Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  Among the huge crowd that welcomed the king when he disembarked at Dover was Lord Mordaunt, resplendent at the head of a troop of mounted gentlemen, ‘all in black velvet coats’. Mordaunt was received graciously by Charles, who knighted him at Canterbury, a stopover in the colourful and cheerful royal progress to the capital.2 Yet Mordaunt was hoping for more than a knighthood; he had high expectations, which he did not conceal, that his services in the king’s cause would be well rewarded with an important position in the royal household.3 Although for the most part not as assertive of their claims as Mordaunt, all the agents who had served Charles II, or his father, or both, and had survived to witness the restoration of the monarchy must have looked forward to their services now being recognised and rewarded. Yet, despite all their efforts, the royalists had failed to defeat and kill the Commonwealth; instead, it had committed suicide. The Restoration had been accomplished by Monck and his army, with the Cavaliers apparently ineffectual and passive observers of events over which they had no control, so how important had the activities of the royalist plotters and spies, envoys and couriers, intelligencers and journalists, been to the survival and apparent eventual triumph of the king’s party in 1660?

  At one level the record of the activities of royalist agents is a history of failure. From the army plots and the Incident in 1641 right through to the crushing of Booth’s rising in August 1659, it is a dismal record of one disaster after another: uncovered plots and abandoned designs, treacheries and betrayals, suppressed risings and rebellions, battles that were lost and promised invading armies and fleets that never materialised. Between the missions of Cochrane and Poley to the court of Christian IV of Denmark in 1642 and the journey of Charles II, Ormond and O’Neill to the Franco-Spanish peace conference in the Pyrenees in 1659, repeated attempts were made to acquire aid for the Stuart cause from the kings, princes and potentates of Europe. Again and again hopes were raised that the kings of France or Spain, Denmark or Sweden, the Prince of Orange, the dukes of Lorraine or Courland, even the Pope, would provide an army, or a fleet, or treasure. Again and again these hopes were dashed.

  Royalist agents frequently took enormous risks and endured severe privations and hardship on the king’s business, but despite their efforts, their missions and schemes ended in failure. Daniel O’Neill, frustrated in all his attempts to convince his stubborn old uncle Owen Roe of the urgent need to unite his forces with Ormond’s; ‘Honest Harry’ Firebrace, constantly disappointed in his increasingly desperate plans to contrive the escape of Charles I from Carisbrooke Castle; Colonel Strachan, wandering the Highlands in his plaid, one step ahead of the soldiers on his trail, failing to persuade the clans to rise: in this book there have been many such examples of devotion, courage and resourcefulness displayed by the king’s agents in a wide variety of situations. But they were not rewarded with success.

  Why were their activities on the king’s business apparently so unsuccessful? Answers to that question help to illuminate the very nature of Civil War and Interregnum royalism, the attitudes and values that underlay allegiance to the king’s cause. Royalist agents did not operate discretely in a vacuum isolated from the history of the three Stuart kingdoms and the Commonwealth during this turbulent period. They were not a self-contained little group, and the history of their activities cannot be self-contained either; it contributes to our understanding of the wider political, diplomatic, social and military history of royalism, a subject that until very recently has been neglected.4 The inadequacies of the king’s agents – stupidity, rashness, incompetence, carelessness, the list can be quite extensive – could damage the fortunes of the cause for which they were working. Similarly, weaknesses and problems within the king’s party, especially within its leadership – what Clarendon colourfully labelled ‘the discomposures, jealousies, and disgusts, which reigned at Oxford’, and not only in Civil War Oxford – could seriously restrict and damage the activities of agents on the king’s business, which in turn meant endangering the survival of royalism.5

  It is also necessary to appreciate how the defeat of the king’s armies in the first Civil War transformed the status of royalist agents, whether they were envoys in Copenhagen or journalists in Oxford, from that of legitimately employed servants of a lawful monarch and his government to that of rebels, attempting by secret and underground means to overthrow an established regime. The problems encountered by the king’s agents in what may be called the open and legitimate phases of their careers were enormously increased when they were driven underground or into exile, forced to confront Commonwealth regimes that could draw on immensely greater military, political and financial resources.

  The superiority of the resources at the disposal of Parliament in the 1640s and of the different Commonwealth regimes in the 1650s remains an important explanation for the failure of the long series of different royalist plots and designs. O’Neill, in a frank and realistic letter to Ormond from Oxford on 12 April 1645, acknowledged that in ‘numbers of men, money, and all materials, they [the parliamentarians] much excel’, and that imbalance of resources was only to get worse for the royalists.6 This lack of ‘men, money and all materials’ was to cripple both the royalist war effort in the three Stuart kingdoms in the 1640s and the chances of success of the insurrections organised during the 1650s.

  This perennial shortage of money was a major theme in the complaints of royalist agents. It was a complaint made by many agents, in a range of circumstances, for example by Berkenhead, unable to pay the cost of printing and distributing Mercurius Aulicus as the parliamentarian armies closed in on Oxford, or by Middleton, forced to disband the Scottish mercenaries he had recruited in Danzig because he could not pay them, or by Armorer, stranded in Calais in August 1659 and claiming to be in danger of starving.7 Another major problem faced by royalist agents was the unstable leadership of the king’s party, with different groups or factions, each with their own clientage networks, competing for control over the shaping of policy. To be employed on the king’s business could be a challenging and unrewarding activity, as it meant serving the interests of a fragmented and frequently dispersed leadership, grouped around more than one source of Stuart royal authority. The disintegration of the court on two separate occasions – at the end of the first Civil War, when Charles I slipped away from Oxford to join the Scots army outside Newark, and then four years later, when his eldest son, having failed to learn from his father’s experience, also entrusted himself to the Covenanters and sailed for Scotland – intensified these divisive struggles for control of policy, which were made more damaging by the bitter personal and factional disputes that accompanied them.

  The royalist agents lived and worked within a party in which complex and frequently shifting client–patron relationships were an integral part. Colonel John Stephens, as Thurloe’s informer Corker had reported, ‘belongs to Ormond’.8 The magnates and leaders of the royalist party – Hyde and Nicholas, Ormond and Montrose, Rupert and Hertford, Digby and Jermyn, Gerard and Langdale, – all had their own networks of agents. And so did the various groups, associations or parties that at different times attempted to direct royalist conspiracy and intelligence: the Sealed Knot and its rivals and successors, the ‘Action parties’ and the Great Trust; the ‘royal Presbyterians’ and the Western Association. In practice, the allegiance of an agent to his own particular patron was not necessarily as total or exclusive as Corker’s statement on Stephens suggests. Not all of Stephens’s missions to England were at Ormond’s direction. There are certainly a number of examples of an agent’s strong personal allegiance to a particular patron – Cochrane to Montrose, Titus to Massey, Baron to Mordaunt, and O’Neill to Ormond, for example – but these ties did not necessarily prevent them from serving other leaders of the king’s party as well. Some agents had a range of very different patrons. The Paulden brothers were employed at different times by Buckingham, Langdale and Hyde, who certainly had no particular love for each other, and by both the Knot and the ‘Ac
tion parties’.9 As we have seen, Nicholas Armorer’s ascent through the hierarchy of the royalist party was marked by the patronage of a succession of increasingly influential figures. This study of the activities of the king’s agents has shown the important part played by overlapping clientage networks in the structure and operations of the royalist party.

  The dependence of agents on patrons for employment, protection and advancement was largely the result of that critical weakness of the royalist party, the absence of effective, clear and strong leadership from the top. A significant explanation for the failure of that ‘ill-carried design’, the confused and muddled army plots, was the inability of Charles I to read the situation in 1641 clearly and to respond decisively and appropriately. Fourteen years later, Charles II’s ambiguous and equivocal directions to the Knot and the ‘Action party’ were a not unimportant factor in the half-hearted nature and ignominious collapse of the insurrection that broke out in March 1655. In the world of conspiracy and intelligence, what Clarendon condemned as the ‘unsteady and irresolute condition of the King’s councils’, particularly the absence from them of a royalist equivalent of Walsingham or Thurloe, was critical.10 Certainly, Secretary Nicholas was closely involved with intelligence and conspiracy, from his days in Civil War Oxford, when he was a patron of Berkenhead and Mercurius Aulicus, to his time in exile, when he maintained an extensive correspondence with intelligencers and conspirators. Nicholas was conscientious and hardworking, very efficient at the systematic preservation of correspondence and cipher keys, but he undermined his own potential effectiveness by remaining at The Hague and refusing to join the exiled court in Paris, and then by taking his time about joining it when it moved to Cologne. When Charles II’s alliance with Spain caused the court to remove itself to Flanders, first to Bruges and then finally to Brussels, Nicholas only went as far as Bruges, where he remained. It is therefore not surprising that the Secretary was frequently by-passed by agents and intelligencers, who preferred to deal directly with Hyde or Ormond, or if their particular patron was no friend of the Chancellor, with some other royalist leader, like Digby, Jermyn, Gerard or Langdale.

  It is perhaps not really fair to Nicholas to compare him unfavourably with Walsingham or Thurloe, powerful government ministers in a position to draw on all the resources of the state to defend the regime they served. For much of his career Nicholas was merely a titular Secretary, serving first a monarch who for some of the time was effectively in prison, and then transferring his allegiance to his successor, who was in exile. With only meagre resources, Nicholas was trying to direct activities that sought the overthrow of a regime, a much more unrewarding and difficult task than working to defend one.

  If the royalists were to overthrow the parliamentarian or Commonwealth regimes, then a superior force was needed, new fleets at sea and new armies on the march. Inevitably, any kind of military challenge would entail more bloodshed, more destruction, more upheavals within society. For the various designs promoted by royalist agents involved either an extension or a renewal of warfare. In the 1640s agents like Cochrane, Fleming and O’Neill were involved in schemes for Irish or Scottish armies, or even Danish or other foreign forces, to descend on England. In order to further these designs, Charles I’s willingness to surrender territory, like the Orkney and Shetland islands to Denmark, in return for foreign aid, or to make concessions to Irish Catholics or Scots Presbyterians in order to encourage them to send armies into England, was increasingly unacceptable to many of the war-weary adherents of the king. The unimpressive turnout of English Cavaliers in the Preston and Worcester campaigns is convincing evidence of the strength of this feeling. Also, the various risings planned to break out in the 1650s, with their plans for assaults on York, Shrewsbury, Bristol, Gloucester and other places, would have meant a renewal of civil war. Understandably, there was enormous reluctance by many royalists to take up arms in insurrections that were unlikely to be successful, and whatever the result, would inevitably cause a renewal of bloodshed and misery. To wait patiently for the regicide regime to collapse from its own internal divisions was a more appealing alternative.

  After the defeat of the king’s armies in the Civil Wars, the royalist agents who remained committed to continuing the struggle were always a small minority of the king’s party. Although they were few in number, the extraordinary persistence of their activities indicates the continuing presence of widespread popular royalism. There was clearly a healthy market for royalist broadsheets, with volunteers available to distribute them, and there were a number of safe houses, to which letters from the exiled court could be sent and where fugitives could be concealed. Most remarkable of all is the extraordinary ability of some agents to travel around England, repeatedly crossing back and forwards across the Channel. Despite the information on their movements provided by Thurloe’s spies Bampfield, Manning, Corker and others, notorious agents like O’Neill and Armorer were not captured, and if they were detained, they quickly escaped. They must have been able to rely on shelter and help from many obscure and anonymous royalist sympathisers. Indeed, Thurloe expressed his indignation at the openness and impunity with which the Cavaliers continued to behave: ‘The whole party here carry themselves with confidence and boldness,’ he complained in a memorandum written a few months after the suppression of Penruddock’s rising. They ‘have frequent meetings by themselves, speak, and drink, and swagger, as if all had been their own’.11

  Popular royalist feeling may have been widespread, expressed in sympathy and assistance for fugitives on the run, but that did not translate into active support for the designs of conspirators. That did not matter particularly. For a movement or revolt to be successful in the seventeenth century, popular support was not necessary, as was spectacularly demonstrated by the actions of the small group of noblemen who organised the successful challenge to the personal monarchy of Charles I.12 But in the aftermath of successive military defeats, of the regicide, and of the various exactions and restrictions imposed on Delinquents, there was a strong pressure on royalists to withdraw from the world into ‘the chamber of devotion’, as Richard Harwood had advised his congregation in St Mary’s as the New Model Army closed in on Oxford, there to practise a ‘retir’d integritie’, to live quietly and modestly, and to exercise a resigned and Christian patience while they waited for the divine plan to unfold itself in God’s own good time. There are many examples, in poetry and in other royalist writings, of this attitude, which needs to be balanced against Thurloe’s cantankerous picture of loud-mouthed, bibulous Cavaliers.13 In her Memoirs Ann Fanshawe described how, after the release of her husband, who had been captured at Worcester, the family had retired to Lord Strafford’s country house, Tankersly Park in Yorkshire, where they ‘lived an innocent country life, minding only the country sports and the country affairs’, while Sir Richard Fanshawe, having abandoned for the time being his previously active career as a royal servant, devoted himself to scholarship. 14 The correspondence of Brian Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury, depicts a circle that, at a time when ‘Parliaments and armies, changes and revolutions fill the heads of other men’, turned for security and reassurance to scholarship and pious reflections, in particular to the exegesis of the Psalms of David. The one-time royalist general Hertford confided to Duppa ‘what comforts he found when he repeated the 57th Psalm, particularly in those words, “under the shadow of thy wings shall be my refuge, till this tyranny be overpast”’.15

  A well-known letter from Ormond to Nicholas, written on 19 October 1651 after the news of ‘the fatal day’ at Worcester had reached France, presents this viewpoint forcefully. As ‘all imaginable trials for the recovery of ye royal interest have been made and failed’, Ormond drew the conclusion that God’s ‘not blessing all our endeavours in so just a case I would fain understand to be a command to stand still and see the salvation He will work for us’.16 What is most significant about this letter is that Ormond ignored his own advice. He did not stand still and wait for the divine
plan to unfold in its own good time, instead he tried to speed these workings along. As a principal counsellor to Charles II, entrusted with conducting negotiations for an alliance with Spain, as a soldier campaigning in Flanders in the royal army, and as a promoter of conspiracy, even making a secret visit in disguise to London, Ormond was very much a major patron of the activist wing of the royalist party, of which the king’s agents were such important members.

  This is the real significance of the role of royalist agents to the survival of royalism. Despite the failure of ‘all imaginable trials’ for the success of the ‘royal interest’ – and there were certainly a large number of trials, all with depressing results – the agents, for the most part, did not stand still. Their activities helped to sustain the royalist party when its adherents were defeated politically in the legislative assemblies of England and Scotland, and militarily on a score or more of battlefields. Although the various plots and designs failed, that they still continued to take place meant that a Stuart monarchy was constantly being put forward to the broader nation as an alternative to whatever parliamentary or republican regime happened to be in power. These different regimes were never able to feel secure; the Protector’s search for a settlement failed to find one.17 In a speech on 15 February 1655 Cromwell expressed his understandable irritation that ‘the enemies of the peace are still restless in their designs’, while in an undated memorandum a few months later, Thurloe expressed a more resigned if bitter acceptance that the Cavaliers were ‘implacable in their malice’, that they were ‘men of another interest, which they can no more cease to promote than to live’.18 It was this restless and irrepressible promoting of designs which helped to ensure that traditional monarchist loyalty was not allowed to wither and die in the political nation even although most loyalists had withdrawn from any active involvement in political life.19 There were times when the ‘royal interest’ looked to be lost, when Daniel O’Neill could report from London that there was no talk of ‘Royalist’ at present, when European governments established friendly relations with the English republic and expelled the diplomatic agents of Charles II, and when Nicholas could report the flood back to England of royalist exiles, ‘having little hopes left them’, all anxious to compound and make their peace with the Commonwealth regime.20 But ‘the royal interest’ refused to disappear. Charles Stuart did not suffer the melancholy fate of his great nephew, condemned to permanent exile with his increasingly shabby little court, dependent on the charity of a succession of European princes.