The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood

by Robert Hutchinson

  106 CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.545.

  107 CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.463.

  108 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.223.

  CHAPTER 4: A FRIEND IN NEED

  1 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.225.

  2 CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.537: ‘All proclaimed persons [were] to be brought before Lord Arlington, should [they] be found in London and Westminster. It should also warrant a search for arms in the houses where they are taken’. The warrant was granted on 2 March.

  3 Leving claimed to be paid £20 a year as a spy – equivalent in modern purchasing power to just over £2,500 per annum.

  4 Thomas Gardiner, controller of the Post Office in London, had reports of ‘several robberies about Leeds lately. Leving, one of the thieves is taken; Freer, another, has gone to London and has been several times with Lord Arlington.’ CSP Domestic 1667, p.114. A warrant for Freer’s arrest ‘for dangerous and seditious practices’ had been issued earlier that month; ibid., p.114

  5 CSP Domestic 1667, p.114. A reward of £10 was offered for Freer’s arrest. A warrant for his detention was issued ‘at court at Whitehall’ in May, for his ‘dangerous and seditious practices’. TNA, SP 29/201/93, f.108.

  6 TNA, SP 29/201/39, f.46. John Mascall to Williamson, York, 18 May 1667.

  7 TNA, SP 29/209/44, f.54. W.L[eving] to Lord Arlington, Newgate, 11 July 1667.

  8 CSP Domestic 1667, p.310. Mason had been held in the Tower since 15 June. Two weeks later, his married sister Joan Prestwood received permission to visit him. CSP Domestic 1667, pp.193 and 245.

  9 Now the Life Guards, the senior regiment of the British Army, which, with the Blues and Royals, forms the sovereign’s Household Cavalry. The regiment was formed in 1658 and its third troop, made up of exiled Royalists, became the Duke of York’s troop. It was originally recruited from gentlemen and its corporals were commissioned, and had a rank equivalent to lieutenants in the remainder of the army.

  10 Darririgton is split in two by the London-Scotland A1 trunk road (or the old Great North Road), with the M62 motorway junction nearby.

  11 HMC ‘le Fleming’, p.52.

  12 TNA, SP 29/211/60, f.61.

  13 It has been claimed, without evidence, that Lockyer was married to one of Blood’s sisters (Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, fn. p.236).

  14 Possibly the present-day Spread Eagle, or the demolished Crown Inn, once located on the crossroads in Darrington.

  15 Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.184.

  16 From the now illegal sport of cock-fighting (popular in the seventeenth century in England), meaning to fight pluckily.

  17 ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.223–5.

  18 Under the Statute of Winchester of 1285 (13 Edward 1, caps. 1 & 4) the ‘Hue and Cry’, under common law, required every able-bodied citizen to assist in the arrest of someone witnessed in committing a crime. This pursuit could run from town to town and county to county until the felon was detained and handed over to a sheriff. In Mason’s case, the crime would be escaping from custody.

  19 TNA, SP 29/210/151, f.173. William Leving to Arlington, 25 July 1667.

  20 TNA, SP 29/211/17, f.18. Mascall to Williamson, York, 27 July 1667.

  21 Wheeler was also an MP, having defeated Sir Christopher Wren by a narrow majority in a by-election for the Cambridge University seat on 8 March that year.

  22 TNA, SP 29/211/60, ff.61–2. Darcy to Sir Charles Wheeler, York, 29 July 1667. Some of the troopers reportedly died later from their wounds (Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood . . ., p.60).

  23 Andrew Browning (ed.), Memoirs of Sir John Reresby (Glasgow, 1936) pp.69–70.

  24 Bod. Lib. English History MS C.487, Ludlow, Voyce from the Watch Tower, f.1265

  25 ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.225–6.

  26 Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, f.473v, entries 47–53.

  27 CSP Domestic 1667, p.285.

  28 TNA, SP 29/212/6, f.6, Betson to Arlington, 1 August 1667.

  29 TNA, SP 45/12/246 (damaged); SAL Proclamations, Charles II, vol. 14 (1667–84), f15. Whitehall, 8 August 1667.

  30 CSP Domestic 1667, p.345.

  31 TNA, SP 2/212/70, f.74. Leving to Robert Benson, York Castle, 5 August 1667.

  32 Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, f.473v, entry 51.

  33 Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.167–8.

  34 Buckingham had been accused of ‘holding secret correspondence about the raising of mutinies’ within the army and ‘seditions among the people, he having resisted the messenger sent to apprehend him and withdrawn to some obscure place’ according to the proclamation seeking his arrest. CSP Domestic, 1666–7, p.553

  35 A Pritchard, ‘A Defence of His Private Life by the Second Duke of Buckingham’, HLQ, vol. 44, pp. 157–77 and Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.168.

  36 CSP Domestic 1667, p.427. Freer to Williamson, Bradford, 31 August 1667.

  37 TNA, SP 29/218/18, f.27. Freer to Arlington, York Castle, 28 September 1667.

  38 CSP Domestic 1667, p.465.

  39 CSP Domestic 1667, p.465.

  40 Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood . . ., p.63.

  41 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.226.

  42 HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e6). Testimony of Samuel Holmes.

  43 Ibid., (e7). Testimony of Holmes’s servant.

  44 Ibid., (e9). Testimony of Samuel Weyer.

  45 Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.85, f.474.

  46 HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e5). Testimony of Mrs Elizabeth Price.

  47 TNA, ASSI 35/111/5, f.4 and HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(g3).

  48 HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e13). Testimony of Barnaby Bloxton, tailor.

  49 Ibid., (e10) and (e11). Testimonies of William Gant and William Mumford.

  50 Ibid., (g4). Receipt of Thomas Hunt for sword, belt and pistol.

  51 Its first appearance in literature seems to have been in Eugene Sue’s novel Memoirs of Matilda, published in 1846, although it was being used in common parlance much earlier.

  CHAPTER 5: AN INCIDENT IN ST JAMES’S

  1 TNA, SP 29/281/75 f.101. Benson to Williamson, Wrenthorpe, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire, 24 December 1670.

  2 The curious name of ‘Piccadilly’ is traditionally believed to be a reference to the ruff collars called ‘pickadels’ made in the area in the seventeenth century. An alternative explanation refers to its location on the outskirts of built-up London, from the old Dutch pickedillekens, meaning the extremity or utmost part of anything. Dasent, Piccadilly in Three Centuries, pp.8–9. The first reference to it as a street name is about 1673, although there is a reference in the rate-book of St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1627 to ‘Picadilly’. Part of it was officially known as Portugal Street, named in honour of Charles II’s Portuguese-born queen Catherine of Braganza, although this name was not used by the general populace.

  3 Tyburn Lane is today’s Park Lane. Executions were staged here from the twelfth century. In 1571, the ‘Tyburn Tree’ was erected on the execution site. This consisted of a horizontal wooden triangle supported by three tall uprights which allowed three felons to be hanged simultaneously. In January 1661, the disinterred corpses of Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw (who presided over the trial of Charles I) and the parliamentary general Henry Ireton, who died of a fever at Limerick in November 1651, were hanged from this triple gibbet in a macabre act of royal revenge. The name of Tyburn originated in the stream that rises in South Hampstead, flows south through Regent’s Park and empties in St James’s Park. Today its course runs through underground conduits.

  4 In today’s purchasing power, the cost would be between £5,240,000 and £6,550,000. Clarendon had bought stone originally purchased to repair the medieval St Paul’s Cathedral, destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Doubtless the price for this building material was cheap. Sir Roger Pratt, the architect, employed more than 300 masons, bricklayers and labourers.

  5 Clarendon House was demolished in 1683 and speculative builders constructed Bond, Do
ver and Albermarle Streets on its site.

  6 Ormond was removed as lord lieutenant in March 1669, largely through the intrigues of his political enemies, Buckingham and the Earl of Orrery. See: Barnard, ‘James Butler, first duke of Ormond’, ODNB, vol. 9, 153–63; Beckett, ‘The Irish Viceroyalty in the Restoration Period’, TRHS, vol. 20, pp.53–72 and McGuire, ‘Why was Ormond Dismissed in 1669?’ Irish Historical Studies, vol. 18, pp.295–312. In the early 1660s, Ormond purchased Moor Park in Hertfordshire and sold it at a profit in 1670, briefly renting Clarendon House as his London base.

  7 Dasent, Piccadilly in Three Centuries, pp.38–9.

  8 The hospital was dedicated to St James the Less, hence the name both of the palace and this area of London.

  9 Ben Weinreb & Christopher Hibbert (eds.), London Encyclopedia, p.721; Norman Brett-James, Growth of Stuart London, p.369. In 1670 an Act was passed for the repair of London’s highways ‘now generally soiled by the extraordinary and unreasonable loading of waggons and other carriages and the neglect of repairing and preserving the same’ (London Streets, Paving, Cleansing Act, 22 Caro. II, cap. 17).

  10 The treaty formally recognised English claims to the Dutch colony of New Netherlands on the eastern seaboard of North America. New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Manhattan River, was captured by a small English naval force in 1664 and was renamed New York, after James, Duke of York. It was retaken by Dutch forces in August 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, but returned to England by the Treaty of Westminster in February 1674.

  11 Charles II eventually had fourteen illegitimate children by seven mistresses.

  12 They married in 1677 and the Dutch prince became William III of England and Orange in 1689. See: Trost, William III the Stadtholder King: A Political Biography, pp.62–4.

  13 HMC ‘le Fleming’, p.73.

  14 Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p186; Chancellor, Memorials of St James’s Street, p.188.

  15 CSP Venice 1669–70, p.305.

  16 The forerunner of the Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market was located at the southern end of this piazza from 1657.

  17 Livesey was rumoured to have been murdered by Royalists in the Netherlands in 1660 but he was reported alive and well in Hanau in Hesse, Germany, soon after and later in Rotterdam in 1665, where he probably died in the same year.

  18 ‘Lords Jnls’, vol. 12, 1666–75, p.448. 9 March 1671.

  19 Sometimes called the ‘Buffalo Head’ tavern.

  20 The Bull Head tavern, which occupied the eastern portion of the tenement at 57 Charing Cross, had been a public house since at least 1636. See: G. H. Gater and E. P. Wheeler (eds.), Survey of London, vol. 16, ‘St Martin-in-the-Fields. 1 – Charing Cross’ (London, 1935), p.122. The diarist Samuel Pepys was an occasional imbiber within its portals. He recorded on 1 September 1660 that he dined at the Bull Head with friends ‘upon the best venison pasty that ever I eat of in my life and with one dish more, it was the best dinner I ever was at’ (‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 1, p.216). The pasty was so good, he returned three days later to finish it off.

  21 Canary wine, or ‘sack’ was a fortified white wine with a yellowish tint, imported from the Canary Islands off the north-western coast of Africa. It must have resembled present-day malmsey. Shakespeare refers to canary wine in Twelfth Night (Act 1, scene 3, line 74) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act 3, scene 2, line 83).

  22 A person who grazes or feeds cattle up for market.

  23 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(b). The affidavit was signed by William Pretty, but William Wilson, who plainly could not write, could only scrawl an ‘X’ as his mark. It was witnessed by Robert Joyner, landlord of the Bull Head tavern, and his wife Margery.

  24 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(o): Information ‘given to Arlington concerning the persons who assaulted the duke of Ormond’. The persons named were ‘all . . . desperate men, who shelter themselves under the notion of Fifth Monarchy men’.

  25 RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.155.

  26 Ormond’s account of the attack unfortunately does not survive.

  27 Knight, Encyclopaedia of London, pp.230–2 and Caulfield, Portraits, Memoirs and Characters . . ., vol. 2, pp.177–81.

  28 Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.206.

  29 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.226.

  30 Berkeley House was constructed in 1665 for Lord Berkeley of Stratton, a Royalist army officer in the Civil Wars whose name appears in Berkeley Square, Berkeley and Stratton Streets in the vicinity. In 1733, Berkeley House was gutted by a fire started when a workman’s pot of glue boiled over. The shell was pulled down and Devonshire House erected on the site in 1734–7 for William Cavendish, Third Duke of Devonshire, as his London residence. It was sold by the Ninth Duke in 1918 and was demolished in 1924, with a new block, also called Devonshire House, built on frontage overlooking Piccadilly, opposite the Ritz Hotel.

  31 Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, pp.188–9; Chancellor, Memorials of St James’s Street, p.189.

  32 Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.443.

  33 The horse ferry, originally owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, was leased to Mrs Leventhorpe in 1664 and operated by her family for many years. Lambeth Bridge was first built in 1862. The nearby Horseferry Road takes its name from the ferry.

  34 RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.155.

  35 Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.189.

  36 CSP Domestic 1670, p.571.

  37 An old term for the hindquarters of a horse.

  38 CSP Venice, p.36.

  39 CSP Domestic 1670, p.567.

  40 Frying Pan Alley, between Bell Lane and Sandy’s Row, remains today, a narrow thoroughfare overshadowed on its eastern end by the thirty-three floors of the modern Nido Tower. It got its name because it was originally occupied by numerous ironmongers and braziers who hung frying pans outside their shops as a symbol of their trade.

  41 ‘Stuff’ is a coarse, thickly woven cloth formerly manufactured in Kidderminster, Worcestershire. Originally it was probably made entirely of wool, but later with a warp of linen, yarn and a worsted web. Lawyers’ gowns in England are still made of ‘stuff’ while those worn by queen’s counsels are of silk – hence the distinguishing nickname for QCs of ‘silks’.

  42 This refers to a row of red-brick houses erected by the Earl of Craven in 1665 to receive victims of the Great Plague of London on the site of a defensive battery and breastwork erected in 1642 by order of Parliament to protect the western outskirts of London. The pest houses were also known more prosaically as ‘Five Houses’ or ‘Seven Chimneys’.

  43 Tothill Fields occupied a roughly diamond-shaped area, south of St James’s Park, which today would be bounded by Vauxhall Bridge Road, Francis and Regency Streets. Vincent Square occupies the central portion. The name ‘Tothill’ is probably derived from a ‘toot’, or beacon mound, and the name was most likely given to this district from a beacon being placed here on the highest spot in the flat lands of Westminster. See: Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, Old and New London, vol. 4, pp.14–26.

  44 Smitham Bottom, which today is part of Coulsdon and has the A23 Brighton Road running through it, is located at the junction of three dry valleys which flooded in the seventeenth century. It expanded greatly in the nineteenth century because of the construction of the London-Brighton railway.

  45 London Gazette, issue 529, 8–12 December 1670, p.2, col. 2.

  46 London Gazette, issue 531, 15 December–19 December 1670, p.2, col. 2.

  47 Viner lent large sums of money to pay for the extravagances at court. He showed Pepys over his fine mansion at Swakeleys at Ickenham in Middlesex, including ‘a black boy that he had [as a servant] that died of a consumption. He caused him to be dried in an oven and lies there entire in a box.’ ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 5, p.64; 7 September 1665.

  48 RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.155.

  49 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e3). Deposition of Margaret Boulter, 10 Dec
ember 1670.

  50 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352 (h4). Halliwell’s letter, endorsed: ‘Fifth Monarchy’, seized by Sir Robert Viner at Halliwell’s home in Frying Pan Alley.

  51 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h1) and (h2).

  52 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h8).

  53 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h6). Halliwell’s letter to Howell, a constable.

  54 The Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion (12 Caro. II, cap. 11) became law on 29 August 1660 and pardoned all those fighting for Parliament during the Civil War, save those with a direct hand in the execution of Charles I.

  55 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h7) – Halliwell’s letter to Sir Richard Ford, lord mayor. Halliwell was a cavalry cornet in the parliamentary army. The ‘Act of Free and General Pardon’ forgave treasons and other offences committed since 1 January 1637.

  56 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352 (e12 and h9). Statement by Katherine Halliwell before Arlington, 10 December 1670, and petition of Katherine Halliwell, 26 January 1671.

  57 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(c1). Information of William Done and (c2) information of John Jones, victualler of the White Swan.

  58 Arundel House, demolished in the late 1670s, was located between the Strand and the River Thames, near the church of St Clement Danes.

  59 The ‘Heaven’ tavern adjoined Westminster Hall. There were two other alehouses nearby, called ‘Hell’ and ‘Purgatory’, that dated from the Tudor period.

  60 RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, pp.155–6.

  61 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(c4). Information of Thomas Trishaire and W. Taylor.

  62 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(d1). Examination of John Hurst, taken before Arlington on 17 December.

  63 HMS Portland was a fifty-gun fourth-rate frigate launched at Wapping in 1653 and burnt to avoid capture in 1692. The eighth Royal Navy ship to bear this name, a ‘Duke’ class Type 23 frigate, was launched in 1999 and commissioned in May 2004.

  64 TNA, SP 29/281/77 f.103.

  65 HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e6). Evidence of Samuel Holmes.