Sadly for his career and reputation, Cochrane overreached his instructions. By his aggressive behaviour he severely annoyed too many influential expatriates, while he also became the subject of damaging rumours of personal dishonesty in the handling of the money and material that passed through his hands. Charles was forced into fence-mending apologies to Duke James, and then replaced his too belligerent and forceful representative with more conventional and less provocative envoys.40 Also, Cochrane was totally loyal to Montrose, and the tragic fate of his noble patron was to mean the end of his own long career as a royalist agent.41 Despite the expectations his optimistic despatches had raised, warships from the duchy of Courland flying the Stuart standard were never to appear in the North Sea.
Just as Daniel O’Neill was committed to the cause of creating in Ireland the conditions which would persuade Charles II to come to that kingdom, so Cochrane was equally committed to the task of providing the ships, men, arms and money that would enable Montrose to launch a successful invasion of Scotland. Ireland or Scotland: throughout 1649 Charles II swayed indecisively between the different choices presented to him. The traditional church and king Cavaliers, the ‘Old Royalists’, whose most important spokesmen were Hyde, Nicholas (for the time being sidelined as Secretary by Robert Long) and Hopton, were in favour of Charles going to Ireland to join Ormond while at the same time encouraging Montrose, as the king’s Lieutenant-Governor and Captain-General of all the royal forces in Scotland, to invade that kingdom. In opposition, the so-called Louvre faction, led by the queen and Jermyn, favoured an accommodation with the Covenanter regime in power in Scotland, and so welcomed the arrival of the commissioners from Edinburgh, led by Lanark (soon to be second Duke of Hamilton after his brother’s execution), Lauderdale and Callendar, all of whom were bitter enemies of Montrose.42 The commissioners’ deceptively simple interpretation of recent Scottish history, ‘that there hath been a great debate and sharp contest in these lands now for ten years past between the Popish, Prelatical and Malignant Party, and the well affected’, was unlikely to appeal to many of the exiled followers of Charles II.43 An intelligence report from Breda to the Commonwealth Council of State on 6 March reported that ‘the division still continues in their counsels between the Queen and Jermyn’s party and the Montrosians; but the Prince doth not openly declare which way he will take’.44
The Dutch authorities’ displeasure at the brutal murder by some followers of Montrose of the Commonwealth’s envoy, Isaac Dorislaus, almost as soon as he arrived in The Hague was one of several factors that made the king’s continued residence in Holland increasingly difficult. Although no definite decisions on a course of action had been reached, in late June the court dispersed and Charles headed for France.45 It was a leisurely but essentially unsatisfactory journey from Holland, through the Spanish Netherlands to Paris, with the king continually beset by the conflicting opinions of his advisers and aware that his various hosts, although welcoming his appearance with appropriate formalities and ceremonies, were increasingly reluctant to offend the new regime across the Channel by any too fulsome display of friendship with Charles Stuart. In September Charles left Paris for Jersey, an island for which he had affectionate memories, where his sovereignty was still unchallenged, and which was a convenient stage on the way to any voyage to Ireland. At about the same time that Daniel O’Neill was arriving at the headquarters of the Ulster Irish army and Cochrane was sailing up the Baltic towards Danzig and Riga, Charles was entering the harbour of St Helier on Jersey. Drogheda had fallen to Cromwell a week earlier.
The complexities of the situation that faced the royalist leadership provided significant challenges for experienced agents, who by this time were widely scattered. Some, like O’Neill, were in Ireland, in the service of Ormond or Inchiquin. Others, like Cochrane, were scouring northern Germany and the Scandinavian kingdoms for arms, men and money to support Montrose’s planned expedition to Scotland. Also, by no means all of Charles’s followers had accompanied him when he travelled south from The Hague. A number remained behind in the Low Countries. Will Murray, no supporter of any Irish venture, seems to have remained at The Hague, along with his fellow Scot Sir William Fleming, the Newburghs and that not very courtier-like groom of the bedchamber, the tough swordsman Colonel Thomas Blague.46 Whether established at the Louvre or St. Germain, Henrietta Maria and her confidant Jermyn also still maintained a household that included, despite a certain amount of coming and going, Davenant, Dr Goffe and Kenelm Digby. Despites these absences from his entourage, those who remained either to accompany or to follow the king to Jersey included several experienced agents, among whom were the household officers Tom Elliot, John Poley and Sir Frederick Cornwallis, the latter having with him a wife and daughter. Having fled into exile from England, Silius Titus also turned up in Jersey.47 At this time agents like Poley and other members of the royal household were kept busy as couriers, carrying messages between the scattered leaders of the royalist party. Secretary to the Council Robert Long, writing on 9 March from The Hague to the king’s resident ambassador in Paris, Sir Richard Browne, referred to the receipt of an earlier letter entrusted to Poley and requested that Browne, ‘by the return of Mr Poley and of this bearer Mr Armorer … send me a continuation of all that hath passed since your letter of the 23 of Feb. last by Mr Progers’.48 The correspondence of the exiled leaders of the royalist party is dotted with references of this kind to different couriers.
Among the attendants on the king on Jersey was another of his grooms of the bedchamber, Harry Seymour, an agent who had already shown that he could be trusted with more challenging tasks than merely carrying letters between The Hague, Paris and Jersey. For him, a more demanding and dangerous mission was planned. Jersey was seen as a stage on the king’s journey to Ireland, but Charles’s arrival in the island coincided with the receipt of depressing news from that unfortunate kingdom. Writing to Daniel O’Neill in December, the Cavalier general Lord Byron, one of the fairly ad hoc collection of royalist lords on whom Charles relied to bolster the membership of his shrunken Privy Council, referred gloomily to the news of the battle of Rathmines, that ‘fatal blow near Dublin’, followed by the ‘sad assurance of the loss of Drogheda, then of Wexford, and afterwards of the defection of the principal maritime towns in Munster, and the wavering condition of Inchiquin’s army’. In order to be ‘truly informed of the State of the Kingdom’, it was resolved to send a trusted agent to Ormond, ‘and Mr Seymour was pitched upon, as a person unbiased with any faction, and in whose discretion and integrity the King had great confidence’.49
A sea voyage to Ireland in October 1649 to find Ormond’s headquarters was not an enterprise to be undertaken lightly. Storms had caused the temporary dispersal of the parliamentarian fleet patrolling the southern coast, but it might return at any time. Profiting from Blake’s absence, Rupert abandoned Kinsale in October, leaving very few ports on the southern coast still in royalist hands, while on land Cromwell’s army was advancing relentlessly. William Legge was already occupying a cell in Exeter gaol, having been captured at sea off Kinsale, and a few months later a ship on which William Davenant was sailing was intercepted in the Channel and Davenant found himself, not on the way to the New World as planned, but a prisoner in the Tower.50 Seymour could easily have ended in a similar condition.
Seymour’s departure was delayed by the weather conditions, but he sailed on 21 October, carrying a packet of despatches from Charles which included the George and Garter for Ormond. After avoiding interception by Commonwealth ships on patrol and finding a south coast port still in royalist hands, Seymour found Ormond, who was falling back westwards from Waterford, delivered his despatches, and after what Byron called ‘a most dangerous passage’, was back in Jersey in December. His pessimistic report on the apparently irreversible crumbling of royalist resistance, a picture supported by other letters received from Ormond, O’Neill and others, convinced Charles and his advisers to abandon plans for an expedition to Ireland,
and instead, in Byron’s words, ‘not to stick at words to obtain a treaty with the Scots’. Byron’s justification to O’Neill for the abandonment of the Irish expedition, that ‘the best and only way to relieve Ireland is to make a diversive war in England; which cannot be done but from Scotland’, illustrates the broad but increasingly desperate range of royalist planning.51 Charles prepared once again to leave Jersey and return to Holland, an inevitable stage on any expedition to Scotland.
The dangers faced by Seymour in his journey to Ireland had been largely absent from most of his previous missions on the king’s business, those from his uncle, the Earl of Hertford, to the Earl of Bedford in 1642, to the Earl of Warwick at sea in the Downs in 1648, and to Whitehall on the eve of the king’s execution. These missions had all been to some extent accepted, or at least tolerated, by the parliamentary authorities. Seymour, and many of the other royalist agents whose activities have so far been considered, saw themselves as legally accredited envoys of their rightful ruler, authorised to deal in their master’s name with the governments, princes or magnates to whom they were accredited. But their situation was now very different; it had suddenly become more precarious and more dangerous. Seymour, O’Neill, Cochrane, Fleming and the rest were now acting for a master whose pretensions to kingship were not recognised in England, were under serious challenge in Ireland, and would only be accepted in Scotland if Charles agreed to major conditions and qualifications. During 1649 Seymour was just one of a number of royalist agents who had to make the transition from legally accredited envoys to illegal conspirators and plotters, while at the same being confronted by regimes and forces in the three erstwhile Stuart kingdoms that were displaying a ruthless willingness to deal harshly with recalcitrant and irreconcilable Malignants.
Despite the depressing news from Ireland, and the increased dangers and difficulties confronting those who continued to be active in their support for his cause, Charles and his advisers encouraged projects for a revival of royalist activity in England. As David Underdown has pointed out, to create an organised conspiracy network effective enough to give significant support to an invading royalist force, whether from Ireland, Scotland or the Continent, required the overcoming of serious obstacles. The general demoralised condition of the king’s party after so many defeats and disasters; the reluctance of the principal royalist peers still in England – Richmond, Hertford, Southampton and Northampton – to provide active leadership; the vigilance of the government; the widespread uneasiness at the king’s apparent willingness to welcome aid from Irish Catholic rebels, Scots Covenanters or foreign potentates and mercenaries, and the understandable desire of many Cavaliers, after all they had endured, for a quiet life: it is not surprising that royalist conspiracy in England developed slowly and haltingly.52 That it developed at all and then showed an extraordinary capacity not to be crushed by the depressing series of failures and disappointments it experienced over a ten-year period are what occasions surprise, and even wonderment.
Before he left Jersey in February 1650, Charles and his advisers, by this time joined by the indispensable and hard-working Nicholas, despatched in different directions a flurry of agents carrying letters, instructions and commissions. There were letters to both Argyll and the English Presbyterians requesting their support, but also to Montrose encouraging him to continue with his plans to invade Scotland. One Captain Robert Meade was sent to Stockholm to assist Cochrane in the campaign to collect arms and ammunition to support Montrose’s expedition, while the Lincolnshire Cavalier Colonel Gervase Holles was instructed to organise the raising of money from loyalists in England to support the court in exile, the programme to be carried out by ‘persons of fidelity, secrecy and industry’.53 Agents carrying commissions were also dispatched to England and Wales to plan for a rising to coincide with the arrival of a royalist army, although with no clear indication of when this army would arrive, from what direction it would come, and who, out of several possible candidates – the king, Ormond, Montrose, Hamilton, even the Duke of Lorraine – would command it.
The men who made clandestine journeys into England during these earliest and possibly bleakest years of the Cavalier winter had in a number of cases significantly different backgrounds from those of Murray, O’Neill, Cochrane, Firebrace, Seymour and most of the other persons who have so far featured prominently in this study of the activities of royalist agents.54 The defeat of the king’s armies in the Civil Wars had produced a crowd of dispossessed royalist officers. Rootless and restless, with few prospects available to them in England, where they were harassed and penalised in a range of ways by the authorities, they were men who knew only the camp as a home and the sword as a way of life. Most of them did not have the court connections cultivated over many years by Will Murray, or the influential patrons possessed by Daniel O’Neill, or the diplomatic experience of embassies to kings and princes entrusted to Sir John Cochrane, or the personal friendship of a king enjoyed by ‘Honest Harry’ Firebrace, or the useful aristocratic lineage of Henry Seymour. The agents dispatched into England from Jersey in 1649 and from the Netherlands and France in the following years were for the most part swordsmen pure and simple, demobilised ex-officers from the king’s defeated armies, adventurers looking for an employment in the king’s service that would be appropriate to their military experience, their otherwise restricted prospects and their loyalist principles.55
A number of agents were despatched into England in 1649 and 1650 to establish lines of communication with the newly emerging activists among the loyalist gentry, a process most advanced in the traditionally royalist West Country, where a conspiracy organisation was already taking shape. Richard Pile, who had been a surgeon in the king’s armies in the Civil War and then gone into exile, was sent from Jersey into the West Country in September, just after the king’s arrival on the island.56 He was one of the first of a long line of spies, couriers and conspirators who for the next ten years were to make secret journeys back and forwards across the Channel, attempting either to encourage, organise, participate in or escape from the failure of a series of plots to overthrow the Commonwealth or the Protectorate. Many of them were transient adventurers whose careers as royalist agents were brief and obscure, but some were more significant figures. One of the more important and long-lasting, who also seems to have begun his career as an agent in Jersey in 1649, was Colonel Roger Whitley.
Unlike Pile and other more obscure couriers, Whitley, the eldest son of Thomas Whitley of Aston, Sheriff of Flintshire in 1638, belonged to the substantial landed gentry. During the Civil War he held various commands in Wales and the Marches, rising in rank to full colonel and serving chiefly under one of Rupert’s most trusted generals, the energetic and ruthless Charles Gerard, whose sister he married.57 Having been active in the royalist risings in Wales in the second Civil War, Whitley, after a brief period of imprisonment, went into exile and joined Charles’s following in Jersey. But he did not remain on the island for long. In October he was authorised to return to England, carrying letters and commissions and with instructions to organise conspiracy in the regions he knew best, Wales and its border counties.58
So when Charles left Jersey in February 1650 to return to Holland he had in hand a number of enterprises which, although inter-related, were at the same time in significant ways incompatible with each other. The first was the war in Ireland: how to prop up the crumbing royalist resistance to the relentless advance of the Commonwealth’s forces? One possible solution to this problem was to turn once again to the Duke of Lorraine and his allegedly powerful army, a solution with major disadvantages as it raised the possibility of an eventual challenge to Stuart sovereignty over that kingdom.59 The second was the relationship with Scotland: whether to make an alliance with the Covenanter regime, which would inevitably require Charles to accept humiliating conditions imposed by the unforgiving Kirk party, including the repudiation both of the faithful Montrose and of Ormond’s treaty with the Irish Confederates, or whether t
o encourage Montrose in his well-advanced plans to invade Scotland, or even possibly to try and follow both policies simultaneously. A third enterprise was the encouragement of the creation of a network of conspiracy in England strong enough and ready to unleash an insurrection when the time was ripe. One problem, among many, was that encouragement of a resurgence of the English Cavaliers did not really fit with a policy of forming an alliance with the Scots Covenanters. To many English Cavaliers, the Scots were Presbyterian rebels who had sold their king and slaughtered many of his most loyal subjects; while to many of the Scots, the English Cavaliers were dissolute Malignants and Incendiaries, infected with the vices of prelacy and popery. Finally, but underpinning all of these enterprises, there was the royalist diplomatic offensive, stretching from Russia and Courland to Portugal and Venice, from Sweden to Rome, aimed at winning concrete support and not just expressions of sympathy and good will from the governments of European states. To achieve success in these complex, challenging and in some ways incompatible enterprises required the active involvement of energetic and effective agents.
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