If so, this growing burden of conspiracy on Blood’s time and energies makes it extremely unlikely that he tried to snipe at the king from his uncomfortable waterlogged hiding place among the Thameside reeds near Battersea. Arranging even a simple assassination attempt requires careful planning and detailed intelligence collection about the movements of the intended target. Just how many plots can one man – even the mercurial and feisty Blood – be entangled in at any one time? Yes, it seems highly likely that quick-thinking Thomas Blood made up this story on the spur of the moment to ingratiate himself with the king. Blarney is too weak a word to describe his quixotic canard.
His frank answers to the questions put to him were a curious concoction of bravado, impudence, humility and blatant threats. Blood shamelessly cautioned the king that there were ‘hundreds of his friends yet undiscovered who were all bound to each other by the indispensable oaths of conspirators to revenge the death of any of the fraternity upon those who should bring them to justice’. This inviolable blood oath, he warned bluntly, would ‘expose his majesty and all his ministers to the daily fear and expectation of a massacre’.
On the other hand, ‘if his majesty would spare the lives of a few, he might oblige the hearts of many who, as they have been seen to do daring mischiefs, would be as bold, if received into pardon and favour, to perform eminent services for the crown’. Blood became ever more boastful and ‘pretended’ to be able to wield ‘such an interest and sway amongst the fanatics as though he had been the chosen general and had them all entered on his muster roll’.30
So there was the deal, brazenly placed on the palace table by Blood. Grant me my life, he was proposing, and I will spy for you amongst the dangerous religious dissident community. No wonder he was so keen to be questioned by the king.
Charles had shown considerable ‘coolness and moderation’ throughout his questioning.31 Just to ensure everyone knew what was being offered, the king now asked: ‘What if I should give you your life?’ The colonel replied shortly: ‘I would endeavour to deserve it.’32
There was no doubt that Blood’s candour astonished his assembled listeners. He ‘spoke so boldly that all admired him, telling the king how many of his subjects were disobliged and that he was one that took himself to be in a state of hostility and that he took not the crown as a thief but an enemy, thinking that lawful which was lawful in war’.33
Later, some maintained that Blood had bullied the king and ‘the whole court was frighted and thought it safer to bribe him rather than to hang him’.34 Certainly, Charles treated him ‘with a leniency and moderation not to be paralleled’.35
The well-informed Sir Thomas Henshaw, lawyer, courtier and later diplomat, wrote to his friend Sir Robert Paston, MP and gentleman of the privy chamber, with an account of Blood’s interrogation. He branded the colonel ‘a gallant hardly, [but] a villain as ever herded in that sneaking sect of Anabaptists’, but when he was examined by the king ‘he answered so frankly and undauntedly that everyone stood amazed’. Henshaw reported that ‘men guessed him to [look] about fifty years of age by the grey hairs sprinkled up and down his head and beard’ but thought he was ‘not above forty-five and his son twenty-one’.36
The interrogation in that grand palace apartment must have lasted well over an hour. At its conclusion, Blood was returned to the fetid squalor of his cell in the Tower while Charles conferred with his ministers about his next course of action to curb this doughty fighter against the forces of the crown.
Arlington and Williamson did not rely only on Blood’s testimony in their attempts to fathom out the depths of the conspiracy to steal the regalia. There were several accomplices – Halliwell and Smith – still at large. The usual suspects were rounded up and interrogated.
For example, on 15 May the keeper of the Gatehouse prison in Westminster received a warrant to hold John Buxton ‘for dangerous practices and combinations with Thomas Blood and his son’ and was ordered to keep him a close prisoner.37 This was the same John Buxton, of Bell Alley, Coleman Street, who had been questioned after the Ormond incident because of his friendship with the two Bloods and Halliwell and his involvement in finding a surety for ‘Thomas Hunt’ to buy him freedom from the Marshalsea prison.38 Once again, no telling evidence could be found against him, and Buxton walked free from the Gatehouse within twenty-four hours.39
Amid all the comings and goings to Whitehall in the aftermath of the attempt on the Crown Jewels, there is one mystery document surviving in the State Papers held in the National Archives at Kew. It purports to be a letter from Blood, written from the Tower, to Charles II, dated 19 May 1671, which implicates some of the great and good in the Jewel House robbery:
May it please your majesty: this may tell and inform you that it was Sir Thomas Osborne and Sir Thomas Lyttleton, both your treasurers of your Navy, that set me to steal your crown, but he that feeds me with money was James Lyttleton esquire. ’Tis he that pays under the treasurers at your pay office.
He is a very bold villainous fellow, a very rogue, for I and my companions have had many a £100 of your majesty’s money to encourage us upon this attempt.
I pray no words of this confession [be disclosed] but know your friends.
Not else but I am your majesty’s prisoner and if [my] life [is] spared your dutiful subject whose name is Blood which I hope is not that your majesty seeks after.40
This apparent account of a wider conspiracy operating at the very heart of government was a blatant forgery, even though the last line contains a mischievous pun worthy of Colonel Blood’s tortured humour. The handwriting bears no resemblance whatsoever to his familiar sloped straggly scrawl and it is no surprise that Williamson dismissed it immediately with the contemptuous endorsement: ‘A foolish letter.’
This attempt to incriminate Osborne and Lyttleton must be another squalid episode in the political intrigue and constant jockeying for position that constantly pervaded the royal court. Both men were friends of Buckingham – Osborne was one of the duke’s staunchest allies at this time, but later was to fall out with him. Lyttleton (1647–1709) later became speaker of the House of Commons, but the aspiring Osborne (1632–1712) was probably the main target of this forgery.
He was a combative partisan on behalf of the established Church of England who firmly opposed any kind of official toleration of either Catholics or dissenters. In 1676 Osborne tried to suppress the London coffee houses because of the ‘defamation of his majesty’s government’ that was frequently uttered over the beverage cups. He was a man who made enemies easily. Indeed, after being created First Earl of Danby and serving as chief minister in 1673–9, Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, believed him to be ‘the most hated minister that had ever been about the king’.
The merchant James Lyttleton was a brother of Sir Thomas and cashier to the navy treasurers in 1668–71. Two years later he was employed in the unedifying task of pressing unwilling recruits into service as sailors on board Royal Navy warships.
No one accepted this forged confession as a true bill and Osborne and both the Lyttletons were not even questioned.
The key to Blood’s fate must lie in the factors that drove him to try to steal the Crown Jewels. He was never a career criminal – indeed, he detested his son’s felonious activities as a highwayman – and his previous adventures all had well defined political or religious objectives. His rationale in trying to steal the Crown Jewels puzzled his contemporaries and many of his friends and associates in the radical religious and republican underground. For example, Edmund Ludlow, exiled in faraway Switzerland, could not, for the life of him, perceive ‘what advantage there would have been to the public cause, should they have succeeded in their enterprise’.41
While Blood always insisted that he was driven by purely financial gain, the difficulties of breaking up and converting such high-profile swag into ready money would have worked against his expectations of a healthy profit from the theft. The gold could have been easily melted down but too
many people would have expected a generous payment for their risk in handling such recognisable gemstones. Anyway, did he have the necessary contacts within the London underworld to enable him to sell on all those diamonds, sapphires and rubies prised off the crown’s gold mounting? As this was his first taste of the world of base criminality, probably not.
Then there is the purely symbolic motive aimed at damaging the monarchy: stealing the crown might allegorically remove some of the visible power from the king. This may well have appealed to a former parliamentary officer and a consort of the Fifth Monarchists who, after all, saw Charles II as an agent of Satan, but it seems too abstruse for a man of action such as Blood.
Was he trying to redeem himself with his radical Presbyterian community? There were indications that the Ormond episode had badly injured his reputation among his fellow conspirators in London. One informer reported gleefully that ‘those congregations of nonconformists which [Blood and his accomplices] . . . have formerly frequented, abhor [the attack on the duke] and would be glad to bring them to punishment if it were in their power’.42 If that adverse reaction had troubled Blood, the Crown Jewels escapade failed to restore his good name as a fervent radical. The postponed attack on the House of Lords, caused by the jewel robbery, would not have endeared him to them either. William Dale, one of Williamson’s informers, reported in early August that a ‘dangerous and disaffected person and a man of great design’ called William Thompson, an alias of the former Parliamentarian Captain Povey, had journeyed from London to Loughton in Essex ‘muffled up and [said] that Blood should be stabbed and the rest – for they were false’.43
Was Blood paid to undertake the robbery? Was the theft of the regalia part of one of Buckingham’s strange machinations? A precursor perhaps to the assassination of Charles II and the proclamation of a usurper whose standing would have been enhanced by his possession of the royal regalia? This particular conspiracy theory was reinforced at the time by the news of a burglary in Great Ormond Street, London, the Tuesday after the attempted robbery of the Jewel House. This was the home of the lord high chancellor, Sir Orlando Bridgeman. All his valuables were ignored by the thieves and only the Great Seal of England was stolen. Its loss was highly significant: an impression of it was routinely affixed to important state documents and its disappearance meant that much of the machinery of government would cease to function. A new one had to be made hastily.44
For centuries, there has been persistent speculation that Charles II himself was complicit in the crime.45 Some believed that Blood’s paymaster was the king – hence the colonel’s unusual, princely treatment. One version was that Charles, perennially short of money, conceived a desperate plan to steal his own Crown Jewels and to sell them overseas to raise the required hard cash. He cast around for a suitable criminal to perform the commission and Blood’s derring-do credentials fitted the royal requirements precisely. Buckingham, with his track record of employing Blood, was asked to secretly arrange the crime.
Buckingham probably did undertake disreputable missions at Charles’s behest, providing a valuable cut-out to avoid direct connection with the throne in case anything went disastrously wrong. However, there is no direct evidence to support this notion, attractive as it may appear to those romanticists amongst us, and it sadly must stay firmly in the realm of conjecture.
Another, still less plausible, theory had the king swearing, having partaken too freely at the banqueting table, that after all his painful years of exile in Europe, no one would now deprive him of the crown of England. In a moment of boisterous madness, he unwisely backed this pledge with a recklessly generous wager that none could ever make away with it. Blood heard of this bet and took the king literally at his word – intending to eventually return the regalia and claim his royal winnings with true brio. As conspiracy theories go, this fits the bill precisely: ingenuity coupled with just a smidgeon of lunacy.
On 6 June Sir John Robinson reported an unexpected visit to the Tower by Sir William Morton, a judge of the King’s Bench, who was not only renowned for his loyalty to the monarchy but who revelled in a fearsome and well-deserved reputation for exacting harsh, exemplary justice on any wrongdoers who came up before him in court. (It was Morton who condemned to death the daredevil French ‘gallant highwayman’, Claude Duval, in the teeth of popular protest in January 1670.) After having played a prominent and dogged role in investigating the attack on Ormond the previous year, he was now, terrier-like, demanding to interrogate Blood.
On this occasion, Morton was thwarted again. One can imagine his frustration at being turned away by what he saw as sheer bureaucracy. Robinson told Williamson that, not having received an order allowing the judge’s visit, he had to deny him permission to see his notorious prisoner. The lieutenant added, with just a hint of understatement: ‘Blood, seeing him out of the window, was startled a bit.’46
There was great excitement over what would be made public during the trial of the colonel, his former highwayman son and Perrot. On 12 June, the Venetian ambassador wondered what revelations the colonel had produced in the course of his interrogation: ‘The secrets revealed by Blood, the robber of the Crown Jewels, are hidden among the acts of his examination.’ Here was a ‘faithful and good servant of the late king [Charles I]’ who had become a ‘professed rebel . . . Universal curiosity is excited by his [forthcoming] trial’.47
At the end of the month, Blood and his son submitted humble petitions to Arlington to allow their wife and mother to visit them – the men complaining that ‘close confinement’ in the Tower was impairing their health. Ever loyal, Mary Blood, apparently recovered from her illness and returned from Lancashire, concurrently sought permission to see her husband and son ‘who have been now near eight weeks so closely imprisoned . . . that I can neither hear of their health nor receive any directions from them’.48
Behind the scenes, Arlington was working assiduously to win a free pardon for Blood. This was an ancient and merciful prerogative inherent in the English monarchy. A pardon presupposes guilt or the conviction of a miscreant for a crime committed and discharges the recipient from all penalties. The process is said to make him a novus homo or ‘new man’ in the eyes of society and the law.49 Arlington’s objective was, to use the modern espionage jargon, to ‘turn’ Blood; to employ him as a government double agent and a major player in his campaign to defeat the ever-present menace posed by Presbyterian and other nonconformist dissidents. After the conversation with Charles II, the minister knew he was pushing at an open door as far as the outlaw was concerned.
With a third Anglo-Dutch war looming on the horizon, Arlington had to swiftly neutralise any domestic threats to the stability of the realm. The last thing he wanted was an informal alliance between the religious dissenters at home and the enemy in the Netherlands. A Dutch attack, synchronised with an insurrection by republican nonconformists, was an alarming prospect that would stretch government resources and divert attention away from a successful prosecution of the war at sea and abroad. Arlington must have already been working on drafts of a regulatory measure to provide greater religious liberty to nonconformists and Catholics as a timely sop to dissident opinion.50
Meanwhile, he required reliable intelligence on the intentions, plans and movements of the major players in the dangerous sectarian groups. Blood, characterised by Ludlow as ‘having been acquainted with most of the secret passages [activities] that have of late been transacted in order to [revive] the Lords’ witnesses’,51 was the ideal informer within this shadowy world, having worked for the secret service before on an ad hoc basis.52
Arlington’s plan for Blood’s employment was endorsed by his fellow secretary of state Joseph Williamson, who had rated his value as a spy to be ‘ten times the value [of the] crown’. Although the colonel was never to win the complete trust of the two spymasters, Williamson patently believed that he and Arlington, as Blood’s new masters, now possessed an agent of extraordinary power and ability.
Not co
ntent with his life being spared, the colonel tried to haggle over the terms and conditions of his pardon. Denzil Holles, First Baron Holles – that ‘stiff and sullen man’, according to the king – and Anthony Cooper, Lord Ashley, a supporter of official moderation towards Protestant dissenters, negotiated with the renegade immediately after his release about the agreement to spy for the government. At one point Blood apparently sought an appointment as governor of one of the North American colonies in exchange for his services, but these aspirations went unrequited. Instead, Williamson noted simply that the king ‘would provide for him’.53
Charles placed one inviolable condition on his agreeing to Blood’s pardon. The colonel must apologise humbly to the Duke of Ormond for his attack.
Apologies cost nothing and Blood happily wrote the required letter to Ormond in apparent abject atonement for his assault. The lyrical terms he employed may indicate that he included some suggested phrases – possibly offered by Arlington or Williamson – although its contents, a rambling single sentence covering sixteen lines with almost no punctuation, required some skilful editing (if not careful reading).
His one-page note says:
The greatness of my crimes so far exceeds expression that were not my burdened soul encouraged by finding vent to its grief, though by such an acknowledgement as bears little proportion to my guilt, I had forborn this further trouble to Your Grace, but overcharged with increasing sorrow by the consideration of your renowned excellency which, I unworthy monster was so regardless of, has produced this eruption of the humble acknowledgement of my most heinous crime the which as I have a deep impression of heart compunction, so should I count it my happiness to have an opportunity in the most demonstrative way to manifest it Your Grace, who am unworthy to be accounted, though, in reality, I am
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 17