The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood

by Robert Hutchinson

  21 NAI, MS 12,816, f.35.

  22 Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood’ in ODNB, vol. 6, p.270. Other authorities suggest Blood was born ten years later, e.g. Montgomery-Massingberd (ed.), Burke’s Irish Family Records, p.142, but this seems unlikely.

  23 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.219.

  24 NAI, MS 12,816, f.21. A survey in 1654–6 indicated that Thomas Blood, ‘Protestant’, had held 220 acres (89 hectares) of land in Sarney since at least 1640. Robert Simington (ed.), Civil Survey 1654–6; County of Meath, vol. 5, p.126.

  25 Civil Survey 1654–6; County of Meath, vol. 5, p.129; NAI, MS 12,816, f.35.

  26 CSP Ireland 1666–9, P.88. NAI, MS 12,816, f.20 in an account dated 1791 also records 120 acres (48.5 hectares) in ‘Seatown and Beatown’ and 103 acres (41.3 hectares) in Westfieldstown, East Fingal. Glenmalure is a remote wooded valley in the Wicklow Mountains, with the River Avonbeg running through. It was the site of a battle on 25 August 1580 when an English force under Arthur Grey, Fourteenth Baron Grey of Wilton, was routed as they advanced to capture Balinacor, the stronghold of the rebel chieftain Fiach McHugh O’Byrne. See: Richard Brooks, Cassell’s Battlefield of Britain and Ireland (London, 2005), p.331–2.

  27 NAI, MS 12,816, f.35.

  28 The Irish Confederation rebellion is also known as the ‘Eleven Years War’.

  29 Frost, History and Topography of the County of Clare, pp.369–70.

  30 Tibbutt (ed.), Life and Letters of Sir Lewis Dyve 1599–1669, p.148. A Captain Blood was reported as serving in ‘the old King’s army under Sir Lewis Dyves’ in 1671 (BL Add. MS. 36,916 f.233) and a ‘Capt Bludd’ was noted as quartermaster in his regiment in the indigent officers’ list of 1663 (Anon., A List of Officers Claiming to the Sixty Thousand Pounds Granted by his Sacred Majesty . . ., p.39). However, Blood is absent in the published regimental lists of both the Royalist and parliamentary armies in 1642, so he must have rallied to the king’s colours after this date. See: Peacock (ed.), The Army Lists of the Roundheads and Cavaliers.

  31 Blood’s name does not appear in the brief account of the Sherborne siege by a parliamentary author. John Rylands Library, Manchester, Tatton Park MS 68.20, f.210.

  32 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.220.

  33 Also spelt ‘Rainsborough’.

  34 Paulden and Col. Morrison, wearing disguises, had gained entry to the fortress by fooling the parliamentary sentries and snatched control of Pontefract Castle on 3 June 1648.

  35 Bod. Lib. Clarendon MS 34, f.27v. ‘R.H.’ in his account of Blood’s life, maintained that Rainborowe had been ‘pistolled [shot] in his chamber’. See ‘Remarks . . .’, p.220. Rainborowe’s fellows in the Leveller faction (which advocated religious tolerance, extended suffrage and equality under the law) claimed that he had been assassinated on Cromwell’s orders. A subsequent investigation produced no evidence to support this allegation. Three thousand people took part in his funeral procession through the streets of the City of London before Rainborowe was buried at Wapping. Subsequent street pamphlets, such as Colonell Rainborowe’s Ghost, vociferously demanded revenge to be inflicted upon the royalists.

  36 The defeat at the Battle of Preston quashed any lingering hopes of a Royalist victory. Pontefract, the last cavalier stronghold, hung on grimly. After Charles I was executed, his son was proclaimed king within the besieged castle. This is the origin of Pontefract’s motto, Post mortem patris pro filio – ‘After the death of the father, support the son’. The 100 survivors of the garrison finally surrendered on 25 March 1649 and the castle was slighted.

  37 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.220. Blood’s entry in Andrew Kippis’ Biographia Britannica (vol. 2, p.817), written seven decades after his death, implies his involvement in the Rainborowe attempted kidnapping by pointing out that ‘he was in England’ in 1648 when the colonel ‘was surprised and killed at Pontefract’ [sic].

  38 Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.111.

  39 CSP Domestic 1671–2, p. 373; RCHM Sixth Report, p.370.

  40 John Rylands Library, Manchester, Tatton Park MS 68.20, f.210.

  41 Kippis, Biographia Britannia, vol. 2, p.817. For more information on those who switched allegiance, see Andrew Hopper’s Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil War (Oxford, 2012). A cornet is the most junior commissioned rank in a cavalry regiment.

  42 Cromwell remains a figure of intense odium in Ireland because of the sheer brutality of this campaign. Irish Catholic Confederate battlefield casualties probably totalled almost 20,000. After the fall of Drogheda, Cromwell commented: ‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’ In total, around 200,000 civilians died in the famine and in a bubonic plague pandemic that followed the fighting – although some authorities estimate that Ireland’s then population of 1.6 million was reduced by as much as half a million. In addition, 50,000 Irish were forcibly deported to the West Indies as indentured labourers. See: Sean O’Callaghan: To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dingle, Co. Kerry, 2000), p.85. The last Irish and Royalist troops surrendered in Co. Cavan in 1653.

  43 W. Johnson-Kaye & E. W. Wittenburg-Kaye (eds.), Register of Newchurch in the Parish of Culcheth: Christenings, Weddings and Burials, p.217.

  44 Off Holcroft Lane, Culcheth, Warrington, Lancashire. National Grid Reference: SJ 67979 95162. Postcode: WA3 4ND. Holcroft’s wife was the daughter of John Hunt of Lymehurst and his wife Margaret: BL Harley MS 2,161, f.158.

  45 Hanrahan, Colonel Blood . . ., p.14.

  46 An action for recovery of £200 debt was brought in 1367 in the Chancery Court against Thomas, son of John de Holcroft of Lancashire, by his creditor, Henry de Tildeslegh of Ditton [Widnes]. See: TNA, C/241/147/39; 17 February 1367.

  47 VCH Lancs, vol. 4, fn. p. 161.

  48 Manchester Archives MS L89/1/23/1.

  49 Douglas Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (London, 1954), p.234, and Browne Willis, Notitia Parliamentaria: Part II – A Series of Lists of the Representatives in the Several Parliaments held from the Reformation 1541 to the Restoration 1660, pp.229–39. Dissident troops under the command of Colonel Thomas Pride had forcibly removed opponents to their political aims. Some forty-five were imprisoned for a time, initially in a nearby tavern called ‘Hell’. It is difficult to determine how many MPs were prevented from sitting: there were 471 active members before the events of 6 December and 200 afterwards. Some eighty-six had absented themselves voluntarily and a further eighty-three were allowed back. The way had been cleared for Parliament to establish a Republic and to try the king for treason. Holcroft’s name does not appear on the list of those excluded but neither does it appear in the HoC Jnl reports of the proceedings of the Rump Parliament.

  50 Lancashire Civil War Tracts, pp.32–3; Lancashire Record Office MS DDX 2670/1.

  51 Lancashire Civil War Tracts, p.85.

  52 W. Johnson-Kaye & E. W. Wittenburg-Kaye (eds.), Register of Newchurch in the Parish of Culcheth: Christenings, Weddings and Burials, p.15.

  53 Montgomery-Massingberd, Irish Family Records, p.142.

  54 Kippis, Biographia Britannia, p.817.

  55 ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.219–20.

  56 Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.112.

  CHAPTER 1: CAPTURE THE CASTLE

  1 TNA, SP 63/313/168, f.346.

  2 The Commonwealth Parliament was perennially short of money to pay its troops. In 1646, it resolved to sell the gilded bronze effigy of Henry VIII that lay on top of the black marble sarcophagus marking his grave in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Around £600 for the statue was paid to ‘Colonel [Christopher] Whichcot, governor of Windsor Castle, to be by him employed for the pay of that garrison’. (In one of those delicious ironies of history, Henry had filched the sarcophagus from the unfinis
hed tomb of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey after his downfall in 1529 and the tomb-chest was recycled in 1808 for the huge monument to Nelson in St Paul’s Cathedral, where it remains today.) See Robert Hutchinson, Last Days of Henry VIII (London, 2005), pp.268–70.

  3 See C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–60, vol. 2, pp.598–603 (3 vols. London, 1911), for more information on this draconian legislation and pp.722–53 for the subsequent Act of Satisfaction. Under the so-called Adventurers’ Act, passed 19 March 1642, funds for the suppression of the Irish rebellion could be solicited from speculators. Anyone who invested £200 would receive 1,000 acres (404.7 hectares) of property confiscated from rebel landowners – or four shillings (twenty pence in modern English money), an acre. Cromwell subscribed £600.

  4 John Scott, an English traveller in the West Indies during the Commonwealth period, saw Irish labourers working in gangs in the fields, alongside black slaves ‘without stockings under the scorching sun’. He reported that the Irish were derided by ‘the negroes and branded with the epithet “white slaves’” (TNA, CO 1/21,1667, no. 170). See: Hilary Beckles, ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”: Irish indentured servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 47 (1990) pp.503–22. Irish traditions and heritage survive in the Caribbean – St Patrick’s Day is still celebrated as a national holiday in Montserrat, the only nation to do so outside Ireland.

  5 A star fort known as ‘Cromwell’s Barracks’, dating from this period, defends the harbour of Inishbofin.

  6 Sir William Petty (1623–87), who had leave of absence from his position as professor of anatomy at Brasenose College, Oxford, was paid £18,532 for his pains, but had to accept 30,000 acres near Kenmare, Co. Kerry, in lieu of the last £3,181 of his fee as, inevitably, Parliament’s treasury was bare.

  7 For full details of Blood’s holdings after the Down Survey and previous landowners, see the Trinity College, Dublin, website: http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/landowners.

  8 Irish House of Commons 14 & 15 Car 2 cap. 2.

  9 See: Wilson, ‘Ireland under Charles II’, p.79.

  10 The commissioners appointed were: Sir Richard Rainsford, Sir Thomas Beverley, Sir Edward Dering, Sir Edward Smith, Sir Allan Broderick, Winston Churchill and Colonel Edward Cooke, ‘all men of good parts, learned in the law and clear in their reputation for virtue and integrity’, Carte, Life of . . . Ormond, vol. 4, book 6, p.123.

  11 Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.114 and Greaves, God’s Other Children, p.21. Leckie is described in a number of sources as Blood’s ‘brother-in-law’, but we have no firm record of Blood having had a sister.

  12 Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood . . ., p.42.

  13 Lancashire Record Office MS, DDX 2670/1.

  14 TNA, E 134/1652/Mich2. Pursfurlong had been purchased by Sir John Holcroft in 1549 and it was sold in 1605 to Ralph Calveley but later reverted to the Holcrofts. See: VCH Lancs., vol. 4, pp. 159–60.

  15 Lancashire Record Office DP 397/25/4, f.4.

  16 Lancashire Record Office QSP/147/3.

  17 TNA, E 134/12Chas2/Mich6.

  18 TNA, E 134/13Chas2/East21 and E 134/13/Chas2/Trin6.

  19 13 & 14 Car 2 cap. 4.

  20 TNA, SP 63/313/230, f.465; 13 June 1663.

  21 Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.159.

  22 CSP Ireland 1663–65, pp. 22–7.

  23 Carte, Life of . . . Ormond, vol. 4, book 6, p.129.

  24 CSP Ireland 1663–65, p.31. The king to the commissioners, Whitehall, 28 February 1663.

  25 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.31. Ormond to the king, Dublin Castle, 7 February 1663.

  26 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 44, ff.708–9, with a fuller version in Carte MS 64, ff.392v–339v.

  27 Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, pp.140–41. Ludlow had been appointed lieutenant general of horse during Parliament’s war against the Irish Confederation. After Henry Ireton died in November 1651, he became commander in chief. During the bitter counter-insurgency campaign of 1651–2, Ludlow complained of his operations in the ninety-seven square miles (250 sq. km) of the Burren, Co. Clare, that it was ‘a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang him, nor earth enough to bury him’. A small portion of the area is now an Irish national park. Ludlow later became one of the four commissioners imposing the land seizures under the Act of Settlement of Ireland 1652. In September 1660 a proclamation ordered the apprehension of ‘Edmund Ludlow esquire, commonly called Col. Ludlow’; SAL Proclamations, vol. 13, 1660–06, f.27.

  28 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.448. Vernon was told of the conspiracy by an unidentified correspondent, a member of the Pigott family (?Thomas Pigott, an Irish MP) in a letter of 11 March: ‘I suppose you will hear from others of the late design of surprising the castle here by some fanatic. The design was desperate and would have been bloody in its execution for most as yet observed to be engaged in it were formerly officers and since discontented tradesmen. Every day makes new discoveries so that many know not and most fear where it will end.’ Addressed to Colonel Edward Vernon ‘at Mr Henry Nutings, his house in Plow Yard, in Fetter Lane, London’. CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.37.

  29 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.446; in cipher with decoded text interleaved. Minute in the hand of Sir George Lane, Irish Secretary. Dublin Castle, 4 March 1663.

  30 HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 2, p.251.

  31 Abbott, ‘English Conspiracy and Dissent 1660–74’, p.519.

  32 Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, book 6, pp.124–5.

  33 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 143, ff.96–7; Dublin Castle, 7 March 1663.

  34 On 30 January 1649 Hewlett was the officer in charge of the troops providing security at the execution of Charles I. After the restoration of the monarchy, he was convicted for his part in the king’s beheading but was not executed with the two other officers who were found guilty at the same time – Daniel Axtell and Francis Hacker. Another prisoner in Dublin Castle was Henry Porter, who had been locked up for two years, charged with being one of the two disguised and masked executioners of Charles I in Whitehall in 1649. On 29 April, Ormond and his Irish Council wrote to Secretary Bennet pointing out that if he was on the scaffold, ‘he should be tried in England and he is clamouring for a habeas corpus’ – a court appearance to free him without charge. They added: ‘We are anxious for his majesty’s direction in the matter’ (TNA, 63/313/120, f.243). The issue was apparently ignored in Whitehall. The public executioner at the time of Charles’s death was Richard Brandon (son of Gregory Brandon, the common hangman), who had beheaded Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford in 1641 and Archbishop Laud in 1645. Initially, he reportedly refused to behead the king, but was persuaded otherwise and was paid £30, all in half-crowns, within an hour of the execution – and was given a handkerchief taken from the king’s pocket and an orange, which he sold for £10 at his home in Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel. Brandon died on 20 June 1649 and was buried at Whitechapel. See: H.V. Morton, In Search of London (London, 1951) pp. 198–9. In 1813, the vault in St George’s Chapel, Windsor containing the body of Charles I was opened and it was confirmed that the king had been decapitated with one clean strike – surely the work of an experienced executioner.

  35 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.34.

  36 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.37.

  37 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.442; Dublin Castle, 18 March 1663.

  38 ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 3, p.67; 20 March 1663. A token from a coffee house at the west end of St Paul’s is described in Boyne’s Trade Tokens issued in Seventeenth-century London, ed. G.C. Williamson (2 vols., London, 1889) vol. 1, p.736.

  39 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.51.

  40 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.51. Ormond to the king, 28 March 1663. Later, he told Charles that he had found out no more about the earlier plot. ‘There certainly was one and if I decided to let it come to a head, as one of my spies [? Alden] suggested, I might have made great discoveries. But Parliament was sitting at the time in very ill humour and there were many dangerous p
eople in Dublin and I did not care to let the game go so long’; CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.83. Ormond to the king, 8 May 1663.

  41 The mythical circular island of Brasil or Hy-Brasil, rumoured to be located in the Atlantic Ocean, west of Ireland, was said to be cloaked in magical mists which cleared for only one day in seven years, the only time it could be seen by sailors. In 1674 Captain John Nisbet claimed to have seen it, finding it inhabited only by giant black rabbits and a solitary sorcerer who lived alone in a stone castle. Porcupine Bank, a rocky shoal in the Atlantic about 120 miles (200 km) west of Ireland, which was charted in 1862, has been suggested as the site of Hy-Brasil.

  42 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.47. In fact, the ship had Colonel Henry Pretty, former parliamentary governor of Carlow, on board, who was also under suspicion of involvement in the conspiracy. The ship escaped from Limerick but was captured in mid-May while hiding among the Aran Islands off Ireland’s west coast. Ludlow was not on the ship. See: Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.141.

  43 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 34, f.674r – ‘Advice of Incidents in Ireland’. The information was sent anonymously to Ormond.

  44 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 143, f.128–31. Ormond to the king, 8 May 1663.

  45 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, ff.51–2. Bennet to Ormond, Whitehall, 15 May 1663.

  46 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.188.

  47 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.111.

  48 HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 2, p.252.

  49 ‘Veitch & Brysson Memoirs’, appendix 9, pp.508–9.