It is 1647. Charles I has been defeated in the civil war, but has escaped captivity and is making for France. Parliamentary soldiers searching the New Forest decide to burn the house of Colonel Beverly, a royalist officer killed at the Battle of Naseby. His four children are rescued by their father's gamekeeper, Jacob, who takes them in.The children gradually shed their aristocratic sensibilities and adapt to the simple ways of the forest, working Jacob's farmstead and befriending other inhabitants of the woodland. But when Charles II raises an army and the spectre of war returns to haunt the Beverly children, they realise they cannot hide from their true identity.