Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  The agents and couriers, spies and conspirators who were employed by the royalist leaders were drawn from several different elements in ‘the king’s party’. They arrived at their dangerous employments for many reasons and in a variety of circumstances. In the more settled conditions that had existed before the civil wars, several had been courtiers, even members of the royal household, but usually not prominent office holders. For example, the resourceful Daniel O’Neill, the aristocratic Henry Seymour, with his well-deserved reputation for ‘discretion and integrity’ and the belligerent ‘loud and bold’ Thomas Elliot were grooms of the bedchamber to either or both Charles I and Charles II. All three were active in espionage and intelligence gathering over most of the period we are considering.7 Not surprisingly, many agents also acquired a military background, having served in the king’s armies during the civil wars. For many of them involvement in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering and espionage came only when the king’s armies were defeated in the field, and the Stuart cause, if it were to survive, had to be maintained by other means. For example, one of the most able and resourceful of all royalist agents, the Northumbrian Cavalier Nicholas Armorer, spent the English Civil War as an obscure lieutenant, commanding the modest garrison of Lord Newport’s fairly insignificant fortified house, High Ercall in Shropshire. It was not until the early 1650s, by which time he had become a not particularly prominent member of the royalist émigré community in Holland, that his talents as a reliable and daring agent were discovered. Armorer soon became one of the most trusted, and certainly one of the busiest, of all the agents who were employed by the exiled Charles II and his principal counsellors.8

  The royalist agents were not only courtiers or swordsmen like O’Neill and Armorer. Major literary figures like Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller were also drawn into the murky world of plots and secret missions. And so were some members of the Anglican clergy, those significant casualties of Parliament’s victory in the English Civil War. Expelled from their livings and university fellowships and forbidden to conduct services that used the Anglican liturgy, most withdrew into retirement, waiting patiently, as the bishop of Salisbury, Brian Duppa, confided to his scholarly friend Sir Justinian Isham, for the time when ‘this tyranny be overpast’.9 But some clergy, not prepared to wait with patient resignation for the divine plan to be revealed, acted to hasten the process. One of the most industrious and courageous of all royalist agents, from the outbreak of the Civil War until the eve of the restoration of the monarchy, was the devout and scholarly Dr John Barwick. After living dangerously for years, enduring harassment and periods of imprisonment, Barwick ended his days as Dean of St. Paul’s.10 Although perhaps the most prominent Anglican clergyman to demonstrate his loyalty to the Stuart cause by becoming an intelligence agent, Barwick was certainly not the only one. Richard Allestree, a fellow of Christ Church until his expulsion by the victorious Parliament, was another. During the Interregnum he was entrusted with several secret missions between the king’s adherents in England and the Stuart court in exile. The Restoration also enabled Allestree to make the striking career change from a courier and agent, frequently on the run from the Commonwealth authorities, who sometimes caught up with him and put him in prison, to a highly respected regius professor of Divinity at Oxford.11

  Although they came from diverse backgrounds and represented different elements in the royalist party, men like O’Neill and Seymour, Barwick and Armorer all combined an unflinching loyalty to the Stuart cause with the qualities of resourcefulness and courage. But they lived and worked in a dangerous and treacherous world of suspicion and fear, a world in which the gallows and the prison cell were prominent features. When, in April 1655, after the suppression of a royalist rising against the Cromwellian regime, O’Neill made one of his several hurried cross Channel flights from England to the Continent, the exiled Charles II was reassured to receive the news that ‘O’Neill is safe in this town [The Hague] by his usual good luck in avoiding being hanged.’12 Not only was the possibility of violent death – on the scaffold, the battlefield or even from the normal hazards of seventeenth-century travel – always present, so was the possibility of betrayal. The royalist agents moved among spies and informers, the agents of the other side, whose responsibility it was to discover and frustrate the projects and plans of the enemies of Parliament and Commonwealth. Men who lived in this dark underworld of the political struggle sometimes changed sides, switching from being totally loyal royalists who had fought for Charles I in the Civil War to becoming Commonwealth spies a few years later, in the employ of John Thurloe, the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State and spymaster. This was the case, for example, with that mysterious and controversial figure Colonel Joseph Bampfield, a man of multiple and short-lived allegiances. If agents like O’Neill and Barwick illustrate the quality of unshaken loyalty to the Stuart cause, men like Bampfield demonstrate the reverse of the coin: treachery and duplicity. In this dangerous world those agents who remained loyal to their beliefs and principles inevitably moved among double agents and informers like Colonel Bampfield.13

  Royalist agents also suffered from another major problem, the lack of a powerful and highly talented individual with the will and authority to control and direct their activities. Intelligence and espionage were traditionally under the authority of the Secretary of State. During the reign of Elizabeth I Sir Francis Walsingham had directed the underground war against what were perceived to be the queen’s enemies with ruthless and terrifying efficiency. Approximately sixty years later, during the Cromwellian Protectorate, another Secretary of State, John Thurloe, was to acquire a similar reputation for mastery of the world of intelligence and counter-espionage. According to one historian, with Thurloe’s appointment in 1653, ‘genius had replaced (the) mere competence’ displayed by his predecessors, which judgement may be a little unfair on the predecessors, Thomas Scot and George Bishop.14 Then, in the years after 1660, when the newly restored and still insecure monarchy believed itself to be threatened by a variety of enemies, ranging from embittered Cromwellian officers to so-called Puritan ‘fanatics’ such as the Fifth Monarchists, security matters gradually came under the control of the extremely competent and assiduous record keeper Sir Joseph Williamson.15 But the royalist Secretary of State who was chiefly responsible for security and intelligence matters, both during the English Civil War and especially during the Interregnum, was Sir Edward Nicholas. Although possessed of several impressive qualities, no one has ever grouped Nicholas with his fellow Secretaries Walsingham, Thurloe and Williamson as a brilliant director of intelligence and espionage.

  The absence of Secretary Nicholas from any list of outstanding directors of intelligence in early modern England was not necessarily the result of his inadequacy or incompetence. On the contrary, historians have reason to be very grateful for the Secretary’s conscientious care of his voluminous papers, including correspondence with agents, instructions, cipher keys and so on, papers preserved throughout the vicissitudes of exile and somehow transported from one city or country to another as Nicholas, according to his particular circumstances, either avoided or joined the nomadic court of Charles II. Without the wealth of material provided by the Nicholas papers this book could not have been written.

  The failure of Nicholas to become a notable director of royalist intelligence and espionage was partly because he had to deal with peculiarly difficult situations that often reduced the effectiveness of the agents he employed. A major problem was the presence of feuds and factions among the quarrelsome and mutually suspicious courtiers, councillors and army commanders who served the king. The relentless and bitter campaigns of prominent courtiers and generals to gain control of the management of the royalist war effort embroiled them in endless intrigues and campaigns, first to obtain the confidence and then to influence the decisions of Charles I. The feuds and factions were not confined to the court in wartime Oxford, nor did they end with the defeat of the royalists in the Civ
il War. On the contrary, they remained a prominent feature of Charles II’s nomadic court, only now exacerbated both by the bitterness and frustration of military defeat and by a permanent shortage of money, an inevitable and depressing feature of existence in exile.16

  Royalist agents were part of this world of feuds and factions that divided and disorganised the leadership of the king’s party. Their loyalties were frequently to individual patrons or factions rather than to any theoretical principle of allegiance to the crown. Lacking the firm directing hand of a Walsingham or Thurloe, the agents looked to patrons for protection, employment and advancement. Daniel O’Neill, for example, was not only a friend but also, in patronage terms, a client of one of the greatest of all royalist magnates, James Butler, Marquess of Ormond. According to the great royalist statesman and historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, it was ‘notorious that the marquis of Ormond loved Mr O’Neale [sic] very well, and had much esteem for him’.17 One consequence of this dependence on individual patrons, who quite often were at enmity with each other, was that the agents also were drawn into the factional rivalries and personal disputes that divided the royalist leaders. What Clarendon called ‘the discomposures, jealousies, and disgusts, which reigned at Oxford’ continued to bedevil the leadership of the royalist party long after the Civil War was over, indeed throughout the Interregnum.18

  So it is clear that the crown’s agents confronted a range of problems and threats, both to their effectiveness and even sometimes to their lives. On their dangerous missions they were exposed to often challenging and demanding physical conditions, experiencing the numerous hazards of seventeenth-century travel as their journeys ranged from the remotest regions of the Scottish Highlands and the coasts of Connaught to the courts of European rulers, from the king of Portugal’s court in Lisbon to the duke of Courland’s in distant Mittau. On their missions they were in peril not only from discovery and capture by their open and obvious enemies, the political, military and other official functionaries of Parliament, Commonwealth or Protectorate, but also from betrayal by the spies and informers intent on uncovering and frustrating their plans. Finally, they had to cope with the unpleasant reality that they were risking their lives for a cause whose leadership was frequently disorganised and divided, which neglected the need to maintain tight security in intelligence activities, and which it in any case frequently lacked the money to finance adequately. A shortage of money was to be a perennial and depressing feature of the careers of the king’s agents.

  Despite the dangers and the hardships, the frequent frustrations and disappointments as plans miscarried and designs were uncovered, there were always agents prepared to resort to plots and secret schemes when the more open and conventional means of maintaining the Stuart cause seemed to have failed. This important element within the royalist party, this partiality for the secretive and the clandestine, first emerged in 1641 with the army plots, when a group of courtiers and officers first resorted to secret meetings to plan a military coup as a way of turning the tables on Charles I’s opponents in the Long Parliament. It was his involvement in the army plots that led to Daniel O’Neill’s imprisonment in the Tower on a charge of high treason. For the army plots were the first indication that, if the king could not achieve his objectives by straightforward political means, either by dominating or at least by reaching a working agreement with Parliament, then a pre-emptive strike to intimidate and neutralise the crown’s parliamentary opponents was an alternative course that had considerable appeal. This belief was still current in the exiled court nearly twenty years later. For the army plots began a pattern that lasted until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. For almost twenty years, secret negotiations, clandestine communications, conspiracies and plots were created and sustained, shattered and then painstakingly rebuilt, by a complex and precarious network of agents whose missions took them on frequently perilous journeys throughout the three Stuart kingdoms, between Britain and the Continent and backwards and forwards on the Continent itself. The important and continuing role given to intelligence and conspiracy demonstrates the belief of many royalists that, if neither their politicians in Parliament nor their generals on the battlefield could achieve victory for the crown, then there was no alternative but to turn to the cloak-and-dagger men, the agents, the spies and the conspirators.

  1 HMC, 9th Report, ii, Appendix, 243.

  2 Commons Journal, i, 560–61; ii, 576; ONeales Escape out of the Tower of London (London, 5 May 1642); HMC, 5th Report, p. 178; HMC, 12th Report, Appendix, ix, 495; HMC, 13th Report, v, 99.

  3 Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols (Oxford, 1888), v, 449; references are to book and paragraph. B. E. G. Warburton, Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, 3 vols (London, 1849), i, 110.

  4 For Keynes, see Geoffrey Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile, 1640–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 85–6.

  5 John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. 20. See also Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c. 1534–1707 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

  6 Bod.L. Clarendon MS 67, fos 191–2.

  7 For Seymour’s ‘discretion and integrity’, see Thomas Carte (ed.), A Collection of Original Letters and Papers, Concerning the Affairs of England … 1641–1660, Found among the Duke of Ormond’s Papers, 2 vols (London, 1739), i, 337. For the ‘loud and bold’ Elliot, see Clarendon, Rebellion, v, 212, 214.

  8 For Armorer, see Geoffrey Smith, ‘Armorer, Sir Nicholas (c. 1620–1686)’, ODNB, online edn, May 2006, accessed 13 March 2010.

  9 Sir Gyles Isham (ed.), Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham (Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1955), p. 179.

  10 Peter Barwick, The Life of John Barwick … Dean of Durham and St. Paul’s, trans. H. Bedford (London, 1724).

  11 For Barwick and Allestree, see Jason McElligott, ‘Barwick, John (1612–1664)’, ODNB, online edn, January 2008, accessed 13 March 2010; John Spurr, ‘Allestree, Richard (1621/2–1681)’, ODNB, online edn, 2004, accessed 13 March 2010.

  12 HMC, Ormonde MSS, i, 318.

  13 For Bampfield, see Colonel Joseph Bamfield’s Apologie, Written by Himself and Printed at His Desire (1685), ed. John Loftis and Paul H. Hardacre (London: Associated University Presses, 1993); John Loftis (ed.), The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

  14 David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England 1649–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 62.

  15 For Williamson and for Bampfield’s career after the Restoration, see Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), passim.

  16 For excellent discussions of factions in the wartime court, see the articles by David Scott, ‘Counsel and cabal in the king’s party 1642–1646’, in Jason McElligott and David L Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 112–35, and ‘Rethinking royalist politics, 1642–9’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 36–60.

  17 Clarendon, Rebellion, viii, 270.

  18 Ibid., vii, 276.

  Chapter 1

  Ill Carried Designs: The Army Plots 1640–1642

  The truth is the design has been ill carried, whatsoever it hath been.

  Secretary of State Sir Henry Vane to Sir Thomas Roe, 7 May 1641

  Some study plots, and some these plots t’undo,

  Others to make ’em, and undo ’em too.

  Sir John Denham, Cooper’s Hill, 1642

  The exact nature of the army plots in 1641 certainly puzzled contemporaries, and for modern historians they still retain an aura of confusion and mystery. In the words of Conrad Russell, ‘we are not extremel
y clear who plotted with whom to do what’.1 But the murky depths of the plots need to be explored, for they were the first serious venture of some of Charles I’s supporters into the world of secret meetings and conspiracy. For some the confused and mysterious events of 1641 were the beginnings of an involvement in this particular dark underworld of political life that would last until either they died or the royalist cause finally triumphed at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

  Old Cavaliers, when they gathered together to reminisce and console each other over their wine during the long bleak years they were forced to endure after losing the Civil War, were prone to look back nostalgically at the time before the war as an ‘halcyon age’. According to Clarendon in his magisterial History of the Rebellion, during the eleven years of the Personal Rule of Charles I that began in 1629 England had ‘enjoyed the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long together have been blessed with’. Throughout the 1630s the ragged armies of the warring princes of Europe had tramped back and forwards across repeatedly devastated lands, but although these armies contained many English, Irish and Scottish volunteers, England had officially remained aloof from the horrors of the Thirty Years War. Peaceful and orderly, according to Clarendon’s nostalgic vision, the kingdom ruled by Charles I was ‘the wonder and envy of all parts of Christendom’.2

  The riots in Edinburgh in July 1637 that followed the fateful attempt by Charles I and Archbishop Laud to impose by royal proclamation a new prayer book on the Scottish church began the sequence of events that brought about the collapse of the Personal Rule, and with it the end of this so-called ‘halcyon age’. A further royal proclamation in February 1638 that defended the new prayer book and threatened its critics with ‘high censure’ only served to stimulate a vigorous and widespread campaign of protest and resistance at what was seen as unwarranted and unconstitutional interference in the affairs of the fiercely independent northern kingdom.3 The campaign culminated in the drawing up of the National Covenant for the defence of Scotland’s religion. In the early months of 1638, in an intense and highly charged atmosphere, copies of the Covenant were circulated widely throughout Scotland, to be received with enormous popular enthusiasm.