Richard Penderel conducted the king out through a back door, unknown to any of his followers, except a trusted few of the lords, who followed him into the back premises, and as far as an adjacent wood, belonging to the domain of Boscobel, called Spring Coppice, about half a mile from Whiteladies, where they took a sorrowful farewell of him, leaving him under the watchful care of three of the trusty Penderel brethren--William, Humphrey, and George. The Earl of Derby and the other gentlemen then returned to their comrades at Whiteladies, where, mounting in hot haste, with the intrepid Charles Giffard for their conductor, they scoured off on the north road; but a little beyond Newport they were surrounded by the rebels, and after some resistance, were made prisoners. Charles Giffard contrived to effect his escape from the inn at Banbury, where they halted, but the loyal Earl of Derby, who had sacrificed his own personal safety by resigning to his sovereign the little city of refuge at Boscobel, instead of occupying it himself, was subjected to the mockery of a pretended trial by the rebels, and beheaded, although he had only surrendered on a solemn promise of receiving quarter--promises which were never regarded by Cromwell and his associates. The cool-blooded malignity with which, in his dispatch, announcing his triumph at Worcester, Cromwell points out the noble captives, whom the fortunes of war had placed in his magnanimous hands, to his merciless tools as "_objects of their justice_," what was it but signing their death-warrants by anticipation, before the mock trials took place of the fore-doomed victims? and how revolting, after that death-whoop, appears the Pharisaical cant of his concluding sentences: "The dimensions of this mercy are above my thoughts--it is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy. I am bold humbly to beg that the fatness of these continued mercies may not occasion pride and wantonness, as formerly the like hath done to a chosen people." If Cromwell had understood the true meaning of the Saviour's words, "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice," he would probably have acted more like a Christian and written less like a Jew. "But to return," saith the quaint chronicler of Boscobel, "to the duty of my attendance on his majesty in Spring Coppice. By that time Richard Penderel had conveyed him to the obscurest part of it, it was about sun-rising on Thursday morning, and the heavens wept bitterly at these calamities, insomuch that the thickest tree in the wood was not able to keep his majesty dry, nor was there any thing for him to sit on; wherefore Richard went to Francis Yates's house, a trusty neighbor, who had married his wife's sister, where he borrowed a blanket, which he folded and laid on the ground for his majesty to sit on." A three-legged stool would have been a luxury, at that comfortless period, to the throneless monarch, who claimed three realms as his rightful inheritance.