The story of his last visit has a pathos of its own that we need not be Royalist to perceive. In March, 1646, the King at length saw his hopes to be desperately failing everywhere, even in the loyal West; garrisons of towns, castles, and fortified houses had been compelled to yield, and himself reduced to fleeting, the embarrassed head of an impossible cause, from place to place; bringing upon places and persons devoted to him a common ruin. Friends began to despair of his shifty and untrustworthy policy towards themselves and in negotiations with the enemy, and although their loyalty was hardly ever in doubt, for they were fighting, after all, not merely for the King personally, but for an order of things in which their interests were involved, they had by this time exhausted energies and wealth in a vain effort, and perhaps thought peace at almost any price to be by this time preferable to the uncertainties of civil war, in which the only certainty seemed to be that, whoever eventually won, they must needs in the meanwhile be continually making further sacrifices. The King was at Oxford when he at length came to a decision by some means to end the struggle; by flight over sea, or by surrendering himself to the enemy: in the hope, in that alternative, that the sanctity of Kingship would enable him by some means to snatch an advantage out of the very jaws of defeat and ruin. The first thought was to take flight from the country, by the port of King’s Lynn, but that was at length abandoned for the idea--a fatal _tertium quid_, as it proved--of surrendering, not to the English army and the Parliament, but to the Scots, who, he thought, were likely to make better terms for him. The Scottish army was at that time engaged upon the siege of the Royalist castle of Newark, near Southwell; and to Southwell the King, therefore, went from Oxford, in disguise. He left Oxford on April 26th, and, to the last incapable of being straightforward, even toward his own, gave out to his council that he was going to London, to treat with Parliament. On May 3rd he was at Stamford, and came to the “Saracen’s Head” at Southwell at seven o’clock in the morning of May 5th, accompanied by Ashburnham and his chaplain, Dr. Hudson, but travelling with them as Ashburnham’s servant. At the inn he was received by Montreuil, the French Ambassador to Scotland, who had been advised of his coming. The King, believing himself in every sense free, invited the Scottish Commissioners over to dinner at the inn, from the Bishop’s Palace, where they had their quarters; and in what is now the Coffee Room, the negotiations took place that ended in the King’s yielding to the Scots. It would, in any case, have so ended, for the Commissioners came by invitation, as guests to dinner, but were so astonished at finding the King so tamely coming within their grasp that they had not the remotest idea of letting him go again, and would, if needs were, have forcibly detained him.