The execrable design to assassinate the duke of Ormond has alarmed all the country . . . It has opened all men’s mouths and thoughts to speak their liking for him as well as their detestation of the attempt.
Robert Benson to Williamson 24 December 1670.1
In the late seventeenth century, built-up London petered out at the western end of Piccadilly.2 Clean air and the bucolic fields and lanes of the flat Middlesex countryside began at Tyburn Lane, which led north to the city’s traditional place of execution for felons, very near today’s Marble Arch.3 In 1660 a windmill stood at the other end of Piccadilly, at the start of the highway to Reading in Berkshire and onwards to Bristol, known as the ‘Great West Road’. Along the north side of this unpaved street stood half a dozen grand mansions, including the newly completed Clarendon House, the short-lived residence of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, which cost him between £40,000 and £50,000 to build.4
After Clarendon’s fall from power in August 1667, the house was rented by the Duke of Ormond for a few months in 1670.5 It was an impressive London home for the former lord lieutenant of Ireland6 – a huge three-storeyed E-shaped building, with two wings and a central cupola behind a courtyard, set back from the street at the T-junction of Piccadilly with St James’s Street. There were two imposing wrought-iron gates barring its entrance, flanked by porters’ lodges, each one embellished with blind columns on the street façade. The grounds extended to thirty acres (12.14 hectares) of former agricultural land, including the twenty-four once owned by ‘the widow Austin of the “Eagle and Child” [tavern] in the [nearby] Strand’.7 Ormond had served as lord steward of the royal household since the Restoration and was appointed lord high steward of England in March 1661; the mansion was a convenient base for his ceremonial duties at court.
St James’s Street, which began to be built up at the beginning of the century, ran south from Piccadilly, down a gentle slope to Henry VIII’s red-brick palace of St James, erected in 1531–6 on the site of a medieval hospital for leprous women.8 The impressive tall twin-towered gatehouse fronting Pall Mall still bears the old ogre’s royal cipher. This wide street, earlier described as a ‘quagmire’ by the diarist John Evelyn, was paved over in 1661 and was later celebrated across London for the fashionable coffee and chocolate houses scattered among the twenty-four dwellings that lined the road.9
It was at the top end of this street, after seven o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, 6 December, 1670 that Blood staged another outrage that rocked the royal court, triggered a feverish House of Lords investigation and became a sensation throughout all of Charles II’s realms. Blood, together with four or five desperadoes, including his eldest son Thomas, dragged Ormond from his coach in a violent attempt either to kidnap or assassinate the former Irish viceroy.
His crime bore all the hallmarks of a carefully planned operation. Reliable intelligence must have been obtained from a well-wisher (or someone within Ormond’s household who was corruptible) indicating that the lord high steward would attend a state function in the City of London that day. Blood was also provided with the precise time of the duke’s return and his route homewards.
Ostensibly, it was an act of pure revenge. Blood and his fellow assailant, Lieutenant Colonel William Moore, who now lived in Gray’s Inn Lane, London, had irretrievably lost their Irish estates when they were attainted as traitors in the aftermath of the bungled Dublin Castle plot of seven years before. Both held Ormond personally responsible for their continuing impoverishment, as did the younger Blood, who similarly had lost any hope of his inheritance. Their hatred of the duke burned still bright despite the passing of the years.
If our adventurer – by dint of yet another self-promotion now enjoying the exalted rank of colonel – relished a certain vicarious notoriety before, his exploits now became infamous. After such an audacious crime, committed on the very doorstep of a royal palace, Charles II’s government left no stone unturned to find and arrest Blood and his outlaw accomplices.
Yet the blue-blooded aristocrat quite possibly at the heart of the conspiracy was left unquestioned and untouched by the forces of law and order as he strutted vaingloriously within an arm’s breadth of the monarch himself.
It was a propitious time for such an attack, as London was distracted and enthralled by the pomp and splendour of a grand state visit. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had ended three years earlier after de Ruyter’s flotilla broke the chain booms defending the River Medway in Kent, burned some English warships moored at Chatham and jubilantly towed away the Unity and the flagship Royal Charles as prizes. After this national disgrace, the treaty signed on 31 July 1667 at Breda Castle restored peaceful relations between the two rival naval powers.10
William, Prince of Orange arrived in England on a five-month visit, primarily to collect an embarrassingly large debt of 2,797,859 guilders (about £280,000) owed to the Dutch House of Orange by the Stuarts. Of course, the perpetually cash-strapped Charles II could not repay the loan and William eventually agreed magnanimously to reduce it by £100,000. No wonder he was royally entertained, even though the king’s continuing indebtedness, coupled with the lingering shame of the successful Dutch naval attack on the Medway, must have made Charles, for all his gamecock bravura, an uncomfortable and uneasy host.
But the English monarch had other, more sanguine, reasons to lavish his hospitality on the twenty-year-old princely guest in his household. His Portuguese wife, the Catholic Catherine of Braganza, whom he had married in May 1662, had failed in the first duty of any royal consort down the ages: to produce the all-important healthy heir to the throne. She had endured four tedious pregnancies but, sadly, all resulted in miscarriages and stillbirths, the last in June 1669.11 James, Duke of York, Charles’s younger brother and the heir presumptive to the throne, was also a Catholic and this posed almost insurmountable problems, in many eyes, to his peaceful succession. To dampen down or divert parliamentary and popular disquiet, Charles conceived the idea of marrying off Mary, James’s eldest surviving daughter, to the staunchly Protestant William, even though she was eleven years his junior and still played with her dolls in the royal nursery.12
On Saturday, 3 December, Charles, his queen and the Prince of Orange (who was fresh from an agreeable visit to the academic splendours of the University of Cambridge) appeared incognito ‘at the merriments usual at this time of year at The Temple [in London] where they were entertained with dances of all kinds to their very great satisfaction’.13 The following Tuesday, the prince was feasted in the Guildhall’s fifteenth-century great hall by the lord mayor, Sir Richard Ford, and the affluent Corporation of the City of London. After the banquet, William was graciously pleased to review the city’s trained bands of citizen soldiers marshalled outside in the courtyard facing Gresham Street.
Ormond, now an infirm sixty-year-old, had been invited to the function and left the Guildhall sometime after five o’clock by coach to return westwards across the City of London to Clarendon House. Unusually, his vehicle did not have straps fitted at its back for his liveried retainers to hang on to; indeed, the duke had somewhat heartlessly fixed a large number of projecting iron spikes on the carriage to prevent them from enjoying the ride. Instead, they had to pant along behind or beside the coach on each side of the street. He normally was attended by six tall footmen carrying torches or flambeaux to light the way – some running ahead, shouting this proud warning to bystanders: ‘Make way for the Duke of Ormond!’14
The weather was stormy, as it had been for the last fortnight.15 As Ormond’s coach wended its slow way through the crowded and filthy streets, Michael Beresford, a parson from Hopton in Suffolk, was strolling in the Piazza in Covent Garden, a large colonnaded open space situated between St Martin’s and Drury lanes which had been completed by the classical architect Inigo Jones in 1637.16 There, he told Arlington later, he recognised a man called Thomas Allen, dressed smartly and wearing a fine brown periwig on his head. Beresford had formerly known him as a footman to Sir Michael Livesey, another Puritan signatory to Charles I’s death warrant who had fled for his life to the Netherlands in 1660.17 This was indeed Thomas Blood, as usual hiding behind one of his favourite aliases.
‘Allen’ walked past the parson several times before he stopped, turned back and politely inquired his name. Beresford, in turn, asked him to confirm his identity and he replied: ‘Allen – and that Sir Michael Livesey was living’. Where was Allen lodging in London? He would not say but added that he ‘had been in Ireland and [was] lately come over’ and had relations on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Allen’s reticence and evasiveness troubled Beresford so much that he continued his questioning.
What was Allen doing here? ‘Nothing at all.’
Would Allen like to drink a pint of wine with him (probably in the nearby Shakespeare tavern)? Allen unfortunately had to refuse the kind invitation.
‘What was Sir Michael Livesey [doing] in town?’ Ignoring the question, Allen – ‘looking ghastly’ – blurted out: ‘There are bad designs at foot.’
‘What!’ exclaimed an astonished Beresford, then added: ‘We have had too many already.’ Allen responded with the cryptic comment: ‘We are all desperate.’
As the pair walked northwards towards Long Acre in the gathering dusk, a messenger boy came up and told Allen enigmatically: ‘The horses have gone before’ and he immediately strode off without even saying a word of farewell, leaving behind a perplexed and discomforted parson standing alone in the street.18
This surreal meeting must have ended sometime after six-thirty. The planned rendezvous for Blood’s accomplices was a large hostelry called the Bull Head tavern19 in Old Spring Gardens at Charing Cross, about fifteen minutes’ walk away from Long Acre.20 Matthew Pretty, who drew pints of ale from the tavern’s barrels, and its young potboy, William Wilson, testified afterwards that five men in cloaks, armed with swords, had earlier arrived there on horseback and had ordered drinks.
They having drunk about six pints of wine – canary,21 sherry and white wine – two pints of each and one of them [told] the drawer to draw good wine for they were graziers.22
Then the drawer asked if they knew Mr West, a grazier, who is dead and if they knew Mr Poultney, a grazier of Blackwall. They said, yes, they knew them.
The drawer recalled that one of their horses was ‘a reddish dark colour with a bald face’ and its rider was a ‘tall, lean, pale-faced man with short-black hair’ who said he would not take £10 for his old bald horse yet. The potboy believed this man to ‘be a Portuguese’ and remembered him only too well as he had sometime before taken a message to his lodgings and he had not only beaten him but refused to hand over a tip. Pretty said two of the others were young; ‘about twenty-six years’ old, he estimated with curious precision.
Both witnesses said that ‘near the hour of seven o’clock’ a man wearing a cloak walked into the tavern – this must have been Blood – just as one of the duke’s linkmen ran past, shouting: ‘Make way here for the Duke of Ormond!’ At the same time everyone saw the duke’s coach trundle by outside in the darkened street, followed by his breathless retainers.
The ‘graziers’ and the new arrival paid for and drank another two pints of white wine. After fifteen minutes, they called for three white clay pipes of tobacco and left hastily, taking the tobacco with them. The horsemen rode off at ‘a great pace’ west towards the Haymarket or Pall Mall, leaving their change and some of their wine undrunk. This was consumed appreciatively by the potboy23 and Pretty probably pocketed the coins.
As well as Blood, his son (still employing the pseudonym ‘Thomas Hunt’) and Lieutenant Colonel Moore, this party also included the Fifth Monarchist Captain Richard Halliwell (or Holloway). Another member was called Simons, of whom little more is known, although this may be the alias of another Fifth Monarchist, William Smith, who helped to arrange Mason’s rescue back in July 1667.24
Ormond’s coach and footmen continued their stately progress down Pall Mall and at its end, at St James’s Palace, wheeled right, up the unlit slope of St James’s Street, drawing ever nearer to Clarendon House at the top end of the cobbled road. After a long, tiring and probably tedious day of diplomacy and polite conversation, home was at last in sight for the elderly duke. Any idea of an ambush would not have entered his thoughts.
Blood’s party then struck.
Henley, the coachman, high up on the vehicle’s box in front, heard shouts from a rider suddenly coming up alongside him, warning that there ‘was a dead man’ lying in the street ahead and ‘bade him stop the coach’.
He pulled tightly on the reins, the coach came to a sudden, jerking halt and the collars and bridles of the horses were seized. Two riders aimed their pistols at the terrified coachman’s head.
Behind the coach, an assailant pointed a brace of pistols at the chest of a footman called Exby and swore that he would be shot dead instantly if he moved a muscle in any attempt to help his master.25 The other retainers were scattered by the horsemen and fled for their lives.
Ormond was no doubt sprawling on the floor of the coach after its unexpected and violent halt. His first reaction was that he was the victim of a simple, sordid robbery by highwaymen.26
He was quickly disabused.
After threatening to pistol-whip him, Blood bundled him out of the carriage and down on to the filthy cobbles. Despite Ormond’s struggling, he managed to pin a paper to his chest that spelt out the reasons for his capture and execution.27 Blood then manhandled him up behind ‘Hunt’, sitting astride his horse. Refusing Ormond’s gabbled offer of forty guineas (£42) in ready cash and £1,000 worth of jewellery in return for his immediate release, they tied their victim to the younger Blood with a short length of cord.28
Blood then galloped off westwards down Piccadilly, heading for Tyburn Lane, apparently to check if there was a noose still hanging from the triple gibbet at the north end of the road. His plan was to ignominiously hang Ormond as a common malefactor from the public gallows.
Amid all this noise and confusion in the darkness, the coachman seized his chance of escape, whipped up his horses and raced the short distance up to Clarendon House.
The other attackers began to follow Blood, with ‘Thomas Hunt’ (his protesting prisoner behind him) coming up last. He had been instructed by his father ‘to ride through thick and thin till he got to the place appointed’.29
But the duke was made of stern stuff. Not for nothing had he served as a military commander in the Irish Confederation Wars of 1641–7 and later against Parliament’s army in Ireland, suffering the full rigours and discomforts of campaigning in a wet Irish winter. The old soldier began to struggle violently against his bonds. ‘Hunt’ was unable to subdue him as he was hampered by holding his sword and bridle in one hand and a pistol in the other.
The assailants had ridden a ‘good way past Berkeley House’30 before the plan for the ambush began to unravel.
Ormond managed to knock the firearm out of ‘Hunt’s’ hand and then heaved him out of the saddle by jerking his foot beneath one of his captor’s legs. Both assailant and prisoner fell off the wheeling, panicky horse and rolled over several times in the filth and mire of Piccadilly. The duke landed heavily on top but still managed to snatch the sword out of Hunt’s grasp.
Torches and voices were approaching in the darkness and ‘Hunt’ cut the duke’s bonds, remounted and rode off, his friends firing a ragged volley of pistol shots at Ormond, lying winded in the mud. Whether due to the dark or their panic, every bullet missed.
Thomas Brooks, the porter on duty at the gates of Clarendon House, testified that
the footman came and called out, and not seeing the coach, I looked out and heard a noise and ran and finding my lord, endeavoured to bring him home.
They cried: ‘Kill the rogue’ but I got away from them with my lord within the gates in my arms.
He had been joined by Thomas Clarke, the comptroller of Ormond’s household, who was fortuitously standing in the courtyard in front of the mansion, and, gathering together a number of servants, they raced west down Piccadilly towards the commotion.
The duke had received a ‘knock over his pole [head]’, a sword cut to the hand and multiple bruises from his fall. He lay apparently lifeless on the ground, totally exhausted from the struggle.31 The attack had lasted less than ten minutes.
His rescuers could only identify the victim by feeling, with their fingers, the starburst-shaped Order of the Garter insignia pinned on his coat ‘rather than by any sound of voice he could utter’. They carried his supine body home and laid him on a bed ‘to recover his spirits’.32
Blood meanwhile had fastened a noose to the gallows and, wondering what was delaying his accomplices and prisoner, rode back to rejoin his empty-handed friends at the bottom of Tyburn Lane. Four riders were sharing two horses, having lost their mounts in the fracas. They doubled back to the western outskirts of Westminster and crossed the Thames on the horse ferry operated by Mrs Leventhorpe33 (where today’s Lambeth Bridge crosses the river). Then the party rode eastwards just over a mile (1.63 km) to Southwark (opposite London Bridge), hoping to have evaded the hue and cry in their wake.
Behind them at the scene of the crime lay Thomas Hunt’s silver-mounted screw pistol, his belt (ripped off in the struggle) and sword.
Two loose horses, one a chestnut, distinguished by ‘a white stripe and a blaze all along its face’, had also been caught by Ormond’s servants. The weapons and horses were taken back to Clarendon House as evidence. Both the pistol (later revealed to have been previously owned by Lieutenant Colonel Moore) and the sword had the initials ‘T.H.’ rudely scratched upon them.
The next morning, Blood’s wife, Mary, left her temporary lodgings owned by the schoolmaster Jonathan Davies in the village of Mortlake, Surrey, and disappeared with one of her daughters.
Charles II was incandescent, both at the boldness of the outrage and the fact that it was committed disturbingly near to St James’s Palace. Close watch was set on England’s sea ports to ensure the fugitives could not flee the country.
London in the late seventeenth century had no recognisable police force. The forces of law and order consisted of the local watch, elected by parishes, and constables working under the direction of magistrates. There were others, more bounty-hunters than constabulary, who worked as thief-takers, receiving success fees from those who had property stolen from them. The first organised police in the capital were the Bow Street Runners, founded by the author Henry Fielding in the mid-eighteenth century; the professional Metropolitan Police were established in 1829 by the Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel. A long time to wait for a detective.
Arlington wisely took personal charge of the investigation and, utilising the resources of his secret service, demonstrated that he was no laggard in pursuing the perpetrators of the outrage against Ormond. Through shrewd and diligent sleuthing, he quickly identified the crime’s main protagonists.
Arlington believed the motive behind the attack on Ormond was ‘not to rob or kill [him] but to carry him to some obscure place and oblige him to ransom himself at ten or twenty thousand pounds’.34 More ludicrously, popular report exaggerated the idea of kidnapping the duke, turning it into a cunning plan to sell him to spend the remainder of his life in slavery with the moors in North Africa.35 Rumour naturally abounded: one maintained that only two men attacked the duke, ‘carrying him some distance behind one of them’,36 while Girolamo Alberti, the Venetian ambassador to London, said that twelve men were involved, ‘one of whom carried [Ormond] on his crupper,37 vowing that he meant something more than robbery’.38
On 7 December, Charles II signed a proclamation at Whitehall offering the huge reward of £1,000 (or £142,000 at today’s prices) ‘to any who shall discover any of the six persons who . . . forced the Duke of Ormond out of his coach . . . set him behind one of them on horseback with intent to have carried him to some obscure place out of town, where they might with more privacy have executed their villainous and bloody conspiracy’. The Duke, ‘in his endeavour to rescue himself, [was] so wounded . . . that he now lies languishing under his wounds at his lodgings at Clarendon House’. A royal pardon, as well as this eye-watering financial incentive, was offered to any of the conspirators who broke ranks and ‘declared his whole knowledge’ of this ‘barbarous and inhumane’ plot.39 An additional reward of £100 was available to ‘any who could but tell who owned a horse and pistol which they left behind them’.
The next day’s edition of the London Gazette named four of the attackers and described their escape across the River Thames soon after the botched kidnap. The first suspect identified was Richard Halliwell, ‘a tobacco-cutter, lately dwelling in Frying Pan Alley40 off Petticoat Lane, without Bishopsgate’, in the City of London. He was said to be a ‘middle-sized man, plump faced, with [smallpox] pock holes, of a demure countenance, having a short brown periwig and sad coloured clothes, about forty years of age’.
The second (whom we now know was Blood), was named as ‘Thomas Allen, alias Alloyt, alias Ayliff, who pretended himself a surgeon or doctor of physic, sometimes living at Romford in Essex, but lately lodging at or near Aldgate’, then a Jewish quarter near the eastern gate of the City of London. He was
a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes, with a stuff coat,41 usually wearing a worsted camlet cloak and a brown short periwig, inclining to red, about thirty-six years of age.
This description was generous, if not kind, to Blood’s advancing years. In fact, he was aged fifty-two. His son, ‘Thomas Hunt’, was next described:
A tall and well-proportioned man, of a ruddy complexion, about thirty-three or thirty-four years of age, wearing a flaxen periwig of a large curl . . . but sometimes of late a black one. His clothes black and sometimes wearing a black worsted camlet coat, long, and has one leg a little crooked or bowed.
The last suspect was a man named only as ‘Hurst’ (but later established to be ‘John Hurst’) who was said to be ‘of middle size, good complexion, with a dark coloured periwig and commonly wears a black coat’.
Arlington must have employed many of his informers in the capital’s seamy underworld to come up with so much information about the miscreants so quickly. The London Gazette then related how Ormond’s would-be attackers escaped. ‘Upon inquiry, it is found that the said persons, after the . . . assassination attempt . . . made their way towards Knightsbridge and they [crossed] the Thames near to the Neat Houses42 by Tothill Fields [Westminster].’43 Afterwards, on the south bank, ‘they made their way through Lambeth into Southwark, four of them mounted upon two horses and another singly mounted on a black mare with one white foot, about sixteen hands high, which was formerly seized at Lambeth as belonging to Thomas Hunt, who was then apprehended for attempting a robbery at Smitham Bottom44 in Surrey.45
A subsequent issue of the London Gazette elaborated on Hunt’s description ‘for his better discovery’. This reduced his age by a decade to twenty-three years, and mentioned a ‘mark or scar near his right eye about the bigness of a penny’, probably a souvenir of his time as a highwayman.46
Two days after the attack, Hunt’s lodgings at the apothecary John Anderson’s house near the Plough tavern in Bedlam, off Bishopsgate Street, were searched by Sir Robert Viner, who enjoyed particular favour at court.47 ‘Thomas Hunt’s’ neighbours said that he had lived for some years in Ireland but had not been born there. One described him as a ‘young, tall ruddy man’ and another as ‘a lusty, proper young man, full-faced, about twenty-one years of age’. They knew nothing of his father, other than that he was believed to be a ‘desperate man’ who was still living in London.48
The lord mayor, Sir Richard Ford, and Viner then raided Halliwell’s house in Frying Pan Alley at two o’clock in the morning of the next day, Friday, 10 December. Halliwell escaped their clutches by swiftly dressing and clambering out through a garret window. He scrambled across the nearby roofs and down to street level as the constables searched the ground floor of his tenement.
His twelve-year-old niece, Margaret Boulter, who had lived with his family for two years, was questioned in the small hours. She told the lord mayor that Halliwell had been at home since eight or nine o’clock the previous evening and moments before his hasty exit through the attic window had begged his wife Katherine to tell the unwelcome visitors that he was not to be found in London. The child, manifestly brought up to tell the truth and shame the devil, said she had often seen ‘Thomas Hunt’ at the house and three men had been there at about six o’clock. One of them was the mysterious Hurst, ‘a man of middle stature and no employment’.49 A wet cloak was discovered in the house and ‘treasonable material’ seized, including a letter from Halliwell to his Fifth Monarchist brethren and two to Halliwell from Thomas Allen, alias Blood, found in the pocket of a coat. His wife Katherine and their young child were taken into custody.
The evidence was passed on to Arlington. Halliwell’s letter rebuked his fellow ‘fanatics’ for their coldness and for obeying the ‘filthy proclamation forbidding the churches to meet together’. It was a long, rambling and angry diatribe, which culminated in Halliwell’s threat to quit the ranks of the Fifth Monarchists altogether until they fully ‘repent of their sins’.50 The two undated letters from Blood – signed ‘T.A.’ for Thomas Allen – appeared arcane. The first complained about not hearing anything about an unspecified coat and hose and expressed the desire to arrange a meeting. The second sought the loan of a coat, pistols and a sword. It concluded with the writer’s fond hope that Halliwell ‘may see a happy return’ of them.51
While safely in hiding, Halliwell rather cheekily wrote to one of the constables who had searched his house during that early morning raid. He was a friend and near neighbour called Howell, a weaver who lived in Half Moon Alley, on the other side of Bishopsgate Street. Only too well aware that Williamson’s Post Office might intercept it and read the contents, Halliwell entrusted the letter to be delivered by hand by William Mosely and his daughter Honour, of Blue Anchor Alley, off Bunhill Row.52 He enclosed a letter which he begged Howell to deliver to Sir Richard Ford, the lord mayor. There was nothing ‘unbecoming’ in its contents, he assured the constable, and its purpose was only to vindicate his character.53
This letter was a strange compound of abject pleading and righteous indignation. Halliwell wanted to ‘undeceive’ Ford about him being ‘an actor in the prodigious attempt against . . . Ormond’. His only involvement with Thomas Hunt was related to their business interests and the letter about a case of pistols found in his coat pocket was very old – he had not worn the garment since the previous spring. Furthermore, these weapons were required ‘for an adventure at sea’. The wet cloak belonged to a young boy and been left accidentally at Halliwell’s home. Several witnesses could provide him with a cast-iron alibi for the time of the attack – as he was innocently at home all that day. He then complained about the imprisonment of his wife and child ‘without legal process and [who were] terrified with hard usage and want of food’. He added:
It was to avoid such severity that I absented myself, being under prejudice in respect of my religious principles and of my formerly being in arms, notwithstanding the Act of Indemnity.54
I will readily surrender if I am granted a trial but not otherwise.
I beseech your lordship to prevent my inevitable ruin.55
Mrs Halliwell was to be held by the lord mayor for six weeks and was regularly questioned about ‘the horrid attempt [on Ormond] whereof I praise God I am altogether innocent and hope that my husband is also, though he absents himself, for what reason I am utterly ignorant’. Then she was released into the custody of a king’s messenger. Her protestations began to appear less than ingenuous when the authorities discovered she had sent a cloak to Halliwell, by a Mrs Perryn, whose address she refused to divulge.56
Warrants were issued on 11 December for the arrests of a Dr Ayliff, his son ‘Thomas Hunt’ and Richard Halliwell.
The first breakthrough in the investigation proved something of a mirage. The fourth man named as wanted in connection with the attack on Ormond was ‘John Hurst’, who had been seen at Halliwell’s home on 9 December. Arlington was soon hard on his tracks.
His inquiries threw up one man called Hurst, the son of a Cambridge parson who had served Sir Francis Leake in Nottinghamshire for six or seven years. This Hurst had stayed at William Done’s tavern, the [Golden] Fleece, in Tothill Street, Westminster, for two nights, 19 and 20 December, and had also been lodging at John Jones’s White Swan in Queen Street, off Drury Lane.57 Jones had seen Hurst on horseback at his door the previous October when he said he was a brother of a servant of Lord Howard at Arundel House named Owen,58 ‘a desperate fellow and of ill life’, whom he had visited the day after the assault. Hurst had also been seen drinking at the St John’s Head (or ‘Heaven’) tavern in the precincts of the Palace of Westminster59 on 20 and 21 December and had sold his brother’s horse to Done, saying that he was soon to depart to Jamaica with a commission to receive slaves. He was later imprisoned in the Marshalsea for a paltry debt and was brought from there to be identified by witnesses. Arlington discovered to his chagrin that this was the wrong Hurst.60
On 12 December Arlington interviewed several witnesses about another Hurst, a Yorkshire lawyer who had gone to Ireland in September 1669, leaving his wife Elizabeth behind in London. He had gone on to Scotland but had lately returned and was going to (?bigamously) marry a widow at Deptford, a shipyard area on the south bank of the Thames. This Hurst was described as aged about forty, ‘pretty tall’ with yellow hair and, according to Thomas Trishaire, was a ‘great cheat’. No surprise, then, that he had had one ear cut off, or ‘cropped’, and had stood in the pillory – the normal punishment for writing seditious texts. Superficially, this Hurst’s antecedents seemed very suspicious, fitting the profile of someone quite likely to be one of Blood’s desperadoes. Indeed, a man called Taylor claimed to have seen him in company with Halliwell at the Royal Exchange more than a week after the attack.61 However, no evidence could be uncovered to justify linking him with the Ormond conspiracy.
The investigation turned up a third man called John Hurst, a sailor born in Sussex who had returned four months before from the island of Nevis in the West Indies where he had been based for eight years. He was interrogated on 17 December but was able to prove that he was at ‘Capt. Lawrence’s’ house on the night of the assault. Moreover, Hurst could offer up ‘Lady Lawrence of Chelsea’ and other witnesses who would vouch for his unimpeachable respectability.62
Despite all this effort, it looked likely that the line of inquiry about Hurst was an annoying dead end. Quietly, his name was eliminated from the investigation.
This was not the only red herring. On Christmas Day, a letter arrived on Arlington’s desk that seemed to clear Blood of any involvement in the outrage. Sadly, all that is left us is the postscript – the remainder of the letter is torn away.
I am told that Allen or Ayliff mentioned in the [London] Gazette as one of the persons suspected in the attempt on the duke of Ormond was at sea in the Portland frigate63 and that Jennings or Jennins, who was formerly surgeon to that ship is a great crony of his and a likely man to give an account of him.
Jennings lives over against the Coach and Horses in St Martin’s Lane and his wife works at the [Royal] Exchange. It will not be amiss to call upon him when you go that way.64
The note is endorsed: ‘John Rogers received this letter from William Rogers of Lincoln’s Inn on 24 December and that John Rogers believed it came out of Worcestershire. He does not know from whom, but will write about it to William Rogers who has gone to Gloucestershire.’ ‘Rogers’ was an alias used by Captain John Lockyer, one of Blood’s accomplices in the rescue of John Mason and his companion in his European mission to lure Edmund Ludlow to Paris. It is unlikely that this helpful correspondent was Lockyer, but it is by no means implausible that this was a clever attempt to create a false alibi for Blood and divert Arlington’s questing bloodhounds from his trail. The surgeon Jennings may well have been lined up to receive a visit from Arlington or his agents and to tell of Blood’s convenient adventures at sea. If he did, his account was not believed.
Meanwhile, Samuel Holmes, the apothecary who had tried unsuccessfully to train Blood junior in the mysteries of pharmacy, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the attack on Ormond. On 9 December he was questioned by the lord mayor and Mr Justice Hooker and by Arlington three days later. He acknowledged that Thomas Hunt had been apprenticed to him and that he knew ‘Dr Aylett’ or ‘Elyot’, but he had not seen either man for six months. Both, he thought, were Presbyterians. He knew nothing of Hunt’s father and had never heard of Thomas Blood.65 He was remanded to the Gatehouse66 as a close prisoner on suspicion of being ‘an accessory to the late attempt on the Duke of Ormond’.67
John Buxton, a tailor of Bell Alley, off Coleman Street, told the secretary of state that he suspected Holmes was ‘in the business’, as he corresponded with the three suspects and was ‘a surgeon in the [parliamentary] army’. These three men, he said, ‘were Fifth Monarchists and desperate’. Holmes’s sister, Mrs Elizabeth Price, who had lived with Buxton, had dined with Thomas Hunt four or five months before.68 As he seemed to know them so well, Arlington handed Buxton a warrant empowering him to apprehend all three men on sight.69 However, after Holmes testified against Hunt, Arlington discharged him from prison on 23 January 1671 when he came up with cash as a security to appear when required.70
A week before Christmas, Arlington questioned Francis Johnson, a one-time fellow of All Souls Oxford, ‘a pretended [Congregationalist] minister’ and a former chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, who lived in Gray’s Inn Lane. His lodger for three years had been Lieutenant Colonel Moore, who had remained out throughout the night of 7 December. The notes of the interrogation have the endorsement that ‘Moore had once the pistol’ used by Hunt and left behind at the crime scene.71
Despite all this sound and fury, Arlington was getting nowhere. Every strand of the tangled investigation ended in a blind alley. Three merchants on their way to France, two butchers from Gloucestershire, an Irish counterfeiter turned burglar72 and a London cook were all detained and intensively questioned. Even one of Catherine of Braganza’s royal guards was suspected of involvement.73 All proved wholly innocent of any connection with the attempted kidnap.74 Sir William Morton, a judge of the King’s Bench, told Ormond on 31 December that he was still searching actively for Blood and Lieutenant Colonel Moore as he had heard ‘they are in or about London’.75
On 14 January, sixty-nine temporal and spiritual members of the House of Lords76 were appointed as a committee to ‘examine the matter of fact committed in the late barbarous assaulting, wounding and robbing the person of the lord steward of his majesty’s household and to make a report thereof to this House’. Their lordships, or any five of them, were to meet that afternoon in the prince’s lodgings and have power to adjourn from time to time and ‘to send for such persons as they shall think fit’.77
The Lords investigation turned up little new, aside from the distraction of a handful of reprobates who were unwise enough to utter unflattering opinions in public about the Duke of Ormond.
Thomas Woodhouse, a king’s messenger, was instructed to detain Thomas Sunderland for having ‘in some discourse justified the attempt to assassinate . . . Ormond, or at least declared that the persons that encouraged the assassins were as good men as the duke’ himself. Sunderland happily only spent two days in custody before he was freed.78
The charmingly named John Washwhite, a former parliamentary soldier turned cook, who had lived at Lazy Hill, near Dublin, for seventeen years had been thrown into the Gatehouse for having spoken against Ormond. He appeared before their lordships on 23 January and denied the charge levelled against him of using threatening language against the duke and openly wishing that ‘he had lost his leg as well as his boot’ at the Battle of Rathmines, outside Dublin, on 2 August 1649. More threateningly, he had predicted that Ormond ‘would not die in his bed’. Washwhite denied all this and claimed his accusers were friends of someone he had caused to appear before Judge Morton and were trying to keep him imprisoned ‘to hinder his serving’ the king. The Lords believed him and his chains were ordered to be removed.79
Thomas Dixey, a butcher from the seedy area of Bankside in Southwark, was also accused of using abusive language about Ormond. When he was brought up in front of Judge Morton on 3 February he was accused of involvement in the assault. Defiantly, he replied: ‘What’s that to you?’ Morton, not a man for levity, commented: ‘I do suspect this fellow the more because he is a bold impudent fellow . . . and lives in Southwark whither those who did assault the duke did retire.’
The butcher was hauled up before the Lords committee on 8 and 10 February, when the constable who arrested him swore that he had said: ‘All they can say is that I said the Duke of Ormond is a knave and I will justify it. I think I shall be hanged but I care not.’ He confidently expected to be rescued by his brother John, known as ‘Cherrybounce’,80 and Captain Careless – a mischievous reference to William Careless, Charles II’s companion when he hid in an oak tree in the woods of Boscobel after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651.
Dixey was dispatched to the Gatehouse from where he wrote to Arlington, in a rather more moderate tone, sorrowfully seeking a release on bail, as ‘his goods are seized and his wife and children are turned out of doors’.81 Probably suspecting that the butcher’s bark was worse than his bite, the Lords released Dixey on his providing a financial surety for his future good behaviour.82
The clinching evidence against the two Bloods was that silver-mounted pistol, sword and belt left behind in the mud of Piccadilly, which became the all-important link that connected ‘Thomas Hunt’ and, inevitably, his father with the outrage.
The link was supplied by the petition of Henry Draper, a constable, and Henry Partridge of Lambeth, who claimed the government’s £100 reward because they knew the pistol belonged to the younger Blood,83 as they had taken it from him in the hue and cry following his assault and robbery of John Constable the previous May. Moreover, they had returned all the weapons to him in October when sureties were provided after his release from the Marshalsea prison. The receipt for the equipment, signed by Hunt, was produced as additional proof.84 Finally, the authorities knew that one of the horses used in the ambush – the ‘black mare with one white foot, about sixteen hands high’ – had also been seized at Lambeth and belonged to Thomas Hunt.
In late February Arlington reported to the committee that, of the men suspected, ‘Jones, Blood (called Allen), young Blood his son (called Hunt under which name he was indicted last year), Halliwell, Moore and Simons, were desperate characters sheltering under the name of Fifth Monarchy men’. Always cautious, the secretary of state urged their lordships not to publish the suspects’ real names: ‘Would not exposing of their names by act of Parliament make them hide themselves in the country, whereas the nonconformists with whom they met and abhorred their crime, would otherwise be glad to bring them to justice?’ he suggested.85
Apparently not. After examining a number of witnesses and reading reports of Arlington’s interrogations, on 9 March 1671 the Lords finally produced their report, finding a true bill against Blood, his son and William Halliwell for the crime against Ormond – although the bill used only their pseudonyms. They were given ‘a short day’ to submit themselves to justice or ‘upon failure of coming in, to stand convicted of the said assault’.86
Of course, they failed to appear. The matter was referred to the lord chief baron of the Exchequer, Sir Matthew Hale. Nothing further was accomplished.
Despite Arlington’s view that the proceeds from ransoming Ormond were the prime motivation behind the attack, there seems every reason to believe that Blood intended to kill his old enemy. There are strong indications that he was going to hang the old soldier, like a criminal, from the Tyburn Tree, adding his humiliation and degradation to the heady cocktail of murder. The drama of Ormond’s end would have enhanced the notoriety of the crime. Blood was looking for a place in history.
But revenge was not the only spur for the ambush. Money was probably involved – with the cash almost certainly supplied by one of the highest in the land.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that this mystery figure who wanted Ormond dead and cold in his grave was George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham.
It is known that Buckingham ‘hated the duke of Ormond mortally’,87 possibly because of his continuing grudge over the breakdown of a proposed marriage alliance between the two families of six years before.88 Furthermore, Buckingham was generally believed to have set in train Ormond’s recall as lord lieutenant of Ireland in February 1669.89 He was always ruthlessly ambitious and regularly feuded with his rivals at court, particularly Arlington, and had even quarrelled with the king’s brother, the Duke of York.90 Buckingham was ‘considered the most profligate person of the age and capable of any iniquity, however mean or enormous’.91 The other person who hated Ormond at court was Barbara Palmer, First Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Castlemaine, one of Charles II’s many mistresses and one who had a penchant for meddling in politics.92 In this, perhaps she was Buckingham’s compliant ally.
Indeed, the general opinion at court was that Blood had been hired to assassinate Ormond by both Buckingham and the Duchess of Cleveland. After taking a leading role in the viceroy’s removal from office, Buckingham still believed Ormond’s influence with the king ‘might be able to defeat the measures which he and his cabal had formed for subverting the constitution of the kingdom’. Shortly before Blood’s attack, Buckingham and his cronies had spread rumours that Clarendon and Ormond’s eldest son, Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, had employed two men to murder Villiers. Significantly perhaps, the would-be assassins had been poisoned, but before their death had confessed to the plot.93
Buckingham possessed numerous contacts in the political underground of dissidents, particularly in London. His ‘intelligencers’ moved easily in this grubby, subversive world of hidden motives, whispered confidences and madcap schemes to overthrow the government. It would not be difficult for them to find him someone both desperate enough to undertake this mission and possessing the intelligence and resolve to plan the crime and see it through. Ideally, it should be a man who harboured a burning grudge against Ormond, to conveniently muddy the waters of motivation and keep the murder at arm’s length from its secret central character. Thomas Blood fitted the bill very nicely. Indeed, there was no one else in the whole of London more qualified, or probably more willing.
Circumstantial evidence of this link between Blood and Buckingham comes in a letter, turned up by Arlington’s investigations, dated 17 November 1670, from Thomas Allen to Mrs Mary Hunt and addressed to ‘Mr Davies’ house at Mortlake’. We know Thomas Allen was Blood’s alias and, furthermore, it is written in his distinctive handwriting. It reads simply:
I would have Thomas to come unto me to my lodging on Friday morning.
Let him bring his cloak with him.
We think about the beginning of the week if God gives an opportunity to sign the agreement, which is all at present.
Your friend ‘T.A.’
The note is endorsed in another hand: ‘John Anderson, apothecary. Near the Plough in Bishop [sgate] Street. T.H. lodges there.’94 Who was Thomas Blood about to sign an agreement with? Whilst this can only be conjecture or speculation, was this agreement with Buckingham to implement a plan for the murder of Ormond?95
The most compelling evidence, albeit hearsay, comes from a rather one-sided conversation that occurred at court between Ossory and Buckingham shortly after the events in St James’s Street. Ossory, seeing Buckingham standing by the king, became red-faced with anger, and told him:
My Lord, I know well that you are at the bottom of this late attempt of Blood’s upon my father. Therefore I give you fair warning [that] 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 consider you the assassin.
I shall treat you as such and wherever I meet you, I shall pistol you, though you stand behind the king’s chair.
I tell it [to] you in his majesty’s presence that you may be sure I shall keep my word.96
His eloquent, heartfelt threats were recorded by Francis Turner, the king’s chaplain-in-waiting, who was in the same room. Unfortunately, the reaction of Charles II – or more pertinently, Buckingham – was not recorded, but it is telling that the duke, never slow to take umbrage or seek satisfaction in a duel, on this occasion apparently failed to challenge Ossory.
Certainly, as we shall see in the next chapter, the episode created some powerful friends for Blood inside the royal household.
It was the height of irony that Blood’s attack on Ormond was closely followed by another on 21 December on Sir John Coventry, elected MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, Dorset in January 1667. He was assaulted in Suffolk Street at 2 a.m. while on his way home after a long night ‘supping’ at a Westminster tavern.
The previous day in the Commons, Coventry had proposed that a tax should be imposed on the theatres and playhouses and in his speech had made an unwise jibe about Charles II’s affair with the actress Nell Gwynn.
James Scott, First Duke of Monmouth, born in 1649 as the king’s first illegitimate son by his mistress Lucy Walter, felt this joke too near the knuckle and took great exception to the MP’s impertinence. He commissioned Thomas Sandys, one of the officers in his troop of cavalry, to ambush Coventry and punish him for his impudence by a sound beating, if not worse. Some said afterwards that Monmouth’s plan had the approval of the king himself.
After keeping the MP under surveillance for two or three hours (the tavern supper was clearly absorbing), Sandys and up to twenty accomplices, probably troopers, waylaid him, ‘some of them wrapping him up in his cloak, holding him fast and others cutting and mangling his face in a barbarous manner’.97
In fact, they slit Coventry’s nose to the bone – once a punishment for common criminals guilty of theft or non-payment of debt and the origin of the phrase ‘paying through the nose’. The assailants also stole the MP’s periwig and the sword and belt of his servant.98 Aggrieved at this attack on one of their number and the grievous affront to parliamentary privilege, the Commons passed an Act to prevent malicious maiming and wounding.99
In the Ormond affair, the final question to be resolved is why the forces of law and order could not run the suspects to ground and arrest them. The answer was simply one of priorities and the limited resources available with which to fulfil them. Within three weeks of the attack on Ormond, the government learned of a conspiracy to attack Whitehall and kill the king, led by our old friend Captain John Mason, operating under the unlikely alias of a Catholic priest, ‘Father Thomas’.
Richard Wilkinson, a former Cromwellian soldier and now a sergeant in an infantry company stationed on the Isle of Wight, exposed the plot, which clearly predated the Ormond outrage. Fifty men had been enlisted by Mason to attack the sentries at the gates of the Palace of Whitehall, wearing makeshift protective coats ‘lined with quires of paper which would [block] carbine bullets’. The timing of this ungainly assault (with all that protective padding) would coincide with one of the glittering entertainments at court, such as ‘masking and other jovial sports’.100
Prince Rupert was sent a copy of Wilkinson’s letter on 23 December and told that he knew where Mason was ‘and the name he goes by’. The informant had seen one of the conspirators’ declarations, which had been printed six months before.
If the matter is kept private and Wilkinson is assured of his liberty, he undertakes to make out this and much more in a very short time or submit to be hanged.101
Arlington interrogated Wilkinson in late December, when he promised to obtain a copy of this manifesto. He had been promised ‘a sight of Mason, but for want of money and the uncertainty of his own condition, has been unwilling to seek his company’. Wilkinson did not know whether any of the plotters had a hand in the Ormond ambush.102
Other spies had information suggesting that Blood, Captain John Lockyer and Timothy Butler were involved in planning this latest attack on the king. Butler was certainly in London that December and at Gravesend in Kent the following month.103 Given Blood’s friendship with Mason and his role, and that of Lockyer and Butler, in rescuing him in July 1667, it would be surprising if he had not been caught up in the conspiracy.
But for the time being he was preoccupied, planning the greatest and most daring exploit of his entire madcap career.