Your Grace’s most humble Servant Thomas Blood54
Arlington went to visit the duke on behalf of Charles II and asked him to forgive Blood, probably bringing this letter with him. He told Ormond that the king ‘was willing to save [Blood] from execution for certain reasons which he was commanded to give him’.55 As befits a faithful old courtier, Ormond was magnanimous in his response. The duke replied that if ‘the king could forgive an attempt on his crown, I myself may easily forgive an attempt on my life and since it is his majesty’s pleasure, that is reason sufficient for me and your lordship may well spare the rest of the explanations’.56
The condition thus fulfilled, Arlington dined with Sir John Robinson at the Tower of London on 14 July. In his pocket was a signed warrant for the release of Blood and Perrot. Thomas Blood junior was to remain a prisoner in the Tower for a little while longer, probably as a hostage to guarantee his father’s immediate good behaviour and to test his commitment to his new career as a government spy.57 The warrant for his release was finally signed on 30 August, and his free pardon, with that of Perrot, the following day.58
Blood was free.
On 1 August 1671, Blood was graciously granted his pardon. The six-line record in Arlington’s papers read: ‘Pardon to Thomas Blood the father of all treasons, misprisons59 of treason, murders, homicides, felonies, assaults, batteries60 and other offences whatsoever at any time since 25 May 1660,61 committed by himself alone or together with any other person or persons . . . ’.62
Crime sometimes does pay.
Furthermore, Blood was granted a pension of £500 a year from lands in Straffan, Co. Kildare63 and the return of his Irish and English properties from attainder in return for his informing the government of dissident conspiracies; improving relations between the crown and nonconformists and endeavouring to ‘reduce or disperse’ the ‘absconded persons’ within that community.64
Blood emerged joyfully from out of the shadows. Shortly after his release from the Tower, Thomas Henshaw saw him walking in the courtyard of Whitehall Palace resplendent ‘in a new suit and periwig . . . exceedingly pleasant and jocose. He has been at liberty this fortnight. He is nothing like the idea I had made to myself of him for he is a tall, rough-boned man, with small legs, a pock-freckled face65 with little hollow blue eyes.’66
The diarist John Evelyn was horrified to find the colonel attending a dinner at the home of Sir Thomas Clifford, the comptroller of the royal household,67 with ‘several French noblemen’. As far as Evelyn was concerned, here was the fellow dinner guest from hell. He was mortified to see him free and so blatantly enjoying the delights of polite London society. Afterwards, he wrote:
Blood, that impudent bold fellow who not long before attempted to steal the imperial crown itself out of the Tower, pretending only curiosity of seeing the regalia there, when stabbing the keeper, though not mortally, he boldly went away with it through all the guards, taken only by the accident of his horse falling down.
How he came to be pardoned, and even received into favour, not only after this, but several other exploits almost as daring both in Ireland and here, I could never come to understand.
Some believed he became a spy of several parties, being well with the sectaries and enthusiasts, and did His Majesty services that way, which none alive could do as well as he; but it was certainly the boldest attempt, so the only treason of this sort that was ever pardoned.
This man had not only a daring but villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken and dangerously insinuating.68
Worse yet, Blood had adopted the habit of ‘perpetually’ attending the court and was frequently seen happily promenading in the royal apartments of the Palace of Whitehall. With his usual arrogance and audacity, he ‘affected particularly to be in the same room where the duke of Ormond was, to the indignation of all others, though neglected and overlooked by his grace’.69 Such snubs had no effect on a man of such ego and self-confidence.
There is little doubt that Blood’s release – and reward – astonished many. In Paris, William Perwich, secretary of the British embassy there, wrote to Williamson on 5 September, reporting that there were two major topics of conversation in diplomatic circles there. The first was the sorry saga of Captain Thomas Crowe, commander of the eight-gun yacht Merlin, who failed in his duty in not firing upon a Dutch man-of-war which discourteously ‘refused to strike to the king’s flag’. This had ‘made a great noise here – but nothing so much as talk [about] Blood being forgiven’.70
In London, Sir Roger Burgoyne, up from his Bedfordshire estates and staying with his friend Sir Nathaniel Hobart in Chancery Lane, could not believe that Blood had received a pardon after ‘all his villainy’ and warned darkly that ‘some designs, more than ordinary are on foot’.71
That enfant terrible among courtiers, the often drunken satirist poet John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, may have been the author of twenty-eight stanzas attacking Charles II over a broad spectrum of complaint about his policies and personal behaviour, later described by Arlington as ‘this seditious and traitorous libel’.72 It included this acerbic passage:
Blood that wears treason in his face
Villain complete in parson’s gown
How much he is at court in grace
For stealing Ormond and the crown!
Since loyalty does no man good,
Let’s steal the king and outdo Blood!
There was little hope that Blood’s reincarnation as a government spy could be kept secret; indeed, his showy behaviour after his release stripped away his greatest protection as an agent – anonymity and the ability to merge into his surroundings.
But this was intentional. His public rehabilitation was a conscious decision by Arlington to demonstrate the power of royal mercy to Blood’s friends still on the run and to indicate that, if only they dropped their opposition to the crown, they too could expect lenient treatment and the enjoyment of normal life in open society.
That normality meant the acquisition of a home for Blood’s reunited family. Now restored to funds, he acquired a house on the corner of Great Peter Street and Tufton Street in Westminster, overlooking Bowling Alley, and moved there soon after his release from the Tower.73 This was a prosperous area of new development and the colonel enjoyed the pleasure of having a number of high-status personages from Parliament and the court as his near neighbours. He may also have bought a property in the country: an unsubstantiated tradition suggests that he lived in the manor house at Minley, a hamlet in the parish of Yateley in Hampshire.74
On 26 September 1671, warrants were made out for payments of royal bounty to those who had saved the Crown Jewels. After all his tribulations, the handsome sum of £200 was awarded to the faithful Talbot Edwards and further sums of £100 were each paid to Captain Martin Beckman and Wythe Edwards ‘for resisting the late villainous attempt made to steal the crown’.75
Inevitably, with the parlous state of Charles’s Exchequer, Talbot Edwards did not receive a penny. He was forced to sell on the warrants for ridiculously small amounts of cash to pay his medical expenses in treating the injuries he had sustained at the hands of Blood and his accomplices.
On 30 September 1674 he died, probably from the effects of his wounds.
8
Coming in from the Cold
Blood sees privately and cunningly [James] Innes and his friends but of that not a word, not to the king
Notes made by Sir Joseph Williamson, 9 November 16711
Thomas Blood’s first task in his new guise on the government payroll was to operate as a spy or intermediary to support his masters’ attempts to weaken the radical nonconformist underground and neutralise their threat to the Stuart crown. Arlington outlined part of his mission in evidence to the Committee of Foreign Affairs on 22 October 1671 by relating that ‘upon the pardoning of Blood he went away among his brethren to bring in some of his friends on assurance of pardon’.2
With the prospect of war with the D
utch looming ever nearer on the horizon, accompanied by the unacceptable risk of concurrent sedition and insurrection being fomented amongst religious dissidents, it was imperative not only to deactivate the known renegades but also to quieten nonconformist resentment and anger at the congregations’ treatment at the hand of government. Here Blood could make his mark by spying on his former friends and also by facilitating behind-the-scenes dialogue between government and dissenters.
While he still met Sir Joseph Williamson, Blood’s main contact with his new paymasters, initially at least, was his old jailer, Sir John Robinson at the Tower of London. At the end of December, Sir John, profitably engaged in catching Quakers – those ‘besotted people, fools and knaves’ – reported that ‘Mr Blood sometimes visits me and tells me he has been faithful in keeping his promises’.3
During the mid-166os there was growing popular opposition to nonconformists being hauled up before the courts for flaunting the Act of Uniformity’s insistence that none other than Church of England rites should be employed in worship. At Hereford, a grand jury presented only 150 of these ‘Neros kneaded up of blood and dirt’ who refused to conform4 and similar refusals to indict continued throughout England, as at Norwich, Newcastle and Yarmouth. This general unwillingness to prosecute mirrored the king’s own unease over the prosecutions: Sir Thomas Bridges of Bristol was summoned to appear before the Privy Council and told plainly that rigorous proceedings against nonconformists were not agreeable to his majesty.5
In the face of the continual threats posed by conspiracies and egged on by senior Anglican clergy, Charles II’s government had been forced to take a firmer grip on illegal nonconformist activity. The Act to Prevent and Suppress Seditious Conventicles (or assemblies) of 16706 imposed stiff fines on those who attended religious services other than those of the Church of England. A fine of five shillings (25 pence) was imposed on a first offender and ten shillings (50 pence) for a subsequent breach of the law. In addition, a preacher or any other person who allowed his premises to be used for such illegal purposes risked a fine of twenty shillings (£1), or £140 in today’s purchasing power, which doubled up for a second offence.
Other punishments were harsher. Two Norfolk men were arrested at an illegal conventicle at Beeston for the third time and sentenced to be transported for ten years’ hard labour on one of the Caribbean islands. They were sent to the Dorset port of Lyme Regis but, no ship being available to take them overseas, they were thrown into prison and had remained there ever since. Jonathan Jennings of London also had been incarcerated for three years but eventually offered hard cash as a surety to guarantee his future behaviour as a loyal subject. An endorsement to the record of these men’s miseries reads: ‘Three conventiclers to be discharged; Mr Blood’ – so the old reprobate, in his new role, was trying to right some natural injustices.7
By this intervention, Blood may have been trying to redeem his standing in the nonconformist community which, after the attack on Ormond, the attempted theft of the Crown Jewels, and his very public rehabilitation with Charles II, remained at a low ebb. The Presbyterian Arthur Annesley, First Earl of Anglesey, was still going around London ‘blasting’ Blood amongst the nonconformists.8 The colonel was also unsettled by an unexpected visit to his home by a sinister stranger whom he suspected was sent ‘by some ill-wisher to ensnare him’. He desired to know how the king wanted him to handle ‘such cases’.9
Blood’s activities on behalf of the government can sometimes be discerned through a series of frustratingly cryptic notes written in barely decipherable handwriting by the always frantically busy Williamson, as a kind of journal and aide-memoire for the everyday proceedings of his department. Early on, Blood was busy promoting the government’s policy in the City of London ‘in relation to our affairs [with] Holland and France’ but was also asked to examine letters from exiled radicals in the Low Countries as ‘Blood knows the key [cipher] and the [handwriting]’.10
He soon fell in with an Anglican clergyman named Dr Nicholas Butler, who at the time was commonly despised for his ‘placeseeking and hanging [about] in the [royal] court through Prince Rupert and others’.11 His other main associate was a Mr Church, the clerk at the Fleet prison, off what is now Farringdon Road, on the eastern bank of the River Fleet,12 who was keen for his assistance in obtaining intelligence from Irish sources.
The colonel also began meeting James Innes, a Scottish nonconformist and former rector of the parish of St Breock, near Wadebridge in Cornwall, who was seeking to negotiate with the king to allow his brothers and sisters in the church greater religious freedom. The nonconformists had been divided in their response to the Conventicles Act. Many of their elders believed they had no choice but to obey this draconian law, as their pockets were not deep enough to defy it on a regular basis. This group of clergy, who elected to avoid holding illegal assemblies, became known in popular parlance as ‘Dons’. Other brethren, often younger and more militant, chose to continue with their religious conventicles, literally at all costs. These were nicknamed, rather bizarrely, ‘the Ducklings’, and Innes became their main spokesman.
In early November 1671, he pleaded with Blood to humbly request the king to allow greater religious liberty. Blood refused. Innes then met Charles and begged him to permit the larger groups to openly hold their services in their meeting houses. While the king expressed sympathy with Innes’ cause and showed ‘all tenderness’, he could not promise anything to help or comfort them in the short term. But he told him ‘that they must order their meetings discreetly, that you may strengthen my hands and not weaken them’.13 If the royal eye did not see, plainly the sheriff’s officers would not be calling. But this was not enough. Basic religious freedom still went unacknowledged or, more importantly, enshrined in law.
Williamson was made aware of Blood’s frequent covert meetings with Innes through the Post Office’s interception of the letters between them. His notes of 9 November confirm this: ‘They may not smell out we have correspondence with Innes by Blood.’ He was shocked by his agent’s duplicity: ‘Nota bene [mark well]. Blood sees privately and cunningly Innes and his friends but of that not a word, not to the king.’14
By 11 November, the secretary of state was worried by the growing prospect of a widespread uprising by the nonconformists. His jotted notes mused that the real key to suppressing the crisis was the role of the gentry: ‘Gratify the gentry, for no great disturbance can be, unless they be [at the head]. The people stir not without the gentry. They are dissatisfied (1) as mostly all men are, not to be as high as others at court and (2) especially for being unrewarded for their sufferings.’ After these sociological ramblings, he turned his attention to the increasingly problematical Blood, who ‘disgusts his two friends [Butler and Church] by disappointing them. They think him too high and [he] values himself too much’.15
Then sometime between 16 November and 4 December, Blood suddenly switched his allegiance from Arlington and Williamson to the unscrupulous and licentious secretary of state for Scotland, John Maitland, Second Earl of Lauderdale. It was a strange decision to desert his paymasters, but was probably caused by Blood’s realisation of the strength of Lauderdale’s influence with Charles, as he was said to be ‘never far from the king’s ear or council’ despite his responsibilities for the northern kingdom. It was also symptomatic of Blood’s increasing tendency to meddle in the perilous world of court politics.
Williamson recognised the shift in his agent’s loyalties very quickly. Blood, he noted, ‘is going in to Lord Lauderdale, cries him up everywhere’. Faced with continuing evidence of Blood’s scheming, the spymaster’s patience was beginning to run very thin. His scribbled memorandum noted that the colonel ‘has left himself notably to fantasies’. It was known that he had received money from secret service funds to pay off his debts, ‘but [he] pays none but [only] huffs to them’, the secretary of state added acidly. Blood was boasting that
I dine once or twice a week with the archbishop of Canterbury and
he did not know what should be done.
He also believed it was easy to go over Williamson’s head and deal direct with Arlington. Contemptuously, the spymaster added: ‘His head is turned with wine and treats and the fanatics that keep company with him take advantage of him.’16 So much for Blood shunning strong drink and ‘recreations, or pomps . . . quibbling or joking’ and the other joys of good company.17
Williamson now harboured grave doubts about Blood’s effectiveness and his value as an informer or intermediary with the dissident underground. He noted: ‘Any that are known to join with him are lost to the fanatics.’ He pondered whether it would be wise to end all dealings with the former outlaw: ‘To break with Blood – for if he be thus mutable [fickle] as to Lord Arlington, then whether he be lost with the fanatics or no, it is not safe. To what purpose . . . to meet longer with him?’ Then he added the damning four words: ‘Not to be trusted.’ Williamson concluded: ‘That we may break off meeting with Blood for they [the nonconformists] will not absolutely trust him any longer.’18
This memorandum seemed to have an awful note of finality.
Three days later, Williamson recorded in his notes a meeting between Blood, Butler and Church at the clergyman’s lodgings. Blood had ‘magnified Lauderdale, saying that they understood one another and he was the great man . . . He clapped his hand on his heart and said “[He] had not only the king but Lord Lauderdale here!’” Williamson noted: ‘By all means break off with Blood. He leaps over all heads and his company may ruin them [Butler and Church] to the fanatics.’19
Two Scots informers then came forward to offer information about the nonconformist threat in Scotland to the privy counsellor Sir Robert Moray, a one-time spy for Cardinal Richelieu in France, a prominent Freemason and one of the founders of the Royal Society. His vocal calls for moderacy towards dissenters explains their otherwise strange choice for a point of contact within the government. He passed them on to Sir John Baber, a physician in ordinary to the king, a man well known for his absolute discretion, who was frequently used by Charles as a secret conduit for messages from the throne to the dissenters.20 (Pepys believed him so cautious that he would ‘not speak in company unless acquainted with every stranger present’ in a room.)21 The Scots were directed to Arlington, who passed them back to Baber for further questioning. With all these pillar-to-post meetings, the informers must, by now, have wondered whether their journey south was really necessary.
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 18