parliament offered one thousand pounds reward for his apprehension.
At length, after wandering in various disguises forty days, he
arrived at Brighton, then a small fishing town, and here his friends
succeeded in hiring a fishing boat to take him to France. Numerous
histories of this extraordinary escape were published, but no two
of them agree, excepting that, to please the king, all the credit
was given to Roman Catholics. Of these narratives, that by Dr.
Lingard has the strangest blunder. When they left Shoreham, 'The
ship stood with easy sail towards the Isle of Wight, as if she were
on her way to Deal, to which port she was bound'[276]--Deal being
exactly in the contrary direction! Carte has the best account. The
vessel was bound for Poole, coal-laden; they left Shoreham at seven
a.m. under easy sail; and at five, being off the Isle of Wight, with
the wind north, she stood over to France, and returned to Poole,
no one discovering that they had been out of their course. A letter
recently discovered among the archives of the Society of Friends
at Devonshire House solves every difficulty. It is written by Ellis
Hookes to the wife of George Fox, dated January, 1670--

'Yesterday there was a friend (a quaker) wth the king, one that
is John Groves mate, he was the may yt. was mate to the master of
the fisher-boat yt carried the king away when he went from Worcester
fight, and only this friend and the master knew of it in the ship,
and the friend carried him (the king) ashoare on his shoulders.
the king knew him again, and was very friendly to him, and told
him he remembered him and of severall tings yt was done in ye ship
att the same time. the friend told him the reason why he did not
come all this while was yt he was satisfied in yt he had peace and
satisfaction in himself yt he did what he did to releiue a man in
distresse and now he desired nothing of him (the king) but that he