Here he found Lord Wilmot, one of the officers who had escaped with him
from the fatal field of Worcester, and who had left him at Whiteladies.
It is too much to tell in detail all the movements that followed. The
search for Prince Charles continued with unrelenting severity. Daily,
noble and plebeian officers of the defeated army were seized. The
country was being scoured, high and low. Frequently the prince saw the
forms or heard the voices of those who sought him diligently. But "Will
Jones," the woodman, was not easily to be recognized as Charles Stuart,
the prince. He was dressed in the shabbiest of weather-worn suits, his
hair cut short to his ears, his face embrowned, his head covered with an
old and greasy gray steeple hat, with turned-up brims, his ungloved and
stained hands holding for cane a long and crooked thorn-stick.
Altogether it was a very unprincely individual who roamed those
peril-haunted shires of England.
The two fugitives--Prince Charles and Lord Wilmot--now turned their
steps towards the seaport of Bristol, hoping there to find means of
passage to France. Their last place of refuge in Staffordshire was at
the house of Colonel Lane, of Bently, an earnest royalist.
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