11 Morland’s Brief discourse containing the nature and reason of intelligence, Egmont Papers vol. 214, BL Add MSS 47,133, ff.8–13.
12 A seventeenth-century description of Morland’s ‘speaking trumpet’ was sold at Sotheby’s in London on 4 November 1969, lot. 260.
13 See: Susan E. Whyman, Postal Censorship in England; HMC ‘Finch’, vol. 2, p.265; HMC ‘Downshire’, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp.594–5.
14 A customs officer who boarded and inspected ships on arrival and collected the dues on their cargoes.
15 BL Egerton MSS 2,539, f.101.
16 There was a private entrance to Bennet’s and Williamson’s offices from the privy garden of the palace. Otherwise, a visitor would have to enter from the Stone Gallery through an outer door into a porch, guarded by a door-keeper. See: Marshall, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson and the Conduct of Administration in Restoration England’, HR, vol. 69, pp.21–2.
17 Was one safe house the home of the astronomer Sir Paul Neale (1613–86)? He received £38 from secret funds for his ‘lodging in Whitehall’ from 23 November 1678 to 31 July 1679. Neale had become MP for Newark in 1673 but because the election was contested, he was not allowed to take his seat in the Commons and the vote was declared void in 1677. See Akerman (ed.), Moneys received and paid for Secret Services of Charles II and James II from 30 March 1679 to 25 December 1688, p.5. Williamson had his own house in Scotland Yard, off Parliament Street.
18 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.160.
19 Expenditure on Britain’s three intelligence agencies – the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) the Security Service (MI5) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the equivalent of the USA’s National Security Agency) – is contained in the ‘Single Intelligence Account’ which totalled £1.9 billion in 2014–15, plus a further £123 million for cyber-security funding. For security reasons, the individual budgets of the agencies are not published.
20 BL Add. MS. 28,077, f.139. The hearth tax was imposed in 1662–89 and involved a householder paying one shilling (5 pence) for every hearth or stove twice a year, at Michaelmas (25 September) and on Lady Day (25 March). In 1674, John Cecil, Fifth Earl of Exeter, had to pay for seventy hearths in Burghley House, at Stamford, Lincolnshire.
21 Akerman (ed.), Moneys received and paid for Secret Services of Charles II and James II from 30 March 1679 to 25 December 1688, pp. x and 7.
22 RCHM Fifteenth Report, appendix, pt. 7, p.170.
23 Book of Daniel, chapter 2, verse 44.
24 Book of Revelations, chapter 13, verses 17–18.
25 At least they were consistent in the vilification of their rulers: Cromwell, they declared, had been a Babylonian tyrant.
26 Samuel Pepys records in his Diary for 9 January 1661: ‘Waked in the morning about six o’clock by people running up and down . . . talking that the fanatics were up in arms in the City. So I rose and went forth, where in the street I found everybody in arms at the doors. So I returned (though with no good courage . . .) and got my sword and pistol, [for] which I had no powder to charge . . .’. The next day, he was horrified to hear that the ‘fanatics . . . have routed all the Trained Bands [London militia] that they met with, put the king’s life guards to the run, killed about twenty men . . . and all this in the daytime when all the City was in arms’. ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 1, pp.298–9.
27 Capp, ‘A Door of Hope Re-opened: the Fifth Monarchy, King Charles and King Jesus’, Jnl of Religious History, vol. 32, pp.16–30. For more information on the Fifth Monarchists, see Capp’s The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth century English Millenarianism (London, 1977) and Champlin Burrage, ‘The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections’, EHR, vol. 25, pp.741–3.
28 The first issue of the newspaper, on 7 November 1665, was published under the title Oxford Gazette, as the court had fled to that city because of the epidemic of bubonic plague raging in London. It reported that the ‘bill of mortality’ (or death toll) in London that week was 1,359, of which 1,050 were from plague – a decrease of 428. It became the London Gazette on 5 February 1666.
29 ‘Magalotti, Relazione,’ pp.44–5.
30 ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 3, pp.30–31. 6 February 1663.
31 ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 5, p.223. 1 March 1666.
32 ‘Evelyn Diary’, vol. 2, p.300.
33 ‘Magalotti, Relazione,’ p.44, although the Italian’s estimate was probably exaggerated. See also Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.36 and, by the same author, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson’, ODNB, vol. 59, pp.352–6 and ‘Sir Joseph Williamson and the Conduct of Administration in Restoration England’, HR, vol. 69, pp.18–41.
34 B. L. Egerton MS 2,539, ff.142–3. For details of the pay of the secretaries of state, see F. M. Greir Evans, ‘Emoluments of the Principal Secretaries of State in the seventeenth century’, EHR, vol. 35, pp.513–28.
35 Marshall, ‘Henry Bennet, first earl of Arlington, ODNB, vol. 5, p.102.
36 Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.174.
37 Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, pp.178–9.
38 For more information on the northern rebellion, see Gee, ‘A Durham and Newcastle plot in 1663’, Archaeologia Aeolian, third s., vol. 14 (1917), pp.145–56 and Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Plot, 1663’, Yorkshire Archaeological Jnl, vol. 31 (1932–4), pp.348–59, who notes that the fears of Whitehall officials seemed to have ‘caused something in the nature of a panic which were not justified’ (pp.358–9). For the grisly fate of some of those caught up in the northern rebellion, see Raine, J. (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York relating to Offences Committed in the Northern Counties . . ., Surtees Society, vol. 40.
39 CSP Domestic 1663–4, p.652.
40 Marshall, ‘William Leving’, ODNB, vol. 33, p.345. Jones was the author of the radical underground pamphlet verbosely titled ‘Mene Tekel or the Downfall of Tyranny wherein liberty and equity are vindicated, and tyranny condemned by the law of God and right reason, and the people’s power and duty to execute justice without and upon wicked governors, asserted by Laophilus Misotyrannus’. This angry, seditious document, published earlier in 1663, argued that kings were the servants of the people, were set up by the people and therefore could be removed by the people. With memories of the bloody fate of Charles I still fresh, it was inevitable that its publication touched a raw nerve in the Restoration government.
41 Lambert (1619–84) was accused of high treason at the Restoration and spent the last twenty-four years of his life a prisoner, firstly in the Channel Island of Guernsey and latterly on Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound where he died in March 1674.
42 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.156.
43 TNA, SP 29/97/41, f.54; Sir Roger Langley to Bennet, 3 April 1664. SP 29/97/201, f.32; Sir Roger Langley to Secretary Bennet, York, 23 April 1664.
44 TNA, SP 29/97/75, f.130. One of the earliest documented examples of a career as an informer in England was George Whelplay, a London haberdasher, who conceived the idea after being sent to Southampton to investigate the customs service in the port, by Henry VIII’s enforcer, Thomas Cromwell. See G.R. Elton, ‘Informing for Profit: A Sidelight on Tudor Methods of Law Enforcement’, Cambridge Hf, vol. 11 (1954), pp.149–67. Elton points out that Whelplay received ‘precious little out of bustling activity which, despite its essentially sordid air, had not a little of the pathetic about it’.
45 CSP Domestic 1663–4, p.629.
46 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.221. If this story is true, Blood must have met de Rutyer before his departure in early May on a naval expedition to the coast of West Africa where he recaptured some of the Dutch slave stations briefly held by the English. He then crossed the Atlantic to raid English colonies in North America. In April 1665, de Rutyer was in Barbados.
47 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.222.
48 TNA, SP 29/102/48, f.57.
49 TNA, SP 29/102/49, f.59. Order by the commissioners for the repair of the Tower of London; 12 September 1664.
50 CSP Ireland 1663–3, p.459. Major
Rawdon to Viscount Conway, Lisburn, 20 December 1664.
51 TNA, SP 29/121/131, f.175. List of thirty-one disaffected persons in London.
52 CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.259. Williams to Secretary Bennet, 18 March 1665.
53 CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.259. Williams to Secretary Bennet, 18 March, 1665.
54 The alias of the Fifth Monarchist Captain Edward Carey, who escaped from a messenger (an arresting officer) in 1664.
55 CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.259. Williams and John Betson to Sir Roger Langley, London, 18 March 1665.
56 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.158. Petty France was so called because of the number of French merchants who lived there. The street was later renamed York Street.
57 This was probably the chamber mentioned during the interrogation of William Ashenhurst, a prisoner in the White Lion prison in Southwark. He said the conspirators ‘sometimes stayed there all night and some bring arms [and] looking through the keyhole, he heard them in earnest discourse [about] something to be done’ the following April (TNA, SP 29/115/44, f.124). The White Lion was one of four prisons located between Newcomen Street and St George’s church on the east side of Borough High Street, Southwark, the others being the King’s Bench and Marshalsea (both dating back to the fourteenth century) and the House of Correction.
58 Blood’s notebook suggests that the court martial was held there (Bod Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, ff.473–5). Coleman Street runs from Gresham Street to London Wall and a congregation of Anabaptists was active there during this period. Swan Lane was also a known haunt of Fifth Monarchists. (See: Champlin Burrage, ‘The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections’, EHR, vol. 25, pp.724–5.
59 ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.222–3; Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.183.
60 The winter of 1664/5 was particularly cold, with the ground frozen from December to March and the River Thames twice blocked to river traffic by thick ice.
61 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.161–2; CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.271.
62 TNA, SP 29/103/21, f.13.
63 Marshall, ‘William Leving’, ODNB, vol. 33, p.545. The earliest cases occurred in the spring of 1665 in a parish outside the city walls called St Giles-in-the-Fields. The death rate began to rise during the summer months and peaked in September when 7,165 Londoners died in one week.
64 Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, f.474.
65 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.101. Browne was involved in the Dublin Castle plot, liaising between ‘the fanatics of England and Ireland’.
66 The French periwig or ‘peruke’ became fashionable for men of high social standing after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. Wearing the wig, which had shoulder-length or longer human hair, had its own problems. Pepys, in his Diary for 18 July 1664, noted: ‘Thence to Westminster to my barber’s [Mr Jervas] to have my periwig [that] he lately made me cleansed of its nits which vexed me cruelly that he should put such a thing into my hands.’ (vol. 4, p.178).
67 CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.662. Orrery to Secretary Arlington, Dublin, 8 November 1665.
68 The naval war against the United Provinces of the Netherlands was fought between 4 March 1665 and 31 July 1667. The Royal Navy won an initial victory at the Battle of Lowestoft on 13 June 1665 and although both sides claimed victory in the so-called ‘Four Days Battle’ of 1–4 June 1666, the English ships suffered considerable damage. After the Dutch had blockaded the Thames estuary, the St James’s Day Battle (25 July 1666) off Kent’s North Foreland was another victory for the English fleet. When fighting resumed in the spring of 1667 the Dutch sailed into the Thames and destroyed warships in the River Medway in one of the most humiliating defeats suffered by the Royal Navy.
69 TNA, SP 29/147/115, f.147.
70 This area, once in the suburbs of Dublin, surrounds a small valley with a tributary of the River Poddle, otherwise known as the Coombe Stream. In the late seventeenth century it was the centre of the local weaving or clothing industry.
71 TNA, SP 63/320/45, f.1. Earl of Orrery to Ormond, Charleville, Co. Cork, 12 February 1666. Charleville was founded by Orrery in 1661 and named after Charles II.
72 TNA, SP 63/320/45, f.2. ?Dame Dorcas Lane to her husband, Sir George Lane, 8 February 1666.
73 Was this Blood’s little joke? Morton was the name of an assiduous London magistrate.
74 In April 1662, the canton of Berne granted Ludlow protection for him to live in the area.
75 Blood’s notebook records him being ‘a prisoner in Zeeland’. Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185 f.473v. entry no. 39.
76 Phelps (c. 1619–after 1666) was clerk of the high court trying Charles I for his life. At the Restoration, he escaped prosecution. He lived in exile in Lausanne and Vevey, Switzerland. A black marble monument to his memory was erected in the Swiss Reformed church of St Martin, Vevey, in 1882 by William Phelps of New Jersey, American ambassador to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Dr Charles A. Phelps of Massachusetts, ‘descendants from across the seas’.
77 TNA, SP 9/32/313. Williamson’s address book.
78 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.201–2 and, by the same author, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, HJ, vol. 32, pp.576–8.
79 CSP Ireland 1666–9, p.80. Ormond to Arlington, Dublin Castle, 2 April 1666. The matter had taken some time to reach this stage: Captain Barnes had petitioned Ormond to become custodian of Blood’s lands in February 1664 (Bod. Lib. Carte MS 159, ff.175 and 175v).
80 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 43, f.505. The king to Ormond, Whitehall, 11 April 1666. TNA, SP 63/320/129, f.2.
81 Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, Hf, vol. 32, p.576; TNA, 84/180/62, intercepted letter from Ludlow.
82 All three were executed in London on 19 April 1662. At the Restoration, Downing had been rewarded for his loyalty by the grant of land adjoining St James’s Park which became Downing Street.
83 Blood’s opinion of Ludlow appears in A Modest Vindication, p.2.
84 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, ff.357. Arlington to Ormond, Whitehall, 26 August 1666.
85 TNA, SP 29/168/148, f.148. Grice to [Williamson], 24 August 1666. Grice clearly had been involved on the periphery of the Dublin Castle plot, as he named seven of its conspirators (including Lieutenant Colonel Jones, late governor of the castle) on condition the promise to him that he would not be called as a witness was kept. Grice, a former parliamentary cavalry cornet, had spied for Sir Arthur Heselrige, governor of Newcastle, during the Civil War. See: TNA, SP 46/95/72 and 46/95/78.
86 CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.64. Grice had his enemies. The marshal, Gilbert Thomas, told Arlington the following October that Grice ‘is too large in his discourses’ and was a ‘babbling fellow’. Ibid., p.178.
87 A note from Gilbert Thomas, marshal of the Gatehouse prison in Westminster, to Arlington, dated 2 May 1666 reports where ‘Allen, if he be Blood, doth lodge or lye’. TNA, SP 29/155/17, f.24.
88 TNA, SP 63/321/164, f.55. Orrery to Arlington, Charleville, 22 September 1666.
89 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.52r. Notes on persons suspected of complicity in seditious plots in Ireland.
90 It destroyed 13,200 homes, eighty-seven parish churches and St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as a number of official buildings such as the Royal Exchange.
91 London Gazette,no. 85,Monday, 10 September 1666, p.1, col.1. Some of the French and Dutch had ‘little hand-grenades about the size of a ball which they carried in their pockets’ (HMC, ‘le Fleming’, p.41). Patrick Hubert, a French-born watchmaker, claimed to have started the fire as an agent of Pope Alexander VII. Despite doubts about his mental state and fitness to plead, he was hanged on 28 September.
92 HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 4, p.462. Sir Robert Southwell to Ormond, 22 October 1678.
93 TBA, SP 29/173/132, f.206. Arlington also told Ormond on 7 September that ‘we are reasonably secure the quiet of the kingdom will not be discomposed [by the fire] not being able, by any of the circumstances, to trace out or suspec
t that it was either contrived or fomented by any of the discontented party’ (Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, ff.363–4). A correspondent of Lord Conway also assured him ‘there was nothing of a plot in this, though the people would think otherwise and lay it on the French or Dutch or on the fanatics breaking out so near 3 September their celebrated day of triumph. Others lay it on the papists because some of them are said to be now in arms but it is merely as militia men. The stories of making and casting of fireballs, when traced, are found to be fictitious.’ TNA, SP 29/450/712, f.46.
94 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.54v. Arlington to Sir George Lane. Blood had been in Lancashire and had come close to arrest after the Great Fire of London. Whitehall, 6 September 1666.
95 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, f.383. Arlington to Ormond, Whitehall, 12 October 1666.
96 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.128.
97 CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.349. Leving to Arlington, 15 December 1666.
98 London Gazette, issue 106, 19–22 November 1666, p.2 col.2; HMC ‘le Fleming, p.43.
99 B.L. Add. MS 23,125, f.198r. Declaration by the Pentland rebels.
100 B.L. Add. MS 23,125, f.149r. Sir Peter Wedderburn, clerk to the Privy Council, to the Duke of Lauderdale.
101 London Gazette, issue 110, 3–6 December 1666, p.2, cols. 1 and 2.
102 Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.125.
103 Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.75.
104 TNA, SP 29/196/6, f.6. Sir P. M[usgrave] to Williamson, 1 April 1667. Lady Burghclere, in her biography of Ormond, maintains that Blood ‘was present at the Battle of Pentland Hills on 26 November 1666 and when the insurgents were routed, he contrived, after his usual fashion to make good his escape’ (Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.184).
105 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.146r. List of persons declared rebels [in Scotland] by proclamation.
The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood Page 29