In fact Blood had delivered a letter from Arlington to Arthur Capell, First Earl of Essex, the lord lieutenant of Ireland. The secretary of state, with his well-hidden Catholic sympathies, was worried that he had been accused of supporting the cause of Peter Talbot, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin,59 in his attempts to ease the grievances of the Catholic population of Ireland. Essex reassured Arlington: ‘I am sure there is nothing in it but of advantage to you and your lordship may be fully satisfied that there were no questions put leading to your lordship’s name.’60
For his espionage efforts, Blood was paid a salary of £100 a year, equivalent to £13,750 in today’s purchasing power, as well as receiving his £500 a year pension from Irish lands.61 The king also moved to restore him to his lost Irish estates, writing to Essex that Blood had not yet repossessed his property, as he required a licence for bringing a ‘writ of error for reversal of his outlawry’. The viceroy was now authorised to grant that licence.62
In May 1673, Blood also applied to the king for a grant of £1,400 which had been paid to the former treasurer of Ireland but ‘not yet disposed of by any order’.63 Whether he eventually received this lost money is unknown.
Blood was also willing to use his position at court and at the heart of government to advance the wider interests of his family. In April 1672, he wrote to Arlington, begging his lordship to remember ‘my uncle Dean [Neptune] Blood’s advance in Ireland . . . He has been dean thirty years and was with the king [Charles I] at Oxford and was an active person [on his behalf].’64 Unfortunately, in this instance, his pleas went unanswered. The following January, he suggested that his son, Thomas Blood junior, if serving alongside an ‘able’ lieutenant, ‘could manage a company in the army’ and that his third son Edmund ‘was fit for an ensign or a sea officer, having been twice to the East Indies’.65 Blood even recommended an ‘able lieutenant’ to act as mentor for his former highwayman son. Captain Nicholas Carter ‘is very fit for a lieutenant’, he observed. It is not known whether the eldest son took the king’s shilling as he died around 1675, leaving a wife and an infant son, of whom his brother Holcroft became guardian. Edmund, the fourth son, was appointed purser66 of Jersey,a forty-gun fourth-rate frigate of 560 tons built for the Commonwealth and launched at Maldon in Essex in 1654. Blood’s second son William was a steward on the same ship. Both are known to have been serving in the Royal Navy in 1677.67
He also sought to advance his third son Holcroft’s career in the army. In March 1678, Blood wrote to Williamson, having heard about a ‘vacancy of an ensign’s place in Captain Rook’s company in Sir Lionel Walden’s regiment. The captain accepted my son but the colonel preferred another, since he was accepted. Wherefore, I would request that he may not be put by.’68
There was, however, a more pressing issue preoccupying Blood’s time and attention. He petitioned the king about his father-in-law’s estates, still the subject of a wearying, tedious (and expensive) legal dispute. The property, he claimed, was now legally his in right of his wife, as the old parliamentary colonel’s last male heir, Charles, had died in December 1672.69 Blood had instituted his own legal proceedings against some of the Holcrofts to claim the estate, but matters had now got to the stage where violence and even two murders had been committed in attempts to finally decide the matter.
His petition pointed out that the Holcrofts ‘had laboured . . . to defraud [him] of his just right and finding their own title to be weak have combined with Richard Calveley to promote an old title to his part of the said estate which title for these forty years has been overthrown at law’.
Yet . . . the said Calveley [has] been so vexatious that when his title at law was rejected, they laboured by violence to get [a] footing in the estate . . .
About six years ago, they hired several obscure persons out of Wales that went to the house of a gentlemen, one Hamlet Holcroft . . . and with a pistol killed him dead for not giving them possession when they had no legal process nor officer to demand it by . . .
Some weeks since, Richard Calveley, being attached70 by some of the sheriff’s bailiffs according to law concerning the premises claimed by your petitioner, after they had him in custody . . . Calveley caught up a rapier and killed one of the bailiffs dead on the place.
Blood therefore begged Charles II
out of your princely grace and for the better enabling your petitioner to serve your majesty . . . to confer . . . what estate Richard Calveley lays claim to or lately seized of the estate of John Holcroft and his heirs (and consequently your petitioner’s) if, upon Calveley’s trial and conviction it shall become forfeited to your majesty.71
The outcome of Blood’s appeal is not known, although it seems likely to have failed, as the disputed estate passed to another relative and Calveley escaped justice. He is recorded as evicting a man and his mother eight years later in a case heard during the Epiphany term at Lancaster Quarter Sessions.72
There were other means of income for the old adventurer. Blood transformed himself into a freelance agent and ‘fixer’, not only involved in court rivalries and politics, but receiving fees for easing the path of those wishing to do business with the royal household. He had been ‘admitted into all the privacy and intimacy of the court’. If anyone was suffering delays in decision-making or any other hindrance to their business, ‘he made his application to Blood as the most industrious and successful solicitor and many gentlemen courted his acquaintance, as the Indians pray to the Devil – that he may not hurt them’.73
It was a hazardous career to pursue and one that earned him powerful enemies as well as friends. His overblown confidence and arrogance remained breathtakingly obvious. If he had aggrieved one powerful figure in government, there were many others who would seek his assistance in providing information or gossip to fulfil their ambitions. He had become indispensable and boasted:
‘It’s no matter. If one lets me fall, another takes me up. I’m the best tool they have.’74
Every day, he attended White’s coffee house near the Royal Exchange in the City of London, waiting for consultations with eager, well-heeled clients,75 who may have included such illustrious personages as James, Duke of York and Thomas Osborne, First Earl of Danby.76
His greed and self-importance were to cause his eventual downfall.
There was one already suffering because of his involvement with Blood. Richard Wilkinson, another of Williamson’s spies, claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy involving Blood ‘against his majesty’s person, crown and dignity’. (This presumably was Captain Roger Jones’s plot to assassinate Charles in the House of Lords.) In February 1673, he wrote from prison at Appleby, Westmorland, complaining about his unkind treatment.
When Wilkinson revealed the plot he was ‘promised not only my pardon, but a gratuity’, but he was betrayed and instead of being pardoned ended up in a horrible cell.
Since 23 September last I have been chained of my bed which is a dark stinking hole sixteen or seventeen hours out of every twenty-four, with such a weight, namely nearly four stone77 of iron on my legs.
If it were to save my life I cannot stir a yard from my bed.
Until recently he had neither fire nor candle, but now had one taper to light in the mornings to read by. Despite enduring these privations, he was still a faithful subject and felt obliged to warn of a planned rebellion, having been told that ‘in a very short time the prison doors would be set open for me and others if I would but fight, for there were many men in most counties in great readiness who wait but for a fit opportunity’.
His friends in London had promised him a pardon but he knew he was still living under a cloud of official disapproval: ‘I am very sorry that Lord Arlington is offended at me and that I am blamed because I did not manage the business better concerning Blood.’78
Thomas Blood still had powerful friends.
9
The Ways of the Lord
Some men are so crafty . . . they dare not preach against the sin of man-catching, o
r trepanning men by sham evidence, false witness, sham plots . . . setting snares to catch men, body and goods, life and estate . . .
The Horrid Sin of Man-Catching, July 16811
London in the late 1670s and early into the next decade was a hotbed of intrigue and conspiracy, involving not only the old discontented republicans but also suspected plots by Catholics wishing to restore England to her old pre-Reformation faith. Part of this subversion and sedition was entirely fabricated – merely a trick – designed as a weapon of terror with which to seize some ephemeral personal advantage in the fevered political posturing within the royal court and Parliament.
Some died pitifully on the scaffold or were ruined as a result of the communal hysteria triggered by at least one of these fictitious conspiracies. Sensational revelations piled up, one on top of another, to unsettle or disrupt both the corporate body politic and public confidence, particularly among the population of London. No sooner was ‘one sham discovered, but a new one [was] contrived to sham that’, one polemicist declared artlessly.2 Those who revealed these so-called plots were the lowest dregs of society – informers who were prepared ‘to swallow oaths with as nimble convenience as Hocus3 does . . . and ready to spew them up again to murder the innocent’.4 Their motivation or objectives were sometimes difficult to discern accurately, ‘for here you have him and there you will have him . . . [but] you [only] hug a cloud and embrace a shadow’.5
Much of this turmoil was fomented in the new political clubs that were the harbingers of today’s political party system in Britain. These met noisily in hostelries, coffee houses or private homes throughout London; one of the earliest (whose eighty members nurtured resilient republican beliefs) was founded by Major John Wildman and met at his Nonsuch House tavern in Bow Street, off Covent Garden, after 1658.6 The mercurial and devious Buckingham was a patron of Wildman, who hailed him as ‘the wisest statesman in England’.7 Catholics met at the White House nearby in the Strand or at the Pheasant in Fuller’s Rents, north of King’s Bench Walk in the precincts of the Inner Temple. The latter institution became notorious for some of its members’ alleged proclivity for sodomy. Buckingham’s supporters had their own club whose headquarters were at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside in the City of London, often frequented by visiting Baptist dissenters from the west of England and Scottish Presbyterians.
Although he despised him gready, Thomas Blood patronised the political club run by Sir William Waller,8 that ‘midnight magistrate’ wickedly satirised by John Dryden in 16829 who was a passionate pursuer of fugitive Catholic seminary priests and whose greatest delight came from his pastime of publicly burning confiscated Catholic books and vestments. His club met regularly at the newly built St James’s marketplace, between Haymarket and Piccadilly, possibly in the tavern called the Old Man’s Head, located underneath the market house.10
One of the most powerful cliques was the radical Green Ribbon Club, chaired by the opposition MP Sir Robert Peyton, another of Buckingham’s republican associates, who had been removed as a magistrate from the Middlesex Bench in 1676 for distributing seditious literature. In October the following year, Blood exposed a plot by ‘Peyton and his gang’ who had allied themselves with the Fifth Monarchists and the atheists in an attempt to overthrow the government and seize power. They planned that, initially at least, Richard Cromwell (third son of the Lord Protector, who succeeded him in that title for just nine months) would be appointed nominal ruler of the three kingdoms in the event of their coup succeeding.11 The king and the Duke of York were to be murdered at Newmarket or in London by Peyton and eleven accomplices while others simultaneously captured the Tower of London. According to Williamson’s notes of the information received from Blood, the group were strong opponents of the Anglo-French alliance and were aggrieved at the continuing diminution of English liberty. They also sought to impose even more punitive measures against Catholics. The spymaster believed the conspirators were
near something, not sure how soon.
Talk of the Tower, therefore look secretly to it . . . The guards to be well looked to.
Have sent into Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Bedfordshire to get their friends to a head.12
The MP was twice interrogated but eventually dismissed without charge. However, his colleagues in the Green Ribbon Club thought him far too dangerous a figure to continue as a member, so he was promptly dismissed as chairman and his membership terminated.13
Blood’s investigations of this conspiracy must have continued, for in early January 1678 Williamson wrote to Archbishop Michael Boyle, lord chancellor of Ireland, about a Dublin legal case concerning Blood’s interests on which he was about to adjudicate. The king had commanded that the colonel should be detained in England ‘on his particular service and by his command’ and Williamson earnestly requested that his enforced absence from Ireland should not prejudice his case.14
One of those implicated in the Peyton plot was Blood’s old comrade William Smith, whom he now interrogated. He told the Duke of York:
He has been concerned in most conspiracies that have been these fourteen years. He was with me in the business of Ormond and the business miscarried because he . . . did not follow him . . .
Then, though he was not one of the fighting party at the taking of the crown, he was employed by me as a scout and has often boasted of it.
He was not one of those that went with me to the rescue of Mason but, I suppose, was one that drudged about getting our horses and tack ready . . . and that he also boasted of.
When all my party accepted the king’s pardon, he did not, being a Fifth Monarchy person but a wet one.
Smith had been involved in new plots ‘contriving to assassinate persons and to surprise others’ and had been sent to Westminster to spy for ten days. Blood promised to make him ‘acknowledge’ his role and help ‘unravel the whole game . . . which, by reason of the preservation of my spies, we cannot go in a direct line to, but [should] sail with a side wind’.15 Smith was discharged from prison on 5 August.
More than a year earlier, one of Buckingham’s creatures, the spy Henry North, had revealed another conspiracy against Charles II, this time involving ‘diverse eminent persons’. Following the pattern of other informers, government or private, who had fallen on hard times, North had taken to the road to eke out a precarious living from preying on unwary travellers. After his arrest, he had been condemned to be hanged for highway robbery near Sleaford in Lincolnshire. Now he had decided to make a clean breast of what he knew, as ‘a sincere and candid demonstration of a Christian who shall write nothing in this dying hour but what he knows to be truth’.
North was a very frightened man, terrified, not only by the prospect of dying on the scaffold, but by his rashness in making disclosures involving personages of great power and influence. In a rambling and sometimes incomprehensible two-page letter, he admitted to the king that he had been employed by Buckingham ‘in a troublesome concern which I would cheerfully have performed to the utmost of my power. I sometimes spoke in his presence and understood some of his discontents.’ Then his words grew yet more opaque:
I am able to demonstrate to the Duke of Buckingham, who, I persuade myself, will now believe me, of the fallacy and fraud of such as were instrumental to abuse his heroic soul with notions discrepant to his own judgment and interest, which with great zeal, I have heard him express in reference to your majesty and all your well-wishers.
Frustratingly, he skirted around the great truth he wished to impart, dropping several obscure hints about what must have been Buckingham’s continuing treachery. North had long desired to tell Charles ‘a secret’ and had ‘applied to Mr Blood about it but was advised not to trust any person’.
He added, in a bizarre emblematic reference to the depth and complexity of the conspiracy: ‘The head of [the river] Nile with all his rivulets is not easily discovered.’ Then there was this final cryptic statement, tinted with just a touch of anguish: ‘I might have understood much more th
an I do and I wish had never understood anything thereof.’
Unfortunately he was executed before Williamson could discover anything more of his revelations. His letter had been delayed in the post.16
These two conspiracies may have constituted clear and present dangers to Charles and his government, but disclosure of a new plot in 1678 had a much greater political impact, even though it proved utterly bogus.
One of the magistrate William Waller’s cronies was Titus Oates, a former naval padre in the forty-gun fourth-rate frigate Adventure who had been dismissed from the service with ignominy in 1677 for homosexuality. Shunning Anglicanism, he was received into the Catholic Church later that year and managed to enrol at the English Jesuit College at Valladolid in Spain, despite his ignorance of Latin. As a noviciate priest, Oates proved less than suitable, or indeed successful; he was branded ‘a curse’ by the college authorities and finally expelled. Undeterred by this rebuff, and still pursuing his own idea of a sacred vocation, he talked his way into a Catholic school at St Omer in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, only to be thrown out again.
Rejection can metamorphose all too easily into an intense hatred. Oates was ugly, with sunken eyes and a harsh and loud voice, but was blessed with a photographic memory. He lived almost wholly in a frenzied world of rampant paranoia and fantasy, but his illusory claims and constant lies were camouflaged by an eminently believable manner. Scarred by his experiences in Spain and France, he harboured a fiery, fanatical loathing for the Catholic Church and became determined to wreak revenge on the papists who had so harshly turned him away.
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 20