The timing of the secret dispatch of the commission of array to London in May is significant. The collapse of the peace negotiations in Oxford, a string of Cavalier military successes, the imminent reunion of the king with Henrietta Maria, back from the Continent with a consignment of much-needed supplies and arms and at the head of a small army, all stimulated the carrying out of some of the ‘many fine designs’ that flourished in the febrile imaginations of Charles and his consort, so many that the king found it difficult to choose ‘which first to undertake’.39 Yet this particular fine design remained a closely guarded secret, unknown even to the king’s closest advisers. There seems to be no reason to doubt Clarendon’s statement that the plan was developed without ‘the privity or advice of any one councillor or minister of state’.40 It was also, of course, a plan that directly contradicted the policy of those moderates, both in Oxford and in London, who favoured the continuation of peace talks that would lead to a negotiated settlement.
The rash plan to organise a rising in London, to create by a royal commission an extraordinary officer corps of tradesmen and businessmen, overnight transformed into lieutenant colonels and majors commanding non-existent companies to be entrusted with ambitious objectives like seizing the Tower, had not even a tenuous link with reality.41 Despite the recent royalist military successes there was no prospect of Prince Rupert advancing in intimidating strength down the Thames valley. Dashing raids that ended in successful skirmishes like Chalgrove Field were one thing; a serious assault on London to coincide with a popular royalist rising was a very different prospect. But this farfetched and unrealistic ‘fine design’ was deliberately to be merged by Pym and the parliamentary propagandists with the more moderate plans of those royalist Londoners who looked to Edmund Waller for leadership and direction to help to bring an end to the war.
Wealthy and talented, ‘of admirable parts and faculties of wit and eloquence’ according to Clarendon, Waller had been prominent among the moderate so-called constitutional royalists who emerged as a significant group in the Long Parliament during the autumn of 1641. Unlike most of his parliamentary allies, he did not join the king in Oxford when hostilities began, but remained in London and continued to occupy his seat in the Commons.42 Waller was both sympathetic to and well placed to exploit the developing movement in London, in both Parliament and in the City, for a negotiated peace; the increasingly loudly voiced longing for an end to the hardships and miseries that the prolonged conflict brought with it, and for a return to normal conditions.43 Waller also had his Oxford connections. He had been one of the parliamentary delegation to discuss with the king and his councillors a negotiated peace settlement, and after the failure of the negotiations, seems to have maintained links with those royal advisers who favoured a moderate settlement. In particular, he continued to communicate with the senior Secretary of State, Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, a friend from the ‘halcyon days’ before the war when Waller had been one of the cultivated circle of scholars, poets and wits who gathered at Falkland’s country house at Great Tew.44
Although having in common with Falkland and Waller the desire for a negotiated peace, Richard Challoner, a wealthy London linen draper, was in most respects far removed from the members of the Great Tew circle.45 Challoner was no sophisticated courtier, but nor was he a cloak-and-dagger conspirator; rather, he was a supporter of those tactics that employed passive resistance to the payment of the new taxes and assessments and organised petitions to Parliament in order to bring about a peaceful resolution of the conflict. But Waller himself, and other more shadowy figures, notably Waller’s brother-in-law Nathaniel Tompkins, who had modest but long-standing court connections, were linked both to the Oxford plan, advocated by Crispe and authorised by the king’s commission, for an armed rising and to the London-based peace movement. Not surprisingly, security in this tangle of overlapping designs collapsed.46 At the end of May, in an atmosphere of fear and tension deliberately built up by calling out the militia to patrol the streets, one of the most important of the parliamentary executive committees, the Committee of Safety, ordered a series of arrests. Beginning with Crispe’s agent Alexander Hampden, more than a dozen alleged plotters, including Waller, Challoner and Tompkins, were swept up. Protesting volubly but vainly her immunity from arrest as a subject of the king of France by virtue of her French title, Lady d’Aubigny was extracted from the residence of the French ambassador and installed in the Tower.47
Interrogations and trials under martial law soon followed. Hampden was to die in prison, but Challoner and Tompkins, in whose cellar the king’s commission of array was discovered, were condemned to death for their leading roles in what the parliamentary newsbooks and pamphlets called the ‘Treacherous and horrid Design’. On 5 July, in his speech at the foot of the gallows specially erected outside the Royal Exchange in the heart of the City and close to his home, Challoner attempted to justify his actions. In his final moments he defended his role in the peace movement, asserting that he had been persuaded by Waller:
that if we could make a moderate party here in London, to stand betwixt the gap, and in the gap, to unite the King and the Parliament, it would be a very acceptable work, for now the three kingdoms lay a bleeding, and unless that were done there were no hopes to unite them.48
In his gallows speech Challoner further claimed ignorance of any plans to use violence against Parliament; that was not the ‘way’ he intended to go. Indeed, he was not prepared to take action, or to ‘stir’ at all, until Waller had assured him that the movement to force a negotiated peace had the support of the ‘whole House of Lords except three or four’.49 Challoner’s last words direct attention to another strand in the plot. To what extent, if at all, were the plans of Waller and Challoner secretly supported in the background by influential peers? How far beyond the impractical plans of naïve but essentially well-meaning citizens like the unfortunate Richard Challoner did the plot reach towards the heart of the parliamentarian leadership?
Under interrogation in prison, Waller, in Clarendon’s bitter words, ‘confessed whatsoever he had said, heard, thought, or seen, all that he knew of himself, and all that he suspected of others, without concealing any person, of what degree or quality whatsoever’. Specifically, he incriminated the Earl of Portland and Lord Conway as ‘having been particular in all the agitations which had been with the citizens’, and even claimed that the influential magnate the Earl of Northumberland, although remaining discreetly in the background, supported those measures which would lead to a negotiated peace.50 Conway, the general who had failed to distinguish himself in the Bishops’ Wars and Daniel O’Neill’s first patron, had only recently returned to London from campaigning in Ireland, where he had extensive estates seriously threatened by the forces of the Irish Confederates. Portland, the son of Charles I’s treasurer in the 1630s, was a much less prominent figure, but was a close friend of Waller. Although denying any involvement in the plot, Conway and Portland were arrested, but lacking concrete evidence against them and wishing to avoid any confrontation with a House of Lords notoriously sensitive about its privileges, the authorities soon released them. In August both noblemen quietly withdrew to Oxford, where they were warmly welcomed. Northumberland remained free and unmolested in London; his behaviour may have been suspect, but his prestige and authority rendered him untouchable.51
Waller narrowly avoided the fate of Challoner and Tompkins. He was able to preserve his own life, partly as a consequence of what he himself, in an obsequious submission to the Commons from prison, called ‘the free and ingenuous confession and discoveries made upon promised favour’. His readiness to tell all he knew was followed by an humiliating and abject performance before his fellow members of the Commons on 4 July. As part of his appeal for mercy he even brought to the attention of the MPs his ‘Children, whom the rigour of your Justice would make complete Orphans, being already Motherless’. The combination of Waller’s ‘despairing dejectedness’ of demeanour, his appeals to the emot
ions of his audience, and the bribes directed to ‘some leading Members of the house’ were successful in enabling him to avoid the block. Instead, he was fined £10,000 and imprisoned until November 1644, when he was permitted to go into exile.52
Waller’s plot has certain marked, and from the royalist viewpoint depressing, similarities with the army plots of two years earlier. Separate objectives by different royalists, defects in planning, inadequate direction from the top, a failure to maintain security: these already familiar elements of royalist plotting enabled the authorities to uncover the conspirators’ plans at the end of May. As with the army plots, the plans of Waller and his fellow conspirators provided Pym with a marvellous propaganda opportunity, which he seized with his customary zeal and ruthlessness. In 1641 he had stage-managed from the Commons the exposure of the army plots in order to discredit the court at a critical moment during the trial of Strafford. Two years later he presented a repeat performance which was equally effective. This time his most serious opponents were not the small group of essentially futile royalist plotters, but the substantial and probably increasing peace party in Parliament and the City, those who favoured a negotiated settlement with the king to end the war. In order to weaken and discredit the peace movement, the confused muddle of the plot was magnified by Pym and his allies into a ‘treacherous and horrid design’ to destroy the liberties of good Englishmen.53 Pym’s speech to the Commons dwelt on the dreadful consequences if this ‘great and mischievous Design’ had been successful, nothing less than the ‘ruin and destruction of the City and the Kingdom’, in the rubble of which Religion and Liberty would have been buried. In his speech Pym was free with the names of the plotters, Waller, Challoner, Tompkins and their associates, stressing their links with the court at Oxford, in particular with Falkland, but he was careful not to denounce any peers. Waller’s claim that the plot had supporters in both Houses of Parliament is dismissed as ‘a pretence’, lacking supporting evidence.54 The exploitation, distortion and exaggeration of Waller’s plot by Pym, ably assisted by the parliamentarian popular press with their lurid accounts of a ‘treacherous and bloody plot against the Parliament and City’, successfully if temporarily demoralised and rendered ineffective two potentially powerful and overlapping movements in London: popular royalism and the peace campaign. The requirement of an oath of loyalty, a ‘vow and covenant’, further cowed members of a peace movement fearful of being branded Malignants and Delinquents.55
Consideration of the nature and the effectiveness of what one anonymous broadsheet called the Cavaliers’ ‘Manifold Plots, Conspiracies, Contrivances’ against the ‘Parliament, Kingdom and purity of Religion’ suggests certain conclusions.56 For much of the duration of the Civil War clandestine lines of communication between Oxford and London were kept open by the resourcefulness, ingenuity and courage of a considerable number of for the most part anonymous agents and messengers. Despite some successful interceptions of consignments of propaganda, money or plate and several arrests of couriers, royalist viewpoints, whether expressed in royal declarations or in copies of Mercurius Aulicus, continued to be disseminated throughout the capital by a network of agents. Similarly, Londoners sympathetic to the Stuart cause were able to convey their support to Oxford, again through a variety of means. In different guises and using a variety of methods of transport, couriers were able to convey intelligence, bring donations of money or treasure, or even arrange for volunteers to travel to Oxford to serve in the king’s armies.57 The miserable failure of Waller’s plot, and of a couple of other insignificant and ineffectual conspiracies, needs to be balanced against the success of the networks organised by able and resourceful intelligencers like Barwick and Royston the bookseller.58
This picture of overlapping successes and failures illustrates a major problem confronting royalist agents, spies and conspirators: the absence of effective overall direction of royalist espionage or intelligence gathering in the capital. Peter Barwick may have claimed that his brother had ‘the management of the King’s Affairs’ in London, but that claim cannot be sustained. Barwick, Berkenhead and Royston established an effective network of agents and messengers, but there was no established hierarchy of authority among them or over them. One Secretary of State, Nicholas, was certainly a patron of Berkenhead and supplied him with material for Aulicus, but there are few signs of his attempting to direct the activities of agents travelling between Oxford and London.59 The other Secretary, Falkland, certainly had links with Waller and possibly with some of his associates, but not with the ‘friends’ of Aulicus like Berkenhead and Royston. Peter Barwick scarcely mentions Nicholas or Falkland, and clearly disapproved of the employment in espionage of attention-attracting prominent court figures like d’Aubigny, betrayed according to Barwick by ‘her own splendour’.60 His brother’s network of ‘adventurous’ but largely unobtrusive and anonymous female agents was much more effective. Then there were the agents sent into London by prominent royalists like Sir Nicholas Crispe or army commanders like Rupert to gather and forward intelligence. These agents acted entirely independently of Nicholas or Falkland, Barwick or Berkenhead, reporting back to their particular employer or to the royalist paymaster, John Ashburnham.
If royalist spies and agents were to have any success in undermining parliamentarian control of London they needed a Walsingham or a Thurloe to direct and control their activities. Lacking this central and efficient direction, a varied collection of agents, working to achieve different objectives and answerable to different patrons and employers, served eventually to muddle and demoralise what was clearly a significant body within London of potential or committed supporters of the king’s cause. This body of supporters was increasing as the conflict dragged on and the financial exactions imposed to finance the war effort and punish perceived opponents of parliamentary authority bit progressively deeper. Nothing illustrates more sharply the disastrous effects of the lack of efficient overall direction of the activities of royalist agents in the capital than the failure of Waller’s plot and its consequences: a critical weakening of the influence of the peace party, and a serious blow to the morale and confidence of the king’s supporters in the capital. The bodies of Challoner and Tompkins dangling from gallows in the heart of the City conveyed a powerful message. The failure of this particular ‘fine design’ in the middle of 1643 was followed during the next few months by the development of an increasingly ominous military situation. Charles would be forced to look elsewhere for the means to bring about a royalist victory in the Civil War.
1 Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, pp. 136–8; David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 39–40; J. S. A. Adamson, ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, vol. 40 (1990), 93–6.
2 For discussion of the widespread optimistic expectation that wars will be short, see Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 35–47.
3 For royalist Cromwells, see P. R. Newman, Royalist Officers in England and Wales, 1642–1660: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), p. 95. For the Feilding family, see ibid., p. 130, and Trevor Royle, The British Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 196, 226.
4 Richard Ollard, This War Without an Enemy (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 84–5.
5 For an excellent discussion of this subject, see Barbara Donagan, ‘Varieties of royalism’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 66–88.
6 Donagan, ‘Varieties of royalism’, pp. 71–80.
7 Clarendon, Rebellion, vii, 89, 91, 92, 297; Newman, Royalist Officers, p. 71; Royle, British Civil War, pp. 237–41.
8 The most spectacular side changer must be the Scottish professional soldier Sir John Urry (or Hurry), who was involved in the ‘Incident’. U
rry fought in the parliamentary army at Edgehill in 1642, went over to the royalists in 1643, returned to Parliament after Marston Moor in 1644 and was sent to Scotland with a command against Montrose. Defeated by Montrose at Auldearn in 1645, he then joined the marquess, to whom he remained loyal to the end. Captured at Carbisdale on 27 April 1650, he was executed in Edinburgh a week after Montrose. Edward M. Furgol, ‘Urry [Hurry], Sir John (d. 1650)’, ODNB, online edn, 2004, accessed 15 March 2010. For further examples of side-changing, see Donagan, ‘Varieties of royalism’, pp. 68–9, 76.
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