A cook scolds a clumsy farmhand who cannot work a roasting jack, and he explains that his family was too poor to eat meat. The farmhand is Charles II, the most wanted man in England. On September 3rd, 1651, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army destroyed his forces at the Battle of Worcester, and the king fled out the back of his lodgings with about 60 mounted officers. Persuaded that a private army could not hide, he sent them away, put on green breeches, a leather doublet, and a greasy gray hat, and let Richard Penderel hack off his hair with shears.

This episode follows the six weeks that came after, a flight kept alive by Catholic families practiced at hiding people, by a borrowed travel permit, and by luck. Parliament offered 1,000 pounds for the king and promised death to anyone who helped him. He walked on bleeding feet in shoes too small, hid in priest holes, rode as a servant named William Jackson, and was nearly undone by a locked bedroom door and a set of horseshoes. In the early hours of October 15th he sailed from Sussex on a coal boat, two hours ahead of the cavalry.

• Charles spent a day in an oak tree near Boscobel House while soldiers searched below, and Colonel William Careless pinched him to keep him from falling asleep and out of the branches.
• At Moseley Hall the priest John Huddleston bathed the king’s feet, and Charles called for him on his deathbed 34 years later to convert to Catholicism.
• Posing as Jane Lane’s servant, he told a blacksmith that the rogue Charles Stuart deserved to be hanged more than all the rest.
• A captain hired at Charmouth never showed because his wife, sensing danger, locked him in his bedroom.
• Captain Nicholas Tattersell recognized his passenger in a Brighton pub and demanded an extra 200 pounds before he would sail.