of what it all meant. Would
Charles II have been a different king
had these six weeks never happened?
The days and nights spent in hiding
must have affected him in some way.
Did the need to assume disguises,
to
survive on wit and charm alone, to
use trickery and subterfuge to escape
from tight corners help form him? This
is the one area where the book doesn’t
quite hit the mark. Instead its depiction
of Charles II in his final years as an
ineffective, pleasure-loving monarch
doesn’t do justice to the man (neither is
it accurate), or to the complexity of his
character. But this one niggle aside, To
Catch a King is an excellent read, and
those who come to it knowing little of
the famous tale will find they have a
treat in store.