by Jordan, Don
As the group’s natural leader, Ludlow took it upon himself to obtain assurances from Geneva’s ruling councillors, known as syndics, regarding their safety. None of the refugees spoke French, so Ludlow asked his landlord to intercede with a senior councillor, Monsieur Voisin, on their behalf. Ludlow’s man did not come back with the cast-iron guarantees they had hoped for. Instead, he brought promises of help: ‘if any letters should come into his hands concerning us, he would give us timely notice, but if such a thing would fall out in the night, he would cause the water-gate, of which he always kept the key, to be opened for our escape, and if we should be obliged to depart by day, we would have a safe passage through any of the city gates that we should choose …’5
To these assurances, Voisin made one further promise: that when his fellow senior syndic Monsieur Dupain came back from a visit to Bern, they would discuss the exiles’ safety. Ludlow thought their hosts were doing all they could in trying circumstances. Not all his colleagues agreed. Lisle saw things through a lawyer’s eyes and wanted absolute guarantees. Cawley backed him up. As a result of their protestations, the regicides were advised to present their case in person before the entire body of syndics.
This was not at all what Ludlow wanted. As he expected, the presentation was a disaster. One of the syndics, a Monsieur Let, was owed money by Charles II and now saw his repayment put in jeopardy by the presence of English fugitives. The council told the Englishmen to withdraw their application, which was to be reconsidered once the fuss had died down. Ludlow and the rest were in a worse situation than before. They had no option but to find another city to take them.
By late spring in 1662, all three regicides, Ludlow, Lisle and Cawley, were in Lausanne, in the canton of Bern. They had not been there long before they received wretched news – Sir Harry Vane had been executed for treason following a trial that was all too similar in style to the great show trials of autumn 1660.* Ludlow said of Vane that he possessed ‘the highest perfection, a quick and ready apprehension, a strong and tenacious memory, a profound and penetrating judgement, a just and noble eloquence, with an easy and graceful manner of speaking’. These sentiments were echoed by Edward Hyde, even though as Charles’s Lord Chancellor he was Vane’s political opponent: ‘He was, indeed, a man of extraordinary parts; a pleasant wit, a great understanding, which pierced into and discerned the purpose of other men with wonderful sagacity.’6 Charles’s decision to order Vane’s death despite all these attributes – or perhaps because of them, as he was ‘too dangerous’ to be allowed to live – was a sad example of cruel political expediency.
This repugnant act of revenge upon a man who had had nothing whatever to do with the death of Charles I had a profound effect upon the exiles. It demonstrated that Charles II and Parliament would stop at nothing to cut off political opposition, even if it meant manipulating the law to have an innocent man executed. Any lingering hope the Puritan exiles may have had that the royal desire for revenge would soon abate was dashed. Their chances of ever returning home receded far into the distant future.
Meanwhile, other threats against the monarchy were reported in the London press. According to one report, Ludlow was behind a scheme to kill both the king and George Monck, now the Duke of Albemarle. Several thousand unemployed soldiers of the old army were ready, it was said, to march on the City of London, the Tower and Whitehall. According to Ludlow, this was a plot organised by agents provocateurs – known at the time as ‘trepanners’ – as an excuse for rounding up Commonwealth sympathisers. The resultant clampdown led to yet more mass arrests and several executions. The chief organiser, a man named Bradley, was let off. He seems to have been in reality the chief trepanner. News sheets claimed that the authorities had been so close to seizing Ludlow that they had taken his cloak and slippers.
Despite the make-believe, Charles and his ministers had genuine concerns about possible uprisings. The reversal of his promise to allow freedom of conscience regarding religion had gone down badly and the new restrictions were openly defied in churches up and down the country. The execution of Harry Vane was poorly received, even by many royalists. Pepys said of the feeling against the king, ‘they do much cry up the manner of Sir H Vane’s death, and he [the king] deserves it.’ To make matters worse, Charles had fallen out with his new wife Catherine of Braganza on their honeymoon, while the people had turned against her on seeing her attend her mother-in-law’s old Catholic chapel, which had been done up and reopened. To the people, this did not reflect well on Charles, with rumours flying about his own religious affiliation.
In Lausanne, matters were taking a more serious turn. According to Ludlow’s memoirs, a plot was hatched to assassinate him. As the memoirs tell it, the sum of 10,000 crowns was offered via the Duchess of Orléans to a ‘person of quality’ who lived in or around Lausanne for his murder. The duchess was Henrietta Anne, Charles’s favourite sister, who had recorded her father’s words to her on the eve of his execution, now married to the openly homosexual Philippe, brother to Charles XIV. It was unlikely that Henrietta, a cultured and flirtatious member of the French court, would have instigated such a plot unaided. Nor is there any way of knowing if the plot really existed; however, in the light of the events that followed, it is not impossible. If it did exist, it seems likely that it originated within the court of Charles II.7
In the autumn of 1662, the English group at Lausanne grew rapidly in numbers. Ludlow’s stature was undoubtedly a draw to others, but more important was the knowledge that the Canton of Bern had offered official protection. During September and October, seven more exiles arrived.* With John Phelps probably already in Lausanne, the total number of resident fugitives was now at least twelve.
Several of the new arrivals, including William Say, the lawyer and legislator, had passed through the city of Bern. There they made contact with the eminent English-speaking clergyman Johann Heinrich Hummel, who welcomed them and passed on the information that more of their group could be found at Lausanne; and so they travelled on. Once they had arrived in Lausanne and made contact with their fellow countrymen it was decided a letter of thanks should be sent to Hummel and the canton authorities. The reply they received was not what they expected. They were advised to relocate to Vevey, a pretty but relatively obscure town some twenty miles further east along the shores of Lake Geneva. The Bern authorities wanted to help but they didn’t want it widely known that they were doing so.
Six of the exiles – Ludlow, Say, Lisle, Bethel, Cawley and Holland – elected to go to Vevey. Among those who decided to stay behind were Phelps and Colonel Bisco who, though not a regicide, felt he was under threat at home as he had taken up arms against Monck. Their reason for remaining sheds further light on the financial pressures the fugitives were under. According to Ludlow, these two had bought goods at Geneva and elsewhere and wished to see if they could sell those goods in Germany and Holland so as to ‘improve the stock of money they had’.8
At Vevey, the magistrates and council greeted the exiles with great ceremony, praising them for their sufferings in the service of liberty. It seemed the exiles had finally found what they sought: political asylum. One of the members of the town council, a Monsieur Dubois, gave them a house in which to stay. It was on the edge of the town by the lake, beside the town walls; its slightly isolated position made the approach of any suspicious characters easier to spot. We know that Ludlow continued to reside in Dubois’s house but, given the numbers of individuals involved, we must assume the regicides moved into a number of residences, though there is no record of their living arrangements.
In the autumn of 1663, Algernon Sidney came to call on Ludlow at his new home at 47 Rue du Lac. An aristocratic war hero who had been seriously wounded at the decisive battle of Marston Moor while leading a cavalry charge, Sidney was also a political theorist whose thinking underwent a profound change during the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Sidney had been appointed as one of the king’s judges in 1649, but refused to serve, stating in on
e of his many famous phrases that ‘first, the king could be tried by no man; secondly, that no man could be tried by that court.’9 By 1659 he had changed his mind, calling the king’s execution ‘the justest and bravest act’.10 As a republican, Sidney was an ardent foe of Oliver Cromwell. When Charles II gained the throne he was overseas on diplomatic duty. Given his republican views, he decided to stay away.
Sidney took up residence in Rome, a city he knew and whose culture he admired, though he distrusted the papal Church. While Charles’s spies were tracking other republicans around northern Europe, Sidney must have thought Rome a most unlikely place from which to be suspected of launching plots or rebellions. He was received warmly by Roman society and the pope’s nephew, Prince Pamphili, lent him a house. As so often, money was the worry. He was still owed money from his diplomatic work and was broke. He lived on a small allowance of five shillings a day from his father, the 2nd Earl of Leicester. With little money, Sidney threw himself into study and began to enjoy life in the city. His studious idyll did not last long. Even in Rome, assassins planned his death. The details are unknown but he was saved, he recorded, ‘only by the charity of strangers’.11
Sidney left Rome to go to Brussels and Holland. En route, he stopped off to see the exiles in Vevey. In particular, he wished to see Ludlow. In the last days of the Commonwealth, Ludlow had suggested to Cromwell that Sidney should be made second-in-command of the army in Ireland. The appointment was never carried out; the support of the House of Stuart by some of Sidney’s aristocratic relations put paid to that. Sidney and Say were also acquainted: they had been colleagues on the Commonwealth’s foreign affairs committee prior to the imposition of the Protectorate.
We only know in the most general way what Sidney and the Vevey group talked about, but there is no doubting that it revolved around the possibility of unseating Charles Stuart – as Sidney might have put it in another of his oft-quoted sayings, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ In his memoirs, A Voyce from the Watchtower, Ludlow described how the still-fragile state of the court of Charles II provided a background to Sidney’s visit:
The divisions of our enemies began to heighten ye hopes of friends touching ye approaching of our deliverance, in so much that Col. Algernon Sidney … now thinks it seasonable to draw towards his native country, in expectation of an opportunity wherein he might be more active for their service; and in his way was pleased to favour us with a visit …12
From this we know that conversation included discussion about how to restore the Commonwealth, for both men were ardent republicans. The persecution of Puritans roused Sidney to anger.13 Due to several new Acts known, after the Earl of Clarendon, as the Clarendon Code, those who did not take the sacraments in a parish church (i.e. all Puritans, Baptists and other nonconformists) could not hold public office and all public worship by nonconformists was illegal. The effect upon Sidney and Ludlow of news of the religious clampdown in England cannot be overestimated; as Blair Worden’s discoveries of manuscripts written by both men has shown us, religious enthusiasm coloured the glass through which they viewed the world.14 To top it all, there came new rumours that the king was a Roman Catholic.
Sidney’s stay in Vevey lasted three weeks. He left Ludlow with a present of a pair of pistols made by the most famous of Italian gunsmiths, Lazarino Cominazzo of Brescia. For the impecunious Sidney to bestow such an expensive present was deeply significant: he was hoping to entice Ludlow into leading an uprising to unseat Charles. Leaving the cautious Ludlow to ponder his future, and that of the republican ideals both men believed in, Sidney headed on in search of his elusive victorious army. In the visitors’ book of the Calvinist Academy in Geneva, he wrote in memory of Harry Vane, ‘Let there be revenge for the blood of the just.’
In October 1663, an armed uprising took place in the north of England. It was largely inspired by the king’s new policies, which forbade any cleric from preaching that had not been ordained by a bishop of the Church of England. The rebellion, which was small in scale, was led by a Congregationalist minister named Edward Richardson. Men gathered to join the rising in Yorkshire, Westmorland and Durham, but the numbers were low and the rebellion easily crushed. Richardson fled to the Netherlands. Ludlow’s name was again raised in royalist propaganda as being behind it all. There was an uprising in Ireland, too. An attempt to seize Dublin Castle was led by Captain Thomas Blood, the Irish parliamentarian soldier who would later attempt to steal the crown jewels. The Dublin plot was betrayed and most of its participants executed. Captain Blood escaped.
In Vevey, there was cause for rejoicing: Ludlow and Cawley’s wives arrived to join them. Cawley was by now quite sick with an illness from which he would never recover. He described this as a ‘wide and incurable rupture in the intestines with a spice of the stone’.15 The women’s departure from England and arrival in Vevey was noted in London. For some time, the regicides’ wives had been under scrutiny by Joseph Williamson’s security apparatus. Their mail was read for clues about the actions and whereabouts of their husbands. Their support was also the fugitives’ Achilles’ heel.
Ludlow and some of the others decided to visit Bern to assure the authorities of their gratitude and so solidify their position. The syndic assured them that they remained honoured guests. No sooner had the Englishmen returned to Vevey than they received intelligence that a certain ‘Riordo’ was now in Turin and was on a mission to kill them.
‘Riordo’, also known as Major Germaine (or sometimes John) Riordane, was an Irish officer who had once served in the Duke of York’s Regiment. Having left his commission and fallen on hard times, Riordane now sought, like many Irish soldiers, to find work where he could. For Riordane, this included the desperate world of espionage and murder. According to Ludlow, Riordane’s real name was MacCarty and he had become a hired assassin for the English crown. Apart from information about MacCarty, the exiles also heard that Charles II had written to the authorities in Bern asking them to give up the English rebels. Although they hardly knew it yet, Ludlow and the rest of the group now had their backs to the wall.
From the fact that Riordane corresponded directly with Lord Arlington, secretary of state, spymaster and chief procurer of the king’s mistresses, it was clear he was under the direction of Charles’s government at the highest level. It is true that there is no paper evidence that Riordane was instructed by the authorities in London to do any more than seek out the regicides, but Arlington and his head of intelligence, Williamson, were far too wise to commit any base instruction to paper. However, as Ludlow discovered, Riordane was also in the employ of (or was at least paid by) the king’s sister, Henrietta, the Duchess of Orléans, whom he often used to pass information to members of the French court, including Louis XIV himself.
The little group of exiles received intelligence of other death threats. As Ludlow recorded:
Divers letters from Turin, Geneva, Lyons, and other places, which we and our friends at Vevey received, were full of advices from those parts, that so many, and such desperate persons had engaged against us, that it would be next to impossible to escape their hands. And one of my best friends, who was then at Geneva, sent a messenger express to me, with a letter to inform me, That he had received a billet from a person who knew our friendship, and desired not to be known, with these expressions at the end, ‘If you wish the preservation of the English General at Vevay, let him know, that he must remove from thence with speed, if he have any regard to his own safety.’16
Such frantic warnings placed the Ludlows and their companions in an awkward situation. They had promises of protection where they were, but if they moved, they might not be able to obtain the same level of protection. Ludlow received information that Riordane had been seen in the Pais de Vaux and Savoy. Alarmed by such reports, the Vevey group considered their options. Despite the dangers of remaining where they were, they decided they didn’t want to play cat-and-mouse across Europe with men like Riordane. They concluded that with the protection
in Vevey ‘so frankly, publicly, and generously extended’, the best option was to stay put. Meanwhile, Charles II’s agents were closing in. Riordane reported to London that many of the king’s murderers, including Ludlow, Lisle, Whalley and Goffe, were now in Vevey. While his intelligence was right on the first two, it was completely wrong on the others, for Whalley and Goffe were in a different continent. Riordane even suggested that one of Oliver Cromwell’s sons was in Switzerland; he doesn’t say which one, though it most likely would have been Richard.17
No sooner had they decided to remain in Vevey than a group of ‘villains that had been employed to destroy us’ arrived in the town.18 On Saturday 14 November, Riordane, together with two other Irish soldiers and a group of locally hired thugs, crossed the lake from Savoy. They arrived in Vevey an hour after sunset. In total, there were ten in the group, plus two servants.19 Riordane then split his group in two to lodge at different inns. They told anyone who asked that they were pilgrims on their way to a Catholic shrine further along the lake. The following morning, Ludlow’s landlord, M. Dubois, went to church. At the quayside he saw a boat with four watermen sitting at their oars, ready to put off. The ropes securing the town’s boats had been cut to prevent pursuit. Nearby stood two men Dubois had never seen before, with their cloaks thrown over their shoulders and held closely around them. Dubois spotted the barrels of carbines sticking out from under the cloaks. Two more men were sitting under a tree with their cloaks held around them as if hiding something. Another two strangers were sitting a little way off.
Dubois reached the obvious conclusion – kidnappers or assassins had come for his guests. Abandoning his devotions, he retraced his steps. On the way back he met one of his neighbours, a Monsieur Binet, who informed him he had earlier seen two men loitering near his house and had spotted four more in the marketplace. These six had then moved down towards the lakeside. This information confirmed Dubois’s suspicions and he hurried home to alert the Englishmen.