Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies
Page 7
The chivalric code illustrated by aristocratic generals challenging each other to single combat soon withered as the English Civil War spread, intensified, and most importantly, showed no signs of being rapidly brought to a conclusion. During the first twelve months of the war the royal court and administration established in Oxford received constant reports of successful raids and skirmishes, of victories in battles in the provinces, of the capture of towns and strongholds – reports that were good for morale in the overcrowded and unhealthy city, but were not indications of any kind of imminent final victory. The key to victory in the Civil War was the possession of London, the centre of direction of the parliamentary war effort, the principal source of the wealth in men and materials that raised and maintained Parliament’s armies.12 To Clarendon, London was ‘the fomenter, supporter and indeed the life of the war’, a judgement that has much evidence to support it.13 Although royalists might deplore ‘the unruly and mutinous spirit of the city of London’, which, again according to Clarendon, was ‘the sink of all the ill humour of the kingdom’, they could not abandon the hope of recovering control of the capital in which it was believed that, despite the flight of many loyal Londoners to Oxford, a substantial body of sympathisers for the king’s cause still remained.14
The hasty withdrawal of Charles I from Whitehall in January 1642 demonstrated that, at least for the time being, the king had lost control of his capital. Through a series of disputed elections, popular demonstrations and parliamentary interventions the control of the City’s government by the royalist Lord Mayor Sir Richard Gurney and the Recorder Sir Thomas Gardiner was broken.15 Gurney and Gardiner were impeached, the former to die a prisoner in the Tower, while the latter was able to escape from London to join Charles in York. The allies of Gurney and Gardiner on the Common Council, many of whom had close links with the court through their positions as magistrates and office holders under the crown, as holders of royal grants of patents and monopolies, and as substantial creditors of both the king and a number of his courtiers, were swept aside. Under the leadership of the new Lord Mayor, Isaac Pennington, and John Venn, both MPs and radical puritans, supporters of Pym and his ‘popular party’ in Parliament replaced the royalist aldermen and other office holders in the administration of the City.16
These upheavals left behind them a significant body of politically displaced and understandably bitter citizens, hostile to the programme of Pym and his radical allies and supporters, a potential fifth column – to use an anachronistic term – within the City, open to being exploited by the royalist high command in Oxford. The leadership of London’s loyalists was traditionally vested in the ‘Grandees of the Metropolis’, wealthy merchants with court connections like Sir George Benyon, Sir Nicholas Crispe and Sir Peter Pindar, but events were to demonstrate that support for the Stuart cause was not confined to the established elites, but extended down through a diverse range of social groups.17
The limitations of royalist military power determined the ways in which the king and his advisers in Oxford could make use of this potentially powerful body of supporters in London. When on 13 November 1642 Prince Rupert made the fateful but sensible decision not to launch his weary and outnumbered cavalry across the market gardens of Turnham Green at the Earl of Essex’s army, drawn up to protect London, but instead ordered a withdrawal to Oxford, the royalists acknowledged that they did not have the strength to attempt an all-out military assault on the capital. The Oxford field army was not strong enough on its own, and the other significant royalist forces, in the West Country and the north, were too deeply entangled in their own campaigns to be able to combine with Rupert’s forces in an attack on London. If the authority of Parliament were to be undermined, if the City were to be regained, or if that were not possible, if at least the wealth and services of loyal Londoners could be tapped to support the royal cause, then other means, indirect and clandestine, would have to be employed. The withdrawal of Rupert’s Cavaliers from Turnham Green left the way open for the agents, for couriers, spies and conspirators. If the king’s cause were to be maintained in London, there was a wide range of dangerous activities available in which they could be employed.
Clandestine communication between Oxford and London was managed in a variety of ways and with several different objectives. To say that the military frontier between the regions controlled by the king and by Parliament was porous is an understatement. Although in theory the movement of people and goods between Oxford and London was restricted, royalist agents and couriers, many of whom were women, were frequently able to outwit the not very rigorous surveillance of Parliament’s officers.18 Messengers, scouts and spies, often disguised as hawkers or beggars, constantly travelled between the two cities. One of the most active directors of this dangerous traffic was an Anglican clergyman, Dr John Barwick. A fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and chaplain to Thomas Morton, Bishop of Durham, the scholarly Barwick was far removed from the traditional stereotype of the Cavalier. He was certainly no courtier swordsman like Daniel O’Neill or Henry Seymour, but during his long career – remarkably long considering its hazards – as a royalist agent and intelligencer he was to show impressive courage and resilience in the face of hardship, danger and disappointment. At the end of 1643, with the Bishop of Durham no longer able safely to reside in his bishopric and Barwick ejected by puritan parliamentarians from his Cambridge fellowship, both divines were living in Durham House in London. It was at this time, according to his brother Peter, that Barwick assumed an important role in:
the Management of the King’s Affairs, and as a secret Spy, carried on a private Correspondence betwixt London and Oxford, where the King’s Head Quarters were; on the one Hand communicating to his Majesty all the Designs and Endeavours of the Rebels, and conveying his Royal Orders and Commands on the other.19
Barwick possessed important qualities and skills as a clandestine manager of the king’s affairs in a hostile city. Unlike, for example, the army plotters, with their regrettable but appropriately cavalier disdain for matters of security, Barwick was discreet, normally communicated by letters in cipher, concealed dangerous correspondence ‘relating to the King’s Business’ in secure hiding places in rambling Durham House and tolerated no ‘indiscreet Blabbing’. He was to show himself an indefatigable networker, creating and exploiting a range of connections, including some that penetrated into the parliamentarian leadership, which provided him with the information that was the basis of his reports on the ‘Designs and Endeavours of the Rebels’. Two of his sources of information in the Commons were the north Wales magnate Sir Thomas Myddleton, something of a lukewarm parliamentarian, and Roger Pope, both of whom were also army officers. But his most important informant, who was to have a long career in royalist espionage, was Francis Cresset, ‘a gentleman of a Shropshire family who was in great credit with the Earl of Pembroke’. Cresset was able to obtain passports which authorised ‘free Passage to and fro’ between Oxford and London, ‘by virtue of which certain London pedlars, most faithful to the King, could freely traffic’ through the areas controlled by the parliamentarian army.20
Barwick’s other significant contribution to royalist espionage in London was his employment as couriers of ‘certain adventurous Women, hired for the purpose by Mr Royston the Bookseller’. The women travelled in the guise of beggars or pedlars, ‘loitering at places agreed upon to collect books conveyed on Thames barges, and then [instructed] to distribute them’. Barwick was careful to employ only ‘faithful and honest Messengers’ whose apparently modest condition made them less conspicuous.21 As well as the spurious pedestrian beggars and pedlars, some carriers who had a licence to convey goods also smuggled letters, newsbooks and other objects along the roads. In December 1643 a parliamentarian newsbook complained that ‘all commodities which the Cavaliers want’ were taken by carriers to High Wycombe, and from there ‘sent in the night to Oxford by wagon loads at a time’. Bargemen on the Thames operated similar schemes, shipping goods l
egally to Parliament controlled Henley, from where they were taken in secret overland to Oxford. Barwick’s claim that this route was also used by his female couriers is supported by reports in the pro-Parliament newsbooks. On 27 July 1643 The Parliament Scout complained about ‘a woman Intelligencer that lives in the Suburbs’ who ‘goes weekly between Oxford and London and carries the most material Letters’. She avoided discovery by travelling ‘a great part of her way by water, and then takes horse’.22
The London newsbooks contain a number of references to the activities of the female agents employed to communicate between Oxford and London, not all of whom were necessarily employed by Barwick or Royston. In November 1644 Mercurius Civicus claimed that Mrs Penyall, the wife of a ‘sometimes Clerk or Singingman at Windsor castle’, secretly ‘carries Letters constantly of information of all the business of London’ to Oxford, and ‘again brings Letters from Oxford hither, and to some other parts’. We cannot now know why Mrs Penyall took these risks in the king’s cause, but it is significant that she and her husband Matthew lived in crowded royalist Oxford, and no longer in Windsor Castle, which by this time housed a garrison of parliamentarian soldiers who would have had neither the need nor the desire for royal ‘singingmen’. This forced change of residence would have given Mrs Penyall ample personal, economic and quite possibly religious reasons to justify her royalism. In the same issue of Mercurius Civicus, ‘Mistress Guy, a Proctor’s wife, now at Oxford’, was denounced as ‘another great informer of news from London’.23
It is apparent in their references to the couriers and spies that a principal concern of the pro-parliamentary newsbooks was to condemn their activities not only as ‘constant conveyor(s) of dangerous Intelligence between Oxford and London’, but also as smugglers of that ‘spearhead of Royalist propaganda’, Mercurius Aulicus.24 During its comparatively short but exciting life, Mercurius Aulicus was edited for most of its issues by the brilliant journalist John Berkenhead, a protégé of Archbishop Laud and a devoted royalist. The best evidence to support the view that Aulicus was feared and hated for the vigour and wit with which it presented the royalist view on the Civil War is the extraordinarily large number of London periodicals and pamphlets whose principal function was to discredit and denounce the royalist newsbook.25 What is also significant about the wealth of attacks on Aulicus is that they demonstrate how widely the newsbook was read in London. It is clear, when reading the attacks in the London newsbooks Mercurius Civicus, Mercurius Britanicus, The Parliament Scout and the rest, that the editors assume their readers are familiar with the content and distinctive style of Aulicus. The ‘she Informers’ denounced by Mercurius Civicus, who smuggled Aulicus into London and then ensured its widest possible distribution, clearly did their work well.26
The City authorities were unable, despite occasional seizures of consignments, to prevent widespread distribution of the newsbook, the organisation of which seems to have been managed principally by Richard Royston. According to Peter Barwick, Royston ‘did great Service to his King and Country, by printing and dispersing in the most difficult Times, books written in defence of the Royal Cause’. Denounced as a ‘friend’ of Aulicus, Royston was eventually arrested at the end of July 1645, by which time the end was in sight both for royalist military fortunes and for Aulicus and the other newsbooks that had so successfully celebrated them. Considered important enough to be brought before the bar of the House of Lords, Royston confessed that he had received from Oxford and distributed a newsbook, The Souldier’s Catechisme. Royston was committed to the Fleet prison, The Souldier’s Catechisme was denounced as ‘a base and scandalous Book against the Parliament and their Proceedings’, with all copies to be seized and burned by the common hangman, while two of the alleged distributors of the newsbook, John (or William) Thomas and Eleanor Passinger, were also arrested.27
A further reason why the parliamentarian authorities were so incensed at the success and popularity of Mercurius Aulicus was that, as well as demonstrating royalist success in maintaining lines of communication between Oxford and the reading public of London, its contents also revealed that Berkenhead had a considerable and well-informed number of intelligencers and correspondents in the capital. The frequent ironic or derisive accounts in Aulicus of debates in the Commons, of the sermons of puritan preachers, of the actions and policy decisions of Parliament’s leaders were normally introduced with some such provocative statement as ‘this day came several advertisements from London touching the matters there in agitation’.28 Berkenhead’s coverage of events in London showed that he made full use of the intelligence brought back to Oxford by his ‘she Informers’ and other spies. As Mercurius Britanicus complained querulously in August 1643, Aulicus had ‘as exact intelligence from some of the close [secret] committee, and both Houses as can be wished’. This complaint was well founded. In his biography of Berkenhead, P. W. Thomas gives several examples of the accuracy and speed with which Aulicus reported political events in London. A spectacular example is the correct reporting in Aulicus of a speech by Oliver St John in the Commons in April 1644, which according to Mercurius Britanicus was delivered in a voice ‘at that time a little low’, so that ‘not above six’ MPs could have heard it.29
As well as copies, even sometimes great bundles, of Mercurius Aulicus, couriers carried royal declarations, dispatches and letters to supporters and agents inside the capital. Intelligence reports, including material to be used by the editors of Aulicus, financial contributions to the royal treasury and messages of one kind or another were conveyed secretly back to Oxford.30 The accounts of the army plotter William Ashburnham’s brother John, the Treasurer at War and a groom of the bedchamber to Charles I, contain several records of the receipt of large amounts of money from London, including £6,041 from ‘P.P. and others’, presumably a reference to the wealthy City magnate Sir Peter Pindar, and £500 from ‘Mr Challoner’, soon to be fatally involved in conspiracy, ‘and others’. There are also many records of payments to individuals for ‘secret service’ or ‘Intelligence’, including £60 to a Mr Pooley, a name that will occur again in later chapters, ‘for three journeys to Cambridge’, a city deep in Parliament-controlled territory, and £3 to ‘a seaman that came from London’.31
The agents who, if they were lucky, avoided capture and survived eventually to be reimbursed for their ‘secret service’ or intelligence-gathering activities were a diverse collection of men and women, ranging from Cavalier swordsmen to London artisans. The newsbooks that complained about spies being sent into London ‘from the King’s Army only of purpose to hear news to carry to the King’ sometimes recorded the fates of those whose luck ran out. There are several references to agents being captured. In May 1643 there was a report of ‘an Agent of Sir Philip Carteret [being] apprehended’ in possession of writings ‘of dangerous consequence’, and another in October of the same year to two royalist soldiers being arrested in the City, they having talked their way through the guards on duty. Convicted spies, as distinct from simple couriers, could expect to be treated ruthlessly. On 27 November 1643 Daniel Kniveton, ‘a haberdasher of small wares upon Ludgate Hill, was hanged before the Exchange in Cornhill for a Spy’. His crime was the bringing into London of ‘Writs and Proclamations from Oxford’ without a pass either from Parliament or the Lord General, the Earl of Essex. An identical fate was suffered by Tobias Beasely, a corporal in Rupert’s own regiment, who was hanged as a spy in Smithfield.32
The executions of Kniveton and Beasely show that the authorities in London viewed extremely seriously royalist attempts to undermine the City’s loyalty to the cause of Parliament. Smuggling copies of Aulicus one way and letters and donations of money the other were seen as undesirable irritants, but they were not activities that were going to bring Rupert at the head of an army of vengeful, plundering and licentious Cavaliers storming into Westminster and the City. But a rising by the royalist fifth column within the capital, promoted and organised from Oxford, was a different matter. It might
even succeed in returning the City to royal control, an achievement which would almost certainly enable the royalists to win the Civil War. The so-called ‘Waller’s Plot’ in the early summer of 1643 was, at any rate officially and at face value, intended to achieve this objective.33
As with the army plots of two years earlier, the plot to which the poet Edmund Waller has given his name and sacrificed his personal reputation was a confused and muddled affair. The extent to which there ever was a serious royalist plot in the early summer of 1643 to seize control of London from within remains doubtful. Not surprisingly, Mercurius Aulicus ridiculed the notion, reporting in the 3 June issue that there was ‘a great tumult raised in London on pretence (forsooth) of a horrible Treason then discovered against the City and its worthy members’. Berkenhead’s scepticism has been shared by some modern historians, who maintain that there was ‘no plot at all, but the deliberate conflation by Pym of what were almost certainly two entirely separate and disastrously contradictory strands of royal policy’.34 There were certainly contradictory strands, but there were more than two, and they were brought together in a tangle centred on the complex figure of Edmund Waller.
The plot had its origins in Oxford in the early months of 1643. The king’s headquarters were the refuge of many royalist refugees from London who formed there what Ian Roy has called ‘a veritable Greek chorus demanding vengeance on the rebellious city’.35 In the centre of the front row of this chorus was Sir Nicholas Crispe, wealthy merchant, monopolist, customs farmer and militant royalist. Crispe had fled to Oxford in January, when an intercepted letter revealed that he was claiming £3,700 ‘for secret service done for his Majesty’, leaving his extensive London properties and assets to be plundered and sequestered.36 From Oxford, Crispe was able to establish communication with fellow royalists in London, from whom, according to Clarendon, ‘he gave the king often very useful intelligence, and assured him of a very considerable party which would appear there for him whenever his own power should be so near as to give them any countenance’. Royal letters patent and a commission of array were prepared, addressed to 17 named citizens, authorising them to raise forces, appoint officers and spend money in the king’s name in preparation for an armed royalist rising.37 Crispe had his own agents who travelled between London and Oxford, notably Henry Heron and Alexander Hampden, a cousin of the parliamentarian leader, but the commission of array was entrusted to a more glamorous figure. A prominent member of the court at Oxford, Katherine Stuart, née Howard, Lady d’Aubigny, was the high-spirited young widow of a cousin of Charles I, George, Lord d’Aubigny, who was killed at Edgehill. Lady d’Aubigny obtained permission from Parliament to go to London to deal with her dead husband’s affairs, and in May she travelled to the capital with the commission concealed in her clothing, delivering it safely to one Nathaniel Tompkins, brother-in-law to Edmund Waller.38