Oak trees that hid a King will grow again
Steph Spyro
THE oak grove which helped King Charles II escape Oliver Cromwell’s army has been reborn.
English Heritage has begun planting 32 saplings around the 18th century descendant of the Royal Oak – often called Son of Royal Oak – where the future king took refuge, near Boscobel House, in Shropshire.
The conservation charity has also propagated 10 trees that are descendants of Son of Royal Oak.
The descendant of the Royal Oak has stood out as a solitary landmark for over 200 years but conservators now said that its forebear existed amid an oak pasture.
On September 6, 1651, the freshly deposed king of Scotland was being hunted by Cromwell’s New Model Army following the Battle of Worcester, when he decided the high branches of the tree would be the best place to avoid capture.
Isolated
The final battle of the English Civil War marked the end of Charles’s military attempt to regain the throne lost by his father, Charles I, in 1649.
The 21-year-old king was taken to Boscobel by the Catholic Penderel family after the battle.
It was relatively isolated and had hiding places but Royalist officer Colonel William Careless thought it was too dangerous for Charles to remain inside during the day.
Diarist Samuel Pepys recorded the king’s recollection 30 years after the war. Charles recalled: “He told me that it would be very dangerous either to stay in the house or go into the wood. [We] got up into a great oak that had been lopped some three or four years before and so was grown out very bushy and thick not to be seen through. And there we sat all the day.
“While we were in the tree we see soldiers going up and down in the thickest of the wood searching for persons escaped, we seeing them now and then peeping out of the woods.”
Charles and Careless went back to the half-timbered farmhouse at dusk.
Following Cromwell’s death nine years later, Charles returned to the throne and rewarded Careless and the Penderels with money and coats of arms depicting the tree.
The event was pivotal in the history of England, celebrated by more than 500 pubs named the Royal Oak.