Lieutenant Colonel Robert Shapcott had also been arrested in Ireland and Charles II himself wrote to Ormond instructing that the prisoner be sent to London for interrogation ‘before me or such as our Privy Council appoint’ to find ‘more effective proof against him’. The king ordered: ‘You shall send him over here in custody and see that he speaks to none save when his custodians are present.’56
One in, one out. Due to Vernon’s behind-the-scenes machinations, Philip Alden managed to escape from the Dublin Castle prison a few days afterwards by clambering out through a barred window. To the outside world, this disconcerting jailbreak appeared to be the result of careless or lax security; indeed, Ormond blamed the ‘negligence’ of the constable of the castle. Ned Vernon kept up the pretence, writing to Secretary Williamson, rather tongue-in-cheek, on 19 June:
You will hear how that most notorious villain Alden broke prison. Great efforts are being made to find him and the constable of the castle, a very knave, [has been] turned out about him.57
The rogues (dissident Presbyterians) are very pleased at his escape as it is believed that he knew much of all their designs in England and Ireland . . .
So subtle was the knave that ’tis not imagined how he broke loose, for the window bar that he broke was upon the top of all the castle in the highest turret.
If he comes to Whitehall I know you will secure him.58
The first batch of prisoners were arraigned at the bar of the King’s Bench court in Inns Quay, Dublin59 on 25 June, among them Leckie, Edward Warren, Alexander Jephson and Richard Thompson. All pleaded ‘not guilty’ to charges of treason.
But the government’s judicial retribution on the rebels had an ill-starred beginning. After the prisoners were called into the dock, there was, according to Sir George Lane, ‘an unlucky accident which frightened the whole court in so much that the judges were disturbed and even ready to rise’.
Private John Fellows, one of the soldiers standing guard, was ‘discomposed’ by the large, noisy crowd thronging the courtroom, and accidentally fired his musket, the bullet killing another soldier nearby. Immediately, everyone assumed that an audacious rescue of the prisoners was under way – a belief shared by the men in the dock,
especially Mr Leckie who smiled very pleasantly when he saw the disorder but when he saw there was no redemption, he quickly changed his leering countenance.60
When order was finally restored, the trial was resumed. Leckie, in a loud, rambling outburst from the dock, claimed the devil had possessed him and went ‘stark mad, blaspheming God and affecting to be Christ’, reported Vernon. Because of his sudden insanity, his case was deferred.
Other conspirators would face trial in the new law term. Those found guilty ‘will die penitent Christians, desiring that their brethren, the Presbyterians, may be carefully watched, for there is a thorough engagement amongst them both in England and Ireland and Scotland and this [they confessed] without desire of their lives but by way of repentance, being worked to it by Dr Parry and others [of Ormond’s] chaplains, from whom they received the Sacrament this day’, according to Vernon.61
On 22 June, the lawyer Darcy had written to Ormond, enclosing twenty-nine names of the members of the grand juries of the county and city of Dublin who had been sworn in to try the conspirators. He was less than sanguine about the outcome of their judicial deliberations: ‘I know so few of them that I cannot tell what to say unto them but I fear that . . . not many of them are fit for the business now to be agitated’.62 Darcy also passed on some disquieting gossip:
This morning . . . Sir John Ponsonby said openly in the presence of his old gang that in this trial of the prisoners they [the government] would find themselves deceived . . .
Ponsonby and others pretending to [know the] law [maintain that] the conspiracies and declarations without [being] done is no treason.63
The lawyer urged the lord lieutenant to follow three simple courses of action to avoid disaster in prosecuting the would-be insurgents. Firstly, he should choose ‘old Protestants’ as jurymen; secondly, he should act with speed; and finally, the words of the indictments should be selected carefully or ‘the king and your grace may be the sufferers when it may be too late to call the fact treason’. He concluded: ‘The God of heaven preserve the king and his interests.’64
Leckie, Warren, Thompson and jephson appeared again in court on 1 July and the indictment was read out to Leckie. Vernon, who must have attended the hearing, reported that the jury were all ‘able discreet persons of good estates’ with Sir John Percival acting as foreman. Sir William Domville, attorney general, and Sir John Temple, solicitor general for Ireland, in two eloquent speeches
showed the practices in all ages both by the Mosaical law,65 the Saxon, Norman and our more modern laws, how conspirators against princes were most severely punished.
About six witnesses were then called, Col. Scott, Capt. Sanford and persons engaged with them to prove the [scope] of the design, both in Ireland, England and Scotland . . .
How they intended to march through Scotland with this English army whom they thought their own; that 20,000 Scots in the north of Ireland would keep the Irish employed whilst the English invaded England with what party they could raise in Scotland . . .
That it was a covenant design and driven on by the pretended clergy of that gang, many of which met in periwigs the day before the design to ask a blessing on it.
Domvile also called eight witnesses against Leckie ‘who all proved the charge against him’.
Then there was another sensation in court. ‘A most handsome woman . . . with very great soberness and more prudence than usual in that sex’ swore that she was with Leckie’s wife (who had just given birth at her home near Dunboyne), when the troopers arrived to arrest her husband.
Mrs Leckie expressed great fear that the attack on Dublin castle had been discovered but afterwards she was much cheered with a belief that though her husband was taken and condemned, yet his pardon would be obtained by two persons [who] were bold and so much concerned for him that they would not be denied.
These mystery men of power and influence were named in court as Sir Audley Mervin, speaker of the Irish House of Commons (and Ormond’s bête noire) and John Clotworthy, First Viscount Massereene, custos rotulorum of Co. Londonderry and a prominent and vocal champion of Irish Presbyterians. In the event, while official suspicion over their loyalties remained, no action was taken against them.
Leckie, in his defence, would ‘not admit the truth of the whole of the charge but put himself upon the law and was not free to say or answer more’. The previous night he had suffered another apparent bout of madness, but at the bar ‘his Presbyterian spirit was very calm and he said little’.
The jury promptly found him guilty.66
Despite his earlier grave doubts about the outcome of the trial, the ‘learned counsel’ Patrick Darcy was delighted by its progress. He told Ormond on 3 July that never in his life had he ‘met with better management by lawyers of a matter [of procedure] than that shown by Sir William Domville against Lackes [Leckie]. Nor was ever evidence better managed by all the King’s Counsel.’67
A week later, Warren, Jephson and Thompson were brought back to court for sentence. Baron Santry, the increasingly infirm chief justice, employed striking biblical references and language to leave them in no doubt as to the heinousness of their crimes and promised death and damnation for all rebels. Sternly, he condemned them to suffer the terrible fate of all traitors: death by hanging, drawing and quartering.68
Such executions turned the scaffold into a veritable butcher’s block of gore and suffering. The victim was initially hanged by the neck but cut down from the gallows while still alive. He then was castrated and his vital organs ripped out and burnt before his eyes. Finally the corpse was beheaded and hacked into quarters, and the body parts displayed in public spaces as a dreadful deterrent to those who rashly contemplated conspiracy against their king.
Robert Leigh, Will
iamson’s agent in Dublin, told him: ‘Leckie, having turned mad within two days (or feigned himself so) was brought to the bar but escaped sentence – the law being not able to take hold of a madman and so was carried across in a cart back to his prison. Some people pity their cases here, but not I.’69
Sir George Lane noted that Leckie was ‘stark mad and is therefore reprieved, though if he should recover his wits, [there would be a delay] until the next [law] term because till then death cannot be pronounced upon him’. He had arranged that reports of the trial proceedings should ‘be collected carefully for the press, so that the world may see the horridness of this wicked plot’. Copies would be printed and sent for distribution in England.70
Leckie had meanwhile reportedly tried to cheat the executioner ‘by knocking out his own brains in prison’ but had survived this apparent suicide attempt.71
One of those condemned, Thompson, deputy provost-marshal for Leinster,72 wrote ‘a declaration’ from his Dublin Castle cell on 5 July about his ‘unhappy role in the late plot’, naming Blood as the man who drew him into the failed conspiracy:
First, that Thomas Blood late of Sarney . . . was the first person that I ever heard make mention of the plot.
He assured me that their aim was to surprise the castle and city of Dublin for the accomplishment of which . . . he had many friends both in the city and in the regiment and particularly two sergeants in the regiment whose names he would never tell me though I oft pressed him and also that he expected seven hundred men out of the north from among the Scots before the appointed day of surprise to assist them in the act . . .
Second, he mentioned no less than 30,000 Scots (if occasion offered itself) who were ready to prosecute the design or to draw into the field the particular persons he would never name whom he corresponded with [except] only one, Mr Hart, a Scotch minister, as I take it, of the north . . .
Third, when I urged (that in case the designs failed) to know what sanctuary we might have to secure ourselves in, he assured me that Drogheda was made fit to receive [us] by which means I could never tell but I apprehended his way still was to [win over] some inferior officers and the common soldier and upon these hopes I conceive he [would] remove his family into Drogheda.
Thompson had overheard conversations between Blood and others about the city of Derry and the ‘general disquiet of the army’ which they hoped to exploit. Blood had also talked about an old conspiracy to rescue the leading Scottish covenanter Archibald Campbell, First Marquis of Argyll, who had been accused of treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1660. A plan to liberate him, also involving Gibby Carr, was abandoned after he told them he was an ‘infirm man and ancient, therefore they should desist until a more seasonable time – or that they should await God’s pleasure’.73
In his covering letter to the confession, Thompson asked Ormond to be ‘pleased graciously to accept these last words of a dying man which not the fear of death but a sense of duty forces the writer to present to your grace’. He stressed:
I call God to witness that I was no contriver but drawn by Mr Blood into these plots for which great sin I beg pardon from God, the king and your grace and all good people.
And give me leave to make this last protestation that if your grace shall please to employ me as a witness to [help] find the contrivers and depths of this design I shall use the utmost of my endeavours.
This I beg of your grace, not as a design . . . for fear of death but to make some satisfaction for my past crimes.74
Despite his contrition and anxiety to make amends, it was inevitable that Thompson would still die for treason, but because of his confession, his sentence was commuted to simple hanging.75
What of the fugitive conspirators who, despite every effort, still eluded capture?
The ‘minister’ Andrew McCormack had managed to escape to Scotland before the round-up of Presbyterian clergy. Colonel ‘Gibby’ Carr had been reported in Scotland and then, rather embarrassingly, was said to have been living in Rotterdam in Holland, according to an official certificate signed by the city’s borough masters and governors, provided by Jacob Vortius.76 A few weeks later, Bennet told Ormond that Carr’s wife, who was then living in London, had ‘produced testimony from magistrates in Rotterdam that he had been constantly seen there these six months’. He added, a trifle cynically: ‘Perhaps ’tis a bought testimonial only.’ Ormond commented later that if these statements were ‘authentic, let me say they are here [regarded as being] much in the wrong’. There were some in Dublin who would ‘swear they saw him in the north about the 23rd of May, two days after the plot was to have been executed’. He concluded more in hope than expectation: ‘He should come here where he will be heard if he has a fair defence.’ One can detect frustration and asperity in this response, but the lord lieutenant’s black mood may have been affected by his painful gout and ‘an extraordinary indisposition of the spleen’.77
Bennet had more bad news in the same letter: despite the most meticulous of inquiries, no trace of Charnock had been found in London.78
And what of Thomas Blood? Although the spymaster Vernon believed him beyond reach in Scotland, he apparently remained stoically in Dublin for three days while the arrests and searches continued around him. Probably believing the city was becoming too hot to hold him, Blood headed north, using the alias Thomas Pilsen, to seek shelter with his Presbyterian cronies. James Milligan was later arrested and questioned over his concealment of the fugitive79 and was described as ‘Blood’s only guide and protector in Co. Antrim’. He had hidden him at his mother’s home in Antrim while she was away and had been dispatched by Blood with a message for his wife who had moved to Drogheda and was living ‘in a house beyond the bridge next [to a tavern] of the King’s Arms’.80
There were fears that Blood was planning to assassinate Ormond and the lord lieutenant was warned ‘to have about his person a sufficient guard’.81
He had a number of narrow escapes while on the run from the government manhunt. His later notes of the times when God had provided him with deliverance mention an incident at Loughbrick-land, a small village south of Banbridge in Co. Down, near the main Dublin-Belfast road, and another ‘in the wood’, unfortunately with no more information as to what happened or the precise location. He also eluded arrest after being betrayed ‘by false brethren’.82
Blood hid in the hills and mountains in the north of Ireland, sometimes in the unlikely guise of a Catholic priest. At one stage he even sheltered with a group of ‘papists’. Using other aliases and disguises, he headed for the wastes of Co. Wicklow, where he was sheltered in the home of a minister called Cox. There, he corresponded with a fellow fugitive, the Dublin brewer, John Chamberlin, probably early that August. Blood tried hard to keep faith with his dreams of rebellion, believing that ‘most of our friends are safe, as I understand by the [list of] prisoners’ names . . . [and] that many were taken up that were not concerned [in the plot]’. Therefore, he had ‘hopes yet to advance that broken interest’ by trying to recruit supporters for a fresh insurrection amongst former parliamentary cavalry troopers in the area.
I have no confidence in the Scots . . . they stick so to the king’s interests, though I have laboured with some of them of a small sort to come along with me.
I can prevail little yet I doubt not to pick up some.83
An additional slip of paper attached to this letter contained instructions for the bearer, listing friends who could provide assistance and information.84
Daringly, and not without a touch of arrogance, Blood then returned to Dublin to visit his wife and children, who had gone back to the city. Even though their lodgings must have been watched, he spent a ‘night and part of a day’ with them, before departing brazenly ‘at the gates at noonday and through the streets’.85
Meanwhile, those who had played key roles in foiling the conspiracy were contemplating their rewards for their services to the crown. On 14 July, Ormond wrote to Charles II recommending Vernon, ‘w
ho was mainly instrumental in discovering the late plot. He has on all occasions served the king well.’86 Vernon left Dublin en route to London the next day – almost certainly with the spy Philip Alden in tow, who doubtless had spent the three weeks in a Dublin safe house. If the lord lieutenant had been disingenuously unaware of the true nature of the informer’s escape, he now knew the full extent of Vernon’s plans, as he wrote to the lord chancellor in London:
Col. Vernon will bring a friend of his and of the writer to see the chancellor. He is the man by whose honesty and industry, notice was given of the late [traitorous] design . . . He cannot appear here and be any longer useful in that way. But ’tis hoped that he may be useful in England.87
The day of Vernon’s departure also marked the executions of Warren, Jephson and Thompson at Gallows Green, situated where today’s Lower Baggot and Fitzwilliam streets intersect in Dublin. Sir George Lane, the Irish Secretary, was very sparing in detail in his businesslike account of their deaths sent to Bennet:
The speeches of Warren, Thompson and Jephson will show you that they are executed.
The first died like a Christian. The other two had made the world believe, before they came to the place of execution, that they would do their duty by confessing their guilt and exhorting the people to loyalty, obedience and the renunciation of popery.
But this was clearly only a feint in expectation of pardon, for their speeches, which they had penned beforehand, declared their seditious thoughts.88
Perhaps it was a politician’s reluctance to be the bearer of bad news, or just plain bureaucratic reticence, but Sir George’s report lacks much of the drama and pace of what really occurred that summer morning on the scaffold.
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 6