Through this crazy world of violent religious fervour strode Thomas Blood, whose assorted allies constantly crossed the nonconformist religious divides. Standing four-square in the way of his political and personal aims and objectives were the establishment figures of Ormond in Ireland and the two secretaries of state and spymasters, Bennet and Williamson.
Like Walsingham before him, Williamson sought to manipulate public opinion by the use of information, or propaganda, to promote the government’s standing through the medium of newsletters and the London Gazette, its official journal, ‘published by authority’ and sent by post to subscribers up and down the country.28 Regular news from up to fifty sources in the British Isles, notably customs officers, governors of garrisons and postmasters, filled its columns and short precis of dispatches from English embassies overseas yielded intriguing snippets of foreign news.
In 1668, Lorenzo Magalotti, an Italian philosopher, author and later a diplomat, met Williamson during a hectic week-long trip to Windsor, Hampton Court and Oxford. He described him as ‘a tall man, of very good appearance, clever, diligent, courteous and . . . very inquisitive in getting information’.29 Samuel Pepys first met him in February 1663 at the dinner table of the well-heeled Thomas Povey. He was not impressed: Williamson, he confided to his diary, was ‘a pretty knowing man and a scholar but it may be [he] thinks himself to be too much’.30 Three years later, Pepys had changed his opinion dramatically, declaiming enthusiastically: ‘Mr Williamson, who the more I know, the more I honour’.31
However, that other great Restoration diarist, John Evelyn, sneered at Williamson’s rapid promotion up through the tiers of government and his burgeoning influence at court. In July 1674, Evelyn was at Windsor and wrote that Sir Henry Bennet had let Williamson ‘into the secret of affairs, so that there was a kind of necessity to advance him and so by his subtlety, dexterity and insinuation he got now to be principal secretary, absolutely [Bennet’s] creature – and ungrateful enough’.32 Like so many others in Tudor and Stuart public service, Williamson, knighted in 1672, managed cunningly to exploit every available opportunity to create wealth for himself: in 1668, he was said to be worth £40,000 a year in ready cash, or nearly £6 million at today’s values.33 God, Williamson pointed out piously, was the ‘real author of every good and perfect gift’.34
The senior secretary of state, Henry Bennet, was a son of the landowner Sir John Bennet who owned property in Harlington, Middlesex. He was another Oxford man, going up to Christ Church, and he had fought in the Civil War, suffering an honourable scar across the bridge of his nose during a brutal skirmish at Andover on 18 October 1644, when the king’s vanguard drove William Waller’s parliamentary troops helter-skelter out of the Hampshire market town. Bennet joined the exiled royal court at St Germain, near Paris, three years later and was knighted in 1657. Fluent in Latin, Spanish and French, on 15 October 1662 he became secretary of state, despite the opposition of his many enemies at court such as Lord Chancellor Clarendon and Buckingham, who became ever more jealous of the influence Bennet, with his Catholic sympathies, wielded so dexterously with the king. For his faithful services, he was created First Earl of Arlington on 14 March 1665.35
As far as intelligence-gathering was concerned, Bennet was ultimately responsible for all espionage and surveillance activity, but it was Williamson who ran the agents and other operations on a day-to-day basis.
According to Clarendon, in the early 1660s, Charles II had grown so weary of the incessant rumours of potential uprisings, ‘that he had even resolved to give no more countenance to any such information, nor to trouble himself with inquiry into them’.36 A case, perhaps, of ‘wolf’ being cried too many times by his spymasters. But growing evidence of a potential insurrection in the north of England captured even the king’s jaded attention.
When the would-be rebels met in Durham in early March 1663, they took a ‘sacramental engagement or vow, not only of secrecy but also to destroy without mercy all those who [would] oppose [them]’ especially Albemarle and Buckingham. Agents were sent to Dublin, to London (where a council of radicals had been set up) and to the west of England to synchronise the timings of rebellion. They drew up a manifesto, bursting with righteous indignation, containing a veritable litany of the terrible evils they saw about them – blasphemy, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, the all-pervasive papists, the Anglican Church’s worship of idols, unemployment and unfair taxes (ironically, including that on chimneys). The green and pleasant realm of England had now become a vivid reincarnation of biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. To eradicate such widespread sinfulness, they were ready to risk their lives ‘for the reviving of the good old cause’ – as it was better ‘to die like men than live worse than slaves’.37
Local officials knew full well that 12 October had been set as the date for the rebels to make their move and two days earlier, in a carefully orchestrated operation, the ‘principal officers and agitators’ were arrested across north-east England while the militia mobilised near Pontefract in Yorkshire, reinforced by 1,000 men from Buckingham’s own regiment. Apart from a few minor acts of violence, the rebellion was surgically cut out before it could even spring into life.38 Most of its leaders were captured, such as Captain John Mason, detained while hiding in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, but who later managed to escape from Clifford’s Tower in York in July 1664 with three other men involved in the abortive uprising.39 Others remained dangerously at large, like John Atkinson, a former soldier turned stocking-weaver, who, having stained his face, masqueraded as a labourer in Co. Durham.
Durham-born William Leving was among the conspirators arrested and thrown into York Castle. Together with his father, he was to raise his native city under Captain Roger Jones, alias ‘Mene Tekel’.40 Leving had been a junior officer in Sir Arthur Heselrige’s Parliamentarian regiment and served with him when he was governor of Newcastle. Leving supported the vain and ambitious General John Lambert41 over his failed attempts to resist the House of Commons’ control of the New Model Army in 1659. As a consequence, Leving forfeited both his commission and the back-pay owed him.42 Such ill-luck, or more pertinently, his frequent bad judgement, was to dog him in his future career as a government spy.
Sir Thomas Gower, governor of York, whose own all-pervasive spy network in north-east England had been a major factor in the suppression of the insurrection, claimed to have two witnesses ready to testify against Leving, with incontestable evidence that would hang him. But Sir Roger Langley, high sheriff of Yorkshire, believed his prisoner would be of more value to Charles II’s government alive and well, serving as an informer, than as a rotting corpse hanging from a gibbet as a deterrent to would-be rebels. He suggested to Bennet:
If a way could be found to get Mr Leving out of the jail so that he would not be suspected by his own party, he might be of great use, for he assures me he would not question to let you know some of the names of some of the [rebel] council now in London.43
Langley gave him £10 as pocket money and dispatched him to London in May 1664, where he spent some time in the Tower. From there he wrote enthusiastically to the secretary of state, boasting that, in return for his freedom, he could ‘give an account of every plot that may be hatched between London and the [River] Tweed’ on the Scottish borders. To cloak his espionage activities, he suggested that his escape should be faked and he could then ‘shift as a banished man’.44 To outwardly confirm his undying loyalty to the cause of rebellion, he still corresponded with his fellow conspirators, pledging he would happily accept any suffering before betraying them.45
His ‘escape’ being successfully contrived sometime in July 1664, Leving was soon about his business. Employing the alias ‘Leonard Williams’, he quickly infiltrated the radical Presbyterian council in the capital, which was busy planning an attack on the king and court at Whitehall Palace, as well as seizing the Tower of London. Blood was named as one of the leading lights in this audacious conspiracy.
The adventurer had left Irelan
d, probably in the last three months of 1663, and arranged a clandestine meeting with his mother-in-law Margaret Holcroft in Lancashire, when he was almost captured. After travelling about the north of England with Williamson’s agents hard on his heels, Blood fled to Holland at the beginning of 1664, where he was befriended by the Dutch admiral and naval hero Michiel de Rutyer, who was ‘pleased to admit [him] into his society and honoured with an entertainment answerable to that respect and affection which he bore the nation of England’.46
Sometime around March 1664, Blood returned to London and ‘fell in with the Fifth Monarchy men, resolving to venture all in . . . their interest’ as he found them ‘to be a bold and daring sort of people like himself and their principles so suiting with his discontents’. Tellingly, Blood judged them ‘very proper for his management’ as his maxim was always ‘never to put his confidence in any that were not engaged either by principle or interest to his designs’.47 The fanatical Fifth Monarchists matched that requirement precisely.
On 12 September 1664, Bennet’s intelligence service produced a list of thirteen persons ‘now in London who go about in disguise and under other names’. Among those listed are John Atkinson (alias Peter Johnson) and Captain Lockyer (alias Rogers) and a Mr Allen. Above this last name is written, in the same hand but in a different ink: ‘His name is Blood’. Williamson added a note at the end of the list: ‘The chief meeting house is at a widow’s in Petty France and my informer [says] they have got money for the imagining of a design which they intend to set in London and to that end are [planning] how they may become masters of the Tower.’48
This threat was taken seriously by the state. The same day, orders were issued for the repair of the Tower of London and for stretching chains across its access from the city – ‘the key to be kept by the Master of Ordnance’. The public were also prohibited from the Thames wharf alongside the fortress.49
In December 1664, there were unconfirmed reports that Blood and his two fellow conspirators in the Dublin Castle plot, the Presbyterian minister Andrew McCormack and Colonel Gibby Carr, had slipped into the north of Ireland, landing in the vicinity of Rostrevor in Co. Down. It was also rumoured that 300 muskets had been shipped in from Scotland for use by rebel forces. Despite strenuous searches, no traces of the fugitives could be found.50
A list of the following year, written on one sheet of paper, has the ‘names of various persons suspected to be in and about the City of London this 22 May’. ‘Blood alias Allen’ is included in a list of seven men who met at the Swan near Coleman Street and sometimes at the home of ‘Robert Melborne, a silk thrower in Shoreditch’. Of these plotters, Timothy Butler and Christopher Dawson were the ‘persons entrusted to buy arms’.51
Leving’s regular reports began in 1665, having received payments of £20 each for himself and a fellow informer, John Betson, for spying services rendered to Bennet. The spy complained about the miserliness of his pay: ‘The money is insufficient. I have run great hazards and spent much money in the cause. A good reward would encourage Mr Betson and tend much to the king’s service’, he told Bennet.52 Soon after, he repeated his pleas for more generous remuneration ‘having caused the taking of sixteen at once, some more considerable than [John] Atkinson’,53 who had fled to London from Yorkshire after the collapse of the northern rebellion the year before.
Atkinson was detained and questioned in the Tower. He admitted his acquaintance with Blood, Lockyer and other conspirators, as well as having been ‘engaged by the [Ana]baptists of desperate fortune’. But he had ‘wearied of their selfish designs and looked for an opportunity to [unmask] them’. He disclosed the addresses of some of the plotters – but warned that if any were arrested, the others would flee immediately and would be difficult to hunt down.
Leving also reported on his progress to his erstwhile mentor, Sir Roger Langley in York:
In March 1663, Atkinson was active in the design and got a [rebel] council together – namely Blood, Lockyer, Captain Wise, [Captain Roger] Jones, Carew54 and Major Lee. They mean to take houses near the Tower and Whitehall, gather arms, and destroy the king, [the] Dukes of York and Albemarle and lord chancellor [Clarendon]. Atkinson knows where most of these persons lodge and will tell anything else wanted [if] pinched . . . to a confession.55
Blood’s first biographer, Richard Halliwell, describes the work of this secret committee ‘of which Mr Blood was head’. To ensure their security, they were protected by ‘a Court of Guard, seldom less than thirty [men] a day’ while they met at the Widow Hogden’s house in Petty France, Westminster.56
At this committee all orders were given out, all manner of intelligence brought, examined and all things sifted and debated in reference to their grand design.
Then Blood began to suspect that two of his fellow conspirators had become traitors to the cause. Either ‘out of remorse or [in] hopes of reward, [they] had begun to make some discovery of this project at court.
He appointed to meet the two persons at a certain tavern in the city, who were no sooner come according to their summons, but he took them both prisoners and from thence carried them to a certain place of darkness, which they had found out and hired for their convenience.57
This ‘place of darkness’ was probably a room or cellar in a tavern in Coleman Street, a notorious ‘hotspot’ of dissent and sedition in the seventeenth century, or its side street, Swan Lane.58 Harking back to his own career in the military, Blood ‘very formally’ called together a court martial of his own ‘and tried the two men for their lives’. They were found guilty and sentenced to be shot dead by an impromptu firing squad within forty-eight hours.
When the time for execution came, they were both brought to the stake and being without any other hopes, were forced to prepare for death.
Then, at the very point of despair, Mr Blood was so kind as to produce them a pardon and so releasing them and giving them their freedom, bid them go to their master and tell them what they had done . . . and that they should ask him to be as favourable to his soldiers [plotters] when they fell under his mercy.59
It is very plausible that one of these two men was William Leving. His description of undergoing a similar ordeal at the hands of the conspirators, and Blood’s biographer’s account of his own kangaroo court, chime remarkably.
Leving’s narrative begins one cold Sunday evening in February 1665,60 when he was asked by two friends to attend a secret meeting. They escorted him through ‘many turnings into an obscure place’ where he was suddenly confronted by a group of men who, threatening him with pistols and swords, angrily accused him of being a spy. Leving, of course, denied this vehemently but was held a close prisoner for two days, always demanding to know the identity of his accuser. He later learned it was Henry North, a fellow government informer, and an ‘intelligencer’ in the pay of Buckingham. As far as the conspirators were concerned, Leving was guilty of rank treachery and betrayal, but curiously they decided not to kill him. Instead, he was simply released, with his solemn promise not to meet Bennet or any of his agents.61
At the end of March 1665, Leving sought to return to his home city of Durham to induce his friends to confess to involvement in the abortive rebellion and accordingly requested Bennet, now Earl of Arlington, to provide him with ‘protection under the king’s hand and seal’. The result was not nearly as grand as Leving had hoped: he was given a single sheet of paper, on which was written his ‘certificate of employment’, to be waved under the noses of sheriffs and magistrates if he faced arrest or imprisonment:
This is to certify [to] all whom it shall concern that the bearer hereof William Leving is employed by me and consequently [is] not to be molested or restrained upon any search or inquiry whatsoever.
Henry Bennet62
This document proved useful that May when Leving was arrested in Leicestershire but was released after proving his identity and credentials as a servant of the crown.
Despite his anxious protestations, Leving was ordered to remain in
London that hot summer, all through the height of the epidemic of bubonic plague that killed 100,000 (or 20 per cent) of the capital’s population. To forestall the risk of infection, the royal court fled first to Hampton Court in July, then moved on to Salisbury in Wiltshire and finally ended up in Oxford in September, accompanied by Parliament and the high courts of justice. Back in London, victims were locked in their houses and their doors daubed with the words ‘Lord have mercy’ as a warning to others not to enter. Between one and three of the occupants died in most infected homes. Grass grew in the streets, and because domestic animals were believed to pass on the ‘Great Plague’, special ‘dog killers’ were employed, slaughtering 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats. Leving lost most of his family to the disease, which in reality was spread by fleas living on the city’s prodigious population of black rats.63 Blood survived the plague, which he confidently saw as a sure and certain sign that God smiled on his involvement in sedition and rebellion aimed at transforming this ungodly nation.64
At the end of October 1665, the Presbyterian factions held a clandestine conference at the Liverpool home of Captain Brown, the former Cromwellian governor of the city,65 to plan new insurrections in England, Scotland and Ireland. Orrery, in Dublin, soon learned details of their deliberations from his ‘fanatic intelligencer’, who sent him news of ‘the transactions of that wild people’. The Irish contingent was represented by Blood and his fellow Dublin Castle plotter, Lieutenant Colonel William Moore. The third member of this delegation was our old friend Philip Alden, still working undercover as an effective government informer.
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 8