The fanatics of Ireland were represented by Lieutenant Colonel William Moore . . . and one Mr Blood and Mr Alden, two notorious villains of this country.
The Earl of Orrery to Secretary Arlington 8 November 1665.1
Charles II’s remarkably efficient intelligence operations were created by just one man: Sir Joseph Williamson, the second surviving son of an impecunious Cumberland vicar, a fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford and the former keeper of the king’s library in the Palace of Whitehall in Westminster. This colossal power, focused in the hands of one man, mirrored the extensive overseas and domestic spy networks established a century before by Sir Francis Walsingham, Williamson’s doughty Elizabethan predecessor, to defend the last Tudor monarch from Catholic intrigue and her Protestant realm from Spanish invasion.2
We all learned at school (those that still teach traditional English history) that the reign of that ‘Merry Monarch’ Charles II swept away the bleak, joyless edicts of Oliver Cromwell’s republican regime and returned a broad smile to the face of drab old England. Elements of popular culture such as bawdy and licentious drama, the ‘filthy exercise’ of maypole dancing – even the ungodly Christmas mince pie3 – had fallen victim to dour Puritanical proscription, but these were happily now revived to gladden the hearts of Charles’s subjects.
Reality was somewhat different. Life was not always quite so merry. Behind that gorgeous and glittering façade of a new-found, confident monarchy, the Restoration government was confronted in the 1660s with a seemingly endless wave of dangerous uprisings and plots that endangered both king and realm, not only in Ireland, but also in England and Scotland. In truth, these were hazardous times. The risk of assassination, by bullet, bomb or silent crossbow bolt, never seemed far away for Charles, his brother James, Duke of York,4 or George Monck, First Duke of Albermarle, the major player in restoring Charles II to the throne.
Williamson, created one of the two secretaries of state in 1662, alongside Henry Bennet, frankly acknowledged the perils:
I find a spirit of malice has everywhere insinuated fears and jealousies into the people, which it must be the care of prudent men to exercise and cast out, ’ere it possess them too far.5
Desperate times require desperate measures. The state monopoly of a General Post Office was set up in 16606 and this nationwide mail-delivery system became the main weapon of Stuart counter-espionage through the regular interception, reading or copying of private citizens’ letters at its headquarters in Cloak Lane (near Dowgate Hill, in the City of London), under Thomas Witherings, who enjoyed the splendid title of ‘postmaster of England’.7
An example of Williamson’s covert postal intelligence operations (while pursuing an increasingly cold trail left by Thomas Blood) were his instructions issued in August 1666 to intercept ‘all letters coming from Ireland, addressed to John Knipe [of] Aldersgate Street (London) or going to Ireland, addressed to Daniel Egerton of Cock [Cook] Street, Dublin’.8 He hoped this correspondence would indicate the movements, or plans, of those under suspicion for plotting crimes against the state.
Of course, many letters written by conspirators (or, for that matter, government informers) would not be in plain text – the risk of such vital information falling into the wrong hands was just too great. Ciphers were often employed, based on a simple principle of letter or symbol substitution. Without a key for decoding, encrypted letters appeared to be mysterious gibberish to the reader.
In the late seventeenth century, these codes were far less sophisticated than today’s complex encryption methodologies. And they had one major failing. Whatever letter, number or symbol is substituted, its original frequency of use is retained in the enciphered message. Thus, by analysing the incidence of the letters on the page, it was possible to establish which consonant or vowel each substituted letter represented. The greatest vulnerability of such codes therefore is the frequency in which vowels occur in words – for example, ‘e’ accounts for 13 per cent of all letters used in any kind of prose, whereas ‘z’ is used less than 1 per cent of the time. Once the letters or symbols for vowels and commonly used letters such as ‘t’ have been isolated, the secrecy of the message becomes fatally compromised.
For the nineteen years he ran his spy network, Williamson employed a number of code-breakers such as the Oxford mathematician Dr John Wallis9 and the German theologian and diplomat Henry Oldenburg, who translated letters in foreign languages.10 Sir Samuel Morland, another of his cipher experts, perceived his work as being of high importance and value to the crown as ‘a skilful prince ought to make a watch tower of his general post office . . . and there place such careful sentinels as that, by their care and diligence, he may have a constant view of all that passes’.11
Morland was also a prolific and ingenious inventor12 and in 1664 the king spent three hours, accompanied by Bennet and probably Williamson, in a late-night visit to the mail interceptors’ ‘secret room’ at Cloak Hill. Fascinated, Charles watched demonstrations of various primitive mechanical machines that could open letters without trace, replicate wax seals, forge handwriting, and copy a letter (possibly by pressing dampened tissue paper against the inked handwriting) ‘in little more than a minute’.13 It was an impressive demonstration of the formidable covert surveillance capability of the king’s secret service. Years later Morland reminisced:
With these [machines] the king was so satisfied that he immediately put [them] into practice as they were and competent salaries appointed for the same and this practice continued with good success till the fire of London consumed both the post house and all the engines and utensils belonging to the premises.
Equally important to the Stuart government’s intelligence gathering were the informers who, as in Walsingham’s time, comprised an army of mainly social misfits, criminals and turncoats who were prepared to risk their lives supplying information about the internal enemies of the state, in return for the grant of a royal pardon for past delinquencies or simple monetary gain. Sometimes they were rewarded in kind. In May 1667, William Garret petitioned Williamson for the post of tide-waiter in the customs14 in recompense for his regular supply of useful intelligence to a previous secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas.15
Unsurprisingly, the life expectancy of the members of this raggle-taggle corps of spies was frequently all too short. Only a handful managed to enjoy lengthy careers to match those of Joseph Bincks, who informed on religious radicals and was still operational a decade later, and William Huggett, who had served the parliamentary general Thomas Kelsey, governor of Dover Castle in Kent, in the 1650s and was still spying for Williamson twenty years afterwards.
The penetration and reach of this ever-changing group of spies and informers was extraordinary throughout the three kingdoms, particularly so in England. No man could believe himself entirely immune from arrest for any injudicious words spoken drunkenly in a rowdy tavern, or for being seen in the company of suspected persons in the street.
Many of these agents collected their pay and received fresh instructions during furtive visits to Williamson’s office on the ground floor of Whitehall Palace,16 or more often at a nearby safe house, rented specifically for these clandestine meetings.17 We know that one informer, William Leving (whom we shall meet shortly), made a number of such visits to ‘Mr Lee’, apparently a codename for Williamson, ‘when necessity required it’, at times varying between seven and nine o’clock in the evening, presumably therefore under cover of darkness.18
Intelligence-gathering is always inherently expensive. In 1674, a payment of £4,000 was made to the two secretaries of state to fund their undercover operations – equivalent in today’s spending power to more than £15 million.19 The money was drawn from government income derived from the unpopular hearth or chimney tax, which was levied on the number of fireplaces in dwellings to pay for the royal household’s costs.20 These secret service funds were also employed for a multitude of other purposes, many having nothing to do with espionage, such as the £30 paid to Leonard Manning in December 1679 for his extensive tree-planting in the New Forest (then in Hampshire) and the £375 paid out in part payment for the funeral of ‘Mrs Elinor Gwynn’ at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster.21 We know her better as the actress Nell Gwynn, one of Charles II’s many mistresses and mother of his two bastard sons. She died on 14 November 1687 at her comfortable home at 79 Pall Mall in St James’s after suffering a stroke. This area of government income was evidently treated more like a handy contingency fund to hide embarrassing or inconveniently timed expenditure than a fully fledged departmental budget.
The twilight world of domestic espionage was a crowded one. As well as agents employed by regional magnates or the governments in Ireland and Scotland, noblemen such as George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, also employed their own private ‘intelligencers’ to spy on rivals at court or gather indiscreet information useful in furthering their political ambitions.
The duke had squandered an estate reputed to be the largest in England through his reckless extravagance and a misguided trust placed in a succession of employees who cheerfully appropriated his money. He was ruthlessly ambitious with a short-fused temper which sometimes escalated into violence, as when he came to blows with the Marquis of Dorchester and ripped off his wig during parliamentary business in December 1667. Both peers were briefly sent to the Tower to cool their heels, if not their tempers. Buckingham’s servants unfortunately followed their master’s bad example: in August 1663 they fought a pitched battle among themselves in the courtyard of his London home when many were ‘hurt and the porter, it is thought, will not recover’.22 Nine years later his cook was executed for murdering his counterpart in George Sondes First Earl of Feversham’s household.
Back in the murky world of espionage, Williamson’s everyday domestic adversaries were an unlikely alliance of religious nonconformists such as Presbyterians, Anabaptists and the occasional Quaker who objected to the legal imposition of liturgical rites laid down by the established Church of England. There were also many former parliamentary soldiers who fervently sought a return to a righteous, godly republic in place of the unrestrained hedonism of Charles II’s monarchy.
The most zealous opponents, if not fanatics (to use a word frequently employed in official correspondence) were the Fifth Monarchists. They based their religious and political beliefs on the prophecy in the Bible’s Book of Daniel23 that four ancient monarchies (the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian and Roman civilisations) would precede the new kingdom of Christ. The year ‘1666’ held especial significance for them because of its resemblance to ‘666’, or the ‘Number of the Beast’, described in the Book of Revelations24 – which identified the Antichrist whose kingdom would herald the end of worldly rule by wicked mortals. When Christ appeared, as King of Kings, in His Second Coming, the Fifth Monarchists keenly anticipated becoming the new generation of saints in a thousand-year reign.
There was nothing in their creed to gainsay a pre-emptive strike on England’s body politic to prepare for this longed-for Second Coming. As far as they were concerned, Charles II was both a despot and a traitor to King Jesus.25 Over four days from Sunday, 6 January 1661, fifty well-armed Fifth Monarchists, wearing full armour, roundly defeated musketeers sent to disarm them in the City of London. They later fought 700 troopers from the Life Guards, as well as an infantry regiment, for more than half an hour in running battles in Wood and Threadneedle streets in the heart of the city. Forty were killed in the fighting, including six Fifth Monarchists, one with the spine-chilling nickname of ‘Bare-bones’, who had barricaded themselves in the Helmet tavern in Thread-needle Street and refused any quarter.26 Their leader, the wine cooper Thomas Venner, who had been shot three times in this last, desperate stand, was hung, drawn and quartered as a traitor on 19 January 1662 at Charing Cross. Twelve of his brethren were also executed.27
Through this crazy world of violent religious fervour strode Thomas Blood, whose assorted allies constantly crossed the nonconformist religious divides. Standing four-square in the way of his political and personal aims and objectives were the establishment figures of Ormond in Ireland and the two secretaries of state and spymasters, Bennet and Williamson.
Like Walsingham before him, Williamson sought to manipulate public opinion by the use of information, or propaganda, to promote the government’s standing through the medium of newsletters and the London Gazette, its official journal, ‘published by authority’ and sent by post to subscribers up and down the country.28 Regular news from up to fifty sources in the British Isles, notably customs officers, governors of garrisons and postmasters, filled its columns and short precis of dispatches from English embassies overseas yielded intriguing snippets of foreign news.
In 1668, Lorenzo Magalotti, an Italian philosopher, author and later a diplomat, met Williamson during a hectic week-long trip to Windsor, Hampton Court and Oxford. He described him as ‘a tall man, of very good appearance, clever, diligent, courteous and . . . very inquisitive in getting information’.29 Samuel Pepys first met him in February 1663 at the dinner table of the well-heeled Thomas Povey. He was not impressed: Williamson, he confided to his diary, was ‘a pretty knowing man and a scholar but it may be [he] thinks himself to be too much’.30 Three years later, Pepys had changed his opinion dramatically, declaiming enthusiastically: ‘Mr Williamson, who the more I know, the more I honour’.31
However, that other great Restoration diarist, John Evelyn, sneered at Williamson’s rapid promotion up through the tiers of government and his burgeoning influence at court. In July 1674, Evelyn was at Windsor and wrote that Sir Henry Bennet had let Williamson ‘into the secret of affairs, so that there was a kind of necessity to advance him and so by his subtlety, dexterity and insinuation he got now to be principal secretary, absolutely [Bennet’s] creature – and ungrateful enough’.32 Like so many others in Tudor and Stuart public service, Williamson, knighted in 1672, managed cunningly to exploit every available opportunity to create wealth for himself: in 1668, he was said to be worth £40,000 a year in ready cash, or nearly £6 million at today’s values.33 God, Williamson pointed out piously, was the ‘real author of every good and perfect gift’.34
The senior secretary of state, Henry Bennet, was a son of the landowner Sir John Bennet who owned property in Harlington, Middlesex. He was another Oxford man, going up to Christ Church, and he had fought in the Civil War, suffering an honourable scar across the bridge of his nose during a brutal skirmish at Andover on 18 October 1644, when the king’s vanguard drove William Waller’s parliamentary troops helter-skelter out of the Hampshire market town. Bennet joined the exiled royal court at St Germain, near Paris, three years later and was knighted in 1657. Fluent in Latin, Spanish and French, on 15 October 1662 he became secretary of state, despite the opposition of his many enemies at court such as Lord Chancellor Clarendon and Buckingham, who became ever more jealous of the influence Bennet, with his Catholic sympathies, wielded so dexterously with the king. For his faithful services, he was created First Earl of Arlington on 14 March 1665.35
As far as intelligence-gathering was concerned, Bennet was ultimately responsible for all espionage and surveillance activity, but it was Williamson who ran the agents and other operations on a day-to-day basis.
According to Clarendon, in the early 1660s, Charles II had grown so weary of the incessant rumours of potential uprisings, ‘that he had even resolved to give no more countenance to any such information, nor to trouble himself with inquiry into them’.36 A case, perhaps, of ‘wolf’ being cried too many times by his spymasters. But growing evidence of a potential insurrection in the north of England captured even the king’s jaded attention.
When the would-be rebels met in Durham in early March 1663, they took a ‘sacramental engagement or vow, not only of secrecy but also to destroy without mercy all those who [would] oppose [them]’ especially Albemarle and Buckingham. Agents were sent to Dublin, to London (where a council of radicals had been set up) and to the west of England to synchronise the timings of rebellion. They drew up a manifesto, bursting with righteous indignation, containing a veritable litany of the terrible evils they saw about them – blasphemy, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, the all-pervasive papists, the Anglican Church’s worship of idols, unemployment and unfair taxes (ironically, including that on chimneys). The green and pleasant realm of England had now become a vivid reincarnation of biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. To eradicate such widespread sinfulness, they were ready to risk their lives ‘for the reviving of the good old cause’ – as it was better ‘to die like men than live worse than slaves’.37
Local officials knew full well that 12 October had been set as the date for the rebels to make their move and two days earlier, in a carefully orchestrated operation, the ‘principal officers and agitators’ were arrested across north-east England while the militia mobilised near Pontefract in Yorkshire, reinforced by 1,000 men from Buckingham’s own regiment. Apart from a few minor acts of violence, the rebellion was surgically cut out before it could even spring into life.38 Most of its leaders were captured, such as Captain John Mason, detained while hiding in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, but who later managed to escape from Clifford’s Tower in York in July 1664 with three other men involved in the abortive uprising.39 Others remained dangerously at large, like John Atkinson, a former soldier turned stocking-weaver, who, having stained his face, masqueraded as a labourer in Co. Durham.
Durham-born William Leving was among the conspirators arrested and thrown into York Castle. Together with his father, he was to raise his native city under Captain Roger Jones, alias ‘Mene Tekel’.40 Leving had been a junior officer in Sir Arthur Heselrige’s Parliamentarian regiment and served with him when he was governor of Newcastle. Leving supported the vain and ambitious General John Lambert41 over his failed attempts to resist the House of Commons’ control of the New Model Army in 1659. As a consequence, Leving forfeited both his commission and the back-pay owed him.42 Such ill-luck, or more pertinently, his frequent bad judgement, was to dog him in his future career as a government spy.
Sir Thomas Gower, governor of York, whose own all-pervasive spy network in north-east England had been a major factor in the suppression of the insurrection, claimed to have two witnesses ready to testify against Leving, with incontestable evidence that would hang him. But Sir Roger Langley, high sheriff of Yorkshire, believed his prisoner would be of more value to Charles II’s government alive and well, serving as an informer, than as a rotting corpse hanging from a gibbet as a deterrent to would-be rebels. He suggested to Bennet:
If a way could be found to get Mr Leving out of the jail so that he would not be suspected by his own party, he might be of great use, for he assures me he would not question to let you know some of the names of some of the [rebel] council now in London.43
Langley gave him £10 as pocket money and dispatched him to London in May 1664, where he spent some time in the Tower. From there he wrote enthusiastically to the secretary of state, boasting that, in return for his freedom, he could ‘give an account of every plot that may be hatched between London and the [River] Tweed’ on the Scottish borders. To cloak his espionage activities, he suggested that his escape should be faked and he could then ‘shift as a banished man’.44 To outwardly confirm his undying loyalty to the cause of rebellion, he still corresponded with his fellow conspirators, pledging he would happily accept any suffering before betraying them.45
His ‘escape’ being successfully contrived sometime in July 1664, Leving was soon about his business. Employing the alias ‘Leonard Williams’, he quickly infiltrated the radical Presbyterian council in the capital, which was busy planning an attack on the king and court at Whitehall Palace, as well as seizing the Tower of London. Blood was named as one of the leading lights in this audacious conspiracy.
The adventurer had left Ireland, probably in the last three months of 1663, and arranged a clandestine meeting with his mother-in-law Margaret Holcroft in Lancashire, when he was almost captured. After travelling about the north of England with Williamson’s agents hard on his heels, Blood fled to Holland at the beginning of 1664, where he was befriended by the Dutch admiral and naval hero Michiel de Rutyer, who was ‘pleased to admit [him] into his society and honoured with an entertainment answerable to that respect and affection which he bore the nation of England’.46
Sometime around March 1664, Blood returned to London and ‘fell in with the Fifth Monarchy men, resolving to venture all in . . . their interest’ as he found them ‘to be a bold and daring sort of people like himself and their principles so suiting with his discontents’. Tellingly, Blood judged them ‘very proper for his management’ as his maxim was always ‘never to put his confidence in any that were not engaged either by principle or interest to his designs’.47 The fanatical Fifth Monarchists matched that requirement precisely.
On 12 September 1664, Bennet’s intelligence service produced a list of thirteen persons ‘now in London who go about in disguise and under other names’. Among those listed are John Atkinson (alias Peter Johnson) and Captain Lockyer (alias Rogers) and a Mr Allen. Above this last name is written, in the same hand but in a different ink: ‘His name is Blood’. Williamson added a note at the end of the list: ‘The chief meeting house is at a widow’s in Petty France and my informer [says] they have got money for the imagining of a design which they intend to set in London and to that end are [planning] how they may become masters of the Tower.’48
This threat was taken seriously by the state. The same day, orders were issued for the repair of the Tower of London and for stretching chains across its access from the city – ‘the key to be kept by the Master of Ordnance’. The public were also prohibited from the Thames wharf alongside the fortress.49
In December 1664, there were unconfirmed reports that Blood and his two fellow conspirators in the Dublin Castle plot, the Presbyterian minister Andrew McCormack and Colonel Gibby Carr, had slipped into the north of Ireland, landing in the vicinity of Rostrevor in Co. Down. It was also rumoured that 300 muskets had been shipped in from Scotland for use by rebel forces. Despite strenuous searches, no traces of the fugitives could be found.50
A list of the following year, written on one sheet of paper, has the ‘names of various persons suspected to be in and about the City of London this 22 May’. ‘Blood alias Allen’ is included in a list of seven men who met at the Swan near Coleman Street and sometimes at the home of ‘Robert Melborne, a silk thrower in Shoreditch’. Of these plotters, Timothy Butler and Christopher Dawson were the ‘persons entrusted to buy arms’.51
Leving’s regular reports began in 1665, having received payments of £20 each for himself and a fellow informer, John Betson, for spying services rendered to Bennet. The spy complained about the miserliness of his pay: ‘The money is insufficient. I have run great hazards and spent much money in the cause. A good reward would encourage Mr Betson and tend much to the king’s service’, he told Bennet.52 Soon after, he repeated his pleas for more generous remuneration ‘having caused the taking of sixteen at once, some more considerable than [John] Atkinson’,53 who had fled to London from Yorkshire after the collapse of the northern rebellion the year before.
Atkinson was detained and questioned in the Tower. He admitted his acquaintance with Blood, Lockyer and other conspirators, as well as having been ‘engaged by the [Ana]baptists of desperate fortune’. But he had ‘wearied of their selfish designs and looked for an opportunity to [unmask] them’. He disclosed the addresses of some of the plotters – but warned that if any were arrested, the others would flee immediately and would be difficult to hunt down.
Leving also reported on his progress to his erstwhile mentor, Sir Roger Langley in York:
In March 1663, Atkinson was active in the design and got a [rebel] council together – namely Blood, Lockyer, Captain Wise, [Captain Roger] Jones, Carew54 and Major Lee. They mean to take houses near the Tower and Whitehall, gather arms, and destroy the king, [the] Dukes of York and Albemarle and lord chancellor [Clarendon]. Atkinson knows where most of these persons lodge and will tell anything else wanted [if] pinched . . . to a confession.55
Blood’s first biographer, Richard Halliwell, describes the work of this secret committee ‘of which Mr Blood was head’. To ensure their security, they were protected by ‘a Court of Guard, seldom less than thirty [men] a day’ while they met at the Widow Hogden’s house in Petty France, Westminster.56
At this committee all orders were given out, all manner of intelligence brought, examined and all things sifted and debated in reference to their grand design.
Then Blood began to suspect that two of his fellow conspirators had become traitors to the cause. Either ‘out of remorse or [in] hopes of reward, [they] had begun to make some discovery of this project at court.
He appointed to meet the two persons at a certain tavern in the city, who were no sooner come according to their summons, but he took them both prisoners and from thence carried them to a certain place of darkness, which they had found out and hired for their convenience.57
This ‘place of darkness’ was probably a room or cellar in a tavern in Coleman Street, a notorious ‘hotspot’ of dissent and sedition in the seventeenth century, or its side street, Swan Lane.58 Harking back to his own career in the military, Blood ‘very formally’ called together a court martial of his own ‘and tried the two men for their lives’. They were found guilty and sentenced to be shot dead by an impromptu firing squad within forty-eight hours.
When the time for execution came, they were both brought to the stake and being without any other hopes, were forced to prepare for death.
Then, at the very point of despair, Mr Blood was so kind as to produce them a pardon and so releasing them and giving them their freedom, bid them go to their master and tell them what they had done . . . and that they should ask him to be as favourable to his soldiers [plotters] when they fell under his mercy.59
It is very plausible that one of these two men was William Leving. His description of undergoing a similar ordeal at the hands of the conspirators, and Blood’s biographer’s account of his own kangaroo court, chime remarkably.
Leving’s narrative begins one cold Sunday evening in February 1665,60 when he was asked by two friends to attend a secret meeting. They escorted him through ‘many turnings into an obscure place’ where he was suddenly confronted by a group of men who, threatening him with pistols and swords, angrily accused him of being a spy. Leving, of course, denied this vehemently but was held a close prisoner for two days, always demanding to know the identity of his accuser. He later learned it was Henry North, a fellow government informer, and an ‘intelligencer’ in the pay of Buckingham. As far as the conspirators were concerned, Leving was guilty of rank treachery and betrayal, but curiously they decided not to kill him. Instead, he was simply released, with his solemn promise not to meet Bennet or any of his agents.61
At the end of March 1665, Leving sought to return to his home city of Durham to induce his friends to confess to involvement in the abortive rebellion and accordingly requested Bennet, now Earl of Arlington, to provide him with ‘protection under the king’s hand and seal’. The result was not nearly as grand as Leving had hoped: he was given a single sheet of paper, on which was written his ‘certificate of employment’, to be waved under the noses of sheriffs and magistrates if he faced arrest or imprisonment:
This is to certify [to] all whom it shall concern that the bearer hereof William Leving is employed by me and consequently [is] not to be molested or restrained upon any search or inquiry whatsoever.
Henry Bennet62
This document proved useful that May when Leving was arrested in Leicestershire but was released after proving his identity and credentials as a servant of the crown.
Despite his anxious protestations, Leving was ordered to remain in London that hot summer, all through the height of the epidemic of bubonic plague that killed 100,000 (or 20 per cent) of the capital’s population. To forestall the risk of infection, the royal court fled first to Hampton Court in July, then moved on to Salisbury in Wiltshire and finally ended up in Oxford in September, accompanied by Parliament and the high courts of justice. Back in London, victims were locked in their houses and their doors daubed with the words ‘Lord have mercy’ as a warning to others not to enter. Between one and three of the occupants died in most infected homes. Grass grew in the streets, and because domestic animals were believed to pass on the ‘Great Plague’, special ‘dog killers’ were employed, slaughtering 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats. Leving lost most of his family to the disease, which in reality was spread by fleas living on the city’s prodigious population of black rats.63 Blood survived the plague, which he confidently saw as a sure and certain sign that God smiled on his involvement in sedition and rebellion aimed at transforming this ungodly nation.64
At the end of October 1665, the Presbyterian factions held a clandestine conference at the Liverpool home of Captain Brown, the former Cromwellian governor of the city,65 to plan new insurrections in England, Scotland and Ireland. Orrery, in Dublin, soon learned details of their deliberations from his ‘fanatic intelligencer’, who sent him news of ‘the transactions of that wild people’. The Irish contingent was represented by Blood and his fellow Dublin Castle plotter, Lieutenant Colonel William Moore. The third member of this delegation was our old friend Philip Alden, still working undercover as an effective government informer.
As a result of this strategy meeting, two rebel agents were dispatched to Scotland ‘to revive their party there’. Moore also travelled to Ireland, ‘and having shaven his head, now wears a great bushy periwig66 and is gone into the borders of Munster. From thence, [he] is to go . . . to the Scots of Ulster to incite them into new rebellions’, Orrery reported to Arlington:
I have sent some trusty spies after him, who, I hope, may apprehend him. They have had lately numerous meetings in [Dublin] at the house of Capt. Sands and at the house of one Mr Price where they rail bitterly against his majesty’s authority and particularly against my lord lieutenant and myself by name.
They promise their party great things after Christmas.67
In February 1666, another of Orrery’s spies reported that Blood could be found at the home of his old associate, Colonel Gibby Carr, ‘in the north of Ireland or at his wife’s, near Dublin’. They planned to seize the city of Limerick in the province of Munster. Now came news that the Liverpool meeting of the ‘fanatics’ had delayed any general uprising until the Royal Navy were busy fighting the Dutch (in the Second Anglo-Dutch War) and the government was distracted by this foreign threat.68 They claimed to have 10,000 cavalrymen on call but would march to Scotland ‘in small numbers’.69 Orrery informed Ormond that Blood and a man called George Aires were living under assumed names and ‘may be caught, if care is used, going out of the house of one Cock or Cooke, a brewer at the Coombe in [south] Dublin’.70 He suggested watching the brewer’s house ‘by some who know their faces well. Otherwise they may escape the search.’71
He enclosed an extraordinary two-and-a-half-page letter which seems to have been written by Dame Dorcas Lane, wife of the Irish Secretary Sir George Lane, to her husband about an admission made to her by a conspirator regarding ‘a damnable plot which has been hatching this year or two against his majesty and all the nobility of the three nations’. All the castles and fortresses in Ireland would be surprised and all those who resisted ‘would be put to the sword’. It had been postponed from New Year’s Day but ‘is very soon to be put into execution’. Her informant had ‘laid out a sum of money to the promoting of this devilish design’ and they ‘had corrupted the most part of all the soldiers that are in any strongholds’ – including Dublin Castle, which had cost them ‘many a piece of gold’. He made Dame Dorcas swear a sacred oath to keep secret what she had heard.
When this man told me first of the business, truly I thought he was mad or drunk . . . that he should tell a silly woman a business of that great weight and therefore I thought little of it.
But a day or two after . . . he came here again . . . [and] implored me with fresh protestations to keep his counsel.
I [appeared] to like his design on purpose to sift him as well as I could, but I could not get from him the names of any of the plotters.
For all my oath, my conscience tells me I ought not to keep secret so damnable a design that threatened the death of so many innocent souls and knowing that the Great God of Heaven forced him to discover this business to me, [I ought] not to conceal it.
Dame Dorcas was only too well aware that she held her informant’s life in her hands: ‘it is not fit that I should, by the discovery of the plot, be the cause of his death’. After all, she had only been told of its existence so that she could ‘provide for the safety of me and mine’. She told her husband:
I beg that my name may not be mentioned but that you will pretend that he heard this from some other source.
I forget to tell you that their pretences are for liberty and religion but I am sure [that] murder and treason never came from God.
They do believe that God has [had] a hand in it since they have not been discovered all this while.72
Perhaps finding counter-intelligence operations in Ireland too efficient, Blood returned to England. He had other important business to transact, seemingly to further the nonconformist cause. Under the alias of Morton,73 Blood landed in the United Provinces of the Netherlands in March 1666, accompanied by the Fifth Monarchist John Lockyer, en route for a meeting with the old parliamentary cavalry commander Edmund Ludlow, who was innocently engaged in writing his memoirs, safely exiled among the sympathetic Swiss in Lausanne under the name ‘Edward Phillips’ – a pseudonym based on a variation of his mother’s maiden name.74
The aim was to escort Ludlow to Paris, together with the fugitive regicide Algernon Sidney, to negotiate substantial funding from the French and their Dutch allies for yet another uprising in England. Unfortunately, Blood and Lockyer were arrested as suspected English spies by the Dutch in Zeeland, as they possessed no passports or other means of identity.75 However, they managed to talk their way out of detention, assisted by another exiled regicide John Phelps, who was making one of his periodic visits to the Netherlands from his home in Switzerland.76
Therein lies a mystery. Joseph Williamson’s address book, covering the period 1663–7 and containing more than 150 names, includes a frustratingly vague entry concerning correspondence with a ‘Mr T.B.’ in Zeeland77 who was writing letters from Holland to a ‘Thomas Harris’ in London – one of the cover names then used for the secretary of state’s office in Whitehall. Was this spy Thomas Blood? Had he become a double agent working for the government? Was he now involved in a covert operation to persuade Ludlow to move from the safety of Switzerland so he could be assassinated, or at least kidnapped and brought to trial in England? Some kind of subterfuge was patently under way, else why did Blood feel the need to use an alias when he was ostensibly amongst friends? There are more questions than answers – not surprising, given the elusive, enigmatic figure of Thomas Blood. The evidence is not wholly conclusive, but it may go some way to explaining why he so miraculously escaped capture so often and his later generous treatment by Charles II and his government after the most outrageous of his adventures.78
Yet, at the same time, matters very damaging to Blood were being decided in Dublin. On 2 April 1666, Ormond sent a draft grant of lands to London ‘in favour of Captain Toby Barnes who served King Charles I and the present king in Ireland and abroad’.79 Those lands were Blood’s remaining property, which had been forfeited to the crown since he was declared a traitor. Nine days later Charles II wrote back to Dublin, signifying his assent:
In remembrance of Sir Toby’s service . . . we direct you to take steps for granting him, under the Great Seal, a lease at such rent and or a term as you think fit of the town and lands of Sarney, Braystown and Foylestown in the barony of Dunboyne, Co. Meath and five hundred acres of unprofitable mountain at Glenmalure, alias The Glinns, Co. Wicklow, formerly belonging to Thomas Blood of Sarney, lately attainted of high treason.80
This was hardly a sensible action to preserve the loyalty of a double agent. Or was it a case of purely bad timing and bureaucratic ineptitude – or, indeed, a method to preserve and enhance Blood’s reputation within insurgent circles?
Certainly Blood, or Morton, failed in his mission to escort Ludlow to Paris. The parliamentary general was not impressed by Blood when he and John Phelps talked to him in Lausanne and anyway he was wary of travelling as he had heard of ‘several persons sent out of England to destroy the friends wheresoever they may be met with’, according to his intercepted letter.81 Doubtless the assassination of the regicide John Lisle by three Royalist agents in a churchyard at Lausanne almost two years before was also still fresh in his memory. Nor did Ludlow trust the Dutch, pointing to the arrest of the three regicides Miles Corbet, John Barkstead and John Okey in the Netherlands by Sir George Downing, the English ambassador there, in 1661.82 This, said Ludlow, was ‘an act of treachery and bloodguilt’ for which the Dutch should repent ‘before God’s servants could join with them’.
After much ‘heart-searching’, Ludlow refused to budge from the anonymous safety of Switzerland. Blood was equally unimpressed by the republican hero, believing him ‘very unable for such an employment’ and much more interested in ‘writing a history as he called it’.83
Meanwhile Arlington, focusing on the problems of the naval war against the Dutch, was slow off the mark to appreciate the dangers of new unrest in Ireland. He warned Ormond the following August that Blood ‘and other notorious conspirators would resort’ to Ireland, with the aim of spreading sedition throughout the ranks of the militia. ‘Some of my informers have offered to go to Ireland’, he added, but, perhaps believing that local knowledge paid the best dividends, declined to send them, unless Ormond specifically asked for assistance.84
Williamson had received intelligence from one of his spies, Captain John Grice, a former parliamentary agent, who also reported that Blood and Captain Roger Jones (the infamous ‘Mene Teke’) had ‘gone to Ireland . . . to do mischief’.85 Grice had generously offered his services to arrest them, suggesting that a good man to detain would be the innkeeper of the Black Boy at Oxmantown, ‘who will know [of] any plot in Ireland’.86
Although the adventurer had returned to London from Europe in the early summer of 1666,87 Orrery, attending the lord lieutenant on a progress through the province of Munster that September, was convinced of Blood’s permanent presence in Ireland. Accordingly, he had ‘put all the province on their guard in case of disturbance. Those who are in arms here are of one mind in their loyalty’, he assured Arlington.88
One spy told Sir George Lane that ‘John Breten in Bride’s Alley [Dublin] a tobacco man [and] one Johnson, a shoemaker in St Patrick’s Street’ would know where the fugitives were.
The man that keeps the Black Boy [tavern] in Oxmantown in [north] Dublin . . . [this] was the place where Blood lay. It had his horses or [he] caused them to be brought [to] him that morning that he made his escape from Dublin.
The man’s name I have forgotten but you may find him out for his wife is blind.89
Like the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of another era, Blood was seemingly here, there and everywhere. He was accused of starting the Great Fire of London, which began about one o’clock in the morning of 2 September 1666 in the bakery of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane and went on to consume most of the medieval city before it burned out three days later.90 ‘Divers strangers, Dutch and French were during the fire apprehended upon suspicion that they contributed mischievously to it who are all imprisoned’, reported the London Gazette at the time.91 Much later, Israel Tonge, the unhinged confederate of the rabid anti-papist Titus Oates, suggested that Blood had a ‘share’ in starting the fire and claimed it was a ‘Popish-French Louvestin [Republican] plot, Blood being the agent for the latter’.92 Another culprit, named in a letter to Charles II, was Captain John Mason. These all proved to be idle allegations. Williamson published a memorandum which concluded that ‘after many examinations by . . . his majesty’s ministers, nothing has been found to argue [that] the fire in London [was] caused by other than the hand of God, a great wind and a very dry season’.93
Amid the chaos and destruction caused by the Great Fire, Arlington reported to Sir George Lane on 6 September that Blood had been reported in Lancashire but had travelled to London and came near to arrest after the fire had broken out.94
Five weeks later, Arlington had changed his mind about strengthening the intelligence network in Ireland, dispatching his own agents (Leving and later his fellow spy William Freer, or Fryer) to Dublin. Leving was armed with another letter of protection to show to the lord lieutenant: ‘The bearer of this letter is sent into Ireland to endeavour to take Blood and his conspirators. His true name is Ward but he goes by the name of Williams.’95 The spymaster was being cautious about the identity of his agent, using two separate aliases for Leving.
It is particularly difficult for an agent to operate in the strange environment of a different country. Who you know, after all, is more important than what you know. Leving, however, managed to infiltrate the Presbyterian community in Ulster, delivering ‘information concerning Blood and other conspirators who are fled from Ireland’ to Ormond on 16 November.96 He and Freer spent ten weeks in Ireland before returning to England in December. Lev-ing’s last message from Ireland regretted that he had not detained Blood or ‘Mene Teke’ in Ireland. He had, however, met several of their acquaintances and had passed on the intelligence he had gained from them to Ormond.97
Meanwhile, in Scotland, one Presbyterian rebellion had actually come to pass. Although seemingly unpremeditated – it was triggered on 13 November 1666 by soldiers bullying an old man in Dalry, Kirkcudbrightshire, about his unpaid fines for not attending authorised church services – there had been signs that an insurrection was already being planned. Four townsmen rescued the victim, shooting a corporal in the stomach and disarming four other soldiers. As feelings rose, 200 men rode to Dumfries and kidnapped Sir James Turner, the local military commander (still wearing his nightgown and feeling ‘indisposed’) and shamefully disarmed his two infantry companies, before throwing them into prison.98 From there, the rebellion escalated rapidly, with the rebel force growing to about 2000-strong. The rebels maintained steadfastly their loyalty to Charles II, yet demanded the end of episcopal rule in the Church in Scotland, a restoration of Presbyterianism and that deprived ministers should be returned their livings.99
Three days later, the Scottish Privy Council mobilised its forces under Lieutenant General Thomas Dalziel. It was wary of support for the rebels from a ‘fifth column’ of collaborators, so in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh security was tightened at the gates, the night watch reinforced and the militia ordered to swear an oath of allegiance to the government in London.100 On the morning of 28 November, the rebels, depleted by desertion to just over 1,000, fought Dalziel’s troops at Rullion Green, seven miles (11.3 km) from Edinburgh. They defended a snow-covered hilltop position, and despite fighting desperately were defeated at sunset after three charges by government troops. About fifty rebels were killed and 120 captured in the night pursuit that followed.101 One of those killed was the minister Andrew McCormack, Blood’s fellow conspirator in the Dublin Castle plot.102
Evidence for Blood’s involvement in the Pentland uprising is scant. Viscount Conway was told of his role there by Charles II himself soon after its defeat and Orrery also informed Ormond of Blood’s participation, based on information received from Arlington.103 An almost contemporary report from Sir Philip Musgrave, custos rotulorum of Westmorland, in April 1667 mentioned ‘one Blood, who was among the Scotch rebels last winter and in last year’s insurrection in Ireland’. He had been spotted in Westmoreland ‘at a rigid Anabaptist’s [house] with whom he corresponds’. More recent authorities maintain that he was present when the Presbyterian forces were routed but escaped unharmed.104 Strange then that Blood’s name does not appear on the government list naming the Scottish rebels’ leaders.
Warrants for his arrest were issued in London on 19 January 1667105 and on 2 March – the latter granted to Leving, permitting him to seize Blood, Timothy Butler, Captain Lockyer and others together with ‘any instruments of war that may be in the places where they are seized’. The prisoners had to be brought to Arlington for interrogation if arrested in London or Westminster, ‘or in the country, before the nearest deputy lieutenant or justice of the peace’.106 But the bird had apparently flown from the capital. On 21 January, Grice reported Blood in his old stomping ground of Lancashire, living ‘about Warrington or Manchester’ under the name of ‘Allen’ or ‘Groves’. He planned to remain in the area until the end of February.107
Blood had had enough. He decided to withdraw from the dangerous world of espionage. Casting around for a more ‘safe and quiet way to get a livelihood’ he made the bizarre decision to become a doctor, practising at Romford, Essex, under the assumed name of ‘Ayliff’. Without any medical qualifications, one wonders what became of his patients. His wife Mary and his eldest son, Thomas, were sent to live in an apothecary’s shop in Shoreditch, north of London, where they changed their name to Weston.108
Aside from his own charlatan medical practice, Blood had suddenly become a law-abiding citizen.
But his apothecary’s hat and gown were merely another cover to mask his true activities. His greatest adventures were yet before him.