Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  With the English Commonwealth and the United Provinces at war from the summer of 1652, the royalists in arms in the Highlands were encouraged by the possibility both of Dutch aid and of the arrival of Charles himself to lead them. But not surprisingly, Charles was reluctant to return to his northern kingdom, which during his previous sojourn had inflicted on him so many unpleasant experiences. In any case, it was extraordinarily difficult for the king and his advisers to obtain accurate intelligence of the situation in the Highlands. ‘We receive information so rarely of your condition’, wrote Charles to the Highland clan chieftains on 4 March, ‘(having never had any express from you since Capt. Smith), that we know not whether you are in a readiness and disposition to rise, or in a body together able to make an attempt upon the Rebels.’5 Glencairn’s difficulties were further compounded by a lack of arms and ammunition, and by the rivalries and personal animosities among the leaders of the rising. These divisions are not surprising when one considers who the rising’s leaders were: touchy clan chieftains like the Earl of Seaforth and Angus MacDonald of Glengarry; ‘royal Presbyterians’ like Balcarres and Moray; Highlanders and Lowlanders who were mutually suspicious; the son of the executed Montrose, and Lord Lorne, the son of Argyll who had done so much to bring about the execution, plus a scattering of professional soldiers and adventurers.6 Having been delayed by illness and by difficulties in raising money to equip his expedition, the failure of Middleton to reach Scotland until February 1654 allowed these rivalries and animosities to fester, so that when he at last arrived, ‘he found’, in Clarendon’s words, ‘the few whom he looked to find in arms more broken with faction among themselves than by the enemy’.7

  A number of agents, or ‘expresses’, were employed to make dangerous journeys between the exiled court and the leaders of the rising, carrying commissions and letters and attempting to reconcile the disputes that undermined Glencairn’s authority. We know very little about most of them, other than their names: Colonels William Drummond, Norman Macleod and Borthwick; Captains Peter Mews (who ended his life as a bishop), Smith and Strachan, and Balcarres’s man, Malcolm Roger. From the braes of Atholl and the wilds of Lochaber they found their way back and forwards to Paris across difficult country and sometimes dangerous seas, facing the constant threat of capture by English army patrols or the Commonwealth’s ships.8

  The complex and unstable character of the Highland rising was made for someone like Bampfield. Ignoring the king’s order for Bampfield’s arrest, if it ever reached them, clan chiefs like Seaforth continued to trust him and hold him in high regard. On 22 April Seaforth wrote to Charles that he was sending Bampfield personally to report on the situation in the Highlands, ‘he having been so incredibly active and industrious in your Majesty’s service’. If that were not enough to annoy the king and Hyde, Seaforth finished with the disturbing information that ‘there is nothing wherewith he is not most intimately acquainted’.9 Despite this endorsement of Bampfield’s loyalty and industry, Charles and Hyde’s distrust of him was unremitting. The Chancellor warned Middleton that Bampfield had been sent among the Highlanders ‘to corrupt and perplex them … for that fellow is cunning and diligent in all his designs’. Middleton was ordered not to receive Bampfield, for the ‘King will never trust him nor see him’. Hyde maintained that ‘advertisements from London give us cause to suspect that he is not without correspondence with the most powerful there’.10

  There are several possible explanations for these totally irreconcilable views: the ‘indefatigable industry and conduct’ praised by Moray that contrasted totally with Hyde’s fears of the ‘mischief which Bampfield will every day do’.11 The leaders of the rising were caught within complex patterns of different political allegiances and religious confessions, of frequently violent past histories and of recent changes in their loyalties. The allegiance of Bampfield, with his Presbyterian sympathies, was to the ‘royal Presbyterians’, Balcarres and Moray, and the onetime Covenanter, Seaforth. By contrast, Glencairn, MacDonald of Glengarry and Middleton were by this time totally royalist in their loyalties. Middleton, for example, even so far renounced his covenanting past as to take Anglican communion.12 A sympathetic view of Bampfield’s behaviour, therefore, is that he was merely trying to support one faction against another. But Bampfield was also a traitor, as his frequent and copious reports to Thurloe make clear, and was therefore happy to set the different leaders of the rising against each other. When he arrived in Paris in September he may already have been on Thurloe’s payroll, but when exactly did he enter the employment of the Protector’s spymaster? He left the Highlands before Middleton, who had firm instructions to have nothing to do with Bampfield, arrived to take command of the rising, so there was no point in his returning to Scotland. Also, his liaison with Anne Murray, who was still in Edinburgh and had finally found out about her faithless lover’s still-living first wife, was over.13 Bampfield’s employment opportunities were narrowing drastically. He needed an income to overcome what he loudly claimed was his ‘insupportable necessity’, and only Thurloe could provide it. There may have been contacts with government officials during 1653, along the lines of Argyll’s, but they were probably not especially significant; his career as a notable spy for the Protector seems only to have begun after he arrived in Paris.14

  After a leisurely journey from Scotland, via Hamburg and Copenhagen, Bampfield finally turned up in Paris in September, to a cool reception from the king but a warmer one from the Louvre faction.15 Although still regarded with intense suspicion and dislike by Charles and Hyde, who resolutely refused to employ him in any capacity, Bampfield, who still retained the trust and even friendship of the ‘royal Presbyterians’ like Moray and Balcarres and of clan chieftains like Seaforth, was kindly received by Louvrian courtiers, especially by Jermyn. Remembering the length of Anne Murray’s infatuation with someone she was constantly warned against, it is clear that Bampfield was a very plausible rogue, although being the object of Hyde’s enmity was in itself probably enough to recommend him to Balcarres and Jermyn.16

  Bampfield was soon in regular correspondence with Thurloe, sending him accounts of court gossip and of the arrivals and departures of émigrés, interspersed with complaints of his shortage of money.17 Among the many intelligence reports sent by Bampfield from Paris to Thurloe, there is one that identifies and discusses at some length what he considered to be the principal designs of the king’s agents as they confronted a new and powerful enemy, the Cromwellian Protectorate. The report is undated, but from the context it must have been prepared in the autumn of 1654, some time after the departure at the beginning of July of Charles and his court for the Rhineland.18 In some respects the report is well-informed and perceptive on the development of a royalist underground movement, in others it is confused and inaccurate. It is certainly detailed in its identification of the principal court personages and in its analysis of the factions. The report is supporting evidence for the view that, although Hyde and his allies the Old Royalists, or what Bampfield called ‘the old episcopal party’, were now dominant in the royal counsels, the king remained accessible to approaches and opinions from a variety of other sources. To the despair of Hyde, Charles’s circle of advisers was wide enough to include courtiers like Taaffe, Crofts and the recently arrived Digby; Louvrians like Percy and Jermyn; generals like lords Wentworth and Gerard; his companion on the escape from Worcester, Henry Wilmot, now Earl of Rochester, and grandees too important to ignore, like Prince Rupert and Buckingham, who had their own circles of clients. Also too important to ignore, and by no means reconciled to remaining quietly in the background, was Queen Henrietta Maria, with whom, according to Bampfield, Charles had ‘been upon very ill terms’.19

  The complex, frequently changing patterns of court factions, with bitterness towards those they regarded as rivals or enemies their only constant feature, were an important fact of life for royalist agents, who looked to prominent courtiers for patronage, preferment and employment. Their already di
fficult and dangerous existences were made even more hazardous by the competing rivalries of the different ‘knots’ and factions that entangled the leadership of the royalist party. An experienced and resourceful agent like Daniel O’Neill, familiar with the behaviour of courts, moved easily and confidently through this unstable and precarious world. Of course, he had the security of the friendship and favour of the (fairly) unassailable Ormond, to whom, as Sir Richard Fanshawe expressed it in a letter to the Lord Lieutenant, he ‘shows himself at every turn passionately your Excellency’s’.20 O’Neill also acquired, which is perhaps more surprising, the respect and friendship of Hyde, who was not naturally given to a favourable view of Gaelic Irishmen. Defending O’Neill to Nicholas, who was certainly not one of the Irishman’s admirers, Hyde claimed that he was ‘ingenious and reasonable in all things, and he is honest and kind to the Marquis of Ormond and me, and sufficiently odious to Jermyn and c.’21 It seems to have been about this time that O’Neill acquired the distinctive nickname ‘Infallible Subtle’, which it was not beneath Hyde’s dignity to use in correspondence with the Irishman.22 Not surprisingly, more recent recruits to the royalist underground, like the Paulden brothers, Nicholas Armorer and others, found it more difficult to keep their feet and their sense of direction in the shifting sands of the rival patronage networks, the ‘knots’ and factions with which they had to deal. Some were to manage this feat more successfully than others.

  According to Bampfield, the principal ‘designs’ of royalist agents were: to raise money for the king’s support and use, to ‘prepare parties in all parts of the kingdom to rise’ against the government, to win over to the Stuart cause ‘some considerable person’ in the Army, and to assassinate the Lord Protector. For the furtherance of these designs, ‘many emissaries have been sent to and fro’. Among a number of emissaries named by Bampfield was Major Nicholas Armorer, who began his career as a royalist agent approximately twelve months before this intelligence report was written. On 15 September 1653 Nicholas, still doggedly remaining at The Hague, wrote to Hyde to inform him that:

  Mr Nich. Armorer, a servant of the Princess Royal, going to England in about a fortnight upon some particulars of his own, would be glad to receive his Majesty’s commands, being well known to, and well loved by, all the King’s party, not only in the North where he was born, but in Shropshire, Staffordshire and those parts.23

  At this time Armorer was unknown to Hyde, and presumably also to Charles. He began his career in espionage as a client of Nicholas, to whom he agreed to send his reports and from whom he received his instructions and a cipher key. Two weeks later Armorer left The Hague for England. ‘He is certainly a very faithful man, but I doubt he is not for Negotiations,’ the Secretary informed Hyde, concluding optimistically, ‘yet I hope he will do the K. good service in England’.24

  Armorer was by no means the only royalist emissary travelling to and fro; as Bampfield informed Thurloe, there was a steadily increasing number of them as the king’s more active supporters prepared to challenge the hold on power of the new Cromwellian regime. But an examination of Armorer’s mission illuminates many aspects of the role and activities of royalist agents in the mid-1650s. Certainly, for an obscure Cavalier junior officer, Armorer did not lack self-confidence.25 After about a month in London he sent to Nicholas a fairly optimistic picture of ‘the K.’s business’, but with the recommendation that ‘it will be most necessary for him to fix on one or two of the most prudent to make it their business to attend his affairs, and to put them in a form that there may be no clashing’. Armorer believed there was no time to lose, as ‘the sooner the Resolution is taken in this the more it will be for his Majesty’s advantage’. Nicholas forwarded this proposal to Hyde, while at the same time replying to the letter with the request that royalists in England agree ‘on some fit and faithful persons’ who should then communicate with the king to receive from him directions and official recognition of their credentials and powers. Within a couple of months a secret council was formed, authorised by Charles to prepare a large-scale royalist rising: the Sealed Knot.26

  The Sealed Knot had six members, all Cavaliers with distinguished war records, all younger sons, and all, with one exception, belonging to influential noble families. John, Lord Belasyse, ‘a gentleman very able and forward to serve’, was a prominent Yorkshire royalist, while the others – Henry, Lord Loughborough, Sir William Compton, Sir Richard Willys and Colonels John Russell and Edward Villiers – were all based in East Anglia and the midland counties. The premature death of Hertford’s son Lord Beauchamp early in 1654, ‘an unspeakable loss’ according to Hyde, deprived the Knot of an obvious member to represent ‘the business of the West’. The failure of any natural successor to Beauchamp to come forward left the Knot’s membership with a somewhat restricted territorial influence.27

  The Sealed Knot was commissioned by the king, who, in Clarendon’s words, ‘consented to all they proposed; and the ciphers and correspondence were committed to the Chancellor, in whose hands with the privity only of the marquis of Ormond, all the intelligence with England … was entrusted’.28 The very fact that the Sealed Knot was regarded as the sole ‘official’ body responsible for organising royalist conspiracy and intelligence was to become a critical weakness rather than a strength. For it was seen as the instrument of the Old Royalists’ control of policy and decision-making in the exiled court, to be ignored or even undermined by those factions and individuals who opposed the influence over the king of Hyde and his allies. Several elements in Armorer’s mission to England illustrate the problems facing the Sealed Knot as it attempted to impose its authority over the organisation of conspiracy and to manage the preparations for a serious rising.

  Although Armorer’s recommendation for a secret committee to manage the king’s business in England was acted upon with impressive speed, he clearly did not consider that his subsequent instructions to co-operate with the Sealed Knot prevented him from making contacts with other royalist activists. A Northumbrian, who had seen most of his military action during the Civil War in the Welsh border counties, Armorer left London early in 1654 for the two regions he knew best. In Shropshire he made contact with two prominent local Cavaliers, Sir Richard Corbet of Moreton Corbet, who had been in the garrison of High Ercall with Armorer when it successfully withstood a siege in April 1645, and Colonel Richard Scriven of Frodesley. After discussing with Corbet and Scriven plans to seize Shrewsbury and Ludlow in a general rising, Armorer then continued his journey to Yorkshire and Northumberland.29 Among several Cavaliers whom he next contacted was Colonel Edward Grey, who had served in the Northern Horse under Sir Marmaduke Langdale. With good reason, Hyde regarded Langdale, whose unhappy existence in exile was embittered both by poverty and by his exclusion from royal counsels, as one of his more prominent factional enemies. Langdale had his own clientage network in the north, employed his own agents – notably Charles Davison, and for a time the Paulden brothers – and had, according to Hyde, ‘many projects upon England to which Prince Rupert is privy’. In particular, there were plans, which had apparently been discussed with Nicholas and Armorer at The Hague in September, to seize Newcastle and Tynemouth.30 Langdale had no intention either of abandoning these projects or of subordinating them to the authority of the Sealed Knot. Armorer’s friend, Colonel Grey, who was involved in the scheme to capture Tynemouth, was a client of Langdale, which further aroused the suspicion of the Chancellor. He warned Nicholas that Armorer ‘acts all by and for Sir Marm. Langdale’, and advised the Secretary in future to have nothing to do with him.31

  Nicholas defended his protégé to Hyde, claiming that he had ‘the repute of a very honest and loyal person among all who know him’, and pointing out that he had received intelligence reports from Armorer, brought over by Davison, that had been forwarded on to the king. ‘Nic. Armorer’, in the Secretary’s opinion, ‘does his Majesty good service in England.’32 Hyde backed down, and had the grace to acknowledge that his suspicions were
unjustified; changing his tack, he requested Nicholas to ‘let Mr Armorer know that the King very well likes all that he hath done’.33 Armorer continued his travels, slowly making his way back to London, making contact with royalist activists in the counties and with other agents on similar missions, and even collecting some money for the king, who wrote at his request to Mary of Orange asking for an extension in his leave of absence from her household.34

  As Armorer travelled throughout England during the first half of 1654 his activities as intelligencer, money collector and organiser of plots were imperilled by the reckless and futile schemes devised in the fertile but unbalanced minds of what David Underdown has called the lunatic fringe of royalist conspiracy.35 The Ship Tavern and Gerard plots, cooked up over drinks and games of billiards in disreputable taverns, were for the most part the work of obscure and desperate adventurers, ‘the scum and faeces of that party’, as Thurloe colourfully described them.36 Lord Gerard’s brother-in-law, Roger Whitley, was the only plotter of any real significance or experience of royalist conspiracy. The involvement of Whitley and of a cousin of Lord Gerard’s reveals that the designs were promoted from abroad, specifically from the Swordsmen faction of Gerard, Langdale and his friends, with Rupert in the background; this was another ‘knot’ attempting to challenge the authority of the Sealed Knot. Inevitably, the half-baked plans to assassinate the Protector and in the ensuing confusion stage a rising in London were betrayed. The seizure of the principal plotters at the end of May led not just to the execution of two of them and the imprisonment and transportation of others, but to widespread arrests of known royalist activists, sweeping up men who had nothing to do with the plots, including John Ashburnham and Harry Seymour. The failure of the Sealed Knot to control and direct royalist conspiracy effectively and to prevent ‘absurd and desperate attempts’ to overthrow the government was glaringly exposed.37