When Worcester Fight ended so badly for “the man Charles Stuart, that Son of Belial,” as the Republicans were pleased to call Charles II., he made at once for Boscobel, the place where, only a few days before, the Earl of Derby had secreted himself. Accompanied by Colonel Carless, he threw himself upon the assured loyalty of the five Penderel brothers and their widowed mother, Dame Joan, who then lived here and at ruined Whiteladies Priory, half a mile away. “Will Jones,” for that was the name he adopted, could have found no more loyal hearts had he searched the realm, and the Penderels had already found the transition from secreting priests to Royalist fugitives an easy one. But Boscobel had become suspect, and the quarry was now so important that rigorous search was made, and Charles and Carless, although hid respectively in the secret recess behind the panelling in the Squire’s room, and in the pit beneath the cheese-loft during the night, were in daytime for greater security secreted in the bushy head of a pollard oak growing in a meadow near the house: the tree afterwards famous as the “Royal Oak.” In that leafy refuge Charles slept, with his head in the faithful Colonel’s lap, and beneath them quested the search-party of Cromwell’s dragoons. The story is well known, how that tree effectually concealed them, and how, after many wanderings, the King fled the country from the sea shore at Brighthelmstone. [Illustration: BOSCOBEL AND THE “ROYAL OAK.”] The original Royal Oak is gone; hacked to pieces for mementoes in a very short while after the Restoration, and the youthful oak that stands solitary in a field does but mark the spot. But the house stands still, with its old hiding-places, and many are those who come to see; so that the pile of visitors’ books, all closely filled, is a mighty and a growing one. Of the “bosco bello,” the Fair Wood that gave the old house its name, not a trace remains. Downhill from Ivetsey Bank, the Watling Street presently crosses into Shropshire, and comes to the village of Weston-under-Lizard—or “Weston-subter-Liziard” as it was formerly named—a cheerful little place, clinging like some feudal dependant to the park and Hall, the seat of the Earl of Bradford. The church and mansion stand adjoining, at the end of a short drive: in the church the cross-legged effigies of Sir Hugh and Sir Hamo de Weston, who flourished six or seven hundred years ago; and in the exquisitely fitted Bradford Chapel memorials of that family. Burlington Pool, a reedy lake on the right hand, is now passed, and Crackley Bank, leading downhill towards another scene of industry and coal-mining, seen from afar by reason of its smoky skies. Close by, at the place called Red Hill, the Roman station of _Uxaconium_ was placed.