by Howard Pyle
This famous and often-quoted passage is, strange to say, almost all that remains of the actual portraiture of a man once notable among the notables of his day. The little else called authentic that has descended to us is obscure and generally contradictory. Besides a mention in a few dry and now altogether unread histories, it comprises two or three curious pamphlets in the British Museum, a mention here and there in certain scandalous poems written by Rochester and other scandalous versifiers of the court of Charles II., and one or two of those rare and curious black-letter ballads of the period that have somehow escaped the wastebasket of Time, and have come fluttering down to us of the present age. These few brief mentions are, as was said, generally contradictory; but, such as they are, they are all that is left — a few frayed and tattered remnants of what was once the web of a real life history.
It is now almost impossible to rearrange these broken and tangled threads into anything like an actual semblance of the original pattern. After the best has been done, we can only see a faint and general outline — dim and faded — of a wild and adventurous life lived in that dark and shadowy time so long ago. In the beginning we see a shadowy image of the hero as one Thomas Blood, Esquire, of Sarney, enjoying a considerable rental from an Irish estate of some value.
Next he appears — faint, dim, obscure — fighting in the Cromwellian wars, though whether upon the side of the King or Parliament it is now next to impossible to say. Then we see him at the time of the Restoration (still faintly outlined), desperately poor and needy, petitioning the Irish Court of Claims — and petitioning in vain — for the restoration of his estates, which had somehow become sequestered during the late war.
Then, for a little space, the threads of his life run into the stronger woof of real history, and we see a clearer picture of him leagued with the Irish Presbyterians and malcontent sectaries in a rather famous, but desperate and fruitless, attempt to abduct the Duke of Ormond, then the Lord Lieutenant, from Dublin Castle.
Then again the threads run astray from more lasting history, and for a while they become again more tangled, obscure, and faded even than at first. A faint image of him is seen lurking, a fugitive, among the Irish mountains — now sheltered by the Presbyterians, now by the wild peasantry; here disguised as a malcontent sectarian enthusiast or preacher, now as a refugee priest — passing through a thousand marvellous adventures and a hundred hair-breadth escapes, and finally getting safe away to Holland.
About this time the notable Fifth-Monarchy Plot began to draw toward a head in England in York and Suffolk, and then in a little while Colonel Thomas Blood is back again from Holland, and we see his vague form moving restlessly here and there in the very midst of the conspiracy.
This part of his life, particularly, smacks not a little of the romantic. By way of disguise, he assumed the name and title of Dr. Ayliff, and began the practice of physic in the town of Runniford. He soon became much respected by his neighbors, who looked upon him as a most quiet, orderly, law-loving, inoffensive body. The suggestion offered is quite of a kind with the old school of romantic fiction. The double life — by day a respectable chirurgeon and quiet, decent, pill-rolling apothecary; by night a fierce incendiary enthusiast, holding forth hoarsely in some gloomy, torch-lit hiding-place of the Fifth-Monarchy conspirators.
By-and-by the Fifth-Monarchy Plot exploded and then, from the midst of the general ruin, the outline of Colonel Thomas Blood, as it emerges, begins for the first time to assume a more definite and positive shape and color.
Among the Fifth Monarchy conspirators arrested at that time was one Captain Maison, an old and tried friend of Colonel Blood’s, and one for whom the adventurer felt a peculiar affection. He was taken in London by the government agents, and it was necessary to remove him thence to York to stand his trial at the coming assizes. Accordingly he was sent down under guard, and Blood determined upon a rescue.
In a village not far from Doncaster the escort troop was suddenly attacked in the dark by four armed horsemen. A fight desperate and bloody followed, in which two of the soldiers were killed, three unhorsed, and the rest wounded, while all who could betook themselves to flight. The rescue was effected, and Captain Maison rode away with his friends in triumph. The leader of the rescuing party was Colonel Blood, and in the encounter, so the history of the affair says, he was shot in the body five times, suffering wounds enough to kill any ordinary man.
In the contemporary account of this affair we catch a dim but curious picture of England of that day — a picture looking strange and dark in these days of light. Though the encounter, says that account, “happened in a village where a great number of people were spectators of the combat, yet none would venture the rescue of either party, as not knowing which was in the wrong or which was in the right.”
“It was,” says the same worthy authority, “Mr. Blood’s misfortune to ride all that day and lose his way, nothing but blood and gore all over from top to toe, before he could get to a friend’s house whither he designed, and have the assistance of a surgeon, which he there obtained.”
A reward of £300 was set upon his head, but he had disappeared, and it seems to have occurred to no one that the peaceful Dr. Ayliff of Runniford was in any wav connected with the now famous desperado Colonel Blood.
It is a confused, entangled narrative; it is difficult to follow, shifting as it does from scene to scene and from place to place, and the following of it is of use only so far as it may lay the ground for the after-story — as it may give some notion of the first making of a character so bold and so desperate that the stealing of a duke’s person and a king’s crown were to it matters not only possible but practicable.
The first of these two famous adventures was a second attempt upon the life of the Duke of Ormond, in the very heart of London, and almost at the very gates of his own palace.
II.
In the winter of the year 1670 the Prince of Orange visited England, and on the 6th of December a grand entertainment was given to him by the city of London. The Duke of Ormond was also a guest of the city, and it was very late that night “when he returned from the banquet to Clarendon House, where he was then lodging. The Duke’s coach, when he rode abroad, was always attended by six running-footmen, and to prevent them from climbing up behind and so overloading the horses, his Grace had had spikes driven both into the coach itself and into the stand behind.
It happened this particular night that the streets were so wet and muddy that the footmen had run upon the sidewalk instead of keeping to the roadway, and when the coach filially turned into St. James Street, at the end of which stood Clarendon House, it was found that not a single guard attended it.
By some accounts it is said that they had lagged behind; by others that they had been stopped upon the way. Be this as it may, the coach was entirely without attendants when it was suddenly brought to a stand by a party of some half-dozen horsemen in the darkest part of the street. Before the coachman had time to make any outcry he was dragged from his seat and thrown into the dirt, where he lay with a pistol pressed to his temple, not daring to make any alarm. Then the door of the coach was flung open by two or three men in vizard-masks, who seized the Duke, in spite of his outcries and struggles, and dragged him out into the muddy street. Without a word being spoken, he was instantly lifted to the hack of a horse behind one of the party, and there, in spite of his shouts and struggles, strapped tightly to the horseman.
It was not until some time afterward that it was fully known what was the intention of the Duke’s assailants. Had they been contented merely to assassinate him, which was the main aim of the assault, they might have attained that object there and then. But they were not satisfied to end the matter merely with the shot of a pistol or the stab of a sword or dagger; it was their intention, as it was subsequently learned, to carry him to Tyburn, and there to hang him upon the gibbet like a common malefactor. Accordingly, the Duke being safely secured, the whole party rode away with him through the darkness. Aft
er they had gone the coachman gathered himself up, and mounting the box of the empty coach, drove on to Clarendon House, where he roused the porter, calling out confusedly that two men had seized the Duke and carried him off down Piccadilly.
The porter, without waiting or thinking’ to alarm the house, immediately ran off in pursuit, and one Mr. James Clarke, a gentleman of the Duke’s household, who happened at that time to he in the court of the house, hastily giving the alarm, and bidding the servants to come after him as fast as they could, ran after the porter, and in the same direction.
It is probable that they might have been too late to rescue his Grace had not the Duke’s own presence of mind, coolness, or dexterity saved his life. Colonel Blood, who was the leader of the gang, had ridden on ahead as far as the gallows to make all ready, and had actually tied the halter in place. In the mean time his party had become separated. The ruffian to whom the Duke had been strapped was a man of very great strength, but he was so embarrassed by the incessant and vehement struggle of his prisoner that he could only progress very slowly. In consequence his companions had ridden on ahead, leaving him to come at his leisure. The Duke and his captor had gone some distance past Devonshire House towards Knightsbridge, when his Grace contrived to get his toe under the other’s foot, and by a sudden dexterous heave to upset him from his horse. Being strapped together, both captive and captor fell into the dirt and mud of the roadway, where they lay struggling when the Mr. Clarke before spoken of turned the corner of the street and came running up. Before he could reach them, however, the fellow to whom the Duke had been strapped had managed to disengage himself, and seeing the neighborhood alarmed and a number of people running toward them, scrambled up on horseback again, and after firing both pistols point-blank at the Duke, who still lay in the mud, galloped away.
So when Colonel Blood came riding back from the gallows he met his friends galloping away in a great hurry, and the whole of that quarter of the town aroused.
Thereupon, without saying a word, he turned his horse’s head and led the way for Fulham Ferry, the others following behind. There they all got safe over and into hiding before any general alarm could be given.
Luckily, in the darkness and hurry, the fellow who had shot at the Duke had missed his aim. But the poor old nobleman was so spent with struggling that when Mr. Clarke and the porter reached him he could not speak, but lay still as though dead. At first they thought him to be seriously hurt, for his Grace could not speak, but after they had carried him home and laid him on a bed, he recovered himself sufficiently to tell what had befallen him. He must have known very well who was his chief assailant, for the reward of £1000 was set upon the capture of Blood by name, and the fame of his daring attempt was in the mouth of all England.
Everywhere in town and country the talk was of how Colonel Blood had stolen the Duke, but in the midst of all the hubbub Dr. Ayliff continued peacefully practising physic at Runniford, listening quietly, perhaps, to all the wild rumors and gossip about the doings of Colonel Blood.
There has been and is still much speculation as to why Blood should have made this, which, counting the unsuccessful adventure at Dublin Castle, was his second attempt upon the Duke of Ormond’s life. In the darkest days of his fortune, immediately after the Restoration, he had suffered much at the Duke’s hands — or thought he had. But such a motive seems hardly sufficient to account for such a bitter and cruel revenge as that intended. The suspicion seems to be almost more than well grounded that Blood was in the pay of the Duke of Buckingham and the Duchess of Cleveland. Certainly neither the gentleman nor the lady would have been above hiring a bravo to assassinate a rival and an enemy. Corroborating such a suspicion is an account (somewhat apocryphal) which is said to have emanated from Dr. Turner, afterward Bishop of Ely, then the King’s chaplain-in-waiting, who tells of a meeting between the Earl of Ossory (the eldest son of Ormond) and the Duke of Buckingham in the presence of the King a short time after this affair. He says that Ossory came directly up to his Grace, who was walking beside the King, saying:
“My Lord, I know very well that you are at the bottom of this late attempt of Blood’s upon my father, and therefore I give you fair warning, if my father comes to a violent end by sword or pistol, if he dies by the hand of a ruffian, or by the more secret way of poison, I shall not be at a loss to know the first author of it. I shall treat you as such, and wherever I meet you I shall pistol you, though you stand behind the King’s chair; and I toll you this in his Majesty’s presence, that you may be sure I shall keep my word.”
III.
But it was Colonel Blood’s last and greatest adventure that made him so celebrated. Maybe even such a bold undertaking as the attempted hanging of a Duke might long since have faded away into obscurity more or less dense, but the projected stealing of a crown at once set the planner far above and beyond the common herd of rascals.
The old regalia of England, so long the heirloom of her kings and queens, comprising among other articles the ancient crown and sceptre said to have belonged to Edward the Confessor, had been broken up during the Commonwealth, and sold for old gold for the benefit of the state. Accordingly new regalia had to be provided for the coronation of Charles II., and in an account of that ceremony, written by Sir Edward Walker, Garter principal King-at-arms, we read that the Master of the Jewel-house had been ordered to provide “two Imperial Crowns set with pretious Stones, the one to be called St, Edwards Crowne, wherewith the King was to be crowned; and the other to be put on after his Coronation before his Maties retorne to Westminster Hall. Also, an Orbe of gold with a Cross sett with pretious Stones; a Scepter with a Crosse sett with pretious Stones, called St. Edwards; a Scepter with a Dove sett with pretious Stones; a long Scepter, or Staffe of Gold with a Crosse upon the top and a Pike at the foote of steele, called St. Edwards Staffe; a Ring’ with a Ruby, &c., &c.” The crown that was so nearly lost was probably St. Edward’s, or the imperial crown, the second mentioned in the list just given; the sceptre was that of the dove set with precious stones.
The keeper of this treasure at that time was one Talbot Edwards, an old and trusted servant of Sir Gilbert Talbot, the Master and Treasurer of the Jewel-
One day a country clergyman and his wife paid a visit to the Tower. The parson was dressed, the accounts agree in saying, in a long cassock-cloak and a canonical girdle. The couple desired to see the regalia, and Mr. Ed wards very kindly consented to show them. While in the jewel-house the lady was taken suddenly and violently ill, and was with some difficulty assisted to the keeper’s lodging, where Mrs. Edwards and her daughter administered a cordial, unlaced her stays, and rendered such other necessary assistance as the case demanded. By-and-by the lady appeared sufficiently recovered to take her departure, which she did with profuse apologies for the trouble she had occasioned, and as profuse thanks for the kindness she had received.
A day or two after, the parson returned with several pairs of gloves as a present from his wife to Mrs. Edwards. A great many very pleasant words were exchanged, and in the end the parson staid to dinner. He made himself so agreeable that he was pressed to call again and bring his wife, which he promised to do upon the first occasion that offered. He was as good as his word, and by degrees a close and warm intimacy sprang up between the two families.
The Edwardses had a comely, wholesome-looking daughter of a marriageable age, to whom the country parson appeared to take a very great fancy — so great, indeed, that he at last proposed for the young lady’s hand for his nephew, who was, he told the keeper and Mrs. Edwards, a young gentleman of property and an income of £300 a year. The match was a very desirable one, and the Edwardses accepted the proposal eagerly. A time was set for the betrothal — it was the 10th of May, 1670, a day memorable indeed in the annals of the Tower — and the parson undertook to find two friends to act as witnesses.
The evening before the betrothal day the parson called upon the keeper, and informed him that the friends whom he had chosen to act as w
itnesses would have to go down to the country in the morning, and so he would fetch them and his wife and his nephew about seven o’clock. Accordingly, at the time appointed, the reverend gentleman made his appearance with the three men, one of them a goodlooking young fellow, presumably the nephew. He introduced his friends and his nephew, and then informed the keeper that his wife had been detained, but that she would come by-and-by; that meantime they would not go up stairs, but that if Mr. Edwards was so disposed, his two friends from the country would like very much to see the crown treasures before they returned home.
The keeper, of course, willingly acceded to the request of his friends, and so they went all together to the jewel-house. The regalia were probably kept under some sort of protection at that time, though not as they are to-day.
A contemporary writer says, “It is the custom of the keeper of the regalia, when he exposes them to public view, to lock himself within a kind of grate or door with open bars, to the end that those things of high value may be seen, but not soiled by the touch of so many people as daily come to see those precious ornaments.”
Upon the present occasion, after the keeper had unlocked this wicket, and as he was about to lock himself within the enclosure again, he was suddenly seized by the parson and his friends, and flung violently down upon the ground. The parson drew forth a horse-pistol from under his cloak, pressed the nozzle of it against the poor terrified old man’s temple, and swore with a most tremendous oath that if he breathed a sound or a whisper, he was a dead man.
At first the old man lay silent, stunned and bewildered by the suddenness of the attack; but presently regaining both his wits and courage, he began, in spite of the gag, to make such a noise that in a little while he would probably have aroused the whole Tower. In vain the ruffians threatened and swore. One of them cried out to kill him at once, but the leader, the pretended parson, would not allow them to take the old man’s life. However, they beat him again and again upon the bead with a wooden mallet until he lay stunned and senseless, and one account says that they then stabbed him in the belly with a rapier, which one of them had brought concealed in a cane.