Sir William Waller was also sacked as a magistrate for similar irregularities and misdemeanours and he later fled to Holland.
Buckingham meanwhile was intent on vengeance against his erstwhile employee Blood. He brought an action for defamation – a civil suit for scandalum magnatum – against the colonel, Christian and Curtis claiming £10,000 damages.54 The jury found for Buckingham.
Blood was growing desperate. Whenever a situation becomes especially fraught, one calls in favours from every quarter, so on 14 July he sent his son Charles to see James, Duke of York, to seek his royal intercession on his behalf. The next day, Blood wrote to the duke politely thanking him for ‘the great favour’ in granting the audience and asking if his brother the king would order the Treasury to pay his salary, which ‘Lord Sunderland has often done without effect’. The hard-pressed colonel could not possibly find the wherewithal for a bail payment and he wondered if the king ‘would encourage some to [stand] bail for me’.
He was becoming ever more frustrated by Whitehall’s bureaucratic ineptitude. ‘You ordered my son to go to Sir Leoline Jenkins [appointed secretary of state in April 1680] to understand what instructions he had from the king concerning me – and he said he knew not a word of it.
I therefore humbly beg that I may not be left in this cause to fall, which is because I keep the Commonwealth party in awe and broke the neck of Sir William Waller.
I intend to have a habeas corpus today and to put in bail before Judge Dolben.55
If you can favour me with any interest in him, it will be my great advantage.56
The ever-dilatory Treasury still failed to come up with his salary and three days later Blood, frustrated and fuming, wrote to Jenkins with a frantic plea for his immediate assistance.
I have been left destitute of the usual supply of money from the court and tantalised from day to day and week to week . . . [The] lords of the Treasury have promised me from three days to three days the payment of that £60057 which the king allowed me for my salary to enable me to do his business. [This has] all ended in words, [so] they may be effectively spoken to.
Next I desire an immediate supply of thirty or forty guineas to bear the charges of my disentanglement for I am quite destitute, having pawned my [silver] plate. I would also entreat you to encourage some persons to be bail for me.
Blood was writing from within the walls of the Gatehouse prison in Westminster. The sheriff’s officers would not acknowledge or accept ‘his privilege’ and dragged him off into the prison, leading to a complaint about his treatment being made to the king. Blood angrily maintained that Buckingham and the Commonwealth party had spent £10,000 ‘to get me out of their way, knowing I have been a check on their disloyal actions these nine years and remain so still’. Having got the ‘better of them as to the criminal part of the cause, in spite and envy, they arrest me in an action for £10,000, supposing that sum was so great that it would fright any tradesman from bailing me’.58
He received his writ of habeas corpus on 21 July and removed himself to the King’s Bench prison for debtors in Southwark.59 Happily he was bailed the following morning. Some well-disposed individual put up a surety for his release (did the money come from secret service funds?) and he was freed, amid voluble protests that he had been illegally proceeded against.60
When Blood was incarcerated in the Tower, following his abortive attempt to steal the Crown Jewels, a small book of his was confiscated by his jailers. The original is now lost but a copy is preserved in the Pepys papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.61 It seems to have been compiled during Blood’s more ruminative moments while still in captivity or just after being released in 1671 – there is one line on the first page that mentions ‘my son who is wont [to be known] by the name of Thomas Hunt, now a prisoner in the Tower’.62
Under the heading ‘Deliverances since I was for the Lord’s cause’, his seventy escapes from arrest or danger are listed for the period 1663–71, annoyingly with a frustrating lack of detail. These include his adventures in Dublin after the coup attempt (‘I escaped when most were taken’), boarding a ship ‘when none knew me’ and arriving at a port where he was well known; eluding capture when visiting his mother-in-law in Lancashire and again during his wanderings around Manchester and being pursued by a pack of dogs.
His exploits also included being ‘a prisoner [in] Zeeland’ and escaping arrest in Bishopsgate Street during the Great Fire of London. There are other escapades, the circumstances of which we can sadly only guess at: ‘my swimming’; ‘the guard at the bridge’ the ‘Life Guard man’; ‘from friends at Ipswich’ and being ‘taken by a constable at Essex’. His rescue of Captain Mason is probably covered by the entries: ‘from the trepan beyond Newark’; ‘from them in the little hours’; ‘in the battle’; ‘Leving confession’ and being ‘healed of my wounds’. Even after going into semiretirement as a quack apothecary, he faced ‘discovery at Romford’; ‘a design by some to cast me off’ and from ‘discontented friends’. There was also another deliverance at the ‘Bull in the Strand’.63
Interleaved in these notes are two entries referring to his son’s decision to take to a life of crime, clearly a source of great disappointment to his father: ‘my son’s wickedness – this was Hunt’s robbing on ye highway’ and ‘My son’s being stopped and coming before [Justice] Keeling’. Were these deliverances or trials?64
All these feats created the absolute certainty in Blood’s mind that he should never ‘forsake the cause of God for any difficulties’. His notes also contain twenty-two one-line moral and religious tenets for life that he plainly tried to adhere to and which also indicate Blood’s belief in the existence and power of Providence (which had served him so badly at the Martin Tower). These included: ‘To [spend] each day in serious consideration of my interest in Christ and what he has done’; ‘To avoid disputing or crossing in discourse or undervaluing of persons in religious or civic things’ and ‘To labour to be content with my condition, considering nothing comes by chance’. These precepts also urged his avoidance of strong wine and drink and any ‘recreations or pomps or excess in apparel . . . quibbling or joking . . . all obscene and scurrilous talk’. There were also three rules, very pertinent to the uncertain life of a spy: ‘To be faithful in trust remitted and wary to whom I commit it’; ‘Not to reveal secrets’ and ‘Not to break engagements’. Blood was clearly a deeply religious man, inclined to searing self-analysis and the need to discover some pattern in his life and personal objectives, laid down by God Himself.65
The colonel needed that religious belief and fortitude now, as never before. He returned to his home on the corner of Great Peter and Tufton streets in Westminster and here ‘reflected upon his condition, both as to his personal reputation and the interests of his family’.
His faithful wife Mary was already dead, as was his eldest son, Thomas. His two daughters were prosperously married and his other sons were gainfully engaged in careers in the service of the king. But Blood’s standing in society had been ‘extremely blasted’ by the ‘malice of enemies’ and was ruined by the failure of his debtors to reimburse him – a particular blow when he was faced with having to pay a gigantic bill for damages to Buckingham.
Blood could not now see any means of ‘getting out of the mire by his former methods of contriving and daring’. In the past, he had ‘trusted to his hands’ and his sagacity to rescue him in any emergency but now he realised he was completely ‘manacled’.
These ‘dismal thoughts’ degenerated into ‘a pensive melancholy’ and this, combined with the hot weather of the season, caused a ‘fatal, though not violent distemper’ – a disturbed condition of the mind.
His sickness lasted fourteen days and throughout this period Blood was visited by his loyal friends and a Presbyterian minister who found him in a ‘sedate temper as to the concerns of his soul’ and not ‘startled by the apprehension of approaching death’. Blood told him he had set his thoughts in order and ‘was ready and willi
ng to obey, when it pleased God to give him the last call’. These were the only words he uttered, as he seemed unwilling to talk to his other visitors, and the only noises he made were ‘involuntary sighs’ between increasingly frequent spells of sleep. On the Monday before his death, he was struck speechless and barely able to move, presumably having suffered a stroke, and his breathing grew ever more laboured.
On Monday, 22 August he dictated his last will and testament, ‘being at the time sensible of the frailty and mortality of man’ and afflicted by ‘a weariness of body’. Blood therefore bequeathed his soul ‘into the hands of almighty God . . . in full assurance of that blessed resurrection held forth in the Holy Scriptures’ and his body ‘to the earth from whence it came’.
As a debtor, the terms of his will were necessarily curtailed. Long gone were the halcyon days of riches and affluence, with Blood strutting arrogantly around town dressed in the latest fashions and wearing the finest periwig. His ‘small temporal estate’ now consisted only of the simple goods and chattels that he still possessed. Everything else of value had been pawned or disposed of. Those items ‘capable of being sold’ were to be turned into cash immediately and the proceeds were to be divided equally into three parts. His daughters Mary and Elizabeth were to receive one part each and the third was to be shared by his three surviving sons Holcroft, William and Charles and his daughter-in-law, the widow of Thomas Blood junior. The only bequest outside the family was the twenty shillings (£1) to be paid ‘to my old friend John Fisher’. His executors were named as ‘my faithful and loving friends’ Robert Blakeys, of London, clerk, and Thomas Lisle of Westminster, ‘not doubting their old friendship and kindness in undertaking’ these duties. The will was witnessed by Sarah [?Frend] and John Ward, Blood’s servant.66
An inventory of his remaining goods and chattels in May the following year lists the items left in each room of his house: ‘the dining room’; ‘the little parlour and entry’; ‘the little chamber backward’ and the like. There was precious little remaining: a few chairs, a leather jack (a jug for beer), some hangings, a chopping knife and some brass candlesticks in the kitchen, a bedstead, blankets and some rugs. All in all, they were valued at £300 14s 2d, which was probably more than Blood realised.67
At three o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, 24 August, Colonel Thomas Blood died. He was aged sixty-two.
After a life of striving to ‘make a noise in the world’ by assiduously courting popular notoriety and infamy, his passing was marked more by a pathetic whimper than the anticipated bang.
Or was it? One last event that caught the public’s imagination marked his demise.
The old colonel would have been gratified that lurid rumours about his death swept London. Some gossips maintained that he had used a ‘narcotic and stupefying’ drug to hasten his end, but his contemporary biographer believed this was a harsh judgement on a man ‘who had the courage not to despair in the worst circumstances of life and far less should be thought to do it on a deathbed of no painful sickness’. Others claimed he died a devout Catholic after a last-gasp conversion. This again was untrue: ‘It would be needless to produce the testimonies of persons beyond exception who were constantly with him in his sickness to refute this . . . calumny raised by those enemies of his’.68 At least Blood did not die alone and friendless.
Two days later Blood was ‘decently interred’ a few hundred yards away from his home in the chapel in Tothill Fields69 near the grave of his wife.
If he had pious hopes of a joyful resurrection awaiting him, these were realised sooner than he could have wished.
As we saw at the beginning, there was much talk that his final illness, death and burial were nothing more than another trick to throw off his enemies and avoid paying Buckingham his punitive damages. Some people testified that they had seen him alive and well in his familiar haunts in Westminster and the Palace of Whitehall. Was his apparent death nothing but a devious ‘farce and piece of pageantry to carry on some design’ planned by Blood? Such was the pitch of excitement in London that the authorities decided the only way to scotch such uncontrolled speculation was to exhume Blood’s body, to prove, once and for all, that he was truly dead.
Accordingly, the grave was reopened on the following Thursday. A coroner and jury from Westminster – made up of twenty-three honest citizens who knew him in life – were convened in an inquest to view the disinterred and odorous body.
Such civic duties can never be pleasant and this was particularly gruesome. After six days below ground in that warm season, the jurymen were horrified to find his ‘face so altered and swollen’ and so ‘few lineaments and features of their old acquaintance’ remaining that they were unable to recognise the corpse formally, or even informally. An army captain was called in who maintained, under oath, that the thumb of the cadaver’s left hand demonstrated conclusively that this was Blood’s body. All who knew him had ‘taken notice’ of this distinguishing feature which had grown ‘to a prodigious bigness’ after an old injury. However, this was not enough to convince the sceptical jury and no verdict was returned.70
The body was decently returned to its grave, although some reports long afterwards suggested that the colonel was reburied not in Tothill Fields, but in the graveyard of St Andrew’s parish church in Hornchurch, Essex. Alongside the church on the High Street side is an anonymous grave marked only by a weather-beaten and effaced slab bearing a skull and crossbones which is pointed out as that of Blood. Despite Hornchurch’s proximity to his old stomping ground in Romford, this seems highly unlikely.
A number of satirical broadsheets marking his death were quickly published by those wanting to capitalise on the end of someone quite so infamous. The seventy-six lines of doggerel verses An Elegy on Colonel Blood, Notorious for Stealing the Crown, rushed out by J. Shorter only six days after Blood’s death, began with the damning:
Thanks, ye kind fates for your last favour shown
Of stealing BLOOD who lately stole the Crown
We’ll not exclaim so much against you since
As well as BEDLOE you have fetched him hence,
He who has been a plague to all mankind
And never was to anyone a friend . . .
and ended with the suggestion that this should be his epitaph:
Here lies the man who boldly has run through
More villainies than ever England knew
And nere to any friend he had was true
Here let him then by all unpitied lie
And let’s rejoice his time was come to die.71
Unkind words indeed.
Perhaps a more appropriate epitaph would be the summary of his life written by Richard Halliwell, his contemporary biographer, who generously declared that Blood never pursued
mean . . . and sneaking actions that leave an indelible character of ignominy upon those who would be thought gentlemen when they tread in the steps of villains.
He was indeed for forbidden game, but never on the king’s highway, always in royal parks and forests. Crowns, sceptres and government were his booty and the surprising of castles and viceroys his recreation.
His exploits, he wrote, were ‘to live in story for [their] strangeness, if not by the success of his attempts’.72
They do indeed. His arrogance and daring were spellbinding, particularly so as, despite the plaudits of his former accomplice, he rarely enjoyed any real success in his adventures. Some might see the colonel as a psychologically flawed attention-seeker, perhaps wholly narcissistic, as the symptoms of this personality disorder apparently include an exaggerated sense of one’s own abilities and achievements, a constant need for affirmation and a sense of entitlement and expectation of special treatment. When examining his exploits, these may sound uncannily familiar.
But aside from the complexities of his psychology, a strong case can also be made that his primary motivation was a volatile mix of religious fervour, a sense of injustice and the burning need for vengeance – like so ma
ny others in seventeenth-century Britain. However, the colonel stands out as a different kind of desperado to those grim-faced fanatics that populated his twilight world of espionage and treachery in Dublin and London.
Unlike them, Blood was an eccentric gambler who was never daunted by the odds that fate threw up against him and who took a rash delight in staging an outrage purely for its own sake. In his turbulent career, Blood tried to assassinate viceroys, rescue friends and stole the unthinkable (or unattainable) just because the challenges were perceived as too great by other mere mortals. What drove him on was the same irrepressible motivation that later forced people to climb mountains purely because they were there.
Fame was his spur.
He ranks high in the pantheon of true adventurers, with his escapades frequently the excited talk of three kingdoms. His colourful, madcap exploits enliven and enrich the pages of seventeenth-century British history. We remain amazed by his daredevil audacity, his astonishing effrontery and smile at his harum-scarum escapes from the hand of destiny.
Although the governments of Ireland and England of the time would disagree, thank God he was there.
Epilogue
Most dangerous conspiracies are still carrying on against your person and interest, [made] far more general and dangerous . . . by the incredible numbers of the commonalty and gentry of both city and country.
Charles Blood to James, Duke of York, 16811
George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, was finally restored to Charles II’s favour in 1684 but his enjoyment of this royal approval was short-lived as the king died on 6 February the following year, a few days after suffering an apoplectic fit. After the accession of the Duke of York as James II of England and James VII of Scotland, the old schemer returned briefly to public life, diligently attending routine parliamentary business and writing A Short Discourse on the Reasonableness of Man’s having a Religion in 1685, a pamphlet that advocated greater religious freedom for both Catholics and Protestants.
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 22