Things of this nature, in my humble judgment, must not be dallied with, but be crushed in the very egg and a rebellion is easier prevented than suppressed.
Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery and president of Munster, to Charles II, 23 May 16631
Wholesale state confiscation of Catholic and Royalist lands in Ireland followed Oliver Cromwell’s brutal suppression of the Irish Confederation rebellion. Superficially, this seemed to be the action of an impecunious administration in London confiscating traitors’ property simply to meet the vociferous demands of New Model Army veterans in Ireland for their eighteen months’ arrears in pay.2 English governments had taken this harsh step before and were prepared to repeat it in the future.
However, the objective was far more malevolent than a mere juggling of hard-pressed state budgets.
The Rump Parliament’s Act of Settlement of Ireland in August 1652 authorised the summary execution of the leaders of the defeated uprising. It also established a legal framework to seize sufficient land to reward those ‘adventurers’ (or rather speculators) who had funded English efforts to put down the insurrection to the tune of £10 million from 1642, as well as recompensing, in kind, the 12,000 English troops still serving in Ireland.3
Many Royalist and almost all the Catholic landowners, particularly those living in Ulster, Leinster and Munster, lost all or part of their estates. Even those who played no part in the rebellion were penalised. Those living in Ireland between 1 October 1649 and 1 March 1650 who had not ‘manifested their constant good affection to the interest of the Commonwealth of England’ lost one third of their lands. Before these punitive measures were implemented, 60 per cent of Ireland’s land was in Catholic hands. Afterwards, their holdings had plummeted to about 8 per cent – and much of this acreage produced poor agricultural yields.
Worse still, Cromwell planned a coldly calculated programme of ethnic cleansing, perhaps defined more accurately as social engineering. Around 50,000 Irish men, women and children were deported to Jamaica, Barbados and the smaller Caribbean islands of St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat to work as indentured labourers on sugar and tobacco plantations.4 Landowners were told in July 1653 that they must move to Connacht (the smallest and poorest of the four Irish provinces) and its counties of Mayo, Galway, Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon, all west of the River Shannon. The only alternative offered to this banishment was to be summarily hanged; reputedly, Cromwell himself demanded that the Irish must go ‘to Hell or Connacht’.
These newly designated Irish homelands were intended to be tribal reservations, in all but name, their populations hemmed in by water – either by the river or the North Atlantic. To reinforce the point, a one-mile (1.61 km) wide security zone was established along the eastern perimeter of Co. Clare and reserved for armed military settlers ‘to confine the transplanted and to cut them off from relief by sea’.
Furthermore, a £20 bounty was offered for the arrest of Catholic priests. Assisting or sheltering them became a capital offence. In the forlorn hope that the faith would wither and die in their absence, priests were incarcerated in an internment camp on Inishbofin, a bare rocky island,5 measuring 3.5 by 2.5 miles (5.7 by 4 km), seven miles (4.35 km) off the coast of Co. Galway.
With the massacres of Wexford and Drogheda of 1649 still vivid in their memories, it is no surprise that Catholic landowners upped sticks and left hearth and home to obey Cromwell’s penal edict. Popular myth talks darkly of wholesale depopulation, but in reality many remained on their former property as tenant farmers, serving absentee English landlords.
To ensure the profitable and most efficient distribution of the sequestered lands, a radical and intensive mapping survey of Ireland was undertaken by William Petty, one-time physician-general to the Commonwealth army in Ireland. Assisted by 1,000 men, the ‘Down Survey’ took three years to complete from 1655 and its results allow us to see precisely how the riches of Ireland were divided up, as its scale was generally forty perches to an inch, one perch equalling twenty-one feet (6.4 metres).6
Thomas Blood, as a former parliamentary soldier, was one of those who benefited from this redistribution of other people’s assets. In addition to his old property in Sarney and in Co. Wicklow, the survey shows him with land holdings in the parish of Athboy in Driseog, Co. Meath, formerly owned by the Protestant Royalist Edward Scurlocke. These totalled 237 acres, which he shared with Trinity College, Dublin, and another old parliamentary comrade-in-arms, Nathaniel Vincent. Elsewhere in the county, at Moyagher, in the barony of Lune, Blood held a one-third share in 843 acres, formerly owned by Catholics named as James White, John Begs and another only identified as —Plunkett from Rathbone. At Kilpatrick, in the barony of Margallion, Blood now held 66 acres in his own right and shared 562 acres (of which 270 were categorised ‘unprofitable’) at Brittas in the parish of Nobber in the same barony with James Watson, both parcels of land once owned by a Catholic called Patrick Cruice.7
Together with the 500 acres of unprofitable mountainside at Glenmalure and his 220 acres in Sarney, Blood thus had ownership of or part share in a total of 2,428 acres.
Suddenly, by the shifting fortunes of war and the rich bounty of state intervention, he had become a very well-heeled gentleman indeed.
All this was to change dramatically after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Two years later, the Irish Parliament passed an Act of Settlement8 which ordered that the Cromwellian settlers and the demobilised Commonwealth soldiers surrender some or all of their allotted lands to ‘old English’ Royalists and the so-called ‘innocent Catholics’ who had played no part in the Irish Confederation rebellion but had lost their property.9 All the plaintiffs had to do would be to lodge a formal claim and prove their original title to their lost acres. The new settlers would be compensated with awards of an equal amount of land elsewhere in Ireland, according to the legislators.
Each case was to be decided by a seven-man Court of Claims – made up of seven imported English gentlemen to allay Protestant misgivings about the process.10 Within six months, between 5,000 and 6,000 Irishmen applied for restitution of their property, and of the 600 cases heard during this short period, more than 85 per cent were successful and their lands restored. On top of this flood of claims, it was discovered there was not nearly enough vacant land to hand over to the newly dispossessed. The plan was unworkable and the seeds of discord and resentment took root in the fertile soil of Irish bitterness.
As a direct result, Thomas Blood forfeited his possession of 1,426 acres granted under the 1652 Act of Settlement – or almost 85 per cent of the property handed over to him by a generous Roundhead Parliament. Of the lands left to him, the 270 acres at Brittas were acknowledged to be barren and unprofitable, as were those previously granted by Charles I in the Wicklow Mountains. He was left with just 220 acres at Sarney that could yield any kind of profit on which to live.
At one stroke, his wealth and hopes of future prosperity had been destroyed. He had been dispossessed by statute. One report says he was forced to move from his hometown of Sarney to Dublin and lodge with his Scottish brother-in-law William Leckie (or Lackey), a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, former Presbyterian preacher in Co. Meath and now a local schoolmaster.11 His landlord was a voluble and vocal advocate of using armed force to restore the lands of dispossessed Protestants.
Blood’s continuing poverty is perhaps revealed by the later petition of a Dublin butcher called Dolman. On 30 June 1663, the slaughterman sought the legal assistance of James Butler, First Duke of Ormond (lord lieutenant of Ireland since 1661), to recover an ‘outlandish bull and cow’ of which he had been unlawfully deprived by Blood, described in the petition as a ‘lieutenant in the late army’. His petition was approved and presumably the butcher had his animals returned. As to whether they came back dead or alive, history is silent.12
His financial and legal troubles were not confined to Ireland. In Lancashire, his father-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Holcroft, had died and was buried at Newchurch on 22 April 1656, virtuously bequeathing £80 a year to the curate of the village.13
Holcroft’s death came at an inopportune time, as far as the convenient settlement of his estate was concerned, for his executors found themselves confronted by an administrative nightmare. A legal action had begun four years earlier over the ownership of Holcroft’s manor of Pursfurlong and property called ‘Great and Little Wooldens’ in the hamlet of Cadeshead in Lancashire. This litigation stemmed from the estates, debts and last will of another local magnate, Edward Calveley, who died in November 1636.14 Depositions had been taken from witnesses in 1652 which suggested that Holcroft had sustained Calveley when he was in straitened circumstances and the estate was bought by Holcroft, who raised the money by selling his rights to the tolls levied on the roads in Manchester. Evidence was given that ‘several great sums of money and gold’ had been brought by horse and that the parliamentary officer had moved into the property ‘and was accounted the owner by the country’.15 Events then became more menacing. At the Lancashire midsummer Quarter Sessions held at Ormskirk in 1657, the colonel’s widow Margaret swore on oath that on
the twelfth day of February in the night time, Thomas Holcroft of Holcroft esquire; Hamlet Holcroft the younger of Culcheth, gent[leman], Joseph Key, Robert Drinkwater, husbandmen and Richard Dean Milner, all of Holcroft, forcibly and riotously w[i] th swords . . . and other weapons did enter into . . . [the] house of this infor[mant] . . .
The document is badly torn16 and, frustratingly, the lacuna rules out any chance of explaining why Margaret’s eldest son and another member of her late husband’s family, together with three henchmen, should break into her home at dead of night, armed to the teeth. In the light of events that we shall explore later, it seems likely this was somehow connected with the division of Holcroft’s estates.
A flurry of court actions now assailed Blood’s embattled in-laws over their extensive property holdings throughout north-west England. In 1660, Robert King brought a civil case against ‘Mary Holcroft, relict of John Holcroft’ and John Benbow, over an earlier conveyance made by Christopher Trentham of his estate in Cheshire to Holcroft.17 To complicate matters still further, during the Easter and Trinity legal terms of 1661, depositions were taken in a fresh action brought by John Calveley against the son, Thomas Holcroft, his mother and others over the ownership of the manors of Holcroft, Cadeshead, Barton-upon-Irwell and Pursfurlong and lands in Culcheth, Risley, Atherton and Wigshaw, all in Lancashire.18 As we will see, the intransigence of the issue was to deepen as the years passed and, as usual in such cases, only the lawyers profited.
Therefore, as far as Thomas Blood was concerned, on top of the problems of a growing family in Ireland and an unexpected dramatic downturn in his fortunes, immediate fulfilment of his wife’s expected inheritance rights seemed less than certain. His future looked decidedly bleak, if not hopeless.
There were others in Ireland in the same sorry plight and feelings amongst the English and Scots Protestant population began to run high. Anger and resentment became widespread and there were furious demands for action to redress perceived injustices.
A further factor in the growing agitation amongst the nonconformists was the Act of Uniformity of 166219 which made use of the new Book of Common Prayer compulsory during church services and decreed that officiating ministers had to be ordained by bishops. Any clergyman who refused to take an oath swearing allegiance to the terms of the Act faced ejection from his living. This legislation imposed the established Anglican Church and its rites and form of prayers on the population and further alienated Presbyterians and other dissenting ministers and their congregations.
Fear of violence and unrest multiplied like an unseen contagion throughout Ireland. In October 1662, the Dublin government was forced to order that unauthorised stockpiles of gunpowder should be surrendered by 10 December under amnesty. A second proclamation in November banned anyone other than MPs and enlisted soldiers from openly carrying weapons.
Another disturbing straw in the wind was the continuing losses, apparently from pilfering, of weapons from the army’s arsenals in Ireland. An inventory drawn up in June 1663 showed major losses of arms since the last stock-taking nine months before: 112 modern firelock muskets were missing; 848 older matchlock muskets, 837 bandolier belts with powder cartridges; 80 cavalry carbines; 93 pikes; 80 pistols and 3,499 swords. While in the normal course of events some may have been discarded because of age and others sent for repair, there were inevitable suspicions that some of these weapons had found their way into the hands of nonconformist dissidents – more than enough to equip a well-armed regiment of rebels.
More perturbing, perhaps, was the absence of twenty-three ‘great guns of all sorts’. Again, this may have been because these cannon were no longer regarded as fit for use; of the remaining artillery, only forty guns were ‘sufficiently mounted’ for service in combat.20
In early 1663, an intercepted letter written by Irish nonconformists was palpably designed to be both inflammatory and seditious. It purported to be penned by a Catholic and aimed to trigger antipopish hysteria with its talk of ‘crushing the fanatic [Protestant] officers [in the army] by peeling their rind and imprisoning some of the leading men’ as part of a plot to make the army in Ireland wholly Catholic.21
Protestant settlers believed it was high time to sweep aside the niceties of political protocol and make a stand in the defence of their interests. On 13 February 1663, Sir Audley Mervyn, speaker of the Irish House of Commons, delivered an eloquent and powerful address to Ormond in the presence chamber of Dublin Castle.
It must have been uncomfortable listening for Ormond as Mervyn rambled on, employing colourful, sometimes almost apocryphal prose, in a thirty-page speech designed to demonstrate the great anger felt by his MPs and their constituents. He began with dire warnings that popery still posed a grave danger to the Anglican religion in Ireland:
Believe it sir, whatever delusive tenets have been broached of late, the contrary has been written in blood, not in his majesty’s kingdom, but wheresoever the Papal power has been exalted.
Persons preferring the reformed religion are but tenants for their lives and fortunes till a time of slaughter is appointed.
Mervyn then moved on to the unrest and disquiet over the restitution of lands under the 1662 Act of Settlement: ‘We have been asked to speak for the people, who had we not spoken for them would certainly have spoken for themselves . . . The alarm that Hannibal is at the gates is hot throughout the Protestant plantations’. They were being treated unjustly: ‘The law says “All hail Protestants of Ireland” but if the execution is dissonant we are crucified under a glorious inscription of mockery.’22
Just over two weeks later, the Irish Commons reinforced their message to Ormond’s government by approving a motion pledging that they would apply ‘the utmost remedies to prevent and stop the great and manifold prejudices and inconveniences which daily did and were like to happen to the Protestants of Ireland by the proceedings of the Commissioners’.23 The vote did nothing to dampen the dangerous powder trail of discontent and protest.
The lives and well-being of the commissioners were now being threatened and in London Charles II was quick to lend them his royal support in what was becoming an impossible task:
We have heard there have been several threats and disrespects used to you by some turbulent and unquiet persons to discourage or at least [harass] you in the execution of the trust committed to you.
We shall loyally support you against all such affronts and are pleased with your impartiality.24
No wonder the acrid, sharp smell of insurrection began to creep through the streets of Dublin. That month, the lord lieutenant warned Charles II that the army in Ireland was so ill-prepared that it was impossible to predict how far a rising might succeed:
This general discontent will not, I hope, cause any disturbance but if it should, the army is in a very ill state to repress [it], for there is nothing in the Treasury to draw or keep it together . . .
If we cannot keep the army together it will always be in the power of a few desperate men to start a commotion with regard to which no one can say where it would end.25
Ormond waited until 9 March before he made his official response to the Irish MPs’ resolution. He did not mince his words, reproaching them for having caused so much ‘general uneasiness’ that many English-born Protestants ‘had been frightened into selling their lots and adventures at vile and under rates or compounding with the old proprietors on very ill terms’.26
In making his admonishment, Ormond was aware that a conspiracy to stage a coup d’état in Dublin was under way. On 4 March, he had received a letter from Philip Alden, a shady lawyer, a dealer in forfeited estates and a known agent of the former parliamentary general and regicide Edmund Ludlow, who after the restoration had escaped to Switzerland to save his head.27 Alden had been recruited by an army officer, Colonel Edward Vernon, as a double agent at the beginning of 1662 to monitor the activities of nonconformist ‘fanatics’ in Ireland. Now he was proving his mettle.
His encrypted note to the lord lieutenant – sent direct as his ‘handler’ Vernon was away in London – provided sketchy details of a political conspiracy against his administration involving some Irish MPs.28 Ormond replied immediately, demanding to know ‘who are at the head of the design for taking [Dublin] castle’.29
According to the spy, the plot had been under way since the beginning of 1662 with a ‘close committee, being most of the members of [the Irish] Parliament’ sitting daily in Dublin with the objective of overthrowing Ormond’s government and engaging ‘England, Scotland and Ireland in a new civil war’.30 Confirmation came the same day from a soldier named Jenkin Hopkins, who had been reportedly sounded out about joining the insurrection by a Lieutenant Turet. Further credence to the reports was provided by later news of the discovery of a parallel plot in Durham, but there the principal conspirator, Paul Hobson, had escaped.31
The attempt on Dublin Castle was originally planned for 9 or 10 March, but the conspirators brought forward the date to Thursday, 5 March – just twenty-four hours after Alden revealed it to Ormond – because Sir John Stevens, constable of the castle, was due to mount the guard that day. He was blissfully unaware there were traitors within his garrison. A sergeant and fifty privates had joined the plot and, having obtained arms and powder ‘out of the store by the folly of the storekeeper’s boy, resolved to make their attempt on the outer gate’.32 Ormond organised a hasty plan to thwart the coup attempt with loyal troops, but the plotters got wind of it and fled the city.
Two days later Ormond wrote to Chancellor Hyde describing how the plot to ‘surprise this castle’ had been discovered. He admitted ruefully that he could not ‘boast much of being master of the temper necessary for the government of as ill a sort of people as inhabit any part of the earth. I am destitute of the power which should make them good [and] to keep them from doing hurt’.33 The same day, he wrote to Henry Bennet (the previous year appointed one of Charles II’s secretaries of state), announcing he was deeply engaged ‘in the examination of a conspiracy for taking this Castle and me in it’.
He had discovered ‘no one better in it than [Captain] William Hewlett who has been accused of bragging that it was he that had murdered the last king’.34 Ormond added: ‘These fellows evidently take courage from the [Irish] House of Commons and if they change not and become more temperate, I shall presently make use of the power I have to separate them either by prorogation or for good and all. They will [create] less harm apart than together.’35 At least the chastened Irish Commons pulled back from confrontation. On 11 March they responded to Ormond’s biting words with a short, somewhat cringing response:
Our address was certainly misinterpreted if it was taken to mean anything disloyal to the king.
Our only wish was to lay before you and the Commissioners of Settlement certain considerations in order that you might take resolutions upon them.
The House believes that you have done much to establish the Protestant religion and English interest. We never intended by the orders we made to trench upon your grace’s prerogative and hope that those who made the late plot against the castle will receive condign and speedy punishment.
They concluded with the promise of steadfast assistance ‘against all opponents of the king’s authority’.36
A week later, Ormond sent for Alden ‘for fear of discovery of our correspondence’. A face-to-face meeting was required to elicit more information to help find ‘the bottom of the plot . . . in some way that it may not spoil the use of future intelligence’.37
Two days later in London that inveterate gossip Samuel Pepys heard of the conspiracy in a coffee house near St Paul’s churchyard:
I heard how there had been a surprisal of Dublin by some discontented Protestants . . . and it seems the Commissioners have carried themselves so high for the Papists that the others will not endure it.
Hewlett and some others are taken and clapped up and they say the king has sent over to dissolve Parliament there who went very high against the Commissioners.
May God send all well!38
The Irish government was meanwhile frustrated by its lack of evidence against the handful of minor players swept up after the aborted coup – mostly former parliamentary officers now working as ‘discontented tradesmen’ in Dublin. Ormond was exasperated at the failure to discover and then prosecute the ringleaders: ‘The design to surprise the Castle sticks at Hewlett’, he complained to Secretary Bennet. ‘We can trace no further – not even to get enough evidence to incriminate him legally.’39 He admitted to the king that ‘we find a difficulty in inculpating people in connection with the recent plot against the Council and Parliament . . . Since yesterday I have heard that some go about persuading the English that the Irish had a plot to destroy them’.40
His irritation was exacerbated by widespread rumours that Edmund Ludlow had been involved in the plot and, if so, had cannily escaped his net. John King, First Baron Kingston, reported that the regicide was said to have been in Ireland
until the last week and I think he came here when the last design [plot] in England failed him . . .
He went from Limerick with a vessel pretended for the discovery of a Brazil41 and under that shelter [cover] has been fitting with arms, ammunition, provisions [for] the two or three months past.42
Ormond continued to fear a fresh insurrection and was right to be cautious. By mid-April he knew the conspiracy to seize Dublin Castle had been resurrected by a wider and more capable group of conspirators. The news had come from a spy dispatched to Waterford, Kilkenny and Tipperary to act as an agent provocateur, pretending to recruit dissidents to the banner of rebellion. The agent, identified only by his initials ‘P.A.’ (noted on his report by a recklessly careless Ormond), indicated that two army officers, Major Alexander Staples and a Colonel Wallace, had joined the plot.43 This time, the lord lieutenant decided to sit tight, allow the plot to come to fruition, and catch the conspirators red-handed.
Informing the king of this new danger, the lord lieutenant said the conspiracy involved ‘the same kind of people’ as were responsible for the former. He believed it was a real threat because of the ‘unusual meetings and preparations . . . about the same time in several parts of the kingdom’.44 Secretary Bennet, in response, inquired if Ormond had any new information about the plot and whether he could discover ‘any connections with England and Scotland . . . [where] there is certainly much combustible matter if a fire should ever break forth, from which God keep us’.45
Doubtless inflamed by his brother-in-law’s incendiary polemics, Blood was deeply involved in the first plot – but the precise role he played remains ffustratingly opaque. During 1662, Blood was said to be active recruiting supporters amongst former parliamentary soldiers in Dublin46 and at Christmas that year he and William Leckie had journeyed north to Ulster to sow sedition amongst the Scottish Presbyterian settlers. Here he received some promises of support, with the Scots agreeing to ‘rise in arms and second the design of taking the castle’.47
The part he played in the revived conspiracy is rather more transparent. Although the informer Alden contemptuously plays down his role, dismissing ‘Lieutenant Blood’ as merely an ‘agent [whom] they sent upon errands and not the chief of the rebels as generally reported to be’,48 it is clear he was much more than just a humble messenger boy.
‘Thomas Blood of Sarney’ heads the list of wanted men named in the government proclamation promulgated after the second plot unravelled, and Blood was supposedly the author of the rebels’ declaration, printed for general distribution after the successful capture of both Ormond and Dublin Castle.49 He looms large in the accounts of the conspiracy given under interrogation, as he was to lead the assault on Dublin Castle and claimed, according to one informer, to have planned the coup d’état ‘for three-quarters of a year’.50 Mere mention of Blood’s name was enough to send a cold shiver of apprehension down the spines of both the Irish and English governments in the months and years to come.
Vernon commented to Bennet that while the lord lieutenant had ‘nipped the last little design in the bud, there is now one in blooming which (if it take) he will be surer to gather it when it is full ripe, which will be in a short time’. At the heart of the conspiracy was one Stephen Charnock, a former chaplain to Henry Cromwell, Parliament’s lord deputy in Ireland for two years from 1657. Charnock, said Vernon,
was private, not stirring out of his lodging but on his coming and departure it’s good to have an eye on him but by a very curious [careful] hand, lest he, finding himself suspected may cause a jealousy [hamper] upon our intelligence.
Government spies had established that this new conspiracy was part of a much more ambitious plan to overthrow the monarchy – with concurrent uprisings by radical nonconformists in England and Scotland. Charnock had
told the villains [plotters] that they were so hampered in England they could not stir ‘till the ice was broken here or in Scotland’ (which is said to be very forward) and he assured them of £20,000 ready in [the] bank.
He proposed Henry Cromwell as . . . their general which was generally rejected.
The Scotch designers [plotters] seem to lean towards [establishing a new] Commonwealth and did not positively refuse Ludlow for their . . . captain.
In England, Vernon warned, there were ‘rich discontents’ who had to be closely watched, ‘being there is so much money stirring and my Staffordshire intelligencer [spy] assured me they had notice from London that God had raised them up considerable friends beyond their expectation but at that time, the Lord’s harvest was not ripe’.
I could say more, but it is unwise to do so without [using] a cypher. There are some postmasters on the road who are subtle fellows and have actually served as intelligencers and officers to the rebels.51
The Irish government imposed new security measures to counter the insurrection. On 4 May, two orders in council were signed. The first, designed to secure at least the temporary loyalty of royal troops, regulated military pay and organised the payment of arrears. The second directed ‘the return to his majesty’s stores in Dublin and in various other cities and towns, of arms formerly taken from thence’ – an administrative attempt to neutralise at least some of the weapons and munitions that had been stolen over the previous few months.52
Ormond was confident he had the measure of the plotters. ‘The design . . . ripens very fast and is very far spread, yet my greatest care is not to let the conspirators find they are discovered lest they desist’ he told the king on 16 May.
I want evidence and matter sufficient to make examples of some of them . . . Nothing would contribute [more] to the future settlement and peace of this kingdom.
I do not doubt but that knowing what I do of their actions and intentions, I shall be able to resist and apprehend them in the very act of their attempting the castle . . .
The lord lieutenant assured Charles: ‘I would not have acted upon my own responsibility in this matter but that I cannot, in all probability, [because of slow communications] have your directions. God preserve your majesty’s person and government from this wicked generation.’53
Three days later, he instructed the governors of Carrickfergus, Derry and Galway to search diligently for conspirators and take action to secure the loyalty and security of their garrisons.54
Matters were now coming to a head.
That same day, Colonel Alexander Jephson, MP for Trim in Co. Meath, had approached Sir Theophilius Jones at his home in Lucan, eight miles (13 km) south of Dublin, with an incredible offer. Jones, a former governor of Dublin under the Protectorate and, since 1661, scoutmaster55 of Ireland, had a case set down for hearing by the reviled Court of Claims.
Jephson’s horse had cast a shoe and while the two awaited its re-shoeing at a nearby blacksmith’s forge, Jones had invited his visitor into his home. In the buttery, a tankard of ale, a bottle of cider and a plate of meat were ordered up and, as they awaited these refreshments, Jephson laid his hand ‘on a large sword which he had by his side’.
He said he had not worn that sword for thirteen years before and had made his will and left his wife and thirteen children behind him and was going to Dublin where . . . he and many more men were resolved to adventure their lives and they . . . doubted not to secure the English interest.
They were assured of the castle[s] of Dublin and Limerick, Waterford and Clonmell.
Jones, doubtless open-mouthed at this revelation, could only stammer out that this ‘seemed a very high undertaking’ and required ‘many weighty considerations for effecting it, particularly a good army and money to maintain it’. Jephson assured him there was no problem there.
We want not an army, for there are 15,000 Scots excommunicated in the north by the Bishop of Down and the rest of the bishops, which were ready within two days and they doubted not that our army would join with them.
And they had a bank of money in Dublin sufficient to pay off all the arrears of money both in Oliver’s [Cromwell] time and since the king came in.
Naturally, Jones asked him where all this cash had come from.
He did not know from whence the bank of money should come, if not from Holland and that he [saw] three or four firkins [casks containing cash] carried into Mr Boyd’s house and he himself could carry out of the bank £500 tomorrow.
Jephson threw all caution aside and revealed more details of the plot to an incredulous Jones.
There were 1,000 horse [cavalry] in Dublin . . . which Sir Henry Ingoldesby was to appear with as soon as the castle was taken and a flag put up.
They intended to offer no violence to any [who] . . . opposed them. That the lord lieutenant was to be seized . . . but to be civilly treated. That several other persons were to be secured and Jephson was to seize the Earl of Clancarty56 and Col. Fitzpatrick. Every party had particular orders to surprise all of the guards in the city.
Six ministers in Dublin who went about in periwigs but laid them by when they were in prayer . . . were to be in the street to see that no plunder or disorder should be committed.
This was to be a godly rebellion then. Thousands of copies of a declaration had been printed ready for distribution after Dublin Castle and the city had been taken. These would set out the manifesto for the uprising: securing the ‘English interest’ in the three kingdoms (which had been ruined by ‘the countenance given to popery’); restoration of all the estates in Ireland possessed by the English on 7 May 1659 and re-establishment of the church along the nonconformist principles of the Solemn League and Covenant. There was no suggestion of a return to a republic.
Jephson, carried away by his own enthusiasm, even rashly disclosed the rebels’ passwords: ‘For the king and English interest’.
What of that offer to Sir Theophilius Jones? Jephson promised him that after capturing Dublin, he would become the commander of the rebels’ ‘20,000-strong army’. There was no risk, he added:
[He] should run no hazard in it but might sit still and not appear until the whole work was done.
There were two amongst the conspirators who did not trust Jones, the colonel told him, believing him to be ‘too great a creature of the Duke’s [Ormond] . . . but these [views did] not prevail’, all the rest being for the good knight.57
After Jephson rode back to Dublin, cock-a-hoop that the rebels had a commander-in-chief in waiting, Jones began to worry that there were elements of self-delusion in those wild claims of support. He wrote down a detailed account of this seditious conversation and, in fulfilment of the beliefs of the doubting Thomases amongst the conspirators, early the following morning revealed everything to Ormond.
That night, 20 May, three nonconformist ministers met in Dublin to seek God’s blessing on the enterprise.
Blood was staying at the Bottle Inn near the city’s St Patrick’s Gate. Together with his brother-in-law, William Leckie, he and two other plotters, Lieutenant Richard Thompson (deputy provost-marshall for Leinster) and James Tanner (a Dubliner who was formerly a clerk to Henry Cromwell’s secretary) met at the White Hart, further along Patrick Street, to finalise the arrangements for the coup. After their meal ended, they were joined by Jephson, two men from his Trim constituency called Ford and Lawrence, and a Captain Browne.
The remaining conspirator who attended this cosy gathering was the informer Philip Alden.
Over the preceding days there had been much acrimonious debate about whether to kill Ormond or merely to take him hostage. Some maintained that the lord lieutenant had been ‘a great patron to the English and the Protestant religion’ and therefore should be spared. The more ruthless among them countered that Ormond was unwaveringly loyal to the king and ‘his interest in the kingdom and the army’ was so strong that, if spared assassination, ‘[at] one time or another he would prevail against them’. Their arguments prevailed and the plotters finally agreed to kill him after the castle had been stormed.58
Lawrence urged them to strike now, even though they only had ten cavalrymen at their disposal instead of the 120 planned – or the 1,000 horse that Jephson had earlier boasted of.59 Later, Alden reported:
It was resolved by the confederates not to stay [delay] longer (having greater numbers with their arms, garrisons and towns as they gave out and believed) to second them in that country, in Scotland and England, but the next morning to surprise the castle of Dublin and afterwards to march northwards to join the Scots.
The plan was simple. Six men, including a Dublin shoemaker called Jenkins, would enter the castle about six o’clock the following morning by its Great Gate, disguised as petitioners, exercising their ancient right to seek redress from the lord lieutenant for legal wrongs done them. They would walk to the back gate leading from Ship Street (or Sheep Street as it was known then) and await the arrival of a delivery of bread. The baker would drop his basket of loaves and, in the confusion, the sentinels at the gate would be overpowered.
Blood and about one hundred former parliamentary officers and soldiers would then sweep into the castle, capture it and seize Ormond. He apparently had no intention of killing the viceroy. Lord Dungannon’s troop of soldiers would be lured away by men commanded by one Crawford. William Warren, brother of Colonel Abel Warren, would recruit some of the cavalry at Trim, lately under Sir Thomas Armstrong’s command.60 Once the castle and its arsenal of weapons had been secured – indicated by a flag being hoisted on its highest tower – rebel cavalry would patrol the city streets, dispersing any bands of loyal soldiers they encountered. The nonconformist ministers would use their godly influence to prevent any looting in Dublin. Then the insurgents, reinforced by others rallying to the Protestant flag, would head north to Ulster to join up with a hastily recruited army of Scots settlers, and so sweep on to a glorious victory over the Irish government and the papists.
But more prudent counsels soon prevailed among the conspirators.
Even the most optimistic recognised as the evening wore on that they had too few troops with which to hold the city, let alone guard its gates. Their doubts were intensified by a row with the two landladies who were putting up some of Blood’s assault party for the night. Worried about their possible incrimination in such dark matters discussed on their premises, these doughty proprietors ‘kept up such a clamouring and threatened to discover them’ to the government unless the would-be rebels quit their house immediately. Fearing the next day’s attack had been compromised, caution overcame confidence and it was decided around nine o’clock that Wednesday night that it would be prudent to delay the coup d’état until the following week when another 500 cavalry were expected to arrive in Dublin as reinforcements.61
Alden alerted Colonel Vernon to the change in plans by eleven o’clock.62 After the information was confirmed, the lord lieutenant was awakened at four the following morning in his opulent quarters in Dublin Castle.
Ormond decided to take no more chances. He pounced on the plotters immediately.