CHARLES II. IN DORSET. 11 



at Trent," by Mrs. Anne Wyndham (either the wife or sister of 

 Colonel F. Wyndham), which gave a detailed account of Charles's 

 sojourn at Trent House, and was published originally in 1681, 

 which was probably the date when Blount's second part was 

 published.* In addition there are the extracts from Lord 

 Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, and Captain Ellesdon's 

 memoir to be found in the folio edition of the Clarendon Papers. 

 These authorities are mentioned in the second volume of 

 Hutchins's History of Dorset (third edition), and are published 

 in detail by Mr. J. Hughes in his Boscobel Tracts, the first 

 edition of which was published about 1830 and the last in 1857. 

 Mr. Hughes, in the introduction to this last edition, speaks of the 

 second part of " Boscobel" as being more scarce than the first, and 

 the various editions that were published of it as being not 

 altogether trustworthy. The edition he himself adopted was a 

 duplicate of the copy in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, 

 published in 1725 ; but, through the kindness of a friend in my 

 neighbourhood, a copy of the fourth edition, dated 1725 not the 

 same as the one in the Ashmolean Museum, as the title pages are 

 different has been lent to me, which, beyond including a frontis- 

 piece portrait of the King, and two very interesting woodcuts of 

 the ground plot of the city of Worcester and of Boscobel House 

 (showing the wood and the Royal Oak), contains a " supplement 

 to the whole," giving a short recapitulation of the most memorable 

 transactions in England till the Restoration. 



It will be obvious that the above authorities, with the exception 

 of the Ellesdon memoir, treat generally of the whole of the King's 

 wanderings, and I propose, therefore, to use them only so far as 

 they relate to the King's wanderings in Dorset, and to confine the 

 limits of my paper to the essentially Dorset portion of them, from 

 the time when the King left Trent with the intention of escaping 



* Since reading this paper before the Field Club at Pilsdon, the Rev. J. 

 H. Ward, of Gussage St. Michael, has informed me that he believes there 

 was a quarto edition of the Claustrum R. R. published in 1667. If this be 

 so, the publication in 1681 was probably in conjunction with the comple- 

 tion of the second part of Blount's BoscobeL 



