To Gavin and Caroline, Rob and Matthew;
Jo and John, Bertie and Charlie
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1. Capture the Castle
2. Escape and Evasion
3. A Taste for Conspiracy
4. A Friend in Need
5. An Incident in St James’s
6. The Most Audacious Crime
7. A Royal Pardon
8. Coming in from the Cold
9. The Ways of the Lord
Epilogue
Chronology
Dramatis Personae
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Index
List of Illustrations
1 Unknown man, formerly known as Thomas Blood, attributed to Gilbert Soest. Oil on canvas, 1670s. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
2 Thomas Blood by George White. Mezzotint, early 18th century. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
3 James Butler, First Duke of Ormond, by William Wissing. Oil on canvas, c. 1680–5. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
4 Sir Joseph Williamson after unknown artist. Oil on canvas, 1660s. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
5 Henry Bennet, First Earl of Alington, after Sir Peter Lely. Oil on canvas, c. 1665–70. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
6 Charles II after Sir Peter Lely. Oil on canvas, c. 1675. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
7 George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, by Sir Peter Lely. Oil on canvas, c. 1675. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
8 Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, after Sir Peter Lely. Oil on canvas, c. 1666. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
9 Charles II by John Michael Wright. Oil on canvas, c. 1661–2. (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014)
10 The Martin Tower in the north-east corner of the Tower of London. (© Historic Royal Palaces)
11 Colonel Blood stealing the regalia from the Tower. Colour lithograph, English school, 19th century. (Private collection/ © Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images)
12 Colonel Blood’s daggers. English or Scottish, 1620. (© Royal Armouries)
13 Bird’s eye view of the Tower of London in 1688 by Rev. Richard Lovett. Lithograph, 1890. (Private collection/© Ken Welsh/ Bridgeman Images)
Prologue
So high was Blood’s fame for sagacity and intrepidity . . . [he was believed] capable of undertaking anything his passion or interest dictated [no matter] how desperate or difficult.
Biographia Britannia, 1747–66.1
Colonel Thomas Blood is one of those mysterious and charismatic characters in British history whose breathtaking exploits underline the wisdom of the old maxim that truth can be stranger than fiction.
An attempted coup d’état in Ireland and his involvement in countless plots to assassinate Charles II and to overthrow the lawful government of England, Scotland and Ireland in the late seventeenth century won him widespread notoriety in the three kingdoms. Little wonder, then, that Charles II’s ministers publicly branded him the ‘Father of all Treasons’.2 With a substantial price on his head, dead or alive, Blood became a hunted man throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles.
But this extraordinary fugitive from justice was far from cowed by any hue and cry pursuing him in the dark, filthy alleyways and back lanes of London or Dublin. Paradoxically, the tighter the net was drawn around him, the more audacious this ‘notorious traitor and incendiary’3 became.
Blood’s attempt to steal the Crown Jewels from within the protective high walls of the Tower of London in May 1671 propels him to the top of a very select group of bold outlaws who have preyed upon the riches of the English royal court down the years.
In the mid-fourteenth century, ‘Adam the Leper’ cheekily snatched property belonging to Edward III’s buxom and matronly queen, Philippa of Hainault.4 A few decades before, in 1303, Richard of Pudlicott raided Edward I’s treasury in the Chapel of the Pyx inside Westminster Abbey, assisted by its sub-prior and sacristan. Today we would recognise the crime as a medieval ‘inside job’.5 Richard was hanged and reportedly his skin was flayed off his corpse. Tradition maintains (wrongly) that this was nailed upon a wooden door of that sacred edifice, near the Chapter House, as a terrible warning to lesser mortals who covet the wealth of their sovereign lieges.6
Almost four centuries on, Blood was no mere thief, no matter how brazen his crime. He was an incorrigible adventurer who, not for the first time, eventually turned his coat to live a perilous existence as a government spy, or double agent, for Charles II’s secret service in their battle to counter both internal and external threats to the uncertain Stuart crown.
His skill at avoiding retribution was so adroit that when he finally went to meet his Maker, there was a prevalent belief that he had managed to cheat even the Grim Reaper himself. The alehouses of Westminster and Whitehall buzzed with stories that the old soldier had not died but was only up to his usual tricks. Was his demise just another of Blood’s clever stratagems to fool his many powerful enemies at the royal court? Was death his ultimate cunning disguise?
Such was the full tide of rumour running across London that the government was forced to exhume Blood’s body from his grave in Tothill Fields chapel to demonstrate publicly the mouldering truth. The colonel’s swollen and rotting cadaver was only identified at a grim inquest in Westminster by a witness recalling the inordinately large size of one of his thumbs.
His was a complex character, full of contradiction and inconsistency. He possessed strong nonconformist religious beliefs, pledging himself daily to be ‘in serious consideration . . . of Christ and what he has done’ and not to be ‘slothful in the works of ye lord’. He claimed to shun wine, strong drink and any kind of ‘excess in recreations or pomp or in apparel . . . quibbling or joking . . . all obscene and scurrilous talk’.7
Sometimes he erred from this straight-and-narrow godly path. Blood was also an arrogant, eccentric fantasist with a very persuasive manner, reinforced by buckets of Irish charm and armed with a neat turn of phrase that proved useful in a tight spot. That lyrical word ‘blarney’ might have been created especially for him. And, in truth, his escapades, conducted under a multitude of aliases and assisted by a wardrobe packed full of disguises, left no swash unbuckled, no outrage untested, no crime too great to attempt. Many a daring man of action would resemble more a meek, pious Vatican altar boy by comparison.
Thomas Blood came from a family whose origins, appropriately, lay in a thirst for adventure. The Irish branch traces its origins to Edmund Blood, a minor member of the Tudor gentry, from the tiny hamlet of Makeney, near Duffield in Derbyshire,8 who sailed off to Ireland in 1595 as an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old cavalry captain seeking fame and fortune – or, more bluntly, the simple plunder of war or the joyful sequestration of an enemy’s land and property.
He joined Queen Elizabeth I’s army to fight in what became a bitter nine-year war against the Irish magnate Hugh O’Neill and his allies, who sought, like so many others before and after, to finally end the alien English rule of the Emerald Isle.9 During a stormy sea passage over to Dublin, Blood’s first wife, Margaret, inconveniently gave birth to a son, which at the gracious request of a fellow passenger and comrade-in-arms, the Earl of Inchiquin,10 was appropriately christened ‘Neptune’.
Edmund quickly discovered that the discomforts of soldiering were not to his taste. He resigned his commission and acquired 200 acres (81 hectares) of land near Corofin in Co. Clare, along with nearby Kilnaboy Castle11 and later Bohersallagh House,12 p
ossibly through the influence of Inchiquin, his old travelling companion and later commanding officer, who already owned property in the area.
Extra income was opportunely earned by stopping ships sailing north along the Clare coast to Galway or south to Limerick and politely inviting their captains to hand over sizeable quantities of cash in return for the promise of a safe passage onwards. The presence of armed men in cutters, probably based at Lahinch in Liscannor Bay, was a persuasive reason to accept gracefully such imperative suggestions. Some may regard this traditional pastime as a protection racket, others as pure piracy – but no one dared suggest there was any conflict with the sober Presbyterian religious beliefs that the Blood family had practised after arrival in Ireland.
In April 1613, Edmund was elected as one of two members of parliament for the nearby borough of Ennis in the Irish House of Commons, as part of the Dublin government’s cynical redrawing of constituencies to guarantee a permanent Protestant majority. Edmund was then described as generosus or gentleman.13 After two years’ service as an MP, he hauled himself further up the greasy pole of social status by receiving a grant of heraldic arms,14 the choice of bucks’ heads as charges probably inspired by his love of hunting.
He had two more sons, Edmund (died 1615) and Thomas, by Margaret.15 On his wife’s death, he married Mary Holdcroft, or Holcroft, of Lancashire16 although family tradition suggests he had a third wife before he died c. 1645.17 By Mary, he had a fourth son, William, born at Kilnaboy in 1600.
Neptune, the eldest, was ordained a minister in March 1623 and became the dean of Kilfenora in 1663, as well as vicar general of the diocese thirteen years later. He was a feisty Protestant churchman, serving with King Charles I at Oxford during the first English Civil War,18 and continued the lucrative family tradition of exacting money from hapless ships sailing along the coast of Co. Clare. After parliamentary forces stormed Drogheda and Wexford in September and October 1649 and put their citizens to the sword, Neptune’s boats were burnt by Cromwell’s troops, but he was given three grants of confiscated land as compensation for his loss of the coastal business.19 He rescued the silver communion plate from both Christchurch and St Fin Barr’s cathedral in the city of Cork to prevent its theft or destruction by the Ironside soldiers and, after the restoration of the monarchy, paid the two churches more than £18 in 1665 so he could continue to use the sacred vessels in his own cathedral at Kilfenora.20
Thomas, the third son, born at Kilnaboy in 1598, became an ironmaster in Sarney, Dunboyne, Co. Meath, eleven miles (17.9 km) north-west of Dublin. Some sources describe him as a blacksmith, but this belittles his status, as he enjoyed a profitable business exporting iron ingots to England. Unfortunately, nothing is known about his wife. In 1621 he purchased an estate in Co. Meath from William Cooke and seventeen years later bought 500 acres (202 hectares) in Co. Wicklow.21
As befits a man of such mystery, the early life of Thomas Blood junior remains obscure and contradictory. He was born at Sarney in early 1618,22 probably the elder son of the marriage, as there are tenuous reports of a William Blood, born around 1620, who died some two decades later at Dunboyne. He apparently had at least one sister. Blood’s parents were described as ‘serious, honest and of no inferior credit and possessions in the country where they lived’ according to Colonel Blood’s first biographer in 1680.23 He emphasised that they took care ‘that their offspring should not degenerate from the virtues and repute of his ancestors [sic] by forming and shaping his condition according to the rules of a strict and sober education . . . to preserve him from those extravagancies that usually attend metalled and active spirits’. The youngster may have been sent to Lancashire for his education, in the care of his stepgrandmother’s family.
In March 1640, Charles I granted property in the barony of Dunboyne to the Bloods, including houses, quarries, orchards and gardens of the hamlet of Suppocke, amounting to sixty acres of arable land and ten acres of pasture (totalling twenty-eight hectares), together with five cottages, at an annual rent of 5s 6d (27.5P).24 (A cousin, Edmund, is recorded as owning a mill, seven tenements and seventy acres of land in Dunboyne at the same time, property he bought in July 1621.)25 Thomas Blood junior received further generous grants, in June 1643, of the ‘towns and lands of Sarney, Braystown and Foylestown in the barony of Dunboyne and five hundred acres of unprofitable mountain in Glenmalure, alias The Glinns, in Co. Wicklow,’ the latter award sounding distinctly parsimonious.26 Our future adventurer lived not at Sarney but at Ashtown, in today’s western suburbs of Dublin.27
This new mark of royal favour was probably a reward for Blood’s support for the crown during the rebellion of Irish Catholics that broke out in Ulster in October 1641 over the loss of the best agricultural land to Protestant settlers and increasing fears over the future of the Catholic faith in Ireland.28 The Irish aristocracy and clergy formed a ‘Catholic Confederation’ the following summer, based at Kilkenny, which became the de facto government of two-thirds of Ireland. There were other grave consequences across the Irish Sea. The means of restoring English rule in Ireland became one of the catalysts of the Civil War between King and Parliament, as the MPs sought control of the army sent to defeat the rebels and also the power of veto over royal appointees as its commanders.
Like all such Irish conflicts, it was a bloody affair with neighbour pitted against neighbour, and the opportunities for plunder and vengeance were eagerly seized by both sides. Blood’s dour Protestant uncle Neptune later claimed mordantly that in Co. Clare he had goods worth £180 looted from him, as well as being deprived of church benefices worth £140 a year and his cattle stolen by ‘Hugh Hogan and Teige O’Brien of Caherminnane’. His home at Kilnaboy had been demolished and he had lost £120 in debts owed him by Catholics. More vividly, the clergyman reported the murder of two Presbyterian settlers, George Owens of Kilfenora and Michael Hunt of Moghna who, he claimed, had been killed by Teige and Simon Fitzpatrick of Ballyshanny.29
Thomas Blood had been appointed a justice of the peace at the remarkably early age of twenty-one in 1640 and probably had fought against the rebels in the spring of 1642 when James Butler, First Duke of Ormond, led a series of Royalist army attacks to clear the districts around Dublin of Confederation forces.
Although the Irish war was still continuing unabated, Blood heeded the clarion call to arms issued by his beleaguered monarch when Charles I defiantly raised his royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642.
A ‘Captain Bludd’ served in Sir Lewis Dyve’s regiment of Royalist infantry as quartermaster after May 1643. Although this unit was much reduced after the hard fighting of the Cornish campaign of August 1644, it formed the garrison of the twelfth-century Sherborne Castle, Dorset, in October that year. Many of his brother officers are known to have come from Dorset and Somerset, which suggests that hasty local recruiting had filled gaps caused by heavy casualties. More would fall when the walls were breached and the fortress surrendered to parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax after an eleven-day siege the following August.30
It may be that if Blood was at the siege of Sherborne, he either escaped or, if taken prisoner, was freed on parole to return to Ireland after his father’s death at Sarney in 1645.31 There is some circumstantial evidence that he rejoined the Royalist army when fighting was renewed in 1648 in what became the Second Civil War. His contemporary biographer and apologist ‘R.H.’ – possibly Richard Halliwell, one of his cronies and fellow conspirators in the years to come – maintained that Blood ‘gave his prince all the assistance his personal valour was capable to afford him; wherein he performed several good pieces of good service’.32
One of these exploits may have been his role in an audacious (some may say recklessly foolhardy) attempt to kidnap Colonel Thomas Rainborowe,33 commander of the parliamentary forces besieging Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire.
A Royalist army had been defeated by Oliver Cromwell at the three-day battle at Preston, Lancashire on 17–19 August 1648 and one of their genera
ls, Sir Marmaduke Langdale, was captured. He was taken to Nottingham and black rumours swept through Pontefract’s 500-strong garrison that Langdale would be executed within sight of the castle walls unless they immediately capitulated.
Captain William Paulden, one of their more daredevil officers,34 decided to snatch Rainborowe and exchange his life for that of Langdale. He and twenty-two hand-picked volunteers crept out of the castle at midnight on 28 October and rode the twelve miles (19 km) to Doncaster where the parliamentary commander was billeted in an inn, preparing for godly worship on the Sabbath morrow. Blood may have been one of them.
Four assailants safely reached Rainborowe’s lodgings and announced they held an urgent message for him from Cromwell. The ruse worked: they were admitted and promptly seized the parliamentary commander and his lieutenant, bundling both down into the street and their waiting horses. The colonel suddenly realised he was confronted by only four men and shouted ‘Arms! Arms!’ to rouse his sleeping troops in the town. Amid the confusion, one of his would-be kidnappers grappled with Rainborowe, dropping his uncocked pistol on the ground. The lieutenant picked it up – but before he could open fire, was cut down ruthlessly. Rainborowe was stabbed in the neck and when he tried to stagger to his feet, was run through his body with a sword, killing him on the spot.35
The Royalists rode out of Doncaster, across the bridge over the River Don, and headed back north to Pontefract, sweeping up fifty prisoners on the way.36
Blood’s biographer, ‘R.H.’, maintained that most people believed that he was ‘the contriver and [an] associate’ in ‘this bold and desperate adventure’. However, he acknowledged that Blood ‘frequently disowned the fact himself’ and it would therefore ‘be a crime to impute the honours of other men to a valour that has no need of these shifts’.37
As we shall see, Blood never shrank from claiming the benefits of notoriety for his adventures, so it is strange that he should deny any part in such a daring escapade. And yet, this adventure bears some of the hallmarks of his later outrages: a grievance nurtured; a bold attempt to exact vengeance and a hostage taken.38 Years later, in 1671, Prince Rupert, the dashing and impetuous Royalist cavalry general, generously described Blood as a ‘very stout, bold fellow in the royal service’.39 Amid all those officers in the Royalist armies, why would he remember Blood, unless he had been involved in a remarkable feat of arms? There is one additional piece of circumstantial evidence that may link Blood with this botched and bloody attempted kidnapping. It is known that Rainborowe’s regiment took an important role in the siege of Sherborne Castle in 164540 and the attack on the parliamentary commander may well have satisfied a grudge, a personal desire for revenge for an incident during the fighting.
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 1