In London he found a trusty ally in the shape of the half-crazed Israel Tonge, the former rector of the medieval parish church of St Mary’s Staining in Oat Lane, north-east of St Paul’s Cathedral, which was completely destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.17 After claiming Thomas Blood was involved in starting the conflagration,18 Tonge had now convinced himself that responsibility for the destruction of the capital in the catastrophic inferno lay solely at the door of the Jesuit priests.
Oates and Tonge worked diligently to compile a manuscript or dossier implicating the Catholic Church in a Jesuit plot to assassinate the king. It contained the names of almost one hundred Catholics allegedly involved in the conspiracy. Upon completion, the document was bizarrely hidden behind the wainscot wall panels in the Barbican, London, home of the physician Sir Richard Barker,19 where Tonge was staying.20
Mirabile dictu, the manuscript was ‘discovered’ by Tonge the next morning and shown to Barker’s friend Christopher Kirby, with no explanation as to why this incendiary document had been secreted in the home of such a rabid anti-Catholic. As a chemist who had sometimes assisted Charles II with his scientific experiments, Kirby was a carefully chosen messenger to make the government aware of Oates and Tonge’s sensational accusations. The loyal apothecary breathlessly told the king about the plot as he took his morning royal constitutional in the verdant splendour of St James’s Park on 13 August 1678. Charles was highly sceptical about the claims, even though Kirby emphasised that those who intended to shoot him dead could be easily identified. Furthermore, he claimed that in the event of this attempt failing, Sir George Wakeman, the queen’s own chief physician, would use a terrible poison to kill the king.
The lord high treasurer, Thomas Osborne, First Earl of Danby, a man renowned for his detestation of Catholics and opposition to any kind of religious toleration, did not share his monarch’s incredulity. Danby urged a full investigation of the allegations, despite the robust opposition of Williamson, who was only too well aware of Tonge’s bouts of insanity.
Oates duly appeared before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a Westminster magistrate of some repute, to swear his deposition, preparatory to a full audience with the king and Privy Council. He recalled attending a Jesuit meeting at the White Horse in the Strand on 24 April, where the efficacy of various methods to murder Charles was eagerly debated, including shooting, stabbing by itinerant Irish louts or poisoning by Wakeman.21
Then, on 12 October, the magistrate suspiciously disappeared without trace.
Five days later, his body was found face down in a muddy ditch at Primrose Hill, three miles (4.82 km) north of London. He had been strangled, his neck broken and, for good measure, his body had been impaled with his own sword – but this wound was inflicted some time after death, as there was no sign of bleeding. His money and rings had not been stolen, so there was little chance of robbery being the motive. His murder was immediately blamed on the Catholics and was used as proof of the truth of Oates’s wild claims.22
The fantasist’s associate, the convicted confidence trickster Captain William Bedloe, claimed the reward for tracking down Godfrey’s killer or killers by denouncing Miles Prance, a Catholic servant-in-ordinary to Queen Catherine of Braganza. Under the agony of torture, he named three labourers called Henry Berry, Robert Green and Lawrence Hill as the culprits, all in the pay of three Catholic priests.23 Although entirely innocent, they were found guilty and executed in February 1679 at the scene of the crime.24
It has also been suggested that Sir Robert Peyton may have been involved in Godfrey’s death. The justice of the peace was a member of the MP’s republican ‘gang’ and he may have been murdered because he had betrayed his fellow members, or, more opportunistically, merely to stir up hatred of Catholics.
The magistrate’s death certainly had that effect. Something approaching hysteria gripped the streets of London. Effigies of the pope were burnt by the angry mob. With revived memories of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Parliament ordered fruitless searches for non-existent explosives cunningly hidden in barrels within its cellars. Near panic ensued when it was discovered that a French physician called Choqueux was storing large quantities of black powder in a house near the Houses of Parliament. There were a few red faces when it transpired that he was no assassin but merely the king’s firework-maker.
More seriously, the House of Lords demanded that, for the sake of public safety and maintaining Londoners’ morale, all Catholics should be banished from an area within a radius of ten miles (16 km) around the capital and this proscription was imposed by the government on 30 October.
Thomas Blood had some dealings with Oates and Bedloe, but as he was always careful to cover his tracks, the evidence of his involvement is unclear. There is one contemporary report that he planned to destroy Oates’s credibility by planting treasonous letters amongst his personal papers to demonstrate that the fanatic had been recruited by the nonconformists to damage Catholic interests. But the incriminating documents were discovered and shown to Williamson, who passed them on to the Privy Council.25
Blood was also on the fringes of a Catholic ‘sham plot’ to discredit Bedloe as a witness and to point the finger at Buckingham and Anthony Ashley-Cooper (created First Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672), as the covert instigators of Oates’s ‘Popish Plot’.26 An Irish Catholic called James Netterville, formerly a clerk in Dublin’s Court of Claims and latterly one of Danby’s informers, had been imprisoned for seditious words he unwisely uttered in St James’s Park. After appearing before the Privy Council at the Palace of Whitehall, he did not improve his chances of winning liberty by brawling in the corridor outside the chamber. After a spell in Newgate jail, he ended up as a debtor in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark.
There, he met the Dubliner Captain John Bury in January 1679 and dropped heavy hints to him about the conspiracy to undermine the veracity of Bedloe’s testimony. If the good captain would help, he could expect a generous payment of up to £500 to make his efforts all the more worthwhile.27 Bury, who was a close friend of Blood’s, immediately passed on this information to the colonel, who told him to play along with Netterville and endeavour to discover where this substantial sum of money was emanating from. The liberal donor turned out to be one Russell, a servant to the French ambassador Paul Barillon, and Blood imparted this intelligence to Williamson.
Another version of events came in a ten-page letter in Latin, purportedly written by the Spanish priest James Salgado of Vine Street, near Hatton Garden, to his own father confessor. This described Netterville’s confession to Salgado in which he admitted being instructed to find someone who would swear that the Popish Plot was entirely the devious brainchild of Buckingham and Shaftesbury. Netterville ‘therefore bribed the man who stole the king’s crown to swear to this effect for £500 and the man revealed the whole matter to the king’s secretary’. The priest added: ‘I do not think [Netterville] is altogether innocent, but I leave him to God.’28
Getting wind of this scheming, Oates, Bedloe and Waller visited Netterville in the Marshalsea and browbeat him into revealing all he knew. This latest sham plot was thus neutralised. The prisoner was singularly unimpressed by Oates, who was ‘a villain’, and recalled bitingly that ‘he was always wanting money from the superior when he was a Jesuit [in Spain] . . .’.29
Eventually, Charles personally interrogated Oates. Such is the sagaciousness of monarchs, he triumphantly detected a litany of inaccuracies and lies in his testimony, and ordered his arrest. However, only days later, Parliament forced Oates’s release, and rewarded his patriotism by the provision of an apartment in the Palace of Whitehall and payment of a handsome annual pension of £1,200.
After nearly three years of public unrest and phobia about treasonous Catholics permeating all sections of society, at least fifteen innocent men had been executed. Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, became the last to be entrapped by Oates’s mesh of lies. He was accused in June 1681 of ‘promoting the Roman
faith’ and after only fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury brought in a guilty verdict. Plunkett was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 11 July, the last Catholic martyr to die in England.30
Oates at last received his richly deserved come-uppance. On 31 August, he was ordered to leave his grace-and-favour Whitehall apartment. Undeterred, he denounced the king and the Duke of York and was arrested, fined the huge sum of £100,000 and thrown into prison.31
Blood meanwhile was receiving some extraordinary signs of royal favour. In March 1679, he was sent for ‘early’ by Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, who had replaced Williamson as secretary of state the previous month. The minister had been instructed to tell the spy ‘that the king looked upon him as his friend and therefore sent for him to come to him [and] to communicate it to all his friends that his majesty would cast himself upon his Parliament’.32
It seemed that his reputation had reached a new pinnacle in the highest office in the land; but, unknown to him, Blood was now rapidly approaching his nemesis.
In January 1680, Jane Bradley, the barmaid of the St John’s Head or ‘Heaven’ tavern in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, asked him to call on her, as she believed there was a major conspiracy afoot against the government. She told him that ‘two shabby fellows’ had told her that ‘they had something of great consequence, in reference to the public welfare, to reveal but that they wanted a discreet person to manage it’. Blood told her that he would meet them and that she should pass on to them that ‘if there was anything fit to take notice of, he would bring them to those that had sufficient authority to take notice of it’.
The more suspicious among us might well believe this was some form of trap, or in modern parlance a ‘sting’. Blood probably shared this disquiet but treated it as an occupational hazard for a spy and informer.33
A meeting was arranged, but the two men, later identified as Samuel Ryther and Philemon Coddan, both Irish, fled when they saw Blood, ‘averring they would have nothing to do with him for that he was the Duke of Buckingham’s friend’. Jane Bradley went to Blood’s house in Westminster and told him the men were ‘rogues and trepans34 and advised him to seize them and carry them before a magistrate’.
The colonel had them up before a Middlesex justice called Dr Chamberlain, who was well known to Blood. Both claimed Buckingham owed them money and one said he was willing to swear that the duke was guilty of sodomy. The justice did not believe them and the matter was apparently forgotten.35
What Blood was stumbling into was a conspiracy to bring down Buckingham initiated by his enemies, notably Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. He had been languishing in the Tower since April 1679 after being impeached for corruption and embezzlement from the Treasury, exceeding his powers ‘in matters of peace and war’ and ‘traitorously concealing’ the Oates plot. That gossipy envoy Barillon believed that Buckingham had deliberately absented himself from Danby’s impeachment proceedings in the Lords because the earl had ‘threatened him with prosecution for sodomy’.36 So clearly the plot against him had been under way for some time; indeed, the previous February, Ossory – Ormond’s eldest son and no friend to Buckingham – had confided to Danby that he still cherished hopes ‘of procuring something very material’ against the proud and arrogant courtier.37
The chief protagonist in the plan was probably Edward Christian, Buckingham’s one-time chamberlain, who had been fired for stealing large sums of money from his master in 1673.38 He had worked for Danby for three years as his steward and was the ideal man to organise an assault on the duke’s reputation and to banish him from court. Blood had reviled Christian, from his time as Buckingham’s agent, to the stage of coldly refusing him ‘the civility of either drinking publicly or privately with him’.39 The feeling was mutual.
The heart and substance of the conspiracy was the accusation that Buckingham had sodomised a London gentlewoman called Sarah Harwood and had packed her off to France to preserve her silence and to prevent the scandal becoming public.
Buckingham’s reputation for violence was well known. He acknowledged that some had talked of his ‘cruel, insolent, injurious carriage to my inferiors’. There was the case of the ‘poor old fellow’ angrily beaten by the duke after the farmer had complained that he had trampled through his cornfield while hunting. ‘I protest that the story itself is wholly mistaken as some honest men, my servants that were present, are ready to witness . . . If breaking a hedge be so great a crime, I wonder what huntsmen can ever be innocent?’ he asked disingenuously. Buckingham also denied categorically that he was a poisoner, even though some who had crossed him – like the informer William Leving – had died by this silent means. The attempted sodomy charge was equally serious as it had remained, since Thomas Cromwell’s Buggery Act of 1533, a capital crime. Buckingham blithely, if not eloquently, denied the allegation: ‘There was mention made of my attempting a crime of so horrid a nature that it ought not to be named amongst Christians.
But for my innocency in this I can only call God to witness and rely upon the charity of all men . . . God knows I have much to answer for in the plain way but I never was so great a virtuoso in my lusts.40
Christian now had witnesses lined up, ready to testify that this was a wicked lie.
Philip Le Mar and his mother Frances Loveland were the first two. Le Mar was to claim that six years before Buckingham had committed buggery with him, although it was suggested that the Countess of Danby had offered him £300 to make the allegation.41 Coddan and Ryther were the others. All were unlikely to appear credible figures in the witness box.
Coddan and a fellow Irishman called Maurice Hickey, alias Higgins, had settled in Long Acre, near Covent Garden, where their heavy drinking and energetic arguments in Gaelic had aroused suspicions.42 The plan was for them to convince Ryther that, in return for a large bribe, he would swear that Buckingham had sodomised the woman. If this means of persuasion failed, he would sign a confession while drugged by some narcotic. Coddan was to become the second witness who would support Ryther’s allegations in court. Unfortunately, the star witness tended towards the mercurial: he agreed to testify one minute and refused the next. Another voice was necessary to steady Ryther on the difficult road to plausibility in court.
That man was Thomas Curtis, a cloth worker from Lancashire, who had earlier been briefly jailed because of his embroilment in another sham conspiracy, the so-called Meal-tub plot, named after the fact that incriminating documents had been hidden in the bottom of such a receptacle. He enjoyed an unenviable reputation for heavy drinking and, as most of his efforts to coerce the unwilling Ryther into giving evidence took place at the Crown in Ram Alley, south of Fleet Street,43 or the Bear tavern on the Southwark shore of the Thames near London Bridge,44 he must have relished his work.
Blood appeared at one of these meetings and pressed Coddan and Ryther about their testimony. He became persuaded that both could certainly have their day in court and would produce the required evidence.
However, both potential witnesses then suffered an attack of cold feet. Coddan promised Ryther that ‘we will do this rogue Blood’s business for him and get enough to swear against him by the time Sir William Waller comes to town’.45 The next meeting was at a tavern in Bloomsbury and Hickey was given a paper for both men to sign. He was instructed to offer them £300 in gold coins but to threaten to murder them if they did not make their marks on the document as signatures. Arriving first, Ryther heard the alternatives on offer, snatched up the paper and fled out into the darkness.
He and Coddan visited Buckingham’s lawyer, a Mr Whitaker, and told him what had transpired. Danby’s cat was unfortunately dragged out of the bag.
On 20 January 1680, Blood was summoned by Waller to a meeting at the Buffalo Head tavern in Westminster, near the Gatehouse prison, and confronted by Coddan and Ryther’s sordid tale of subornation. He was startled to see his would-be witnesses now smartly dressed ‘in a genteel equipage and à la mode accoutrements’. Also present a
t this meeting were Whitaker, Buckingham’s attorney, and the linen draper Francis Jenks, another of Buckingham’s radical activists. Blood tried to bluff his way out, but Whitaker urged him to be honest, just and confess. The colonel replied: ‘You have been these last two years employed to asperse me. Could you find no better invention than this?’ They pressed Waller for justice and the magistrate ‘very civilly’ asked the colonel to find bail.46
Blood resisted detention until 22 January when he met a constable at the upper end of King Street, Westminster, who told him he had a warrant for his arrest. Remarkably, they both went to the Dog tavern, alongside the Gatehouse, and over the next few hours had several drinks together. Waller meanwhile discovered the officer was armed only with a mittimus47 and hurriedly sent over a warrant as the constable was worried that it was in the power of Mr Blood ‘to bring me under great trouble for my inadvertency in the thing’48 by bringing action for false imprisonment. Addressed to ‘all constables’, the warrant read:
Whereas oath has been made by two witnesses that Colonel Thomas Blood has been a confederate in a late conspiracy of falsely accusing and charging his grace the Duke of Buckingham of sodomy and has refused to give bail for his appearance at the next general sessions to be held for the city and liberty of Westminster.
These are therefore to will and require that you seize and apprehend the said Colonel Thomas Blood and if he shall refuse to give in bail, to carry him and deliver him into the hand of Mr Church, keeper of the Gatehouse in Westminster, according to the tenor of the mittimus in your hands.49
Blood, in default of bail, was taken to prison.
The colonel, Christian, Curtis and Hickey were tried for blasphemy, confederacy and subornation in King’s Bench court and found guilty. They were fined and imprisoned. Later in May 1680, Le Mar and his mother were convicted of being suborned to swear sodomy against Buckingham.50 Le Mar had been made drunk and given drugs during the conspiracy and he was later to die from the effects of these narcotics in the Marshalsea prison.51 His mother was put into the pillory on 19 June, ‘where she was severely dealt with by the people throwing dirt and rotten eggs at her’.52 The attorney general, Sir Creswell Levinz, investigated the Le Mar case and the examining magistrate, called Barnsley, was removed from the commission of the peace for his ‘undue practices’.53
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 21