by Jordan, Don
In 1656, Downing was appointed special emissary to the Netherlands, where one of England’s principal concerns was the threat from royalist exiles. Large numbers of them were clustered there, mostly around the great ports of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, existing in various states of desperation and hope, dreaming and plotting Cromwell’s downfall. The Netherlands was ‘the nursery of Cavalierism’, declared Secretary of State John Thurloe, who directed Downing to set up a spy network there. The former chaplain was a huge success in the dark arts of espionage and his network eventually spread beyond Europe and into England. A study of intelligence in this period paints a picture of Downing’s blithe ruthlessness: ‘He was engaged in entrapment, hiring spies, harassing exiles as well as the bribery and chicanery to which he appears to have been well suited.’10 The study judges that most of Downing’s ‘talents as a spymaster’ emerged in this earlier period, but that ‘one or two refinements were to be added after 1660 such as more scope for assassination attempts, kidnappings and even suggestions of grave robbery’.
The royalists were terrified of Downing – ‘that fearful gentleman’, one called him – and he himself claimed that he was a target for royalist assassins. A Major Whitford, one of the royalists suspected of killing the regicide Isaac Dorislaus, was seen with others lurking around Downing’s house. The emissary called on the Dutch to provide him with protection.
All in all, this feared spy chief and dyed-in-the-wool Cromwellian would seem to have much to fear from a return of the Stuarts. Yet, at the restoration, far from being thrown into prison or worse, George Downing was knighted by Charles II in the very month that the king returned. What was behind this astonishing turn of fortune? One story, possibly apocryphal, might explain it. During his frustrating years of exile in France, Charles had several times slipped over the border into Dutch territory, either on a secret visit to his sister, the wife of William of Orange, or to rendezvous with exiled supporters. The story goes that, very shortly before the restoration, Charles made one of these visits and an ‘old reverend like man in a long grey beard and ordinary grey clothes’ succeeded in forcing his way into his presence. The old man then pulled off his beard to reveal himself as the feared George Downing, come to warn the king that the Dutch planned to arrest him and hand him over to the English. Charles promptly terminated his visit. Downing had saved his life.11
Whatever the truth, we do know that on the eve of the restoration Downing set out to worm his way into royal favour. He used an intermediary, Thomas Howard, a brother of the Earl of Suffolk and a close intimate of Charles and his sister, the Princess of Orange. Howard had been one of Downing’s informants since 1658, after making the mistake of entrusting potentially damaging private papers to the keeping of a mistress and then falling out with her. Downing somehow acquired the papers and blackmailed the young aristocrat – or, as he put it, ‘gained’ him. ‘I think I can hardly pitch for one better instrument than Tom Howard, he being the master of the horse to the Princess Royal’, Downing boasted in a report to London. From then on Howard was his creature, passing on every titbit about the Stuarts.12
Two years on, in April 1660, when General Monck’s army was in London and astute men were changing allegiances, Downing summoned Tom Howard and instructed him to tell the still exiled king that he now desired ‘to promote His Majesty’s service’. To prove his new allegiance Downing showed Howard intelligence material that he wanted communicated to the king. This included a letter in cipher from Secretary Thurloe reporting feeling in the army and among the general populace. Downing begged for a royal pardon and promised that if he got it, he would ‘work secretly on the army in which he has considerable influence’. As for his own past as a Roundhead, Downing told Howard to relay his repentance for taking up arms against Charles I. He wanted it understood that he had been misled as a youth in New England, where he had ‘sucked in principles that since his reason had made him see were erroneous’.13
As Downing awaited the king’s reply, his good friend John Milton was publishing two anti-monarchist tracts which three months later would be ritually burned by the common executioner, and would see the poet jailed and in danger of joining the regicides on the scaffold. A kinder future was in store for George Downing. In the second week of June the reply came back from the king that he was forgiven. Howard conveyed that Charles would forget past ‘deviations’ and would accept ‘the overtures he [Downing] makes of returning to his duty’. Three weeks afterwards, the new monarch knighted Downing and paid him £1000.
On his reappointment to The Hague, the man who had wished Oliver Cromwell king now oozed loyalty to Charles. He vowed to the king’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon, that on pursuing the regicides he would do ‘as much as if my life lay at stake’. Indeed, ‘if my father were in the way I would not avoid him for my loyalty.’
Downing’s first task was to locate the regicides’ bolt-holes, ‘that I may know where they are and what they do’ – far from easy in a country flooded with English fugitives. ‘It is not to be credited what numbers of disaffected persons come daily out of England into this country’, he reported in his first dispatch, describing the new arrivals from across the Channel as ‘well funded and confident … [they] do hire the best houses and have great bills of exchange come over from England for them’.
In prising out the regicides from among these exiles, Sir George knew he could expect little co-operation from the Dutch. During his previous incarnation in the Netherlands he had been the agent of a fellow republic and, to an extent, approved of. As the agent of a king, particularly one engaged in the execution of republicans, he was now in hostile country. Decades of bloody war with the Spanish monarchy for control of the Low Countries had left the Dutch more wholeheartedly republican than any people in Europe except perhaps the Swiss. A guide to the Netherlands published in England in 1662 warned: ‘The country is a democracy … Tell them of a King and they cut your throat in earnest. The very name carries servitude in it and they hate it more than a Jew doth images, a woman old age and a nonconformist a surplice.’
Anti-royalism ran in the veins of the Dutch authorities. Father O’Neill, the Catholic priest dispatched to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1660 to sound out officials about extradition, had got nowhere. Clarendon complained at the Dutch refusal to co-operate, only to receive a lecture from Johan de Witt, the ruling hand in the United Provinces, on his country’s tradition of sanctuary. ‘Nothing could be done against the liberties of the state’, he was told. Dutch resolve was then put to the test by royalist agent Sir William Davidson. In December 1660 Davidson asked the aid of the burgomaster in Amsterdam to apprehend English fugitives there. The burgomaster’s response was an order forbidding local police to offer any help at all.
At this early stage we do not know who Downing used as agents to discover the regicides, but presumably many old informants were still present in Holland and Germany and there were potentially many more among new refugees. By no means were all of these as well funded as Downing suggested. Some exiles were in dire financial straits and a few guilders bought their loyalty. Others were suborned and blackmailed into spying while still in England, then sent abroad to mix in exile circles.
Downing would ultimately accumulate a rich mix of informants. Along with the unpredictable adventurer Joseph Bampfield, who had once rescued Charles’s younger brother James from the Roundheads dressed as a girl before switching sides to spy for the same Roundheads, and then switching sides again, they included an Irish cutthroat called James Cotter who gloried in his reputation as an assassin. And there was also the bewitching Mata Hari figure of Aphra Behn.
A memorable picture of the efficiency of Downing’s agents was later made by his former clerk, Samuel Pepys. Downing had boasted to Pepys of his intelligence coups in the mid-1660s, during the second Anglo-Dutch war. Pepys’ diary for 27 December 1668 records:
Met with Sir G. Downing, and walked with him an hour talking of business, and how the late war was managed, there
being nobody to take care of it; and he telling, when he was in Holland … that he had so good spies, that he hath had the keys taken out of de Witte’s pocket when he was abed, and his closet opened and papers brought to him and left in his hands for an hour, and carried back and laid in the place again, and the keys put into his pocket again. He says he hath always had their most private debates, that have been but between two or three of the chief of them, brought to him in an hour after, and an hour after that hath sent word thereof to the king.
In June 1661 Downing’s informants reported sightings of five fugitives, some in the Netherlands and others in Germany – George ‘Cornet’ Joyce, Edward Dendy, John Barkstead, John Hewson and John Okey.14 Of the five only Barkstead, Hewson and Okey had been among the king’s judges, but the other two were each considered sufficiently implicated in Charles’s fate to deserve a traitor’s death.
Joyce, the young officer responsible for seizing Charles I from custody at Holmby House, thus arguably setting off the chain of events that led to the king’s trial and execution, had fled to Rotterdam in the summer of 1660. He was living there with his wife and children when spotted by Downing’s men.15
Like Joyce, Edward Dendy was not among the king’s judges. His part in Charles I’s death was as master of ceremonies. He was the House of Commons sergeant-at-arms in 1649 who proclaimed the indictment against Charles with much pomp. Unlike some other servants of the republican cause, he appears to have received little reward for his unique service. In the 1650s he was granted some land in Ireland plus part of the profits from the sale of royal forests. He was also made governor of the Marshalsea prison, which housed government prisoners, who had to pay him for their keep. At other times and in other prisons governors made fortunes from prisoners’ fees. Dendy claimed that he didn’t. He complained that he received only £80 over two and a half years because the government sent its richest prisoners not to him but to the Tower.16
The keeper of the Tower at the time, and a far richer man, was John Barkstead, the second fugitive spotted in Europe by Downing’s spies. Barkstead was said to have made a colossal £2000 a year from fees. A contemporary complained that his exactments were so extortionate that ‘it stinks in the nostrils of both good and bad’. Barkstead was one of the king’s judges and had signed the death warrant in a strong, decisive hand. The son of a goldsmith, he took up arms for Parliament at the outset of the Civil War and rose from the rank of captain to become a major-general and governor of several strategic towns. According to Edmund Ludlow, Barkstead joined the struggle because of ‘the invasions which had been made upon the liberties of the nation’. That meant political liberties, certainly not behavioural liberties. Barkstead was one of the major-generals appointed in 1655–7 to give ‘Godly rule’ to England and he strove enthusiastically to do so, personifying the grim, killjoy Puritan. His bailiwick was Westminster, Middlesex and London. In what was a whirlpool of ungodliness, Barkstead tried to banish not only the more barbarous pleasures but the more innocent too. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was pulled down. Prostitutes were arrested, with some shipped to America into virtual slavery. The bear garden in Bankside was closed. The horses of those caught riding on Sundays were confiscated. Cock-fighting and cock-throwing (stoning a cockerel tied to a stake) were banned. Maypoles were cut down. Under Puritan jurisdiction a woman caught in adultery faced death. The wealthy, money-grabbing, misery Barkstead was not a popular figure. Wisely, Barkstead had joined the exodus in the summer of 1660 and was now living in the prosperous Prussian town of Hanau, twenty-five kilometres from Frankfurt, becoming a burgess of the town and thus securing some measure of protection.
One-eyed John Hewson was if anything an even more unpopular figure, a man particularly hated in Ireland and in London too. Never allowed to forget his humble origins as a shoemaker, Hewson had proved an outstanding soldier in the Civil Wars. He was also a ruthless bigot. In Ireland, where he lost an eye in battle, he took a leading part in the terrible sack of Drogheda in which at least two thousand royalist and Catholic troops were killed after refusing to surrender. Like Cromwell, Hewson justified the massacre as God’s will. He warned after Drogheda that if the Irish did not submit, ‘the Lord by his power shall break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’ When Cromwell appointed Hewson to the peerage, royalists sneered at the idea of a former cobbler sitting in the House of Lords. It was claimed that the Earl of Warwick, the senior peer on Parliament’s side, was so affronted at the appointment of one of such low blood that he refused to take his seat. As for the hatred that Londoners bore for him, this stemmed from that incident in December 1659 when he ordered troops to fire on rioting apprentices and there were a number of deaths. The apprentices had used old shoes as ammunition to throw at Hewson’s soldiers. Now in frail health, Hewson was living in Rotterdam.
The fifth exile to have been sighted in Europe by Downing’s informants was John Okey, his old commanding officer. An altogether more attractive figure than Barkstead or Hewson, Okey’s record suggests him to have been heroic both in battle and in politics, but inconsistent and a poor disciplinarian. A brilliant cavalry leader, like most of the regicides Okey was an ardent Puritan, sometimes too much so for his men. He attempted to sack a captain suspected of holding the anarchistic views of the Ranters, who rejected all authority, believing God to be in every living thing. Okey charged the officer with singing bawdy songs. However, the captain was backed by his men and Cromwell himself had to be brought in to resolve the matter, which he did by persuading the officer to resign.
Okey had not only served as a judge at the king’s trial, he also supervised security at the execution and so was doubly damned in royalist eyes. To the end he would justify his role in 1649, insisting that he had borne no malice towards the king. His subsequent career showed him to be as strong a republican as he was a Puritan. He helped Cromwell to crush the Levellers but when the future Lord Protector began to assume a monarch’s mantle, Okey opposed him every step of the way. His opposition saw him line up with his old Leveller enemy at one point, then tried for his life at another. Having later openly challenged George Monck and finally joined John Lambert’s force in the doomed effort to stop the restoration by force of arms, Okey unlike Lambert had avoided capture when his troops surrendered at Daventry. Subsequently making his escape, like Barkstead he had found a haven in Hanau.
There is no record of Downing’s personal attitude to the five fugitives. But he must have known all of them well. He had served under Okey, who according to some contemporaries had been his friend and mentor. He had sat as an MP and would have regularly seen Hewson, who sat in the upper house. As a government intelligencer it is inconceivable that Downing had not been closely acquainted with Barkstead. No one was better placed to smell out the next conspiracy than the keeper of the Tower of London, with its gossipy population of political prisoners. Cromwell said of England’s grandest prison: ‘There never was any design on foot but we could hear of it out of the Tower.’ The Marshalsea too held men jailed for their politics, and Dendy as its keeper would also have been a magnet for Downing.
The question of how to bring these men back to England and to the scaffold occupied Downing and Secretary Clarendon for much of the summer of 1661. They eventually decided to make Edward Dendy in Rotterdam their first target, but first they needed to square the Dutch to his abduction. The opportunity to do so came with the opening in The Hague of negotiations over a trade treaty with the Dutch. Downing led the English delegation and pressed for the inclusion of an extradition clause in the treaty. Initially Johan de Witt was uninterested, but, after days of wrangling, he gave Downing what he wanted, agreeing to a clause that entitled the English to extradite regicides automatically with no right of appeal and – according to Downing – giving a secret promise that if any regicides were caught before the treaty came into force, they too would be extradited. De Witt agreed with Downing that the extradition should be swift because of the uproar it would unleash.17
Fe
w details survive of the subsequent plan to abduct Dendy. All we can deduce from the archives is that some time in August 1661, a kidnap team was assembled in Rotterdam ready to snatch him, and that the royal yacht was moored in the port ready for a quick getaway. Come the appointed day, all that was needed was a warrant for the arrest and extradition. Downing wanted the names of his targets left out of the warrant so nobody could warn them. Then, with everything in place, de Witt refused to issue a warrant without the names. Furious, George Downing scrabbled around for someone in the States-General who could rescue the situation, eventually persuading Admiral Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam to authorise a warrant. But the States-General baulked at giving Downing a blank warrant and the name of Dendy had to be revealed. Before it could be served, Dendy had been alerted and he fled the country.
Dendy’s narrow escape alerted all the regicides. Some vanished from sight, others became extra cautious. Downing ruefully reported that the exiles were ‘perpetually changing their abode else that way we agreed [would have] taken them. For the murderers nothing protects them here but their continual removings from place to place, never being two nights in a place.’18
Another disappointment followed the Dendy failure. Death put John Hewson out of reach. The ‘child of wrath’ died of ill health in Rotterdam early in September. Hewson’s life history described a perfect arc, from obscurity as a cobbler to Civil War colonel, to regicide, to the House of Lords (though only briefly in 1658) and back to obscurity. Sir William Davidson conveyed the news to Downing and made a suggestion, perhaps in jest but possibly serious: ‘That rogue Hewson … Seeing we could not get him apprehended in his lifetime … you might get him taken out of his grave and send him for England.’19 In the event Hewson’s body stayed where it was.