With these connections, it is not surprising that from the very beginning of hostilities Charles had begun to dispatch agents across the Channel to solicit aid from his princely relatives. As early as April 1642, when Charles was still at York, he had been sent a letter from the queen at The Hague, entrusted to ‘one of her Majestie’s Gentleman Ushers’, that contained the startling news ‘that our cousin the King of Demark is set forwards with a fleet for England’.8 What the queen had heard ‘for certainty and by credible information’ was totally without foundation, but along with the belief in the imminent arrival of a formidable Irish army on the coast of Lancashire, the prospect of a powerful Danish fleet sailing to the rescue of Christian’s nephew was not one to be easily abandoned by the Stuart court. Both these projects, whose prospects of being realised constantly swung between confident expectations and increasingly desperate hopes, were to have a long history. As Daniel O’Neill was to have a long involvement in the various schemes to bring an Irish royalist army to England, so John Cochrane had a similarly long history of attempts to bring significant Danish aid to the Stuart cause.
Cochrane’s involvement in the Incident, the muddled plot to destroy the power of Argyll and Hamilton, had ended any prospects he might have had for further advancement in the Covenanter army. In any case his loyalty now was to Montrose, and not to the regime in power in Scotland. So, for the time being, Cochrane abandoned Scotland, even resigning his estates and his right of succession to the Dundonald earldom to his younger brother. Some time in 1642 he joined the king at York.9 But he did not remain there for long. In the company of another Scottish professional soldier with experience of the German wars, Sir John Henderson, and with a personal recommendation from Elizabeth of Bohemia, Cochrane headed across the Channel to solicit military aid and money. On 11 October the House of Lords recorded its information that ‘Sir John Henderson and Colonel Cockeran [sic] are gone into Denmark, to raise forces there to land at Newcastle, and so to join the King’s army.’10 They were followed a few months later by another envoy, John Poley, a member of a prominent Suffolk family with court connections. Poley (or Pooley), whose name is included in the secret service payments of the Treasurer-at-War John Ashburnham, was also to have a long career as a royalist agent, eventually travelling much further on the king’s business than on his first clandestine journeys from royalist Oxford to parliamentarian Cambridge in the early stages of the Civil War.11
It is therefore not surprising that, on her return to England from her sojourn in France and Holland, Henrietta Maria was informed by her husband that ‘so many fine designs are laid open to us we know not which first to undertake’. The exposure of Waller’s plot, and the failure of the plans to gain possession of Hull and Lincoln, increased the importance and urgency of the other designs: to organise for reinforcements for the king’s armies to be sent from Ireland, to challenge the authority of the Covenanter regime in Scotland by a simultaneous royalist invasion and internal rising, and to solicit the arrival of aid from the Continent, from the Dutch republic, Denmark or France. As the war widened and became more complex, so did the scope for the activities of royalist agents. In some cases the agents had begun their involvement in royalist espionage and conspiracy with relatively simple tasks, carrying letters, either between Whitehall and Edinburgh or York in 1641, or when the Civil War broke out, between Oxford and London. They were now to confront the need for much more extensive and arduous journeys. During the winter of 1643–44 royalist agents rode out of Oxford on missions that were intended to arrest the ominous signs that decisive military victory in the English Civil War was slipping beyond the reach of the king’s armies.
Present in Oxford when the projects of Antrim and Montrose received royal approval were two royalists already experienced in plots and secret missions, Daniel O’Neill and John Cochrane. With the failure of the army plots, O’Neill’s apparent value to the royalist cause had reverted to the use to be made of his experience and ability as a soldier. When the Civil War began, O’Neill, like almost all his fellow army plotters, joined the king’s forces. As a cavalry officer commanding Prince Rupert’s own regiment, he was present at a series of military engagements in the first year of the war, riding with Rupert in dashing minor victories at Powick Bridge and Chalgrove Field, and surviving bloody major battles like Edgehill and Newbury. But when not on campaign, he was clearly unhappy at being quartered with Rupert’s ill-disciplined cavalry at Abingdon. ‘I had rather be your groom at Oxford’, O’Neill complained to the prince in December 1642, ‘than with a company that shall assume such freedom as yours does here.’12 O’Neill preferred to be at the centre of affairs, at the court in Oxford, where he could make use of his other non-military talents, not left in an outlying garrison town in charge of an unruly company of hard-drinking troopers.
It was not until the 1643 campaigning season ended, with the war showing no signs of ending and both sides looking for some dramatic way to break the military stalemate, that O’Neill achieved his ambition and established himself in Oxford. ‘My lord, here is Daniel O’Neill, very serviceable to your Lordship’s memory,’ wrote Arthur Trevor, a regular supplier of court information and gossip to Ormond, in December 1643. ‘His reputation is very good and his access no less [good] with those of the best credit in this state of the world.’13 It was his constant need for access to persons of power and influence that drew O’Neill from Abingdon to Oxford, from the boisterous company of cavalry troopers and their wenches to the intrigues and manoeuvres of the courtiers and army commanders who sought to shape the decisions of the king. For the presence of Antrim and Montrose in Oxford in December 1643 gave O’Neill a splendid opportunity to perform a signal service for Charles I that would enable him to realise his long-held personal ambition to obtain a place in the king’s bedchamber. A drawn-out intrigue followed, its various steps stage managed by O’Neill’s friend and patron George, Lord Digby, the new Secretary of State in succession to Falkland, who was killed at Newbury. According to Clarendon, who described at considerable length Digby’s devious intrigues, it was only with some reluctance that the king agreed to the admission to his bedchamber of a Gaelic Irishman, whose intense dislike of Strafford was well known and who belonged to a family that had supplied many notorious rebels against the English crown.14 With this appointment, O’Neill had forced his way into the heart of royalist decision-making, which was no longer unambiguously the responsibility of the Privy Council and the Council of War, but had become increasingly concentrated within the king’s personal circle of confidants.15 He was no longer a simple Irish swordsman with dubious antecedents; instead he had attained a position with the potential to exercise power and patronage. As Digby, who took to himself the credit for placing O’Neill in the king’s bedchamber, observed to Ormond: ‘he cannot fail there of making a fortune, even without the help of his friends’.16
Digby’s prediction that O’Neill was certain to profit enormously from his new position is a minor illustration of the boundless and frequently unfounded optimism for which he became notorious among his fellow royalists.17 Whatever the potential prospects for fortune-making, in January 1644 O’Neill had neither the time nor the opportunity to exploit the advantages of his new appointment. His immediate future lay not in the royal bedchamber in Oxford, but in politically and militarily divided Ireland, a country ravaged by war. According to Clarendon’s not entirely reliable account, it was only on condition that O’Neill immediately left Oxford to accompany Antrim to Ireland that Charles was eventually persuaded to agree to his bedchamber appointment. As the manifold deficiencies of character and temperament of ‘so shallow an engine as my Lord Antrim’ were regarded with considerable concern by the royalist high command, O’Neill was required to accompany him, essentially as his ‘minder’: ‘by way of ballast’ and ‘as the fittest person to steer’ the naturally wayward earl.18 For although Antrim and Ormond neither liked nor trusted each other, they both regarded O’Neill highly. Again, according to Cl
arendon:
it was universally known that Mr O’Neale … had more power with the earl of Antrim than any man … and it was as notorious that the marquis of Ormond loved Mr. O’Neale very well, and had much esteem for him.
In order to persuade the two mutually suspicious noblemen to co-operate with each other, considerable reliance was being placed on O’Neill’s ‘people skills’, or as Clarendon expressed it in more elegant language, ‘the dexterity of his nature, in which he was superior to most men’ and ‘his singular address’.19 Of course, O’Neill was not intended to act only as Antrim’s minder; as the nephew of Owen Roe O’Neill, the commander of the most effective Confederate army, he had potentially useful contacts of his own.
The agreement between Antrim and Montrose that named the former as General of the Highlands and Islands and the latter as Lieutenant-General (later altered to Lieutenant-Governor) of Scotland and Captain-General was drawn up and witnessed on 28 January by Digby, O’Neill and Sir Robert Spottiswoode, son of the late Archbishop of St Andrew’s, and intended to be Secretary of State in a new royalist government once the Covenanter regime had been overthrown.20 After witnessing the agreement, Antrim and O’Neill must have almost immediately left Oxford. The parliamentary newsbook The Military Scribe was well enough informed to report Antrim’s departure from Bristol to Ireland ‘with a commission to raise the rebels in that Kingdom against the Scots’. Antrim and O’Neill disembarked at Waterford and proceeded immediately to the Confederate capital of Kilkenny.21 ‘Yesternight my Lord Antrim came hither,’ reported O’Neill to Ormond on 24 February. ‘Soon after he arrived, he declared his Majesty’s commands to the Council and so did I.’22 It is clear that O’Neill was seen as much more than Antrim’s minder and travelling companion; this is further demonstrated by the contents of the letter from Digby to Ormond that he carried with him:
This bearer, Mr Daniel O’Neill, my special dear and intimate friend, is sent over so fully instructed, and it is so precisely his errand and business to inform your excellency more particularly than we could safely do any other way, of his Majesty’s intentions and designs concerning that Kingdom, not only in the employment of my lord of Antrim but in all other things concerning his Majesty’s service there; that it were very superfluous for me to make additions in writing to what he is fully charged with; and therefore I shall wholly refer your lordship to him.23
About one month after Antrim and O’Neill’s departure for Ireland, Montrose headed northwards to York on the first stage of his famous and extraordinary venture to seize control of Scotland for the king. Montrose was accompanied by a clutch of Scottish royalist lords, but he sent ahead of his party Colonel Cochrane, recently returned from his mission to Denmark and even more recently released from parliamentary confinement in Hull. Cochrane’s immediate task was certainly less complex than O’Neill’s: to ‘learn the condition of affairs’, and to inform Newcastle, commander of the main royalist army in the north, of the imminent arrival of Montrose and of the marquess’s need for a substantial escort of cavalry troopers to enable him to cut his way through Covenanter-controlled territory to the Highlands, where he hoped the royalist clan chieftains were mustering their forces. Cochrane’s arrival in York with his list of requirements could not have come at a more inconvenient time for Newcastle, whose control of the north was seriously threatened by the invasion of Leslie’s Covenanter army. The whole region was in turmoil, distracted with troop movements, skirmishes and sieges that culminated on 2 July in the decisive battle of Marston Moor and a catastrophic royalist defeat. The few troops that Montrose possessed were requisitioned by Rupert when they met at Richmond in Yorkshire the day after the battle. He was left to invade Scotland on his own, crossing the border in disguise with only two companions on ‘the great adventure’ to win a kingdom.24
Cochrane had not remained in England to take part in the campaign that culminated in Marston Moor. Appointed a royal envoy to the Danish court, he left York to return to Denmark in May.25 His mission to obtain aid from Christian IV was given greater urgency by the military disaster that occurred outside the walls of the city soon after he left it to sail for Copenhagen. For Marston Moor had critically weakened the royalists’ position in northern England; their command structure disintegrated and their fighting manpower largely vanished. Immediately after the battle, Newcastle had sailed into exile from Scarborough, arriving in Hamburg accompanied by up to 180 Scots and English Cavaliers, including his second in command, Cochrane’s friend General James King, Lord Eythin, another Scottish professional soldier.26
The royalist infantry had suffered heavy casualties at Marston Moor, and Rupert had withdrawn to the Midlands through Lancashire, taking most of the surviving cavalry, the Northern Horse, with him. Beginning with York, royalist towns and castles in the northern counties were either surrendering or were under siege. The need for men and supplies was now urgent if the north of England were not to be entirely lost to the forces of Parliament and their Scottish allies. Cochrane’s mission was part of an increasingly desperate attempt by Charles to obtain aid from his uncle. He arrived in Copenhagen to join his fellow Scottish professional soldier, Colonel Sir John Henderson, the companion of his mission to Denmark two years earlier.27 As well as Cochrane and Henderson, as we have seen, another royalist agent, the courtier John Poley, had also been sent to Denmark by the king to solicit aid several months earlier.28
Cochrane’s return to the Continent for the time being removed him from any direct influence on the progress of Montrose’s extraordinary campaign to conquer Scotland for the king. By contrast, the activities in Ireland of his fellow agent, Daniel O’Neill, did help to shape events in Scotland. At the beginning of July, Antrim’s general, the formidable Alasdair MacColla, finally landed in the Western Isles at the head of a force of approximately 2,000 men that probably contained a significant nucleus of veterans from the wars in the Netherlands.29 The despatch of MacColla’s expedition had not been accomplished easily. It had taken some months of often frustrating activity to overcome a series of obstacles that had several times threatened to prevent it ever leaving Ireland. One problem, of a kind not unusual in the tangled history of the royalist war effort, was that Antrim’s design to raise an army from his personal dependents and followers, and then to provide arms, provisions and transportation to enable it to invade Scotland, had been linked to a quite separate objective: to raise a second Irish royalist army to send directly to England and to supply Rupert with 4,000 muskets and 300 barrels of powder, the cost to be borne by Ormond and the Confederation from Irish resources.30 These two separate projects, with their different requirements, that were presented by Antrim to the Confederate Supreme Council in Kilkenny at a time when it had just sent commissioners to Oxford to negotiate with the king terms for a permanent peace to replace the cessation not surprisingly sent what O’Neill called that ‘more learned than wise council’ into ‘much debate’.31
O’Neill was kept busy. All his diplomatic skills were needed to maintain some kind of co-operative relationship between the mutually antipathetic and distrustful Antrim and Ormond. Although Antrim presented himself as ostentatiously devoted to the king’s interests, to the extent that O’Neill complained to Digby in March that ‘’tis not to be imagined the zeal of Earl Antrim to serve the king; ’tis so much that it hurts’, that complex nobleman also had his own agenda, his own personal ambitions and designs that were not necessarily compatible with those of Charles I.32 Even O’Neill, with his customary enjoyment of court intrigue, found the dissensions and divisions in the Confederate capital not merely excessive, but likely to cause serious damage to the royal cause. Writing to Ormond from Kilkenny on 24 May, he expressed his frustration at the ‘symptoms of great distraction in this most irregular Commonwealth’, whose Supreme Council was split into factions, so that ‘they give my lord of Antrim an absolute command of all their forces; unto my Lord Castlehaven they gave another independent of any but themselves’. Predicting that if this �
�folly’ were not prevented ‘the country will be destroyed’, O’Neill abandoned the factional intrigues of Confederate politicians, priests and generals, leaving Kilkenny for Waterford on 25 May ‘to see all things fitted in the ships’.33
For it was not enough to secure the Confederate council’s official support for Antrim’s projected invasion; serious organisational, financial and logistical difficulties had to be overcome before the expedition to the Isles could sail. And there was no time to lose. The northern summer was approaching, a rising by Huntly and his royalist Gordons had broken out in the region around Aberdeen, and there were the terms of the Oxford agreement between Antrim and Montrose to meet. As Ormond observed to O’Neill on 22 April: ‘now or never is the time to complete the distraction of that fatal kingdom and to return to their bosom their own mischief’.34 Patrick Archer, a Kilkenny merchant who accompanied O’Neill to Waterford on 25 May, played a major part in overcoming the financial and logistical problems. O’Neill’s correspondence with the Lord Lieutenant refers to conferences ‘with your friend Archer’, to complex financial arrangements, to the procuring of ships and the provision of corn and ammunition for the soldiers.35 Despite tantrums by Antrim and intransigence by Ormond over the demand to put a strategic port in Ulster under Confederate control for the loading of troops and supplies, Alasdair MacColla’s small but formidable force was finally embarked on 24 June. Early in July, after landings on Islay and Mull, it reached the mainland, where the fateful decision was made to advance into the heart of Scotland, ‘burning, killing, pillaging and spoiling all the way’.36 Late in August, on a hillside in the heart of Atholl, MacColla and Montrose met and the alliance was formed that would, during the following extraordinary 12 months, transform the military and political situation in Scotland. Without Antrim and O’Neill’s achievement in raising, equipping and transporting MacColla’s troops, this famous meeting would never have taken place.
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