The Start, dismissed contemptuously by Clarendon as ‘a very empty and unprepared design’, was a total flop, a muddle of confused orders and last-minute changes of plan. There was no gathering of royalist clans to welcome the king when he rode out of Perth on 3 October, ostensibly for a peaceful day’s hawking, but in fact to join what he believed was a major gathering of royalist clans. When Charles’s flight was discovered, he was pursued by a formidable body of the Kirk’s cavalry and eventually discovered, exhausted and cold, sheltering in a miserable cabin. By this time very few attendants were still with him, but they included two of his grooms of the bedchamber, the loyal and dependable Harry Seymour and Ned Progers, a close personal friend of the king who was also occasionally employed as a royal messenger. Charles, with his few faithful attendants, had no alternative but to agree to a humiliating return to Perth under a heavy escort.11
In fact, the Start marked the beginning of a steady improvement in Charles’s position, as the Kirk party realised the precariousness of its hold on power and the folly of driving the king into the arms of its enemies. But it also meant another purge in the royal household. The poet Abraham Cowley, at this time Jermyn’s secretary in Paris, was employed as a courier between the king and the Louvrian faction leaders, so he had some knowledge of conditions in Scotland.12 Referring to the Start in a letter to his fellow royalist exile Henry Bennet, Cowley reported that ‘Mr Long, Mr Progers, Mr Seymour and Dr Fraiser are again banished for having a Hand in this Business.’ By the end of the year they were all back in either Holland or France.13 With O’Neill having been banished already, the supply of reliable agents was shrinking, so those who were available were kept busy. John Poley had been sent to France months earlier to report the king’s safe arrival in Scotland, but had returned by December. Then the ‘never failing Mr Boswell’, as Cowley described that intrepid agent, arrived in Holland in August, bringing letters from the king. Seymour also was entrusted with despatches for Henrietta Maria when he was expelled. Fleming and Dysart (Will Murray) were both back in the Netherlands by September, but were planning to return to Scotland. Strafford’s old friend Sir George Radcliffe, writing to Secretary Nicholas from the safety and security of Brussels, complained that he could not ‘imagine what stays them’.14 In the conditions obtaining at that time, with Cromwell’s army closing in on Edinburgh and the English fleet dominating the sea approaches, the display of a certain reluctance to sail for Scotland from the Continent is understandable.
The defeat of Leslie’s army at Dunbar, followed by the loss of Edinburgh, led to bitter recriminations and a major split in the Kirk party. To enable a weakened and defeated army to continue to oppose Cromwell’s advance, new levies had to be raised, which this time included Engagers, and even open royalists. These developments all strengthened Charles’s position. With some considerable exaggeration, Mercurius Politicus claimed that ‘at least three parts and a half of that Nation are for their King upon the pure Cavalier Score’.15 In these changing conditions Argyll was increasingly concerned to maintain his personal authority over the king. When Charles was crowned at Scone on 1 January, in a sometimes humiliating ceremony, replete with tactless references in lengthy sermons to ‘the sins of former kings’, to ‘tottering’ and ‘fading crowns’, it was Argyll who placed a fine example of an insecure crown, that of the king of Scots, on his head.16 It seems to have been about this time that Argyll proposed that his daughter, Lady Anne Campbell, should marry Charles.17 Stalling for time, the king stated that he needed his mother’s consent, and the letter containing the proposal was entrusted to Silius Titus, who, with another English ex-parliamentarian soldier with impeccable Presbyterian views, Colonel Richard Graves, had been appointed grooms of the bedchamber in place of expelled Malignants like Seymour and Progers.18 On his dangerous journey to Paris, Titus was accompanied by Joseph Bampfield. Charles would certainly not have approved the choice of this particular travelling companion, but he may not have known of it.19 Not surprisingly, Henrietta Maria in her turn delayed any approval of the proposal that her eldest son marry a Covenanting Campbell, an idea so outlandish that it does not seem to have even occurred to prominent émigrés like Ormond and Nicholas, who, although they suspected ‘that something there must be in it more than a ceremonious visit’, eventually decided that Titus’s mission was part of a Louvrian intrigue to advance Jermyn to a more prominent position in the royal counsels.20
Although both Titus and Bampfield were sometimes employed by Argyll, they also moved among prominent Presbyterians who were no longer closely identified with the Kirk party, in particular the circle around the earls of Dunfermline and Balcarres and the latter’s brother-in-law, the diplomat and professional soldier Sir Robert Moray, who had been in attendance on Charles I at Newcastle in 1646 and was also a friend of Dysart. The presence of Anne Murray in Edinburgh is also likely to be one of the reasons why Bampfield appeared on the scene. As well as her personal attractions, she also possessed useful family connections to Argyll, Dunfermline, Balcarres and Moray; she was in a position to introduce Bampfield into this influential and increasingly overtly royalist group within the broad Presbyterian party.21
There is no doubt that Charles disliked Bampfield personally, and he must also have regretted that his loyal and congenial grooms of the bedchamber, Seymour and Progers, had been replaced by Titus and Colonel Graves, two Presbyterian, ex-parliamentarian officers, but Bampfield, Titus and Graves were useful to Charles as he sought to win the allegiance of both Scottish and English Presbyterians. All three had close if secret contacts with Presbyterian activists in London. If an invasion of England by a Scottish army commanded by the king was to coincide with risings against the Commonwealth regime by both Cavaliers and Presbyterians, then these contacts were crucial.22
Bampfield and his Presbyterian associates were not active in the region where plans for a royalist insurrection were most advanced, the West Country, where the Western Association under Beauchamp’s leadership was relatively well organised with an underground network extending through several counties. Particularly active among the Western Association’s agents were the ex-army surgeon Richard Pile and Harry Seymour’s younger brother, John. But there was a major problem. The ‘Gentlemen of the West’ maintained that a rising could only be successful if it were supported by a landing by a royalist force on the south-west coast, the shipping, the arms and even many of the men to be provided by that generous supporter of the Stuart cause, William II of Orange.23 John Seymour was sent to Scotland in the summer to present Charles with this prerequisite for a successful rising, and did not manage to return safely to the West Country until December.24 There were also other problems as well. With the exception of the counties in the north-west, plans for royalist risings were much less advanced in other parts of England. In the north-west region, where royalist activists were able to communicate with the king’s supporters in Scotland and with the Earl of Derby, still holding out in the Isle of Man, the prospects were more hopeful. The agent primarily responsible for maintaining lines of communication between the conspirators in the north-west counties, Scotland and the Isle of Man was Isaac Berkenhead, brother of the wartime editor of Mercurius Aulicus.25
In East Anglia, where the creation of a royalist conspiracy network had been entrusted to Thomas Blague, disaster did not take long to strike. Blague’s clandestine visit to England in June 1650, accompanied by Thomas Coke and Sir Richard Page, had not lasted long, and he had soon returned into exile. Blague preferred to direct affairs by remote control through servants, with the emphasis on remote rather than on control. When an abortive and unplanned rising broke out in Norfolk in November it was swiftly and easily crushed. At the time Blague was in Holland, from where he sailed the following May to join the king’s army in Scotland. A straightforward swordsman, Tom Blague was much more at home with an army on the march than plotting furtively in the back rooms of taverns.26
In contrast to the plotting in the provinces, which was chie
fly in the hands of Cavaliers, in the capital, opposition to the government was mainly organised by Presbyterians. The army’s purge of Parliament followed by the trial and execution of Charles I had aroused bitter resentment from the London Presbyterians. The firebrand minister Christopher Love led the Presbyterian denunciations of the new Commonwealth, declaring that he was ‘a friend to a regulated Monarchy, a free Parliament, an obedient Army, and a Godly ministry; but an enemy to Tyranny, Malignity, Anarchy and Heresy’.27 Love was drawn into a plot to provide material support for the Scottish Covenanters’ campaign to establish a godly Presbyterian monarch on the English throne. The intention was more to raise money ‘for buying of arms and hiring of shipping’ rather than to raise an insurrection in the streets, but it was to be alleged at his trial that the development of the plot required ‘Agitations … and frequent intercourses’ between Scotland, France, Holland and the conspirators in London. It was principally through Bampfield and Titus, acting as intermediaries, that letters passed between Scottish Covenanting leaders and Love and his fellow plotters, while one Mason, a servant of the Louvrian courtier and one-time army plotter, Lord Percy, was sent to London from Paris with the ambitious task ‘to reconcile both parties, the Royal and Presbyterian’.28
The coronation of Charles as King of Scots at Scone on 1 January and the readmission of royalists into the royal government, court and army were hopeful signs for the king’s adherents, but already the complicated and far-reaching royalist designs had started to unravel. From Ireland, of course, the news remained relentlessly depressing. Then the sudden and unexpected death of the young William II of Orange in November had deprived Charles of valuable support and ended the always faint chance of a cross Channel invasion to support the West Country conspirators. The gloomy news that there would be no foreign support from across the Channel was taken from Scotland to his cousin Beauchamp by John Seymour in December. Back in The Hague, the usually irrepressible Daniel O’Neill lamented the ‘sad disaster’ of the prince’s death in a letter to Lady Ormond, the news ‘too melancholy for your condition’.29
The premature death of William of Orange has been called ‘the decisive event in Dutch history in the middle years of the century’; certainly, it had serious long-term consequences for the fortunes of his brother-in-law.30 But the king and his adherents soon had more immediate problems to confront. In March, Isaac Berkenhead was captured while on his way to the Earl of Derby on the Isle of Man. Anticipating the techniques of the double-cross system employed by British counter-intelligence in World War Two, Berkenhead was ‘turned’ from being a royalist to a republican agent. His disclosures, supplemented by the material in his papers that were also captured, soon led the authorities to Thomas Coke, discovered hiding in a house in the Strand.31 In very real danger of losing his head, Coke managed to keep it in place by outdoing Berkenhead in the fullness of his account of both royalist and Presbyterian plots. In his desperation to save his life, he even reached back into the recent past to denounce Mrs Whorwood and Mrs Wheeler for secretly bringing intelligence to ‘the late King’ on the Isle of Wight.32 To Nicholas, when he received the news at The Hague, the capture of Berkenhead and Coke and their subsequent revelations were as ‘sad and fatal [a] misfortune to the King as hath befallen him since the horrid murther of his blessed father’. On this occasion the Secretary’s habitual pessimism, expressed in his view that the discovery of the plots was ‘like to prove the ruin of his Majesty’s best affected subjects in England, as well presbyterians as others’, was justified.33 The dispatch of soldiers into Lancashire and the West Country and wholesale arrests shattered the different conspiracy networks in the provinces and London, while the extent of Coke’s disclosures revealed the part played by royalist agents in maintaining the links between plotters in England, Charles and his advisers in Scotland and émigré centres on the Continent.34
The wide-ranging arrests swept up most of the leaders of the different designs, but for the most part the couriers and agents escaped the net. Lord Beauchamp maintained the Seymour family’s tradition of undergoing a period of confinement in the Tower, but the lesser figures in the Western Association, his cousin John Seymour, Jonathan Trelawney and Richard Pile, evaded capture. But the arrest and trial of the Presbyterian minister Christopher Love, another victim of Coke’s betrayals, provided further evidence of the activities of royalist agents in England.35 The charge against Love was that he ‘did traitorously and maliciously aid and assist the Scots … to invade England’. He was accused of corresponding with Charles and various Scottish magnates, including Argyll and Balcarres, as well as with Henrietta Maria and her advisers, Jermyn and Percy. He was also charged with attempting to raise money from London Presbyterians to enable ‘Silas Titus, Edward Massey, Colonel Bampfield and one Mason’ to purchase arms, ammunition and ships for use by the Scots against the English Commonwealth.36 Condemned to death on 5 July, a desperate campaign by his wife and friends to win him a reprieve was unsuccessful, and Love was executed on 22 August.37
On the same day that Love walked to the scaffold on Tower Hill, Charles II, at the head of a Scottish army, rode into Worcester. With the Stuart cause in Ireland in ruins and Ormond once more back in exile, with the networks of conspiracy intended to support a royalist invasion of England shattered, with the Commonwealth’s army on the advance in Scotland, capturing Perth on 2 August and threatening the royal headquarters at Stirling, and with no hope of foreign aid, Charles’s position was truly desperate as he led his army south across the border.38
An already desperate position had been made even more precarious by the Commonwealth’s navy patrols that sought to isolate Charles from contact with his supporters on the Continent. In April Mercurius Politicus had claimed that ‘the Cavaliers in The Hague have not in a long while had an express from Scotland, and are wholly beholden to our London prints for the certainty of transactions there’; certainly, the lack of news from Scotland and reliance on information from the London newsbooks are themes in the correspondence of the exiles.39 The newsbooks also reported the interception of ships containing foreign mercenaries and English royalists on their way to ‘proffer their service to the King of Scots’.40
Yet, despite the claims of Mercurius Politicus, agents continued to journey successfully between Scotland and royalist leaders in England, Ireland and on the Continent. On 11 May Nicholas wrote to Ormond that Poley had just arrived in Paris bringing letters from the king, while Mercurius Politicus, somewhat contradicting itself, acknowledged that with the Kirk party’s power declining, many Cavaliers were preparing to head for Scotland from Holland, including Henry Seymour and ‘many more of the same crew’.41 The newsbook was wrong about Seymour, who for the time being remained on the Continent, but when the royalist army marched from Stirling towards the border at the end of July the king was once more attended by two genuinely royalist grooms of the bedchamber, those two notorious Malignants Tom Blague and Daniel O’Neill.42
Encouraged by the reports of the coronation at Scone and that the king was ‘in much more authority and esteem than hitherto’, O’Neill had defied the Committee of Estates’ banishment on pain of death if he returned, and undeterred by the considerable risk of being intercepted on the way, had taken ship back to Scotland in May and joined Charles’s army.43 Writing to Ormond from Stirling on 20 June, under the exotic pseudonym of Principe Barbaro, O’Neill again displayed his habitual optimism, consistently maintained despite the many setbacks and disappointments encountered in his adventurous career. In his letter O’Neill claimed, quite falsely, that ‘his Majesty will in a very few days march with a much more numerous army than Cromwell’s, and (not so much out of duty as affection) all entirely at his command’.44 There was a desperate and feverish element to all this optimism. Writing at the same time to William Crofts, a courtier safe in Paris, Hamilton referred to drinking Crofts’ health with ‘Lord Thomas (Wentworth?), Dan O’Neile and Lauderdale, who are now all laughing at the ridiculousness of our posit
ion. We have quit Scotland, being scarce able to maintain it,’ Hamilton admitted. ‘I confess I cannot tell you whether our hope or fears are greatest; but we have one stout argument; for we must either stoutly fight it or die.’45 Hamilton did both; he fought stoutly at Worcester four weeks later, where he died.
Of the royalist agents who had accompanied or followed Charles to Scotland, only O’Neill, Fleming and Blague were with the royal army as it marched through England to its crushing defeat at Worcester. Most of the officers of the royal household with experience as agents and couriers – Seymour, Fraiser, Progers, Oudart and others – had been banished from Scotland months earlier and were back in exile.46 Only O’Neill had the temerity to defy his expulsion and return. Having safely reached Paris in May with letters from the king, Poley never returned to Scotland. For the time being Titus, Bampfield and Dysart remained in Scotland, where their patrons Balcarres, Dunfermline and what remained of the Committee of Estates were attempting to organise resistance to the English forces under George Monck, who had been left behind to complete the conquest of the country while Cromwell, with most of the army, pursued Charles into England.47 The agents involved in the various conspiracies in England and who had evaded arrest were either lying low, like John Seymour and Trelawney, or had escaped into exile. Colonel Keynes, for example, seems to have abandoned his wife and family in Dorset and fled to Paris, the first stage on a journey that would take him out of the world of royalist conspiracy and into the military service of the Venetian republic.48 The whereabouts of Humphrey Boswell during the Worcester campaign are unknown. He reappears in the records in March 1652 as a prisoner in the Tower, where other royalist officers captured after the battle of Worcester, including Fleming and Blague, had already been confined.49
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