Glamorgan had sailed for Ireland on 25 March, bearing the warrant empowering him to negotiate a secret treaty with the Confederate Supreme Council, but owing to various travel delays, including a shipwreck, he did not reach Dublin until late June, and it was not until early August that he finally arrived at Confederate headquarters at Kilkenny. At about the same time the two agents, Fitzwilliam and O’Neill, were also independently making the increasingly dangerous journey to Ireland, Fitzwilliam from Paris and O’Neill from Hereford, to where the king had temporarily withdrawn after the disastrous defeat at Naseby. On 27 June, two weeks after Naseby, O’Neill received his instructions from Charles to ‘repair to our ports of Dartmouth and Falmouth’, where he was to organise for the captains and owners of ships in the royal service, one of whom was Sir Nicholas Crispe, to ‘send immediately with you over into Ireland all such frigates as are now fitted and ready’. Those ships not ready to accompany O’Neill to Ireland immediately were to be prepared to follow him ‘within a fortnight or three weeks’. Once arrived in Ireland, O’Neill was ordered to make contact with Ormond and inform him that:
no time must be lost in sending over what numbers can be spared of our old English army there, as well as what may be procured of the Irish, together with the best artillery, as well for battery as the field, that the Marquis can assist us withal.
As well as procuring shipping for the transport of this formidable army with its heavy equipment, which Ormond himself was invited to command, O’Neill was instructed to ‘employ yourself in soliciting what aids of all kinds may possibly be had from the Irish’. As long as Ormond approved, whatever O’Neill ‘shall promise or engage in our name by way of invitation or encouragement to our service’, Charles promised that he ‘will be careful to make good’. In this remarkable document there is no mention of either Glamorgan or Colonel Fitzwilliam, who had been given almost identical responsibilities at almost the same time.68
Unlike his optimistic view of the prospects on his first mission to Ireland with Antrim eighteen months earlier, O’Neill can have had no hopeful expectations of a successful outcome for this journey undertaken in the middle of the dreadful royalist summer of 1645. Charles’s instructions were hopelessly unrealistic, displaying an extraordinary ignorance of the condition of Ireland after four years of being subjected to the ravages of armed bands constantly crossing and re-crossing that distracted kingdom. Neither the complexities of Irish factional, ethnic and religious divisions nor the competing ambitions of rival generals, magnates and clerical politicians were ever properly understood at the Stuart courts in Oxford or St. Germain. Even if by some miracle Ormond had been able to assemble an army to bring last-minute aid to the foundering Stuart cause, by the time he had done so there would no longer have been a port still in royalist hands able to receive it. In fact, Glamorgan did manage to scratch together a force of 6,000 men who assembled in Waterford early in 1646, but lack of shipping, the news that on 3 February Chester had fallen and the need for soldiers to confront the more immediate threat posed by the aggressive parliamentary commander Lord Inchiquin in Munster meant that this little army never sailed. Five days after the surrender of Chester, Charles reflected bitterly to Henrietta Maria that he was ‘as little obliged to the Irish as I can be to any nation, for all this year they have only fed me with vain hope, looking upon my daily ruin’.69 For the time being, Glamorgan remained in Ireland, equally ineffectual as a soldier in Munster and as a politician in Kilkenny, until eventually he went into exile in France in March 1648. Fitzwilliam had abandoned his Irish prospects some months earlier; he was in Holland by 1647. O’Neill never resumed his responsibilities as a groom of the bedchamber to Charles in Oxford, but attached himself to his patron Ormond, being employed by him on drawn-out and endlessly frustrating diplomatic attempts to persuade ‘his superstitious old uncle’ Owen Roe, commander of the Ulster Irish army, to combine his forces with those loyal to the Lord Lieutenant.70
As royalist military fortunes collapsed in England, the elaborate and optimistic plans for decisive outside aid gradually evaporated. Two months after Naseby, Montrose’s dazzling year of spectacular victories came to a sudden end when his outnumbered little army, lacking most of MacColla’s Irishmen, who had returned to Argyll on the congenial task of ravaging the Campbell lands, was surprised and defeated by David Leslie at Philiphaugh on 13 September as he marched towards the border. Montrose and the survivors of the defeat hacked their way back to the comparative safety of the Highlands and the fighting in Scotland continued, but the prospect of a Scottish royalist army crossing the border to rescue Charles I had vanished.71
Optimistic hopes that foreign fleets and armies, whether Danish, French or Lorrainer, would appear in the nick of time to save the king also gradually dwindled. For months the royalist inhabitants of Oxford, shaken by the long run of military reverses, had tried to revive their spirits with rumours that substantial aid was on the way. Ormond’s intelligencer Arthur Trevor wrote to him in April 1645, reporting that ‘it is said we shall have 10,000 French here very soon under the command of the Duke of Epernon’. Trevor optimistically maintained that ‘for certain, supplies and arms are prepared for us, and will be here at the first opportunity’.72 Gradually, the realisation imposed itself on the king and queen and their advisers and adherents in Oxford and Paris that these hopes were ill-founded. At first Denmark rather than France had seemed the most likely prospect for significant foreign aid. Since the beginning of hostilities in England, Cochrane, Poley and Henderson had made repeated journeys to the Danish court in their attempts to persuade Christian IV to intervene decisively in the Civil War on behalf of his nephew. Impressive military preparations by Christian in the early 1640s had aroused both parliamentarian apprehension and royalist hopes that the arrival of a Danish armada off the English coast was imminent; indeed, it is possible that some money and ships loaded with arms and ammunition were sent to the royalists. Robert Baillie reported news from France in the summer of 1645 ‘of Colonel Cochrane’s sending of a ship of arms to Montrose’ that had sailed from Nantes in Brittany to the Moray Firth, and ‘that now himself is followed’.73 But reports of this kind rarely operated above the level of rumours; certainly, there is no evidence that Cochrane joined Montrose in Scotland in 1645. Christian’s territorial ambitions in northern Germany and his involvement in a disastrous, at least for Denmark, war with Sweden from 1643 to 1645 are ample explanation both for Denmark’s military preparations and for his failure to provide significant aid to his nephew. Whatever his personal inclinations, however sympathetic he was to the repeated requests by a series of royal emissaries for him to come to the aid of the Stuart cause, Christian had his hands well and truly full with his own problems in Denmark and the Baltic. As Steve Murdoch has argued: ‘it appears neither king fully understood the desperate situation of the other’.74
At least for the time being, the prospects of aid from other European princes also displayed the same mirage-like qualities as the Duke of Epernon’s 10,000 French soldiers, Glamorgan’s Irish army or King Christian’s Danish fleet. The initially optimistic reports of the queen’s Chancellor, Sir Kenelm Digby, that he was hopeful of obtaining ‘supplies of money from Rome’ were not sustained. Until a peace was established in Ireland on terms acceptable to Pope Innocent X and his hard-line representative in Kilkenny, the nuncio Giovanni Rinuccini, there would be no papal aid for Charles I. Personal relations between the pro-French Digby and the anti-French pontiff soon deteriorated to the extent, according to the not exactly reliable Aubrey, that Digby’s extravagant behaviour led the pope to consider him to be mad. Nor were the other Italian princes any more forthcoming; after several fruitless approaches by Digby they were dismissed by him to Jermyn as ‘a frugal generation’.75
Dealing with a more complex set of negotiations in the Low Countries, the queen and Jermyn’s agent, Dr Goffe, eventually fared no better than Cochrane or Digby. What Jermyn called Goffe’s ‘great and useful design’ was intended
to bring about ‘a conjunction of France and Holland with the King’, which would enable French military and Dutch naval power to be despatched to England to preserve the royalist cause. The alliance would be confirmed by a marriage between Henriette Catherine, daughter of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, and Prince Charles. It is difficult to see how what the king called ‘the duke of Lorraine’s business’ could also have been realistically fitted into this scheme, which although possibly ‘great and useful’ was certainly elaborate and complex. The negotiations with the duke, which Goffe claimed were ‘pursued with all vigour’, continued off and on for some years, yet not surprisingly Goffe was soon reporting ‘some delays and difficulties’. Powerful figures in the governments of the French monarchy and of the Dutch republic had serious reservations about the proposed alliance; the queen herself had no great fondness for another Stuart–Orange marital alliance; Parliament’s agent in the Netherlands, Walter Strickland, did his best to sabotage the negotiations, which were further complicated ‘by reason of the King of Denmark’s war’; and doubts gradually emerged about the seriousness of ‘the Duke of Lorraine’s resolution’.76 Despite all the efforts of the king’s agents and emissaries, during the increasingly depressing aftermath of Naseby no significant aid from Ireland or Scotland, from the Dutch republic, from the pope or the kings of France or Denmark, or from the other princes of Europe arrived in time to sustain the collapsing royalist war effort in England. ‘Our duties are done,’ Jermyn wrote sadly to Digby from St. Germain on 12 August, ‘though little fruit appears of it all.’77
Although severely disappointed in his hopes of substantial aid, if not from one of his other kingdoms then at least from one of his princely relatives or alleged friends on the Continent, and with his armies in England in retreat and his towns and castles falling one by one, Charles was not one to give way to despair. After Naseby, the king had withdrawn to the still-royalist Welsh marches to enjoy at the palatial fortress of Raglan Castle the generous hospitality of Glamorgan’s father, the Marquess of Worcester, and in that brief period of comparative tranquillity to consider the steadily shrinking range of options still open to him. One attractive option was to exploit the deteriorating relationship between the English Parliament and its Scottish allies. While the New Model Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell marched from one spectacular victory to the next, the Scots army under the Earl of Leven was bogged down in a series of, by contrast, unspectacular and drawn-out sieges of provincial towns. At the end of July, after passing around Worcester, which was packed with royalists – for the most part refugees, but still possessed of an effective garrison and a formidable governor in Colonel Henry Washington – Leven’s army sat down before the less challenging target of Hereford.78 The convenient proximity of the royal court at Raglan to the Scottish camp outside the walls of Hereford presented opportunities not to be ignored.
As the siege of Hereford dragged on, several senior officers in the Scots army established clandestine and indirect contacts with the king. The agent employed in what were intended to be secret talks was Sir William Fleming, the Scottish courtier who had a number of desirable attributes for his role, including all the right connections. Since the failure of the notorious attempt to arrest the five MPs in January 1642, on which occasion he had commanded the mixed force of royal guards, Fleming had spent most of the Civil War at court as a gentleman usher of the privy chamber, the same position held by Sir Frederick Cornwallis. Fleming was in Oxford in the winter of 1643–44 when Montrose, who referred to him as his cousin, was planning the campaign to conquer Scotland, and was one of the signatories, along with Cochrane, Will Murray and various Scots royalist noblemen, of Montrose’s Band denouncing the Solemn League and Covenant.79 Following the example of his father, the second Earl of Wigtown, Fleming was totally loyal to Montrose, although, like Murray but unlike Cochrane, he also maintained links with some prominent Covenanters. As well as being distantly related to Montrose, Fleming was a nephew of James Livingstone, first Earl of Callendar, a senior officer in Leven’s army, who as well as enjoying an impressive contemporary military reputation that does not seem to be justified by any notable military achievements, also had a personal history of divided loyalties.80
Leven was too high principled or too cautious to meet Fleming, or even give him a safe conduct to visit the Scots’ camp. Clearly holding different views from their general, several of Leven’s aristocratic officers – notably Lords Callendar, Montgomery, Sinclair and Lothian – contrived to hold at least two secret meetings with Fleming: one in a wood near the home of one William Barry of Treglett, and one at Goodrich Castle, still held for the king by Sir Henry Lingen. Fleming kept the level of discussion suitably vague, stressing the king’s anxiety ‘to bring the matter to an honourable treaty with the Scots’. According to a deposition by William Barry ten months later, Lord Montgomery had told him ‘the business they were now about was to settle a happy peace’.81 Of course, maintaining the well-established tradition of royalist plotting, the negotiations were not kept secret, and were not approved of by the army’s commanding general. That sound Presbyterian Robert Baillie, who had grave doubts in any case about the quality of Leven’s army, with its serious shortage of godly ministers and the ‘very great profanity’ practised in is ranks, wrote to his friend William Spang on 7 October to inform him that ‘it’s thought Sinclair, Montgomery, Livingstone and others have some dealing with William Fleming for the King’.82
These rumours of a secret treaty being negotiated between the Scottish army and the king helped to hasten the deterioration in relations between the Covenanters and the English Parliament. As the final collapse of the royalist war effort in England loomed ever closer, and when the news arrived of Montrose’s defeat at Philiphaugh, a complicated series of negotiations developed involving the king, the Scottish commissioners in London, two French envoys (the comte de Sabran and, much more important and energetic, Jean de Montereul) and prominent English Presbyterians, with Queen Henrietta Maria and Cardinal Mazarin in the background, attempting to control proceedings from Paris.83 An unlikely campaign to establish a union of opposites had begun, intended to create an alliance between Cavaliers and Covenanters that would, if necessary, be turned against the Independents in the English Parliament and their protectors, the New Model Army. Although riddled with contradictions and disagreements, this policy was to survive a series of vicissitudes until it finally met its end at the battle of Worcester in September 1651, in which battle the Cavalier Sir William Fleming fought alongside some of the same Covenanter officers he had secret meetings with in August 1645, under the overall command of David Leslie, the general who defeated Montrose, to whom Fleming was devoted, at Philipaugh.
This scheme to bring about a royalist–Presbyterian alliance operated at more than one level. Visible on the political surface were the negotiations that involved the king, the Scots commissioners, some English MPs and the French envoys. The conduct of these negotiations, with participants in Oxford, London, Paris and the camp of the Scots army, was dependent on the below-the-surface role of the royalist agents: men like Fleming, John Ashburnham, Will Murray and a new figure who makes his first appearance at this time in the world of royalist plots and schemes, that controversial mixture of contradictions, Colonel Joseph Bampfield.
Overwhelmingly, the royalist agents considered in this study became involved in espionage, conspiracy, secret missions and the collection and distribution of intelligence as a consequence of their being engulfed in the political upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. Essentially, they would have seen themselves as courtiers, soldiers, diplomats, clergymen or country gentlemen rather than as spies and plotters. For several reasons Colonel Joseph Bampfield is a very different figure. The principal difference is that, in the words of Alan Marshall, he ‘was a man who had lived most of his life spying on someone or something’.84 Bampfield was a professional spy. As is appropriate for a professional spy, there are different versions of some aspects
of his life, including the spelling of his name and his nationality, while other aspects remain mysterious or obscure. Clarendon, who understandably disliked Bampfield, none the less acknowledged him to be ‘a man of wit and parts’; he has been more generally regarded, both by contemporaries and by historians since, as a scoundrel. Both judgements are correct. Clarendon also maintained that Bampfield was really an Irishman named Bamford, a falsehood that has been accepted by several historians of the seventeenth century. In fact, it has now been established that Bampfield belonged to a gentry family long established in the West Country.85
As well as becoming a full-time professional spy, Bampfield is also unusual among royalist agents in that he wrote his memoirs, Colonel Joseph Bampfield’s Apology, Written by Himself and Printed at His Desire, published in 1685 in Holland, where he lived his last years in impoverished exile.86 Bampfield’s Apology obviously needs to be used with caution, taking into account the circumstances in which it was written, the self-serving tone in which Bampfield justifies his actions, and the deliberate omissions of controversial or discreditable episodes in his colourful career. Yet despite these caveats, Bampfield’s memoirs provide vivid and valuable insights into the activities of intelligence agents during this tumultuous period. As with several agents, military service in the king’s armies was the pathway into a career in espionage and intelligence. But Bampfield did not join the royalist forces as an already experienced professional soldier like O’Neill or Cochrane; he was 17 when he left his West Country home to serve as an ensign under Sir Jacob Astley in the first Bishops’ War. With the outbreak of the Civil War, his promotion was rapid, and while still only 19, he was commissioned a colonel by Charles on 16 January 1643. Serving under Hopton, Bampfield was in action on numerous occasions, had the command of Arundel Castle during its long and harrowing siege, was taken prisoner more than once, but either escaped or broke his parole in order to rejoin the king’s forces. After a disorderly retreat from Chard by soldiers under his command, Bampfield was arrested in December 1644 on Hopton’s orders and then dismissed from the army. His military career over but his royalism undiminished, Bampfield left the West Country for Oxford and London, and his new career as an intelligence agent in the personal service of Charles I.87
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