THE BATH ROAD 



23 



nothing in it ; and were it not that Royalty here first 

 sets its foot on the road, we might hurry on to Maiden- 

 head thicket, where we should have our purses taken. 

 Such a lot, at least, would in all likelihood have been 

 ours, had we travelled in the good old days, and properly 

 provided. The place had such a bad reputation so far 

 back as Elizabeth's time that the Vicar of Hurley, who 

 did duty at Maidenhead, drew an extra salary as amends 

 for having to pass it. 



In July, 1647, Charles the First was allowed, after 

 several years separation, to see his children, and child- 

 ren and father met at Maidenhead, at the Greyhound 

 Inn. The meeting must have been a pathetic one, but 

 the town was strewn with flowers and decked with green 

 boughs. The united family, so soon to be so terribly 

 divided, dined together, we read, and afterwards drove 

 to Caversham. It must have been a pleasant journey 

 that down the Reading Road, and would make, I think, 

 a pretty picture ; the king, with a sad smile on his fine 

 face, pale from imprisonment, the children laughing and 

 talking gaily, innocent of what the Fates were pre- 

 paring unseen, the stern guard of Ironsides, not unmoved 

 at the sight, riding grimly behind. I wonder what 

 Charles and his children talked about on that historic 

 journey. Not of past troubles, I suspect. Care had 

 been too constant a companion of late years to be 

 chosen as a topic. I dare say that the king, who knew 

 his folk-lore and his Berkshire too — and who was a 

 capital story-teller if we are to believe Mr. Wills — 

 simply discussed the places of interest on the road, 

 and acted as cicerone to his children. It would be a 

 natural event at so critical a meeting, just as it was 

 natural that Heine, after careful consideration of what 

 he should say to Goethe when he met him, found when 

 the crisis came that he could only talk about plums ; 

 and Charles if he did discuss scenery had a subject. 

 Half a mile south of Maidenhead, he might have pointed 

 out the spire of Bray Church, and told his children the 



