Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies
Page 24
The battle of Worcester on 3 September, the first anniversary of the equally decisive battle of Dunbar, was one of Oliver Cromwell’s greatest victories. We do not know the part played in the battle by Fleming, O’Neill and Blague, but it is likely that, being household officers, they took part in the cavalry charges, the first led by Hamilton and the second by Charles himself, against the parliamentary lines threatening the town on its eastern side. Forced back into the town on all sides by overwhelming numbers, the royalist withdrawal soon became a rout. Hamilton died of his wounds in Worcester Cathedral, where hundreds of prisoners were penned. The Scottish senior officers, including David Leslie, the overall commander, Lauderdale and Middleton, and the severely wounded English General Massey, were almost all captured as they attempted to make their way back to Scotland.50 William Armorer, the royal equerry, occasional courier and unlikely diplomat, was briefly in the same group of fugitives as Leslie. According to Clarendon, Armorer seized the opportunity to demonstrate his well-known dislike of Scots Covenanters by accusing his commanding officer to his face of having betrayed both the king and the army, before riding off on his own. Eventually, Armorer managed to return to exile in France, taking his family with him, but shortly after this exchange Leslie was captured and imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained until the Restoration in 1660.51
The escape of Charles II after the battle of Worcester is one of the most well-known events of the British Civil Wars, and will not be recounted yet again here.52 On the early stage of his flight the king was accompanied by a considerable group of fugitives that included Blague. Charles’s decision to separate himself from this large but in the circumstances useless crowd of followers was the essential first step if he were to evade capture. Blague was not so fortunate; he only got as far as Stafford before he was captured. Fleming was also taken, and at first imprisoned in Chester with a clutch of fellow Scots lords and officers. The prisoners were then all brought to London and committed to the Tower while the Council of State debated whether they should ‘be proceeded against as enemies of the Commonwealth’. In the aftermath of the battle, when government hostility towards irreconcilable royalists was at its most intense, a new series of show trials was envisaged, in which the captured Delinquents ‘should be made examples of justice’.53
Daniel O’Neill did not join Leslie, Middleton, Lauderdale, Massey, Blague, Fleming, Graves and at least a dozen more lords, senior officers and other prominent royalists in the Tower. Like the king and a small number of important fugitives that included Buckingham and Wilmot, O’Neill evaded capture. Unfortunately, we do not know how. Irish royalist soldiers captured in England could expect to be hanged, and O’Neill, ever since his escape from the Tower at the time of the army plots, was a particularly notorious figure. He was certainly in the category of Delinquents that in any final settlement were to be excepted from pardon. As recently as 14 March 1649 an Order in Parliament had decreed that ‘all who have been plotting or assisting the rebellion in Ireland, be proscribed and banished as enemies and traitors, and [to] die without mercy wherever they shall be found within the limits of this nation’.54 Ormond was concerned about the fate of his friend and client, writing to Nicholas from Caen in October to express his joy at the news of the king’s arrival in France and of other fugitives reaching Holland, but wished ‘particularly it were the Duke of Buckingham, the Lord Wentworth and Mr O’Neill’. Ormond had to wait until 12 November, when Nicholas wrote to him from The Hague with the news that ‘Dan O’Neile … [came] the last week to this place safe out of England.’ He had been on the run for almost two months.55
Comprehensive defeat in the battle of Worcester was merely the most dramatic manifestation of the apparent collapse of the royalist cause. In Ireland and Scotland surviving pockets of royalist resistance were gradually and systematically eliminated by the Commonwealth’s armies. In England the different networks of conspiracy had been smashed. The royalist island bases – Scilly, Man, Jersey and Guernsey –surrendered one by one. European governments may have felt sympathy for the condition of Charles II, but they made no offers of practical help. William of Orange, the Stuarts’ most energetic princely supporter, was dead. Although the Treaty of Westphalia had finally ended the long agony of the Thirty Years War, France and Spain remained at war with each other, and in any case the government of the young Louis XIV was embroiled in the rebellious upheavals of the Fronde. Beyond permitting him to live in Paris on a modest pension, for the time being it had neither the will nor the capacity to do anything further for the fugitive king of Scots. King Frederick III of Denmark, his territories seriously threatened by the aggressive expansion of Swedish power, was also in no position to aid his Stuart cousin.56 The behaviour of the hard-headed, intensely practical senators who ruled the republic of Venice is a striking illustration of how European governments regarded Stuart prospects after Worcester. The Venetian Senate first engineered the humiliating expulsion of the royalist resident, Charles’s personal friend Tom Killigrew, in June 1652, then ordered the republic’s ambassador in France to ‘evade the subject’ of a replacement if Charles proposed one, ‘with such cautious address as your own prudence will suggest to you’. At the same time negotiations for an exchange of resident envoys were opened with the Commonwealth government.57
The collapse of royalist fortunes in all three Stuart kingdoms and the reluctance of European governments to provide any significant aid to Charles II had important consequences for those of his supporters who served him as agents, spies, conspirators and couriers. For some, this was the end of the road. Many royalists who had fled abroad now abandoned hope in the success of the king’s cause. The miseries of an émigré’s existence outweighed the disadvantages of living under a regicide regime; as had happened in 1649, there was another drift back to England of royalist exiles, now prepared to compound for their estates, to pay their fines and live quietly. Even the devotedly loyal and conscientious Nicholas, observing from The Hague ‘the abundance of royalists gone for England from these parts … as having little hopes left them’, for a time considered joining them, concerned at how he ‘may honestly get some of my poor estate to support me and my poor family from starving’.58
In the event, despite the apparent destruction of royalist hopes at Worcester, Nicholas and his family remained in exile. But among those émigrés who quietly returned to England and out of their employment as royalist agents were a number of household officers, notably Progers, Poley and Sir Frederick Cornwallis. To the Commonwealth government these three courtier agents were suspect persons, liable to arrest and interrogation during periods of heightened political tension; but in fact these measures were not necessary; although they maintained tenuous links with the exiled court throughout the 1650s, they were no longer employed on the king’s business.59
Despite their return to England in the aftermath of Worcester, the loyalism of Progers, Poley and Cornwallis was never questioned. All three survived to the Restoration, to resume their places at court and to receive appropriate rewards for their services. Sadly, this was not the case with Cochrane, someone who had worked tirelessly in the royalist cause for the ten years that followed his involvement in the Incident in 1641. After the tragic failure of Montrose’s last expedition, Cochrane was never again employed by Charles II. Possibly left bitter and disillusioned by the treatment and fate of Montrose, and also criticised for his brutal and perhaps corrupt behaviour in his dealings with merchants and officials in north German and Baltic states, Cochrane abandoned his public support for the Stuart cause. According to the Commonwealth‘s agent in Hamburg, Cochrane had ‘stolen hence privately with all the money he got in the east parts, without paying any debt’.60 There was no way Cochrane could return safely to Scotland. Instead, with the assistance of his wife, he secured a pass enabling him to come to England. In March 1653 Cochrane was summoned to appear before the Council of State. By this time his financial needs were great. He claimed, apparently unsuccessfully, lands in Irela
nd that were part of his wife’s inheritance, but had to be content with small payments for ‘his present subsistence’ arranged by Gualter Frost, Secretary to the Council. In return he seems to have offered small snippets of intelligence to the government. Cochrane made at least one trip back across the Channel to the Netherlands in the summer of 1656. According to an intelligence report from one of John Thurloe’s spies in Louvain, he made an appearance at the exiled court, established at this time in Bruges, but was ‘discharged by Charles Stuart from the court’. Cochrane’s last years are obscure, and he probably died in London before 1660. It was a melancholy end to someone who had once ridden with Montrose and who, as the official representative of both Charles I and Charles II, had inspired fear and respect in the courts of kings and princes and throughout the ports of northern Germany and the Baltic.61
It was therefore an understandably depleted and impoverished court that gathered around Charles II in Paris at the end of 1651. ‘The old Court flies begin now to flock about him from all parts,’ reported a government newsbook in December:
Some of them are come to the Louvre already out of Flanders, as Hyde – a man of dignity too that calls himself the Chequer Chancellor. Here also is Bramhall out of Londonderry, Dan. O’Neill, Fraizer, a physician, and one Lloyd, a chaplain.
The report anticipated the arrival of Buckingham, Nicholas ‘and the rest of his Majesty’s blackguard and retinue that wander in the Low Countries, if they were sure of daily bread for their attendance’. 62 To assist in the reconstitution of a court that had been dispersed when Charles left Breda eighteen months earlier, Seymour was despatched on a series of journeys to invite the scattered émigré leaders of what remained of the royalist party to gather in Paris. Hyde in Antwerp and Ormond in Caen dutifully obeyed the summons, but some, like Nicholas and Hopton, preferred to remain aloof from the capital of a Catholic monarchy that also contained Queen Henrietta Maria. Despite frequent appeals from Ormond and Hyde to join them, Nicholas, determined to avoid the ‘ill wind that is borne me at the Louvre’, remained at The Hague.63 Although also probably reluctant to desert the hospitality of Mary of Orange and the company of Catherine Stanhope/Heenvliet, O’Neill dutifully travelled from The Hague to Paris early in November. His companion on the journey was a fellow Irishman, Theobald, Lord Taaffe.64 Although a convivial travelling companion, Taaffe possessed many of the traditional Cavalier vices. He was notoriously indiscreet, enjoyed equally the pleasures of wine, women and song, was fond of intrigue, and partial to duels and gambling. Like O’Neill, Taaffe had been loyal to Ormond in the Irish wars, where his military ineptitude, most strikingly displayed at the disastrous battle of Knocknanuss in 1647, had been largely responsible for the destruction of an entire Confederate army and the death of Montrose’s great comrade in arms, Alasdair MacColla. Yet he never lost the favour of Charles II, who presumably appreciated his loyalty, clearly enjoyed his company, and so was prepared to overlook his various failings.65
Although the court was depleted by the flow of exiles back to England, the king and his advisers were in any case quite unable to maintain any kind of impressive establishment. But, as in 1649, the flow was not only one-way. Whether fugitives from Worcester or simply unable to come to terms with living under a harsh regicide regime, many royalists ‘who had made their escapes’, according to Clarendon, ‘arrived every day in France, Flanders, and in Holland’.66 Among the royalists who arrived in France late in 1652 were two brothers, Thomas and Gregory Paulden, members of a strongly royalist Yorkshire family. The two Paulden brothers had been in the royalist garrison of Pontefract in the second Civil War, where during the siege another brother died of fever. This had been a garrison of die-hard royalists, who carried out the daring raid into Doncaster in which the prominent radical officer Thomas Rainsborough was killed and who held out long enough to proclaim Charles II as king on receiving the news of the regicide. After the castle’s eventual inevitable surrender, the garrison commander, Colonel John Morris, and his cornet were both executed at York. Although the surviving Paulden brothers escaped, it was to a future with bleak prospects, made even bleaker by the disasters of the Worcester campaign in which another brother, Timothy, was killed. On 3 October 1652 Captain Thomas Paulden wrote to his father:
I am promised from a person of great quality (whom I cannot name now) to have a particular care taken of me & now in order to it I am providing myself for France. I hope I shall be there within a month at furthest if you please to give me your leave, which I hope you will not deny me when I tell you it is a fortune which many men of far greater fortune than myself would be glad to meet with, & besides I know of no other way of living by which I can possibly subsist myself above half a year longer, & this which is offered me will plentifully support me for ye present and not without hopes of a raise in fortune.67
For the next seven years Thomas and Gregory Paulden were to prove daring and resourceful agents, constantly in and out of England on the king’s business, interspersed with the periods when they were in and out of gaol. The qualities of courage and resourcefulness were just as evident, although also allied with a hard-headed ambition that the brothers lacked, in the career of another royalist officer who turned up in Holland in 1652: Major Nicholas Armorer.
Students of this period should feel very grateful that Secretary Nicholas rejected all requests to join the court but instead remained at The Hague, from where he maintained a regular if frequently querulous correspondence with various prominent émigrés in Paris, one of whom was the gossip-loving Christopher, Lord Hatton. In a letter to Hatton on 3 June, Nicholas recounted how ‘Major Armorer and Leighton met and fought their duel in Brabant. They both passed with good resolution on each other without any hurt, and so closing Armorer had Leighton under him, and thereupon their seconds parted them.’68
Major Armorer sounds here like just another hilt-happy, quarrelsome exiled Cavalier, but this impression is far too simple. He was to prove a formidable character, fated to become one of the most notable of all the agents who served the Stuart cause. Nicholas Armorer, like a number of royalist agents, belonged to the minor gentry. He was the younger son of Thomas Armorer of Belford, Northumberland, and the younger brother of the royal equerry William Armorer. As a young man he served in Ireland as a lieutenant in the English force sent to suppress the insurrection that broke out in October 1641, but along with many of his fellows, he returned to England some time after the outbreak of the Civil War to fight for Charles I. By 1645 Captain Armorer was commander of the garrison of High Ercall in Shropshire, which, after successfully withstanding two sieges, finally surrendered in March 1646. Armorer then withdrew to Worcester and was among the list of prisoners compiled when it surrendered in July, by which time the Civil War was effectively over.69 Armorer’s movements after the surrender of Worcester remain irritatingly obscure, but possibly, like a number of other English Cavaliers, he withdrew to Ireland, a country he was familiar with and where Ormond still maintained the Stuart cause. Somewhere between 1646 and 1652 Major Armorer must have must have received his majority, although exiles traditionally have been prone to the self-promotion of ranks and titles. In any event, whether from Ireland or England, Armorer joined the flow of royalists into exile and appeared at The Hague in the first half of 1652, where he soon came to the notice of Secretary Nicholas.
So, although a number of experienced agents, conspirators and couriers abandoned their active commitment to the king’s business during the months that followed the ‘fatal day’ of Worcester, new men were emerging to take their place.70 The Paulden brothers, Armorer, and others who became active in royalist espionage during the 1650s like Charles Davison, Robert Walters and Thomas Carnaby, did not have the aristocratic backgrounds or the places at court of Cochrane, Poley, Progers and Cornwallis, who in this more hostile and discouraging world they were, in a sense, replacing. For the most part they were Cavalier swordsmen, or in Davison’s case, an expelled Anglican divine; they were now unemployed, and if
they remained in England, unemployable.71 To go into exile was a sensible decision; if they wished to continue in the king’s service they had to go where the king and his principal counsellors were. But not all the king’s agents made the decision ‘to go beyond the seas’, either as fugitives because they had no alternative, like O’Neill, or in search of employment and a patron, like the Pauldens. Some remained in England, lying low when it was necessary, than emerging to foment and organise plots and risings. Men like the surgeon Richard Pile, John Seymour, Jonathan Trelawney, Roger Whitley and a number of other plotters, intelligencers and spies of varying degrees of importance occasionally travelled between the organisers of conspiracies in England and the court in exile. They risked imprisonment if they were caught, which they occasionally were, but they remained based in England, and not in exile. In the months that followed the battle of Worcester very little is heard of them.72
In Scotland the situation was rather different. When Cromwell followed Charles and his army into England he left behind General George Monck with 5,000–6,000 men to complete the conquest of the kingdom abandoned by the king of Scots and most of his army. Stirling was soon taken, then on 28 August most of the remaining members of the Committee of Estates were captured at Alyth near Dundee in a surprise English raid. With the aid of reinforcements no longer needed in England after Worcester, Monck systematically and efficiently overcame the remaining centres of Scottish resistance. One by one, towns and fortresses fell. Argyll effectively abdicated what remained of his leadership and retreated back into the Campbell lands. For a few more weeks Balcarres and Huntly attempted to maintain the royalist cause in the north-east, but lacking resources and support, they were forced to capitulate in November and disband their meagre forces. For the time being the principal royalist leaders still at large and not in exile – Balcarres, Huntly, Moray, Dunfermline and William Cunningham, Earl of Glencairn – remained in Scotland; and while most of the country – exhausted, impoverished and demoralised by years of bitter warfare – passively accepted English military rule, the fastnesses of the Highlands remained unsubdued.73