The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood

by Robert Hutchinson

  Happily, Robert Leigh, Williamson’s shrewd agent in Dublin, was also an eyewitness to events and his vivid narrative provides us with a glimpse of the horror and pandemonium that followed the arrival of the prisoners at the place of execution, after being bumped and battered as they were dragged along the cobbled streets from Dublin Castle, tied on to three sledges or sheep hurdles.

  The renegade MP Alexander Jephson was the first to die. Standing on the scaffold, bizarrely still wearing his hat, he made a ‘large speech’, counselling the crowd around him to avoid sin at all costs. He acknowledged his own crime of concealing treason but said that his death was caused by ‘none but the vile Papists’.89 The condemned man then meekly handed his hat to the hangman who

  immediately turned the ladder and with it Jephson, who held fast by the same to save his life as long as he might, but that would not do.

  With Jephson still hanging from the gibbet, there was sudden commotion, described by Leigh as a ‘hot alarm’.

  Everyone betook themselves to several defences, most part that had arms, besides the guard to their [weapons], and those who had none to their heels, who, tumbling over one another as they ran (and some on horseback amongst them) did some mischief, [such] as breaking legs and arms and some children killed.

  Panic and fear spread through the Dublin streets – ‘all began to shut up their shops and a great many to betake themselves to the castle’ for safety. A company of infantry was sent to reinforce the sheriff’s halberdiers who were guarding the prisoners.

  Thompson and Warren who stood by the gallows foot, only pinioned by the arms, began to pluck up good heart, but the sheriff holding Thompson by the one hand and his sword in the other, did let neither stir.

  Eventually, order was restored and Warren was pushed towards the gibbet ladder. He made ‘a tedious troublesome discourse’ to play for time, ‘and looking several ways about him, as we supposed, for help’. Warren spoke of his ‘just and righteous cause which now lies in the dust [but which] someday would terrify the greatest monarch’.90

  Tired of this diatribe, the sheriff interrupted him and Warren asked angrily ‘why a dying man should not have the liberty to speak his conscience?’ Unnerved by the earlier alarm and fearing an impending rescue attempt, the sheriff had become jumpy and hustled Warren up the ladder ‘so that in some discontent and much against his stomach, he was turned over, though he held as fast as he could by the ladder and then by the rope that Jephson hung by’.

  It was then Thompson’s turn to be executed. Leigh reported: ‘He made a modest speech, acknowledging his crime, saying he was drawn in by one Blood, who made his escape and, having declared himself for the Church of England and prayed for the king, he cast himself off resolutely. There I left all three, wishing all the rest of their fellow plotters were with them.’

  What triggered the panic? Some claimed afterwards that a pair of coach horses had escaped and run amok in the crowd. Others believed firmly ‘it was done maliciously with [the] intention to rescue the prisoners’.91 Was Blood’s reputation, as a man of action who would risk all to liberate his friends even at the eleventh hour, the catalyst for the Dublin crowd’s terror? Or was there a real attempt to snatch the prisoners off the scaffold, which came to naught?

  Warren’s widow Elizabeth later appealed for financial assistance, placing the blame for her husband’s fate squarely on Blood’s shoulders. At a ‘time of great sickness [he] was wrought upon by the pestilential insinuation of one Blood to join with him in his plot against the castle of Dublin’. She pleaded for what was left of his forfeited estate to be remitted to her and her seven children.92

  Leckie remained in Dublin’s Newgate prison, no doubt still ranting and raving, for many months. At about six o’clock on the evening of 14 November he escaped.

  It was an enterprising rescue. Leckie apparently exchanged clothes with his wife in order to fool the guards as he broke prison. He was assisted by two men, also disguised as women, who had filed through the bolts holding fast his cell door. Sir George Lane, unusually voluble, described the aftermath:

  [They] conveyed him to Little Thomas Court and lodged him over the gate of the court in the hollow of the wall.

  On Sunday, a gentleman living near that place, [sent] his servant into the city [and on his] return, discovered Leckie in woman’s attire endeavouring to [get off] the wall and he, seeing the servant, desired him to procure a ladder to help him down.

  The servant told his master in Little Thomas Court about what had happened and, looking out of the window, saw Leckie on the wall. They ran out and overtook him as he was walking towards a clothier’s shop.

  On being asked who he was, Leckie confessed his name and escape . . . and was brought to Little Thomas Court and kept there until he was returned to Newgate.

  On 18 November, the Scottish minister was back at the bar of the Court of King’s Bench. The judge, Sir William Ashton, told him:

  What a remarkable work of God it was that he, who before had feigned madness on purpose to elude the sentence of the law, had, by his own act [of] escaping out of prison discovered himself and demanded what he had to say why judgment should not pass against him, according to law.

  He said he only escaped because of the miseries and hardships of prison and thanked God he was in a better condition to answer for himself than when he was last in that place.

  As he offered nothing material, sentence was pronounced upon him.93

  Leckie was brought out for execution on 12 December. Rumours swept through the 2,000-strong crowd that his brother-in-law, Blood, was on his way to rescue him and the news led to a repeat of the panic that had thrown the earlier executions into chaos. This time, even the executioner briefly fled, leaving Leckie standing forlornly on the scaffold, with the halter round his neck.

  But there was no sudden liberation.

  When order was eventually re-established, he was quickly kicked off the gallows ladder.94

  When the Irish Parliament at last met again in October 1665, eight MPs were named as conspirators: Alexander Staples (Strabane); Abel Warren (Kilkenny town); Thomas Scott (Co. Wexford); two members for Ardee, John Roxton and John Chambers; Thomas Boyd (Bangor); Robert Shapcott (Wicklow); and the executed Alexander Jephson (Trim). Those still living were expelled and disqualified from any public office, civil or military.95

  Staples, who claimed to have warned about the plot, was eventually pardoned, despite the king’s initial refusal, saying that troublesome Ireland had ‘more need of examples of justice than mercy’.96 Shapcott also received a pardon in 1666.

  Blood and the others remained hunted men, forever on the run.

  3

  A Taste for Conspiracy

  The fanatics of Ireland were represented by Lieutenant Colonel William Moore . . . and one Mr Blood and Mr Alden, two notorious villains of this country.

  The Earl of Orrery to Secretary Arlington 8 November 1665.1

  Charles II’s remarkably efficient intelligence operations were created by just one man: Sir Joseph Williamson, the second surviving son of an impecunious Cumberland vicar, a fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford and the former keeper of the king’s library in the Palace of Whitehall in Westminster. This colossal power, focused in the hands of one man, mirrored the extensive overseas and domestic spy networks established a century before by Sir Francis Walsingham, Williamson’s doughty Elizabethan predecessor, to defend the last Tudor monarch from Catholic intrigue and her Protestant realm from Spanish invasion.2

  We all learned at school (those that still teach traditional English history) that the reign of that ‘Merry Monarch’ Charles II swept away the bleak, joyless edicts of Oliver Cromwell’s republican regime and returned a broad smile to the face of drab old England. Elements of popular culture such as bawdy and licentious drama, the ‘filthy exercise’ of maypole dancing – even the ungodly Christmas mince pie3 – had fallen victim to dour Puritanical proscription, but these were happily now revived to gladden the heart
s of Charles’s subjects.

  Reality was somewhat different. Life was not always quite so merry. Behind that gorgeous and glittering façade of a new-found, confident monarchy, the Restoration government was confronted in the 1660s with a seemingly endless wave of dangerous uprisings and plots that endangered both king and realm, not only in Ireland, but also in England and Scotland. In truth, these were hazardous times. The risk of assassination, by bullet, bomb or silent crossbow bolt, never seemed far away for Charles, his brother James, Duke of York,4 or George Monck, First Duke of Albermarle, the major player in restoring Charles II to the throne.

  Williamson, created one of the two secretaries of state in 1662, alongside Henry Bennet, frankly acknowledged the perils:

  I find a spirit of malice has everywhere insinuated fears and jealousies into the people, which it must be the care of prudent men to exercise and cast out, ’ere it possess them too far.5

  Desperate times require desperate measures. The state monopoly of a General Post Office was set up in 16606 and this nationwide mail-delivery system became the main weapon of Stuart counter-espionage through the regular interception, reading or copying of private citizens’ letters at its headquarters in Cloak Lane (near Dowgate Hill, in the City of London), under Thomas Witherings, who enjoyed the splendid title of ‘postmaster of England’.7

  An example of Williamson’s covert postal intelligence operations (while pursuing an increasingly cold trail left by Thomas Blood) were his instructions issued in August 1666 to intercept ‘all letters coming from Ireland, addressed to John Knipe [of] Aldersgate Street (London) or going to Ireland, addressed to Daniel Egerton of Cock [Cook] Street, Dublin’.8 He hoped this correspondence would indicate the movements, or plans, of those under suspicion for plotting crimes against the state.

  Of course, many letters written by conspirators (or, for that matter, government informers) would not be in plain text – the risk of such vital information falling into the wrong hands was just too great. Ciphers were often employed, based on a simple principle of letter or symbol substitution. Without a key for decoding, encrypted letters appeared to be mysterious gibberish to the reader.

  In the late seventeenth century, these codes were far less sophisticated than today’s complex encryption methodologies. And they had one major failing. Whatever letter, number or symbol is substituted, its original frequency of use is retained in the enciphered message. Thus, by analysing the incidence of the letters on the page, it was possible to establish which consonant or vowel each substituted letter represented. The greatest vulnerability of such codes therefore is the frequency in which vowels occur in words – for example, ‘e’ accounts for 13 per cent of all letters used in any kind of prose, whereas ‘z’ is used less than 1 per cent of the time. Once the letters or symbols for vowels and commonly used letters such as ‘t’ have been isolated, the secrecy of the message becomes fatally compromised.

  For the nineteen years he ran his spy network, Williamson employed a number of code-breakers such as the Oxford mathematician Dr John Wallis9 and the German theologian and diplomat Henry Oldenburg, who translated letters in foreign languages.10 Sir Samuel Morland, another of his cipher experts, perceived his work as being of high importance and value to the crown as ‘a skilful prince ought to make a watch tower of his general post office . . . and there place such careful sentinels as that, by their care and diligence, he may have a constant view of all that passes’.11

  Morland was also a prolific and ingenious inventor12 and in 1664 the king spent three hours, accompanied by Bennet and probably Williamson, in a late-night visit to the mail interceptors’ ‘secret room’ at Cloak Hill. Fascinated, Charles watched demonstrations of various primitive mechanical machines that could open letters without trace, replicate wax seals, forge handwriting, and copy a letter (possibly by pressing dampened tissue paper against the inked handwriting) ‘in little more than a minute’.13 It was an impressive demonstration of the formidable covert surveillance capability of the king’s secret service. Years later Morland reminisced:

  With these [machines] the king was so satisfied that he immediately put [them] into practice as they were and competent salaries appointed for the same and this practice continued with good success till the fire of London consumed both the post house and all the engines and utensils belonging to the premises.

  Equally important to the Stuart government’s intelligence gathering were the informers who, as in Walsingham’s time, comprised an army of mainly social misfits, criminals and turncoats who were prepared to risk their lives supplying information about the internal enemies of the state, in return for the grant of a royal pardon for past delinquencies or simple monetary gain. Sometimes they were rewarded in kind. In May 1667, William Garret petitioned Williamson for the post of tide-waiter in the customs14 in recompense for his regular supply of useful intelligence to a previous secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas.15

  Unsurprisingly, the life expectancy of the members of this raggle-taggle corps of spies was frequently all too short. Only a handful managed to enjoy lengthy careers to match those of Joseph Bincks, who informed on religious radicals and was still operational a decade later, and William Huggett, who had served the parliamentary general Thomas Kelsey, governor of Dover Castle in Kent, in the 1650s and was still spying for Williamson twenty years afterwards.

  The penetration and reach of this ever-changing group of spies and informers was extraordinary throughout the three kingdoms, particularly so in England. No man could believe himself entirely immune from arrest for any injudicious words spoken drunkenly in a rowdy tavern, or for being seen in the company of suspected persons in the street.

  Many of these agents collected their pay and received fresh instructions during furtive visits to Williamson’s office on the ground floor of Whitehall Palace,16 or more often at a nearby safe house, rented specifically for these clandestine meetings.17 We know that one informer, William Leving (whom we shall meet shortly), made a number of such visits to ‘Mr Lee’, apparently a codename for Williamson, ‘when necessity required it’, at times varying between seven and nine o’clock in the evening, presumably therefore under cover of darkness.18

  Intelligence-gathering is always inherently expensive. In 1674, a payment of £4,000 was made to the two secretaries of state to fund their undercover operations – equivalent in today’s spending power to more than £15 million.19 The money was drawn from government income derived from the unpopular hearth or chimney tax, which was levied on the number of fireplaces in dwellings to pay for the royal household’s costs.20 These secret service funds were also employed for a multitude of other purposes, many having nothing to do with espionage, such as the £30 paid to Leonard Manning in December 1679 for his extensive tree-planting in the New Forest (then in Hampshire) and the £375 paid out in part payment for the funeral of ‘Mrs Elinor Gwynn’ at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster.21 We know her better as the actress Nell Gwynn, one of Charles II’s many mistresses and mother of his two bastard sons. She died on 14 November 1687 at her comfortable home at 79 Pall Mall in St James’s after suffering a stroke. This area of government income was evidently treated more like a handy contingency fund to hide embarrassing or inconveniently timed expenditure than a fully fledged departmental budget.

  The twilight world of domestic espionage was a crowded one. As well as agents employed by regional magnates or the governments in Ireland and Scotland, noblemen such as George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, also employed their own private ‘intelligencers’ to spy on rivals at court or gather indiscreet information useful in furthering their political ambitions.

  The duke had squandered an estate reputed to be the largest in England through his reckless extravagance and a misguided trust placed in a succession of employees who cheerfully appropriated his money. He was ruthlessly ambitious with a short-fused temper which sometimes escalated into violence, as when he came to blows with the Marquis of Dorchester and ripped off his wig during parli
amentary business in December 1667. Both peers were briefly sent to the Tower to cool their heels, if not their tempers. Buckingham’s servants unfortunately followed their master’s bad example: in August 1663 they fought a pitched battle among themselves in the courtyard of his London home when many were ‘hurt and the porter, it is thought, will not recover’.22 Nine years later his cook was executed for murdering his counterpart in George Sondes First Earl of Feversham’s household.

  Back in the murky world of espionage, Williamson’s everyday domestic adversaries were an unlikely alliance of religious nonconformists such as Presbyterians, Anabaptists and the occasional Quaker who objected to the legal imposition of liturgical rites laid down by the established Church of England. There were also many former parliamentary soldiers who fervently sought a return to a righteous, godly republic in place of the unrestrained hedonism of Charles II’s monarchy.

  The most zealous opponents, if not fanatics (to use a word frequently employed in official correspondence) were the Fifth Monarchists. They based their religious and political beliefs on the prophecy in the Bible’s Book of Daniel23 that four ancient monarchies (the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian and Roman civilisations) would precede the new kingdom of Christ. The year ‘1666’ held especial significance for them because of its resemblance to ‘666’, or the ‘Number of the Beast’, described in the Book of Revelations24 – which identified the Antichrist whose kingdom would herald the end of worldly rule by wicked mortals. When Christ appeared, as King of Kings, in His Second Coming, the Fifth Monarchists keenly anticipated becoming the new generation of saints in a thousand-year reign.

  There was nothing in their creed to gainsay a pre-emptive strike on England’s body politic to prepare for this longed-for Second Coming. As far as they were concerned, Charles II was both a despot and a traitor to King Jesus.25 Over four days from Sunday, 6 January 1661, fifty well-armed Fifth Monarchists, wearing full armour, roundly defeated musketeers sent to disarm them in the City of London. They later fought 700 troopers from the Life Guards, as well as an infantry regiment, for more than half an hour in running battles in Wood and Threadneedle streets in the heart of the city. Forty were killed in the fighting, including six Fifth Monarchists, one with the spine-chilling nickname of ‘Bare-bones’, who had barricaded themselves in the Helmet tavern in Thread-needle Street and refused any quarter.26 Their leader, the wine cooper Thomas Venner, who had been shot three times in this last, desperate stand, was hung, drawn and quartered as a traitor on 19 January 1662 at Charing Cross. Twelve of his brethren were also executed.27