The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood

by Robert Hutchinson

  On Saturday, 3 December, Charles, his queen and the Prince of Orange (who was fresh from an agreeable visit to the academic splendours of the University of Cambridge) appeared incognito ‘at the merriments usual at this time of year at The Temple [in London] where they were entertained with dances of all kinds to their very great satisfaction’.13 The following Tuesday, the prince was feasted in the Guildhall’s fifteenth-century great hall by the lord mayor, Sir Richard Ford, and the affluent Corporation of the City of London. After the banquet, William was graciously pleased to review the city’s trained bands of citizen soldiers marshalled outside in the courtyard facing Gresham Street.

  Ormond, now an infirm sixty-year-old, had been invited to the function and left the Guildhall sometime after five o’clock by coach to return westwards across the City of London to Clarendon House. Unusually, his vehicle did not have straps fitted at its back for his liveried retainers to hang on to; indeed, the duke had somewhat heartlessly fixed a large number of projecting iron spikes on the carriage to prevent them from enjoying the ride. Instead, they had to pant along behind or beside the coach on each side of the street. He normally was attended by six tall footmen carrying torches or flambeaux to light the way – some running ahead, shouting this proud warning to bystanders: ‘Make way for the Duke of Ormond!’14

  The weather was stormy, as it had been for the last fortnight.15 As Ormond’s coach wended its slow way through the crowded and filthy streets, Michael Beresford, a parson from Hopton in Suffolk, was strolling in the Piazza in Covent Garden, a large colonnaded open space situated between St Martin’s and Drury lanes which had been completed by the classical architect Inigo Jones in 1637.16 There, he told Arlington later, he recognised a man called Thomas Allen, dressed smartly and wearing a fine brown periwig on his head. Beresford had formerly known him as a footman to Sir Michael Livesey, another Puritan signatory to Charles I’s death warrant who had fled for his life to the Netherlands in 1660.17 This was indeed Thomas Blood, as usual hiding behind one of his favourite aliases.

  ‘Allen’ walked past the parson several times before he stopped, turned back and politely inquired his name. Beresford, in turn, asked him to confirm his identity and he replied: ‘Allen – and that Sir Michael Livesey was living’. Where was Allen lodging in London? He would not say but added that he ‘had been in Ireland and [was] lately come over’ and had relations on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Allen’s reticence and evasiveness troubled Beresford so much that he continued his questioning.

  What was Allen doing here? ‘Nothing at all.’

  Would Allen like to drink a pint of wine with him (probably in the nearby Shakespeare tavern)? Allen unfortunately had to refuse the kind invitation.

  ‘What was Sir Michael Livesey [doing] in town?’ Ignoring the question, Allen – ‘looking ghastly’ – blurted out: ‘There are bad designs at foot.’

  ‘What!’ exclaimed an astonished Beresford, then added: ‘We have had too many already.’ Allen responded with the cryptic comment: ‘We are all desperate.’

  As the pair walked northwards towards Long Acre in the gathering dusk, a messenger boy came up and told Allen enigmatically: ‘The horses have gone before’ and he immediately strode off without even saying a word of farewell, leaving behind a perplexed and discomforted parson standing alone in the street.18

  This surreal meeting must have ended sometime after six-thirty. The planned rendezvous for Blood’s accomplices was a large hostelry called the Bull Head tavern19 in Old Spring Gardens at Charing Cross, about fifteen minutes’ walk away from Long Acre.20 Matthew Pretty, who drew pints of ale from the tavern’s barrels, and its young potboy, William Wilson, testified afterwards that five men in cloaks, armed with swords, had earlier arrived there on horseback and had ordered drinks.

  They having drunk about six pints of wine – canary,21 sherry and white wine – two pints of each and one of them [told] the drawer to draw good wine for they were graziers.22

  Then the drawer asked if they knew Mr West, a grazier, who is dead and if they knew Mr Poultney, a grazier of Blackwall. They said, yes, they knew them.

  The drawer recalled that one of their horses was ‘a reddish dark colour with a bald face’ and its rider was a ‘tall, lean, pale-faced man with short-black hair’ who said he would not take £10 for his old bald horse yet. The potboy believed this man to ‘be a Portuguese’ and remembered him only too well as he had sometime before taken a message to his lodgings and he had not only beaten him but refused to hand over a tip. Pretty said two of the others were young; ‘about twenty-six years’ old, he estimated with curious precision.

  Both witnesses said that ‘near the hour of seven o’clock’ a man wearing a cloak walked into the tavern – this must have been Blood – just as one of the duke’s linkmen ran past, shouting: ‘Make way here for the Duke of Ormond!’ At the same time everyone saw the duke’s coach trundle by outside in the darkened street, followed by his breathless retainers.

  The ‘graziers’ and the new arrival paid for and drank another two pints of white wine. After fifteen minutes, they called for three white clay pipes of tobacco and left hastily, taking the tobacco with them. The horsemen rode off at ‘a great pace’ west towards the Haymarket or Pall Mall, leaving their change and some of their wine undrunk. This was consumed appreciatively by the potboy23 and Pretty probably pocketed the coins.

  As well as Blood, his son (still employing the pseudonym ‘Thomas Hunt’) and Lieutenant Colonel Moore, this party also included the Fifth Monarchist Captain Richard Halliwell (or Holloway). Another member was called Simons, of whom little more is known, although this may be the alias of another Fifth Monarchist, William Smith, who helped to arrange Mason’s rescue back in July 1667.24

  Ormond’s coach and footmen continued their stately progress down Pall Mall and at its end, at St James’s Palace, wheeled right, up the unlit slope of St James’s Street, drawing ever nearer to Clarendon House at the top end of the cobbled road. After a long, tiring and probably tedious day of diplomacy and polite conversation, home was at last in sight for the elderly duke. Any idea of an ambush would not have entered his thoughts.

  Blood’s party then struck.

  Henley, the coachman, high up on the vehicle’s box in front, heard shouts from a rider suddenly coming up alongside him, warning that there ‘was a dead man’ lying in the street ahead and ‘bade him stop the coach’.

  He pulled tightly on the reins, the coach came to a sudden, jerking halt and the collars and bridles of the horses were seized. Two riders aimed their pistols at the terrified coachman’s head.

  Behind the coach, an assailant pointed a brace of pistols at the chest of a footman called Exby and swore that he would be shot dead instantly if he moved a muscle in any attempt to help his master.25 The other retainers were scattered by the horsemen and fled for their lives.

  Ormond was no doubt sprawling on the floor of the coach after its unexpected and violent halt. His first reaction was that he was the victim of a simple, sordid robbery by highwaymen.26

  He was quickly disabused.

  After threatening to pistol-whip him, Blood bundled him out of the carriage and down on to the filthy cobbles. Despite Ormond’s struggling, he managed to pin a paper to his chest that spelt out the reasons for his capture and execution.27 Blood then manhandled him up behind ‘Hunt’, sitting astride his horse. Refusing Ormond’s gabbled offer of forty guineas (£42) in ready cash and £1,000 worth of jewellery in return for his immediate release, they tied their victim to the younger Blood with a short length of cord.28

  Blood then galloped off westwards down Piccadilly, heading for Tyburn Lane, apparently to check if there was a noose still hanging from the triple gibbet at the north end of the road. His plan was to ignominiously hang Ormond as a common malefactor from the public gallows.

  Amid all this noise and confusion in the darkness, the coachman seized his chance of escape, whipped up his horses and raced the short distance up to Clarendon House
.

  The other attackers began to follow Blood, with ‘Thomas Hunt’ (his protesting prisoner behind him) coming up last. He had been instructed by his father ‘to ride through thick and thin till he got to the place appointed’.29

  But the duke was made of stern stuff. Not for nothing had he served as a military commander in the Irish Confederation Wars of 1641–7 and later against Parliament’s army in Ireland, suffering the full rigours and discomforts of campaigning in a wet Irish winter. The old soldier began to struggle violently against his bonds. ‘Hunt’ was unable to subdue him as he was hampered by holding his sword and bridle in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  The assailants had ridden a ‘good way past Berkeley House’30 before the plan for the ambush began to unravel.

  Ormond managed to knock the firearm out of ‘Hunt’s’ hand and then heaved him out of the saddle by jerking his foot beneath one of his captor’s legs. Both assailant and prisoner fell off the wheeling, panicky horse and rolled over several times in the filth and mire of Piccadilly. The duke landed heavily on top but still managed to snatch the sword out of Hunt’s grasp.

  Torches and voices were approaching in the darkness and ‘Hunt’ cut the duke’s bonds, remounted and rode off, his friends firing a ragged volley of pistol shots at Ormond, lying winded in the mud. Whether due to the dark or their panic, every bullet missed.

  Thomas Brooks, the porter on duty at the gates of Clarendon House, testified that

  the footman came and called out, and not seeing the coach, I looked out and heard a noise and ran and finding my lord, endeavoured to bring him home.

  They cried: ‘Kill the rogue’ but I got away from them with my lord within the gates in my arms.

  He had been joined by Thomas Clarke, the comptroller of Ormond’s household, who was fortuitously standing in the courtyard in front of the mansion, and, gathering together a number of servants, they raced west down Piccadilly towards the commotion.

  The duke had received a ‘knock over his pole [head]’, a sword cut to the hand and multiple bruises from his fall. He lay apparently lifeless on the ground, totally exhausted from the struggle.31 The attack had lasted less than ten minutes.

  His rescuers could only identify the victim by feeling, with their fingers, the starburst-shaped Order of the Garter insignia pinned on his coat ‘rather than by any sound of voice he could utter’. They carried his supine body home and laid him on a bed ‘to recover his spirits’.32

  Blood meanwhile had fastened a noose to the gallows and, wondering what was delaying his accomplices and prisoner, rode back to rejoin his empty-handed friends at the bottom of Tyburn Lane. Four riders were sharing two horses, having lost their mounts in the fracas. They doubled back to the western outskirts of Westminster and crossed the Thames on the horse ferry operated by Mrs Leventhorpe33 (where today’s Lambeth Bridge crosses the river). Then the party rode eastwards just over a mile (1.63 km) to Southwark (opposite London Bridge), hoping to have evaded the hue and cry in their wake.

  Behind them at the scene of the crime lay Thomas Hunt’s silver-mounted screw pistol, his belt (ripped off in the struggle) and sword.

  Two loose horses, one a chestnut, distinguished by ‘a white stripe and a blaze all along its face’, had also been caught by Ormond’s servants. The weapons and horses were taken back to Clarendon House as evidence. Both the pistol (later revealed to have been previously owned by Lieutenant Colonel Moore) and the sword had the initials ‘T.H.’ rudely scratched upon them.

  The next morning, Blood’s wife, Mary, left her temporary lodgings owned by the schoolmaster Jonathan Davies in the village of Mortlake, Surrey, and disappeared with one of her daughters.

  Charles II was incandescent, both at the boldness of the outrage and the fact that it was committed disturbingly near to St James’s Palace. Close watch was set on England’s sea ports to ensure the fugitives could not flee the country.

  London in the late seventeenth century had no recognisable police force. The forces of law and order consisted of the local watch, elected by parishes, and constables working under the direction of magistrates. There were others, more bounty-hunters than constabulary, who worked as thief-takers, receiving success fees from those who had property stolen from them. The first organised police in the capital were the Bow Street Runners, founded by the author Henry Fielding in the mid-eighteenth century; the professional Metropolitan Police were established in 1829 by the Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel. A long time to wait for a detective.

  Arlington wisely took personal charge of the investigation and, utilising the resources of his secret service, demonstrated that he was no laggard in pursuing the perpetrators of the outrage against Ormond. Through shrewd and diligent sleuthing, he quickly identified the crime’s main protagonists.

  Arlington believed the motive behind the attack on Ormond was ‘not to rob or kill [him] but to carry him to some obscure place and oblige him to ransom himself at ten or twenty thousand pounds’.34 More ludicrously, popular report exaggerated the idea of kidnapping the duke, turning it into a cunning plan to sell him to spend the remainder of his life in slavery with the moors in North Africa.35 Rumour naturally abounded: one maintained that only two men attacked the duke, ‘carrying him some distance behind one of them’,36 while Girolamo Alberti, the Venetian ambassador to London, said that twelve men were involved, ‘one of whom carried [Ormond] on his crupper,37 vowing that he meant something more than robbery’.38

  On 7 December, Charles II signed a proclamation at Whitehall offering the huge reward of £1,000 (or £142,000 at today’s prices) ‘to any who shall discover any of the six persons who . . . forced the Duke of Ormond out of his coach . . . set him behind one of them on horseback with intent to have carried him to some obscure place out of town, where they might with more privacy have executed their villainous and bloody conspiracy’. The Duke, ‘in his endeavour to rescue himself, [was] so wounded . . . that he now lies languishing under his wounds at his lodgings at Clarendon House’. A royal pardon, as well as this eye-watering financial incentive, was offered to any of the conspirators who broke ranks and ‘declared his whole knowledge’ of this ‘barbarous and inhumane’ plot.39 An additional reward of £100 was available to ‘any who could but tell who owned a horse and pistol which they left behind them’.

  The next day’s edition of the London Gazette named four of the attackers and described their escape across the River Thames soon after the botched kidnap. The first suspect identified was Richard Halliwell, ‘a tobacco-cutter, lately dwelling in Frying Pan Alley40 off Petticoat Lane, without Bishopsgate’, in the City of London. He was said to be a ‘middle-sized man, plump faced, with [smallpox] pock holes, of a demure countenance, having a short brown periwig and sad coloured clothes, about forty years of age’.

  The second (whom we now know was Blood), was named as ‘Thomas Allen, alias Alloyt, alias Ayliff, who pretended himself a surgeon or doctor of physic, sometimes living at Romford in Essex, but lately lodging at or near Aldgate’, then a Jewish quarter near the eastern gate of the City of London. He was

  a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes, with a stuff coat,41 usually wearing a worsted camlet cloak and a brown short periwig, inclining to red, about thirty-six years of age.

  This description was generous, if not kind, to Blood’s advancing years. In fact, he was aged fifty-two. His son, ‘Thomas Hunt’, was next described:

  A tall and well-proportioned man, of a ruddy complexion, about thirty-three or thirty-four years of age, wearing a flaxen periwig of a large curl . . . but sometimes of late a black one. His clothes black and sometimes wearing a black worsted camlet coat, long, and has one leg a little crooked or bowed.

  The last suspect was a man named only as ‘Hurst’ (but later established to be ‘John Hurst’) who was said to be ‘of middle size, good complexion, with a dark coloured periwig and commonly wears a black coat’.

  Arlington must have employed many of his informers in the cap
ital’s seamy underworld to come up with so much information about the miscreants so quickly. The London Gazette then related how Ormond’s would-be attackers escaped. ‘Upon inquiry, it is found that the said persons, after the . . . assassination attempt . . . made their way towards Knightsbridge and they [crossed] the Thames near to the Neat Houses42 by Tothill Fields [Westminster].’43 Afterwards, on the south bank, ‘they made their way through Lambeth into Southwark, four of them mounted upon two horses and another singly mounted on a black mare with one white foot, about sixteen hands high, which was formerly seized at Lambeth as belonging to Thomas Hunt, who was then apprehended for attempting a robbery at Smitham Bottom44 in Surrey.45

  A subsequent issue of the London Gazette elaborated on Hunt’s description ‘for his better discovery’. This reduced his age by a decade to twenty-three years, and mentioned a ‘mark or scar near his right eye about the bigness of a penny’, probably a souvenir of his time as a highwayman.46

  Two days after the attack, Hunt’s lodgings at the apothecary John Anderson’s house near the Plough tavern in Bedlam, off Bishopsgate Street, were searched by Sir Robert Viner, who enjoyed particular favour at court.47 ‘Thomas Hunt’s’ neighbours said that he had lived for some years in Ireland but had not been born there. One described him as a ‘young, tall ruddy man’ and another as ‘a lusty, proper young man, full-faced, about twenty-one years of age’. They knew nothing of his father, other than that he was believed to be a ‘desperate man’ who was still living in London.48

  The lord mayor, Sir Richard Ford, and Viner then raided Halliwell’s house in Frying Pan Alley at two o’clock in the morning of the next day, Friday, 10 December. Halliwell escaped their clutches by swiftly dressing and clambering out through a garret window. He scrambled across the nearby roofs and down to street level as the constables searched the ground floor of his tenement.