TWO negative features does the writer mention? A

Test 1
24
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on 
Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading 
Passage 3 below.
To catch a king
Anna Keay reviews Charles Spencer’s book about the hunt for King Charles II 
during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century
* Presbyterianism: part of the reformed Protestant religion
Charles Spencer’s latest book, To Catch a 
King, tells us the story of the hunt for King 
Charles II in the six weeks after his resounding 
defeat at the Battle of Worcester in September 
1651. And what a story it is. After his father 
was executed by the Parliamentarians in 1649, 
the young Charles II sacrificed one of the 
very principles his father had died for and 
did a deal with the Scots, thereby accepting 
Presbyterianism* as the national religion in 
return for being crowned King of Scots. His 
arrival in Edinburgh prompted the English 
Parliamentary army to invade Scotland in a 
pre-emptive strike. This was followed by a 
Scottish invasion of England. The two sides 
finally faced one another at Worcester in 
the west of England in 1651. After being 
comprehensively defeated on the meadows 
outside the city by the Parliamentarian army, 
the 21-year-old king found himself the subject 
of a national manhunt, with a huge sum 
offered for his capture. Over the following 
six weeks he managed, through a series of 
heart-poundingly close escapes, to evade the 
Parliamentarians before seeking refuge in 
France. For the next nine years, the penniless 
and defeated Charles wandered around Europe 
with only a small group of loyal supporters.
Years later, after his restoration as king, the 
50-year-old Charles II requested a meeting 
with the writer and diarist Samuel Pepys. His 
intention when asking Pepys to commit his 
story to paper was to ensure that this most 
extraordinary episode was never forgotten. 
Over two three-hour sittings, the king related 
to him in great detail his personal recollections 
of the six weeks he had spent as a fugitive. As 
the king and secretary settled down (a scene 
that is surely a gift for a future scriptwriter), 
Charles commenced his story: ‘After the battle 
was so absolutely lost as to be beyond hope of 
recovery, I began to think of the best way of 
saving myself.’
One of the joys of Spencer’s book, a result not 
least of its use of Charles II’s own narrative 
as well as those of his supporters, is just how 
close the reader gets to the action. The day-by-
day retelling of the fugitives’ doings provides 
delicious details: the cutting of the king’s long 
hair with agricultural shears, the use of walnut 
leaves to dye his pale skin, and the day Charles 
spent lying on a branch of the great oak tree in 
Boscobel Wood as the Parliamentary soldiers 
scoured the forest floor below. Spencer draws 
out both the humour – such as the preposterous 
refusal of Charles’s friend Henry Wilmot 
to adopt disguise on the grounds that it was 
beneath his dignity – and the emotional tension 
when the secret of the king’s presence was 
cautiously revealed to his supporters. 
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Reading
25
Charles’s adventures after losing the Battle of 
Worcester hide the uncomfortable truth that 
whilst almost everyone in England had been 
appalled by the execution of his father, they 
had not welcomed the arrival of his son with 
the Scots army, but had instead firmly bolted 
their doors. This was partly because he rode at 
the head of what looked like a foreign invasion 
force and partly because, after almost a decade 
of civil war, people were desperate to avoid 
it beginning again. This makes it all the more 
interesting that Charles II himself loved the 
story so much ever after. As well as retelling 
it to anyone who would listen, causing eye-
rolling among courtiers, he set in train a series 
of initiatives to memorialise it. There was to 
be a new order of chivalry, the Knights of the 
Royal Oak. A series of enormous oil paintings 
depicting the episode were produced, including 
a two-metre-wide canvas of Boscobel Wood 
and a set of six similarly enormous paintings 
of the king on the run. In 1660, Charles II 
commissioned the artist John Michael Wright 
to paint a flying squadron of cherubs* carrying 
an oak tree to the heavens on the ceiling of his 
bedchamber. It is hard to imagine many other 
kings marking the lowest point in their life so 
enthusiastically, or indeed pulling off such an 
escape in the first place.
Charles Spencer is the perfect person to
pass the story on to a new generation. His 
pacey, readable prose steers deftly clear of
modern idioms and elegantly brings to life the 
details of the great tale. He has even-handed 
sympathy for both the fugitive king and the 
fierce republican regime that hunted him,
and he succeeds in his desire to explore far 
more of the background of the story than 
previous books on the subject have done. Indeed,
the opening third of the book is about how 
Charles II found himself at Worcester in the first
place, which for some will be reason alone to 
read To Catch a King.
The tantalising question left, in the end, is that 
of what it all meant. Would Charles II have 
been a different king had these six weeks never 
happened? The days and nights spent in hiding 
must have affected him in some way. Did the 
need to assume disguises, to survive on wit and 
charm alone, to use trickery and subterfuge to 
escape from tight corners help form him? This 
is the one area where the book doesn’t quite hit 
the mark. Instead its depiction of Charles II in 
his final years as an ineffective, pleasure-loving 
monarch doesn’t do justice to the man (neither 
is it accurate), or to the complexity of his 
character. But this one niggle aside, To Catch a 
King is an excellent read, and those who come 
to it knowing little of the famous tale will find 
they have a treat in store.
* cherub: an image of angelic children used in paintings
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Test 1
26
Questions 27–31
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, 

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