Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  In the heart of these complex negotiations, their treachery not yet uncovered, were Thurloe’s two most useful informers: Willys, tragically trying to serve two masters, and the perfidious Corker. During this tense period Thurloe and his assistant Samuel Morland were flooded with letters from Corker that identified the presence and whereabouts of royalist agents, the intended targets of their attacks and the progress of their plots. The tone of Corker’s reports is urgent, even alarmist, claiming, for example, ‘that Cha[rles] Stew[art] will be for England about a month hence at furthest; and that he is in such readiness, that he stays but for the return of one messenger before he come over’. Corker was on friendly terms with a number of trusting royalist agents, including Tom Paulden. Having discovered Paulden’s secret bolt-hole, ‘one Aplin’s, a tailor’s house in Black-friars’ that possessed ‘an escaping place’, Corker offered to inform Morland and Thurloe when Paulden was next in residence, only wanting to know if the Secretary would prefer to ‘have him taken alone, or with some others of his comrades’.49 Among the many royalist agents whose activities were disclosed by Corker to his employers were both Armorer and Stephens; the latter, the Secretary was informed, but almost certainly already knew, ‘belongs to Ormond’. But despite his efforts, Corker failed to locate where O’Neill was hiding. ‘The concealed person, that we have heard to act privately in London for this long time, is Mr. Daniel O’Neale,’ he informed Thurloe, ‘but he acts cunningly by two or three instruments only, who they say are Weston, Armstrong and Mr John Russell.’50

  The disclosures of Willys and Corker were a significant but by no means the only explanation for the failure of a royalist rising to break out to coincide with a landing of an invasion force commanded by the king himself. The fatal flaw in the scheme was that understandably, the king’s friends in England would not rise until they knew that the king himself was on the way at the head of a powerful army composed of Spanish veterans and the regiments of the royal army based in Flanders, while the Spaniards would provide neither the ships nor the men for an invasion until they were assured that a port – Yarmouth was the preferred choice – was already in royalist hands. 51 During March the plans of the plotters in England began to collapse in the usual welter of mutual recriminations, arrests and flights into hiding or exile. Ostentatious troop movements ensured that London and the provinces remained quiet. Then the re-imposing of the English fleet’s blockade of the Flanders coast, suspended during the winter months, meant that no invasion fleet crammed with Spanish and royalist émigré soldiers would be able to sail from Ostend, even if one had existed.52

  The more realistic leaders of the king’s party, including both Hyde and Ormond, concluded that the rising must be deferred until the following winter. But O’Neill, although constantly moving from one refuge to another and with arrests taking place all around him, was reluctant to abandon the project. Both his activities and his continued presence in London caused Hyde considerable uneasiness. Having received on 22 March a night visit from Stephens, who had just arrived in Brussels bringing ‘a large and very particular account from O’Neill, who remains there full of negotiations and hath many treaties on foot’, Hyde confided to Ormond his misgivings that ‘he may not have proved too active’. Ormond’s response was that O’Neill should be recalled, ‘and all your other emissaries, who cannot walk in the light, and whose being taken may do hurt’.53 Despite what the part-time royalist courier Alice Ross, wife of the agent Thomas Ross, reported as ‘a general clapping up’ of known Delinquents, O’Neill remained stubbornly reluctant to leave London. ‘We have made sure of the Cavaliers,’ wrote Thurloe smugly to Henry Cromwell on 27 April, ‘having most of them under strict guards in the several counties, and are resolved never to let them go until the nation be secured against them.’ But he had failed to secure O’Neill and Armorer, although it was not until May that the two agents slipped out of the capital to return safely to the Continent.54 In the following month five convicted plotters, including Dr Hewett, who was attended on the scaffold on Tower Hill by his friend Barwick, and Sir Henry Slingsby were executed. Mordaunt, tried for his life by the same High Court of Justice, avoided the same fate, partly the result of intelligent interventions and well chosen bribes by his capable wife Elizabeth, but also by pure luck. He escaped conviction on the casting vote of the regicide judge John Lisle, the president of the court.55

  In the long run it was in the best interests of the Stuart cause that Charles II did not storm into Yarmouth at the head of a Spanish army. If the mass of committed English royalists had failed to rally to the king when he invaded England at the head of a Scottish army in 1651, it is hard to imagine a more enthusiastic response if he had returned as commander of a Spanish one. Marchamont Nedham and Mercurius Politicus would have gone overboard with bloodthirsty horror stories about the Spanish Armada, the Inquisition, evil Jesuits and burnings at the stake at Smithfield. When passing judgment on Slingsby for his role in the recent ‘hatching of treasons and rebellions’, Lisle denounced Charles Stuart for being ‘in confederacy with Spain against England, he is in confederacy with that great Popish interest’.56 Also, quite part from the problems that came from an alliance with Spanish papists, the English plotters were not ready in March to launch an insurrection, something which Ormond soon recognised, but which O’Neill, with his entrenched optimism, only slowly and reluctantly came to accept.

  A major reason for this lack of readiness was the absence of firm and purposeful control over the widely spread threads of royalist conspiracy. The Sealed Knot had failed to perform this role for which it had been created. Ormond had immense authority and prestige among the king’s supporters, but this very prominence was a major disadvantage. It was impossible for him to remain in England undetected and at the same time exercise effective direction over royalist plotting. With Ormond’s hurried departure back to France, the responsibility to order either the continuation of preparations for a rising or their postponement until conditions were more favourable descended, for want of an alternative, onto Daniel O’Neill. As he was both resourceful and courageous, and possessed able and energetic assistants in Armorer and Stephens, the ‘Infallible Subtle’ O’Neill was in some ways well qualified for his role. After all, he knew a lot about plots. But O’Neill was an untitled, landless Gaelic Irishman, with a colourful and controversial past, a courtier who was known to be a client of Hyde’s. In the divided and faction-ridden royalist underground, not all conspirators were prepared to accept his direction and authority, especially as he did not always conceal his impatience at the Knot’s caution nor his contempt for some of the plotters. Referring to Richard Pile in a letter to Hyde, O’Neill expressed his terror that ‘such a creature should know so much’.57 The agent Thomas Ross, who had sometimes been employed by patrons who had no great love for the Chancellor, complained to Nicholas on 21 April that some royalist plotters – whom unfortunately, he does not identify, but possibly Pile was one – were ‘extremely troubled’ that the king had been ‘forced to put so weighty an affair into the hands of one so odious to them as O’Neale’.58 While Ormond possessed too much prestige and prominence to make him an effective organiser of conspiracy, O’Neill did not have enough.

  1 NP, iii, 246.

  2 The extensive powers given to the major-generals to supervise and check on ‘disaffected’ and ‘dangerous and suspicious persons’ are listed in Mercurius Politicus, no. 294 (24–31 January 1656).

  3 Different royalist attitudes to proposals to assassinate Cromwell are considered by Underdown, pp. 171–4.

  4 TSP, iv, 245, 473–4, 622, 637, 719, 763; NP, iii, 279–80; CClSP, iii, 87, 90, 134, 414–15.

  5 TSP, vii, 598.

  6 CClSP, iii, pp. 414, 415.

  7 Ibid., iii, 573–4; ibid., iv, 63, 68, 205–6; ibid., vii, 598–9; NP, iii, 279–80; CClSP, iii, 414–15; Scott, Travels of the King, pp. 125–38.

  8 TSP, iv, 680.

  9 For the case of Gilbert Talbot, whose actions were in many ways
similar to Walters, see Underdown, pp. 176–7; Scott, Travels of the King, pp. 138–9.

  10 Mercurius Politicus, no. 294 (24–31 January 1656); ibid., no. 296 (7–14 February 1656).

  11 TSP, iv, 501, 603; ibid., v, 388, 414; CClSP, iv, 69, 71–2, 77, 251.

  12 NP, iii, 158, 159, 185, 211–12, 224.

  13 TSP, iii, 700, 737; ibid., iv, 231–2, 306–7; Bampfield’s Apology, pp. 173–6.

  14 TSP, v, 610–11; Bampfield’s Apology, pp. 173–5.

  15 For Sir Richard Willys and his employment by Thurloe, the pioneering study is Marjory Hollings, ‘Thomas Barrett: A Study in the Secret History of the Interregnum’, EHR, vol. 43 (1928), 33–65. See also Underdown, pp. 194–200; Roberts, The Sealed Knot, ODNB; Aubrey, Mr Secretary Thurloe, pp. 110–12; Richard Ollard, ‘Willys, Sir Richard, first baronet (bap. 1614, d. 1690), rev., ODNB, 2004, accessed 24 March 2010.

  16 For Corker’s background, see Underdown, p. 175; Aubrey, Mr Secretary Thurloe, pp. 118–19.

  17 Hutton, Charles II, pp. 97–102.

  18 Ibid., pp. 97–9, 103–4.

  19 NP, ii, 141.

  20 Ibid., iii, 255–7, 268; CSPD, 1655–56, pp. 159, 209; CClSP, iii, 81, 86. O’Neill, of course, was not a sworn-in member of the Privy Council.

  21 For the terms of the Treaty of Brussels, see Hutton, Charles II, p. 99.

  22 CLSP, iii, 150, 296–7; CClSP, iii, 114, 304, 379, 401. For examples of O’Neill’s resourcefulness, see also Smith, Cavaliers in Exile, p. 135; Cregan, ‘Daniel O’Neill in Exile and Restoration’, p. 43. For O’Neill’s dealings with Lucy Walter, see Hutton, Charles II, pp. 96–7.

  23 TSP, i, 683–4. Early in 1658 Ross was ordered by Charles to seize the child, and as he informed Nicholas, ‘bestow him awhile in a place out of the knowledge of his mother’. With his scholarly interests, Ross was horrified to discover that the sadly neglected nine-year-old boy was unable to read or tell his numbers, ‘though he has much wit and a desire to learn’; CSPD, 1657–58, p. 342.

  24 Ibid., v, 315.

  25 Ibid., 604–5; ibid., vi, 52–3; ClSP, iii, 348; Hutton, Charles II, p. 105.

  26 TSP, v, 53–4.

  27 Ibid., 36. See also ibid., 8, 645–6.

  28 C. H. Firth, ‘Royalist and Cromwellian Armies in Flanders 1657–1662’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series, vol. 17 (1903), 67–75.

  29 CSPD, 1657–57, pp. 297, 300; ODNB.

  30 TSP, i, 710, 716–17, 719; HMC, Report 55, Various Collections, ii, 353, 355, 356, 357–8; Underdown, pp. 206–8.

  31 Bod.L. Clarendon MS 59, fos 56–7, 93–4, 119; CSPD, 1657–58, pp. 296, 549; Newman, Royalist Officers, p. 61.

  32 For Honywood, see Underdown, pp. 186–7; Newman, Royalist Officers, p. 195.

  33 For the revival of royalist conspiracy during this period, see Underdown, pp. 203–15; C. H. Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate 1656–1658, 2 vols (London, 1909; New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), i, 53–61.

  34 For Mordaunt, see Victor Stater, ‘Mordaunt, John, first Viscount Mordaunt of Avalon (1626–1675)’, ODNB, 2004, accessed 24 March 2010; Coate, The Letter-Book of John Viscount Mordaunt.

  35 CSPD, 1655, pp. 204, 508; CSPD, 1656–57, pp. 260–61; CClSP, iii, 303, 339.

  36 Ibid., 111, 122, 130, 132, 169, 287–8, 301; NP, iii, 264–5, 270; LBM, 8n., 145n.

  37 TSP, v, 786–7.

  38 CClSP, iii, 125, 239.

  39 For examples, see CClSP, iv, 3, 8, 9, 13, 32, 59, 66, 99, 133, 463, 472.

  40 Clarke Papers, iii, 147, quoted in Firth, Last Years of Protectorate, ii, 55. See also Clarendon, Rebellion, xv, 88: ‘There were many younger men, who, having no part in the former war, were impatient to shew their courage and affection to the King.’ Mordaunt is a classic illustration of this new generation of Cavalier conspirators.

  41 Carte, Life of Ormond, iii, 666; Firth, Last years of Protectorate, ii, 61–2.

  42 CClSP, iv, 23.

  43 Clarendon, Rebellion, xv, 87.

  44 CClSP, iv, 12.

  45 Firth, Last Years of Protectorate, ii, 42–57; Hirst, Authority and Conflict, p. 353.

  46 Carte, Life of Ormond, iii, 658–67; TSP, vi, 806; Cregan, ‘O’Neill in Exile and Restoration’, pp. 59–60.

  47 Carte, Letters and Papers, ii, 121–4.

  48 CClSP, iv, 10, 11, 18, 20–21, 23.

  49 For a rich selection of Corker’s letters of information to Thurloe and Morland during this period, see TSP, i, 707–20.

  50 Ibid., 710, 717; ibid., vi, 834–5. O’Neill would have known John Weston and Sir Thomas Armstrong, two members of the ‘Action party’ of 1654–55, from his mission to England in February 1655. Colonel John Russell, of course, was on the inner committee of the Sealed Knot.

  51 Writing to Nicholas from Middleburg on 19 March, Wentworth concisely summarised the problem: ‘Several persons of quality, in many parts of the kingdom, are prepared to rise whenever he shall land with any force [but] are unable to rise till the King be landed to give some diversion to Cromwell’s army; but though the Spaniards will provide all in readiness, they will do nothing till the business be begun in England’; CSPD, 1657–58, p. 335.

  52 CClSP, iv, 39, 40; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, pp. 219–27; Firth, Last Years of Protectorate, ii, 64–9.

  53 Carte, Letters and Papers, ii, 132–3.

  54 CSPD, 1657–58, p. 358; TSP, vii, 99, 141; CClSP, iv, 46.

  55 Clarendon, Rebellion, xv, 95–102; Underdown, pp. 227–9; Firth, Last Years of Protectorate, ii, 79–82; ODNB (Mordaunt).

  56 Mercurius Politicus (27 May–3 June), p. 572, quoted in Firth, Last Years of Protectorate, ii, 83.

  57 CClSP, iv, 34.

  58 CSPD, 1657–58, p. 372.

  Chapter 9

  The Coming of the Day 1658–1660

  I do not yet find there are any great stirrings yet upon this occasion (the Protector’s illness); though the cavaliers do begin to listen after it, and hope their day is coming, or indeed come, if his Highness die.

  John Thurloe to Henry Cromwell, Lord Deputy of Ireland, 30 August 1658

  While the royalists looked for people to blame for the failure of a rising to take place in the spring of 1658, it is not surprising that Corker could crow to Morland that ‘hereafter Ch. Stew. will scarce get any to appear for him in England’.1 Certainly, there was no longer any prospect in the near future of a royalist invasion with Spanish support. On 4 June, at the same time that Mordaunt, Slingsby and Hewett were being brought before the High Court of Justice in London, Charles’s little army suffered heavy losses in the battle of the Dunes, fought in the sand hills outside Dunkirk, which was under siege by a strong Anglo-French army. The Spanish army sent to raise the siege, with its British and Irish royalist regiments, was totally defeated, and ten days later the city surrendered. The battered Spanish forces retreated into eastern Flanders as Lockhart, Cromwell’s ambassador and military commander in France, planted an English garrison in Dunkirk while the Protectorate navy patrolled the Flemish coast.2 What remained of the royalist army, probably reduced to no more than 700–800 men, although it was eventually to rebuild its strength, fell back on Nieuport. Among the refugees and the broken and wounded soldiers crowding into the town was Sir Charles Cotterell, in the halcyon days before the Civil War one of the most cultured ornaments of the royal court and a discriminating patron of the arts, but now existing in very different circumstances. In an account of the battle sent to Nicholas, Cotterell listed casualties among the king’s officers; among the wounded were Newburgh and Blague. Cotterell reported that ‘Col. Blagge is here in town and as well as a man can be with a shot in his cheek and out the middle of his neck.’ Blague had commanded the king’s Guards regiment, later to become known as the Grenadier Guards, during its first major action. He recovered from his wound, but understandably, his effective career, either as an agent or a soldier, was over for the time being.3

  The uncovering of the various plots in the spring, the arrests and imprison
ments, trials and executions that followed, and then the shattering at the battle of the Dunes both of the king’s newly raised army and of royalist hopes of significant Spanish military and naval aid left once again the underground resistance movement in a state of disarray and despair. The Knot was reduced to its customary state of paralysis. On their release from the Tower in July, Willys, Compton and Russell were warned by Thurloe, according to Brodrick, ‘that if they negotiated after their enlargement they could expect no quarter’.4 The threat was presumably made for form’s sake as far as Willys was concerned, but for a while, it worked with Compton and Russell.

  Yet Corker’s smug assertion to Morland that the Stuart cause in England was finished was soon proved to be false. This time there was no long period of royalist inactivity like those that had followed the battle of Worcester in 1651 and the suppression of Penruddock’s rising in 1655. Surprisingly quickly, the king’s agents were back in business. Both in England and on the Continent, new developments provided new opportunities for royalist agents and their employers and patrons.

  The international situation in western Europe during 1658 was extraordinarily fluid and unstable, causing diplomatic agents, spies and intelligencers to be active in a number of areas. The resumption of war in the Baltic between Sweden, an ally of Cromwellian England, and Denmark, which could rely on Dutch naval power for assistance against the Swedish invasion, possibly offered opportunities to revive the traditional but by now somewhat battered friendship between the English and Danish royal houses. The tough and experienced Scottish mercenary Sir James Turner, who had long since made the transition from Covenanter to royalist, was sent to Copenhagen, from where he dispatched weekly intelligence reports to Hyde. In 1657 he had been briefly joined by another Scottish veteran, Major-General Robert Montgomery, who seven years earlier had ended the Start when he discovered Charles stranded in a humble cottage with only a couple of attendants. The conversion to royalism of Montgomery, who like Turner had fought at Worcester, been captured after the battle and then eventually escaped, had occurred somewhat later, and was in the long run less convincing than that of his colleague.5 A drawn-out war in the Baltic could also possibly influence Dutch internal politics and therefore affect the fortunes of the Orangist party, which was traditionally friendly to the Stuart cause, but which, by the Act of Exclusion, passed in 1654, very much under Cromwellian pressure, had been banned from exercising any political authority in the United Provinces. Prominent royalists, O’Neill being the main offender, continued to travel in and out of Holland, despite their expulsion under the terms of the republic’s 1654 peace treaty with the Protectorate, and to the frequently expressed irritation of the States General.6