by Jones, Nigel
Blood … that impudent bold fellow who had not long before attempted to steal the Imperial Crown itself out of the Tower … How came he to be pardoned, and even received into favour, not only after this, but several other exploits almost as daring both in Ireland and here, I could never come to understand … The only treason of this sort that was ever pardoned. The man had not only a daring but a villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken and dangerously insinuating.
Whether Charles was moved merely by fellow feeling for a rascal like himself, or whether, more plausibly, Blood was acting as his agent when he raided the Tower, the fact is that Blood inexplicably escaped punishment and spent the rest of his murky life as a ‘cut-out’ link man between the government and his colleagues in the Nonconformist opposition. In stark contrast, the victim of the crime – brave old Talbot Edwards – was treated less than generously. Although he recovered from the stabbing and battering, he became very infirm and applied for a pension – which was initially refused. Grudgingly, the government eventually granted it shortly before Edwards died. Elizabeth Edwards did find a husband as a direct result of that dramatic May morning, but it was not young Thomas Blood. The man she married was the gallant Captain Beckman, who was promoted major for his courage in capturing Blood. The old rogue himself lived on until 1680 when he died, in bed, aged sixty-two. Someone in a very high place had clearly been protecting Blood – but who?
Just as an earlier Duke of Buckingham has often been accused of being the evil genius behind Richard III’s crimes in the Tower, so Charles’s childhood companion, and crony in lechery, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, has been long suspected as the éminence grise behind Blood. We have already seen that Buckingham was widely suspected as the originator of Blood’s bold rescue of John Mason and his bid to kidnap Ormonde, against whom both he and Buckingham held grudges. Certainly, Ormonde’s son Lord Ossory publicly accused Buckingham of the crime – a grave charge that Buckingham, tellingly, failed to answer.
As a convinced anti-Catholic, the Duke sympathised with Blood’s Nonconformist religious stance, if not his Republican politics. Himself descended from royalty on his mother’s side, and brought up with Charles as a member of the royal family after his namesake father’s assassination, Buckingham had pretensions to succeed Charles’s himself, and even on his deathbed referred to himself as ‘a prince’. Finally, the course of his whole life shows that Buckingham was a killer quite capable of commissioning a grand larceny like the theft of the Crown jewels.
The archetypal Restoration rake, Buckingham’s own extraordinary career encompassed no fewer than three separate spells in the Tower. Still a baby when his father, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, the highly unpopular favourite of both James I and Charles I, was murdered in 1628, the younger Buckingham and his siblings were brought up practically as the adopted children of Charles I, and childhood companions of the king’s own children. Buckingham was at Charles II’s side at the battle of Worcester and, like his friend, made a daring escape abroad after their defeat. But he frequently fell out with Charles, and was more than ready to defy his royal friend and master.
Their first clash came in 1657 when Buckingham, having run out of cash in exile, despaired that the monarchy would ever be restored. He decided to desert Charles II in Holland and return to England to recover his vast estates, confiscated by Parliament after the Civil War. His lands in Yorkshire had been awarded to Lord General Thomas Fairfax, victorious commander of the New Model Army. Buckingham’s plan was awesome in its simplicity: a notable ladies’ man, he set about wooing Fairfax’s only child, Mary, a plain girl of nineteen, in order to get back his family estates by marrying her. Buckingham’s campaign scandalised both Royalists and Roundheads, but, astonishingly, it won over the people who mattered: the Fairfax family themselves. Mary fell head over heels for the rogue, breaking off her engagement to Lord Chesterfield in Buckingham’s favour, while even her hardbitten old soldier father was melted by his charm – and possibly the snobbish appeal of making his only daughter a duchess.
In September 1657 Buckingham married Mary Fairfax. Cromwell was incandescent with rage – particularly as Buckingham had bragged that if he failed with the Fairfaxes he would set his cap at one of the Lord Protector’s equally plain daughters! The duke was placed under house arrest in York House, his palatial London home in the Strand. Outraged at this insult to his family, Fairfax journeyed to London to plead his new son-in-law’s case. Ironsided as ever, Cromwell retorted that Fairfax should have consulted his old friends before agreeing to such a scandalous match. A furious Fairfax stormed out of the gallery in Whitehall Palace where the interview was being conducted. It was the last time that the two old Roundheads would meet.
Though supposedly confined to his mansion, Buckingham soon charmed his jailers into letting him leave his house on excursions. Cromwell decided that a more rigorous incarceration was needed. After Buckingham was arrested travelling incognito in Kent, he was sent to the Tower. However, his first confinement in the fortress was not to last long. Within a few days, Cromwell died on 3 September 1658. When Buckingham heard the news, as he recalled later:
… I was then close prisoner in the Tower, with a couple of guards lying always in my chamber and a sentinel at my door. I confess I was not a little delighted with the noise of the great guns, for I presently knew what it meant, and if Oliver had lived for three days longer I had certainly been put to death.
The mournful boom of the cannon firing a tribute to the dead dictator did indeed sound a signal of freedom for the duke. Within days he was removed from the Tower to Windsor Castle, and the following February his father-in-law Lord Fairfax stood bail for him in the astronomical sum of £20,000. Pledging loyalty to Parliament, Buckingham was released by order of the House of Commons.
The duke’s second spell in the Tower was of even shorter duration. It came after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The king had magnanimously forgiven his errant friend for making his peace with Parliament. Charles and Buckingham were both cynical chancers. Their friendship, though often ruptured, was just as frequently repaired. In December 1666, the ever-combustible Buckingham quarrelled with a fellow aristocrat, the Marquess of Dorchester, when he jostled him during a joint session of Parliament. In the ensuing altercation, Buckingham pulled off the Marquess’s periwig, while Dorchester retaliated by tearing out a fistful of the duke’s fair hair – of which he was inordinately proud. Such an affray was a rarity in the dignified House of Lords, and the two peers were both sent to the Tower for a cooling-off period. Within a week, however, both were freed after making a grovelling apology at the bar of Parliament.
Though made a member of Charles’s cabinet known as the Cabal (from the initials of their names), Buckingham never settled into the role of elder statesman. Vexatious and vindictive, his favourite medium was hot water. (Although he had such an aversion to washing that his reputation as a stinker was as pungent as his moral turpitude.) He darkened the Tower’s doors for a third time in June 1667 as a result of his own complex intrigues. Accused of necromancy and casting the king’s horoscope, Buckingham may well have been innocent of the actual charges. But the whiff of sulphur clung to him. He sealed his fate by dodging the serjeant-at-arms sent to arrest him at his Northamptonshire country home, Althorp (later the childhood home and burial site of Diana, Princess of Wales), opting to go on the run.
Eventually, he threw himself on the king’s mercy, gambling that the fit of rage in which the king had ordered Buckingham’s arrest had probably passed. Buckingham was again ordered to the Tower. However, the manner of his entry suggests that he knew his stay within its walls would be as short as usual. He journeyed there by coach, accompanied by a group of hard-drinking cronies, and, as they passed through Bishopsgate, stopped for dinner and more alcoholic refreshment at the Sun Inn. A crowd gathered, and Buckingham played up to his public by bowing to his admiring audience from the tavern’s balcony. Samuel Pepys r
ecorded in his diary that the duke sent word ahead to the Tower apologising for his delayed arrival, and promising that he would be there as soon as he had dined. On 12 July 1667, Pepys also recorded the sequel to Buckingham’s last Tower stay:
The Duke of Buckingham was before the Council the other day, and there did carry it very submissively and pleasingly to the King …
Two days later Buckingham was freed.
A decade later, Pepys himself would have good cause to regret that Buckingham had got off so lightly. He had already experienced the duke’s spite and the damage it could do. In 1668 he realised that Buckingham was targeting one of his own patrons on the Navy Board, Lord William Coventry, for destruction, noting that the duke ‘will ruin Coventry if he can’. Buckingham had both a personal and a political grudge against Coventry. Politically, Buckingham opposed the succession of Charles’s Catholic brother James, whose secretary and ally Coventry had been. Personally, Coventry had been on the Select Commission that had interrogated Buckingham during his most recent incarceration in the Tower. For taking part in this humiliating procedure, Buckingham would not forgive him.
Buckingham’s method of attack was subtle. A patron of the Restoration stage, the duke turned playwright himself. In 1668 he wrote a comedy, The Country Gentleman, which mocked Coventry as a character called Sir Cautious Trouble-All, a fussy little bureaucrat who had invented a circular desk with a hole in the middle in which he could sit, turning this way and that to deal with the piles of paper surrounding him. Since Coventry had proudly invented just such a desk himself, and had shown it off to – among others – Pepys (who recorded it in his diary), the insult was obvious. Getting wind of the play while it was still in rehearsal, the offended official complained to Charles, who demanded the script from Buckingham. Artfully, the duke presented his play to the king – minus the scene in which Sir Cautious appeared. Finding the text innocuous, Charles told Coventry to bother him no more. Enraged, Coventry next turned to Tom Killigrew, manager of the King’s House Theatre where the play was about to open. He threatened that he would pay thugs to slit the nose of any actor daring to mock him on the stage. When this too failed to halt the production (Killigrew knew that Buckingham, with his underworld contacts like Blood, could far outdo Coventry in the matter of hiring hoodlums), Coventry challenged the duke to a duel.
This was a fantastically foolish move. Buckingham was one of the deadliest duellists in the land, and had recently killed Francis Talbot, the 11th Earl of Shrewsbury, in a duel, by running him through with a rapier. The earl had had the misfortune to be the cuckolded husband of Buckingham’s long-term mistress, Anna, Countess of Shrewsbury, an open affair which scandalised even a Restoration court noted for its sexual loucheness. It was rumoured that the countess had held the horses while her lover had fought it out with her husband, and after the former had killed the latter, had joyously ridden off with the victor. Although Buckingham would doubtless have been happy to administer the same cold steel to Coventry, this scandal was still too recent for him to risk skewering a second peer. Instead he reported Coventry’s challenge to the king.
Not only was duelling between privy councillors illegal, Charles had also specifically commanded Coventry to drop his complaints about the play. Furious at this direct defiance, the king had Coventry committed to the Tower. Coventry’s friends were so appalled at the way he had been treated that they literally queued up to visit him there. One visitor was Pepys, who counted no fewer than sixty coaches drawn up outside the fortress, before going in to see his friend at his cell in the Brick Tower. They ‘walked and talked … an hour alone, from one good thing to another’. The diarist well knew who was behind Coventry’s persecution, commenting, ‘The Duke of Buckingham will be so flushed.’ Coventry’s friends, including the king’s brother James, succeeded in obtaining his release from the Tower. But although he remained an MP, his career was ruined. It was now dangerous for an ambitious man on the make like Pepys to be seen with Coventry – and he made an excuse to avoid accompanying the fallen statesman on one of their formerly habitual strolls through St James’s Park. As for Buckingham’s offending play, having served its malign purpose, it was refused a licence and not performed.
Like Coventry, Pepys had been one of the Duke of York’s men since James’s appointment as Lord High Admiral to run the navy. But in the wake of the 1678 Popish Plot, associates of the duke were in danger of arrest, ruin and even death. Pepys knew that to incur the enmity of Buckingham was dangerous. But the rakish duke and he were on opposite sides of the growing political gulf dividing England. For, although not a Catholic himself, in the eyes of the Protestant Whigs, anyone as closely linked to the Duke of York as Pepys was guilty by association. As the diarist wrote to York, ‘For, whether I will or no, a Papist I must be because favoured by your Royal Highness.’ Now it was Pepys’s turn to be devoured by wolves – and thrown into the Tower.
Pepys was familiar enough with both the benign and the malign aspects of the Tower before he joined the long list of its prisoners. As an ambitious young man taking his first steps in his civil service career he had curried favour with Lord Montagu, his boss in the Navy Office, by taking some of Montagu’s ten children to visit the menagerie there.
In 1662 Pepys was back at the Tower on another mission for Montagu, now ennobled as the Earl of Sandwich. His mentor had received a report that Sir John Barkstead, Tower lieutenant under Cromwell, and a regicide, had buried thousands of pounds in gold coins (the alleged amount ranged between £7,000 and £50,000) in butter barrels inside the fortress when he realised that the political winds were shifting and he was about to lose his job. Barkstead had then fled into exile in Germany. But he was lured back to his doom by another former Cromwellian, Sir George Downing, England’s ambassador in the Netherlands. To cement his credentials as a born-again Royalist, this reptilian individual – the man whose name is immortalised in the street where Britain’s prime ministers reside, which he once owned – set a trap for Barkstead and two other exiled regicides, Colonel John Okey and Miles Corbet, and arrested them at their lodgings in Delft as they relaxed over beer and tobacco.
The betrayal of Downing was particularly repellent as he himself had served as chaplain in Okey’s regiment during their Cromwellian days. The three regicides were shipped back to Britain, and held in the Tower before suffering hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn. Pepys saw them taken to their deaths and remarked that ‘they all looked very cheerful’ considering the circumstances. Pepys, who owed his early rise in the Admiralty to Downing’s patronage, nevertheless called his former boss ‘a perfidious rogue’ and ‘a low villain’ for his triple abduction. Fearing that the funeral of the popular Okey would turn into a riot by Cromwellian sympathisers, King Charles broke his word to Okey’s widow and refused to release the body to her for burial. Instead, his mutilated corpse was transported back to the Tower where it was secretly interred. Barkstead, a notably cruel persecutor of Royalist prisoners during his time running the Tower, was treated with even less respect. His head was spiked on a pole and mounted on St Thomas’s Tower looking over the river.
Pepys’s current boss, Lord Montagu, was himself a former Cromwellian loyalist who, like Downing, had accommodated himself to the new Royalist regime. Professing to believe the story of Barkstead’s hidden gold – for Cromwell’s lieutenant had received the substantial salary of £2,000 per annum as reward for his distasteful duties at the Tower – Montagu ordered Pepys to conduct a detailed search for the buried treasure. King Charles II, always short of cash, authorised the hunt on condition that he received a generous cut of any money found.
On 30 October 1661, six months after Barkstead’s grisly end, Pepys presented himself to the Tower’s constable and lieutenant, Sir John Robinson (who combined the two jobs with that of Lord Mayor of London), and began his quest. Wade and Evett, the two men whose story had sparked the search, took Pepys and his digging party, equipped with picks and shovels, to the vaulted basement of the Bell
Tower, Sir Thomas More’s grim prison. Here they started to dig in the earthen floor. Five hours of frantic excavation produced much sweat and cursing and a large heap of turned soil and stones – but no sign of gold. Frustrated, but undaunted, Pepys entrusted the Bell Tower’s key to Robinson’s deputy governor – ‘Lord, what a young, simple, fantastic coxcomb,’ as he characteristically described him in the diary – promising to return and continue the search.
Two days later, he was back. Three more hours of digging produced the same negative results as before. Pepys adjourned to the nearby Dolphin Tavern with Wade and Evett to question them more closely. They promised to bring their witness – a woman who claimed to have been Barkstead’s mistress – to their next digging session. On Friday 7 November, a week after the gold rush had begun, Pepys and his gold-diggers made their third visit to the Bell Tower. Barkstead’s supposed mistress – wearing a disguise to hide her modesty – appeared as promised and confirmed that this was where she had seen her lover burying his barrels. Thus encouraged, the gold-diggers went back to work, only pausing for lunch: ‘Upon the head of a barrel [we] dined very merrily,’ wrote Pepys. By the end of the day they were exhausted and had dug over the entire area of the Bell Tower’s floor – to no avail. Pepys concluded philosophically, ‘We were forced to give over our expectations, though I do believe there must be money hidden somewhere by him, or else he did delude this woman in hopes to oblige her to further serving him, which I am apt to believe.’
But the hunt was still not quite over. Wade and Evett reported to Pepys that Barkstead’s mistress’s memory had been at fault. The barrels were buried, she now remembered, not in the Bell Tower, but in Barkstead’s former garden outside the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. Although it was now December, and the earth was frozen solid, in an astonishing triumph of hope over experience, Pepys suppressed any doubts about the two con men’s credibility, and once again returned to the Tower. This time, Pepys did not personally participate in the dig, contenting himself with watching from a window in the governor’s house as workmen broke the ice-hard soil in the garden outside the Bloody Tower. Here, snugly sitting before a roaring fire with refreshments to hand, Pepys kept one eye on his chilly diggers and the other reading John Fletcher’s play A Wife for a Month, which he loftily pronounced as containing ‘no great wit or language’.