Following his catastrophic defeat by Oliver Cromwell's forces at the Battle of Worcester, the young King Charles II found himself a desperate fugitive, hunted across England by republican soldiers. Displaying remarkable physical endurance and composure, Charles traveled in various disguises, at one point spending an agonizing day hidden inside the dense branches of a large oak tree—the Royal Oak at Boscobel House—while Parliamentarian patrols searched the woodland directly below. He pushed his physical endurance further by executing a high-stakes, six-week flight on foot and horseback, successfully crossing the English Channel to continental exile.

This dramatic, narrow escape became a central pillar of royalist mythology and post-Restoration literature, extensively celebrated in contemporary ballads, popular broadsides, and court poetry. The imagery of the hidden king and the protective oak tree provided 17th-century English literature with a rich, enduring vocabulary of hidden legitimacy, survival in darkness, and the ultimate restoration of historical continuity.