Charles Spencer's non-fiction work To Catch A King - Charles II's Great Escape (#1,009) focuses on a very brief period of Charles II's life after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester, but those few weeks were literally a matter of life and death for him. After the execution of his father, Charles I, at the hands of the Parliament, his fate would have been the same had he been captured. When you read the facts of the matter, it's astonishing that he was able to escape from the net the Parliamentarians had set for him.
Spencer makes the most of this cat and mouse tale, despite the fact that the reader knows the eventual outcome. There were principled folks on both sides of the English Civil Wars, but there were villains, too. Many of the riskiest actions were taken by ordinary people in defense of what they believed to be right, and we meet many of them here.
It's a well written, well researched book about a turbulent time when the balance of power in England ultimately shifted.
I was surprised to find a personal connection to my own family's history in this book. I always knew that one of my ancestors was originally from Berwick, Scotland, and that he was brought to what is now the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts as a prisoner of war. I never connected the date those Scottish prisoners arrived there with the aftermath of the bloody Battle of Worcester. It's a National Park Service site now, but there were a number of prisoners whose names were never recorded there before their contracts were bought, and they were moved off the site to New Hampshire. My forebear was one of those. The facts fit so perfectly that one of those unknowns was undoubtedly my ancestor. Who knew I would find that nugget buried here in To Catch A King?
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