Blood, the same villain, attempted to steal the crown and was taken with it, yet he was pardoned . . . and a pension given him which is a mystery that few can decipher.
Sir Robert Southwell (1635–1702) Privy Council clerk1
Robert Leigh in Dublin wrote to his master Williamson in Whitehall on 16 May 1671, scarcely believing the glad tidings that Blood was at last safely locked up in the Tower of London. The arrest of this ‘notorious villain’ after his extraordinary attempt to steal the Crown Jewels ‘makes all honest men rejoice that he is at last taken’, he declared jubilantly. There was also much optimism abroad that the secretary of state and his secret service could exploit this unique opportunity to round up more of Blood’s fellow traitors ‘and those who attempted to murder the duke of Ormond’. Leigh passionately hoped that the old renegade would now ‘receive the reward of his many wicked attempts both here and in England’.2
If Thomas Blood had set out to ‘make such a noise in the world’, he had clearly succeeded far more than he could ever have dreamt of – even given his own inflated ego and the fact that he had carelessly gambled his life and that of his son to win universal public attention.
News about his attempted theft of the royal regalia circulated in a report published in the London Gazette and numerous private handwritten newsletters dispatched to the provinces from individuals living in London. A remarkably comprehensive account of the botched robbery was sent to a Mr Kirke in Cambridge3 and another to the nonconformist lawyer Robert Aldworth, the town clerk of Bristol.4 Both referred to the outlaw as ‘Old Blood’ and connected him and his son to the earlier assault on Ormond. The account sent to Bristol included a catalogue of his past exploits, beginning with the abortive rebellion in Ireland; his alleged involvement in the northern uprising, through to his rescue of Mason on the road to York. But it emphasised a belief that this latest escapade had nothing to do with politics or religious dissent. ‘Their design’ in attempting the theft was ‘by their own confession . . . only to make their own advantage by the jewels’.
Of course, conspiracy theories about the crime abounded in countless excited conversations in the capital’s coffee houses and taverns. One newsletter confirmed that the would-be robbers were English, although the Venetian ambassador Girolamo Alberti reported in a dispatch to the Doge and Senate of the Serenissima Republica that many Londoners had immediately ‘accused the French of this treacherous act and even baser suspicions circulated . . .’. He added a trifle smugly: ‘I congratulate myself on not having forwarded the various rumours on the subject which was said to be replete with important consequences, since it now seems that the sole object was to obtain a considerable sum of money.’ In the end, ‘I need only to say that among the gang they discovered one of the arch-rebels of Ireland who was concerned with the attack on the Duke of Ormond, mentioned by me on 19 December last.’5
Andrew Marvell, the Presbyterian metaphysical poet who frequently wrote satires attacking Catholics and the scandalous excesses of the royal court, penned these vituperative couplets:
When daring Blood his rent to have regained
Upon the Royal Diadem distrained
He choose the cassock, surcingle6 and gown
The fittest mask for those who rob the Crown
But his lay pity7 underneath prevailed,
And while he sav’d the Keeper’s life, he failed
With the Priest’s vestments had he but put
Bishop’s cruelty, the Crown was gone.8
Despite its sly, scathing dig at the clergy of the Anglican Church, the poem was widely circulated and caused more than a few wry smiles.9
After their capture on Tower Wharf and Gravel Lane, Blood and his son were committed to the custody of Sir John Robinson, the lieutenant of the Tower of London. With a soldier’s appreciation of the importance of reporting up the chain of command, Wythe Edwards immediately conveyed what had happened to his father’s superior, Sir Gilbert Talbot, master of the Jewel House. A shaken and shocked Talbot ‘instantly’ waited on the king at Whitehall and passed on Edwards’ account of the outrageous events at the Martin Tower. Charles instructed Talbot to visit the fortress that evening to question the prisoners.10
He found the two Bloods and Perrot in the White Tower, manacled and under armed guard. Their superficial cuts and bruises, suffered in the fighting during their attempted escape, had already been dressed by a surgeon. Colonel Blood ‘lay in a corner, dogged and lowering and would not give a word of answer to any question’.11
The colonel had adamantly refused to be interrogated by two eager and excited local justices who had arrived to investigate his latest cause célèbre. With remarkable impudence (or was it discretion?) he insisted repeatedly that he should see only Charles II himself to answer the grave charges against him. Perhaps he understood too well that this very long shot was his one chance of avoiding an appointment with the public executioner.
To the amazement of all, the king readily agreed to question him – he reportedly roared with laughter when he heard of the request, so a ‘Merry Monarch’ after all12 – and on 12 May, the two Bloods were escorted across London in chains to the Palace of Whitehall for the royal interrogation.13
Charles’s motives in agreeing to see the colonel and his son remain wholly obscure. Was it just a regal whim, an irresistible curiosity to meet this ‘notorious traitor and incendiary’ who had attracted so much infamy in England and Ireland over the last seven years and now had the effrontery to demand to meet his sovereign?
Although the king was well known for his panache and easy accessibility, this seems improbable. His critics saw Charles II as a wily, astute and sometimes unscrupulous manipulator of public opinion and an inveterate schemer within the turbulent cockpit of domestic politics. Others, still less generous in their opinions, believed him to be a monarch whose inept handling of government business meant that he simply lurched from one crisis to another and only occasionally succeeded in his aims and objectives, more by luck than by any planning or aptitude. Certainly, the king had personally questioned rebels and informers before – and would do so again, as plot after plot against his sacred royal person was diligently uncovered by Arlington and Williamson and their agents.14
But there may have been other, darker forces at work behind this strange meeting between monarch and traitor, held while Charles was busy entertaining some French noblemen who were visiting the royal court.15
As we saw earlier, Blood’s role in the Ormond episode probably obscured the malign interests of leading figures at the royal court who had set their own agenda in their relentless pursuit of power and influence.
The colonel now apparently possessed friends (or, more pertinently, employers) at court. He also knew too many embarrassing secrets that would point a damning finger of guilt at the great and gilded.
The Duke of Buckingham – perhaps in concert with his voluptuous and voracious cousin, the auburn-haired Barbara Palmer, First Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Castlemaine – had compelling motives in supporting Blood’s demands for the royal interview. Both would prefer that any shocking disclosures should be restricted to a private meeting to avoid the risk of revelations at Blood’s trial that could incriminate or embarrass them. Charles would also have been both mortified and sorely damaged by public admissions that his single-minded and politically ruthless mistress – whom the diarist John Evelyn cruelly dubbed ‘the curse of our nation’16 – was intimately involved in the Ormond affair for her own tainted personal ends.17
Furthermore, Arlington, who probably employed Blood as a government agent in the Netherlands in 1666 and in the subsequent attempt to lure the regicide Ludlow to Paris, would also have given much to prevent details of his clandestine espionage operations being described in evidence given under oath. There may also have been a more devious motivation: Williamson had described how Blood’s capture was worth ‘ten times the value [of the] crown’.18 His usefulness to the government, if not the continued safety of the realm, might be greater with him alive rather than dead, as yet another martyr in the nonconformist cause.
Therefore, those close to Charles had a range of powerful reasons, both personal and political, to argue that Blood’s attempts to defend himself should be heard by a very august company behind closed doors. The king’s agreement to meet him probably followed some persuasive lobbying from those around him, both courtiers and ministers.
The Duke of Ormond, an old hand (and victim) in court politics, understood full well what was going on. ‘The man need not despair,’ he confided to his fellow privy counsellor Sir Robert Southwell, ‘for surely, no king would wish to see a malefactor but [only] with [the] intention to pardon him.’19
The interview, in one of the privy apartments of the palace, was also attended by James, Duke of York, Prince Rupert and a number of senior officers of the royal household, doubtless including Arlington and Williamson. The drama and surrealism of the occasion seemingly had no effect on Blood, who appeared not in the least intimidated by being in the company of the reigning House of Stuart. Because of his involvement in a long list of conspiracies to cut short the life of Charles II, he probably remained fettered, standing between several armed King’s Guards.
In reply to the king’s first question, Blood immediately and readily confessed that he was involved in the attack on Ormond six months before. He was then questioned about what had provoked ‘so bold an assault’. Brazenly, he maintained forcibly that the duke ‘had taken away his estate and executed some of his friends and that he and many others had engaged themselves by solemn oath to revenge it’.
Who were his accomplices? Blood steadfastly refused to name them, as he ‘would never betray a friend’s life nor deny guilt in defence of his own’.20
The colonel tried vainly to justify his theft of the Crown Jewels by recounting the ‘wrongs, injuries and losses he had sustained . . . and the disgraces and disappointments he had met with in Ireland’.21 These he sought to remedy by robbing the king, as the representative figurehead of the state that had inflicted such injustices upon him.
The old outlaw was nonplussed to hear of the true monetary value of the coronation regalia. He had initially believed ‘the crown was worth £100,000’, but was horrified to learn that ‘the crown, sceptre and Prince Edward’s staff [had] cost the king but £6,000’. It is a mark of the scale of Blood’s considerable chutzpah that when confronted by imminent public execution for treason, this was probably not the time to feel cheated about the value of your would-be ill-gotten gains. His overactive self-esteem and ego also drove him to lie about his age.
But by admitting his involvement in the Ormond assault and the attempt on the Crown Jewels, Blood recognised that he ‘had sufficiently laid himself open to the law and [that] he might reasonably expect the utter rigour of it for which he was, without much concern of his own, prepared’.22
There were some unexpectedly generous statements made about his character. Prince Rupert testified to Blood’s loyal service for the Royalist cause during the Civil War and acknowledged that ‘he was a very stout, bold fellow’ in his military exploits committed in defence of the king’s unhappy father and his crown. Fortunately for the colonel, there was no mention of his switching sides later in the conflict.23
Then Blood made a dramatic statement. Looking directly at his seated sovereign, he Voluntarily confessed’ his role in another assassination attempt against him – this time by shooting the king ‘with a carbine, from out of the reeds by the Thames side above Battersea where he often went to swim . . . ’. He confessed
that the cause of this resolution, in himself and others, were his majesty’s severity over the consciences of the godly in suppressing the freedom of their religious assemblies.
[But] when he had taken his stand in the reeds for that purpose, his heart was checked with an awe of majesty and he did not only relent but diverted the rest of his associates from the design.24
So the sight of Charles skinny-dipping in the river at Vauxhall caused a dramatic change of heart, as well it might.25 Blood said he suddenly realised that the monarch’s ‘life was better for them than his death, lest a worst succeed him’ and put down his gun.
But was this an admission of another dangerous plot against Charles’s life – or just a figment of Blood’s feverish imagination, timely conjured up with the gift of an Irishman’s gab, to portray himself in a reformed and thus more positive light to his monarch?
If this was something more than a fantasy, the aborted attempt must have been staged either before the Ormond incident in December 1670 or just prior to mid-April 1671, when Blood made his first moves in the plot to steal the Crown Jewels – if only because the bitterly cold temperature of the Thames in winter would deter even the most hardy of kings from swimming in the river.26
What Blood did not bother to mention – and he later acknowledged rather lamely that he had conveniently ‘forgotten’ to confess to it to the king – was his entanglement in another plot to murder Charles, this time in the House of Lords during an attack on Parliament by 300 men. These, he claimed, had already been recruited and were only awaiting his call to arms. ‘It never came into my mind till the k[ing]’s absence’, he ingenuously admitted to Williamson later.
The following September the spymaster noted information supplied to him by Blood and other informers that Captain Roger Jones (our old friend ‘Mene Tekel’ who had escaped justice at York) had drawn the colonel into the conspiracy shortly ‘after Lord Ormond’s business’. The tobacconist John Harrison reported Ralph Alexander’s claims that a ‘great number of battle axes or bills with long staves’ had been stored in a house in Thames Street, near the Tower, ready for the assault on the Lords. The conspirators also planned to kidnap, ‘one night of a sudden’, the irascible George Morley, Bishop of Winchester and Dean of the Chapel Royal, and the privy counsellor, William Craven, First Earl of Craven.27 The motives or purpose behind these choices of target remain obscure.
The planned timing for this coup de main is also uncertain. Charles prorogued Parliament for a year on Saturday, 22 April 1671, and would have been present then in the Lords, ‘seated on his Royal Throne, adorned with his regal crown and robes’.28 There was no evidence whatsoever of an attack or disturbance that day and it seems very plausible that, as a major protagonist, Blood’s preoccupation with the theft of the Crown Jewels forced the postponement of this assassination attempt. Alexander later disclosed that the weapons for the attack were broken and secretly thrown into the Thames after they had heard of Blood’s confession.29
If so, this growing burden of conspiracy on Blood’s time and energies makes it extremely unlikely that he tried to snipe at the king from his uncomfortable waterlogged hiding place among the Thameside reeds near Battersea. Arranging even a simple assassination attempt requires careful planning and detailed intelligence collection about the movements of the intended target. Just how many plots can one man – even the mercurial and feisty Blood – be entangled in at any one time? Yes, it seems highly likely that quick-thinking Thomas Blood made up this story on the spur of the moment to ingratiate himself with the king. Blarney is too weak a word to describe his quixotic canard.
His frank answers to the questions put to him were a curious concoction of bravado, impudence, humility and blatant threats. Blood shamelessly cautioned the king that there were ‘hundreds of his friends yet undiscovered who were all bound to each other by the indispensable oaths of conspirators to revenge the death of any of the fraternity upon those who should bring them to justice’. This inviolable blood oath, he warned bluntly, would ‘expose his majesty and all his ministers to the daily fear and expectation of a massacre’.
On the other hand, ‘if his majesty would spare the lives of a few, he might oblige the hearts of many who, as they have been seen to do daring mischiefs, would be as bold, if received into pardon and favour, to perform eminent services for the crown’. Blood became ever more boastful and ‘pretended’ to be able to wield ‘such an interest and sway amongst the fanatics as though he had been the chosen general and had them all entered on his muster roll’.30
So there was the deal, brazenly placed on the palace table by Blood. Grant me my life, he was proposing, and I will spy for you amongst the dangerous religious dissident community. No wonder he was so keen to be questioned by the king.
Charles had shown considerable ‘coolness and moderation’ throughout his questioning.31 Just to ensure everyone knew what was being offered, the king now asked: ‘What if I should give you your life?’ The colonel replied shortly: ‘I would endeavour to deserve it.’32
There was no doubt that Blood’s candour astonished his assembled listeners. He ‘spoke so boldly that all admired him, telling the king how many of his subjects were disobliged and that he was one that took himself to be in a state of hostility and that he took not the crown as a thief but an enemy, thinking that lawful which was lawful in war’.33
Later, some maintained that Blood had bullied the king and ‘the whole court was frighted and thought it safer to bribe him rather than to hang him’.34 Certainly, Charles treated him ‘with a leniency and moderation not to be paralleled’.35
The well-informed Sir Thomas Henshaw, lawyer, courtier and later diplomat, wrote to his friend Sir Robert Paston, MP and gentleman of the privy chamber, with an account of Blood’s interrogation. He branded the colonel ‘a gallant hardly, [but] a villain as ever herded in that sneaking sect of Anabaptists’, but when he was examined by the king ‘he answered so frankly and undauntedly that everyone stood amazed’. Henshaw reported that ‘men guessed him to [look] about fifty years of age by the grey hairs sprinkled up and down his head and beard’ but thought he was ‘not above forty-five and his son twenty-one’.36
The interrogation in that grand palace apartment must have lasted well over an hour. At its conclusion, Blood was returned to the fetid squalor of his cell in the Tower while Charles conferred with his ministers about his next course of action to curb this doughty fighter against the forces of the crown.
Arlington and Williamson did not rely only on Blood’s testimony in their attempts to fathom out the depths of the conspiracy to steal the regalia. There were several accomplices – Halliwell and Smith – still at large. The usual suspects were rounded up and interrogated.
For example, on 15 May the keeper of the Gatehouse prison in Westminster received a warrant to hold John Buxton ‘for dangerous practices and combinations with Thomas Blood and his son’ and was ordered to keep him a close prisoner.37 This was the same John Buxton, of Bell Alley, Coleman Street, who had been questioned after the Ormond incident because of his friendship with the two Bloods and Halliwell and his involvement in finding a surety for ‘Thomas Hunt’ to buy him freedom from the Marshalsea prison.38 Once again, no telling evidence could be found against him, and Buxton walked free from the Gatehouse within twenty-four hours.39
Amid all the comings and goings to Whitehall in the aftermath of the attempt on the Crown Jewels, there is one mystery document surviving in the State Papers held in the National Archives at Kew. It purports to be a letter from Blood, written from the Tower, to Charles II, dated 19 May 1671, which implicates some of the great and good in the Jewel House robbery:
May it please your majesty: this may tell and inform you that it was Sir Thomas Osborne and Sir Thomas Lyttleton, both your treasurers of your Navy, that set me to steal your crown, but he that feeds me with money was James Lyttleton esquire. ’Tis he that pays under the treasurers at your pay office.
He is a very bold villainous fellow, a very rogue, for I and my companions have had many a £100 of your majesty’s money to encourage us upon this attempt.
I pray no words of this confession [be disclosed] but know your friends.
Not else but I am your majesty’s prisoner and if [my] life [is] spared your dutiful subject whose name is Blood which I hope is not that your majesty seeks after.40
This apparent account of a wider conspiracy operating at the very heart of government was a blatant forgery, even though the last line contains a mischievous pun worthy of Colonel Blood’s tortured humour. The handwriting bears no resemblance whatsoever to his familiar sloped straggly scrawl and it is no surprise that Williamson dismissed it immediately with the contemptuous endorsement: ‘A foolish letter.’
This attempt to incriminate Osborne and Lyttleton must be another squalid episode in the political intrigue and constant jockeying for position that constantly pervaded the royal court. Both men were friends of Buckingham – Osborne was one of the duke’s staunchest allies at this time, but later was to fall out with him. Lyttleton (1647–1709) later became speaker of the House of Commons, but the aspiring Osborne (1632–1712) was probably the main target of this forgery.
He was a combative partisan on behalf of the established Church of England who firmly opposed any kind of official toleration of either Catholics or dissenters. In 1676 Osborne tried to suppress the London coffee houses because of the ‘defamation of his majesty’s government’ that was frequently uttered over the beverage cups. He was a man who made enemies easily. Indeed, after being created First Earl of Danby and serving as chief minister in 1673–9, Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, believed him to be ‘the most hated minister that had ever been about the king’.
The merchant James Lyttleton was a brother of Sir Thomas and cashier to the navy treasurers in 1668–71. Two years later he was employed in the unedifying task of pressing unwilling recruits into service as sailors on board Royal Navy warships.
No one accepted this forged confession as a true bill and Osborne and both the Lyttletons were not even questioned.
The key to Blood’s fate must lie in the factors that drove him to try to steal the Crown Jewels. He was never a career criminal – indeed, he detested his son’s felonious activities as a highwayman – and his previous adventures all had well defined political or religious objectives. His rationale in trying to steal the Crown Jewels puzzled his contemporaries and many of his friends and associates in the radical religious and republican underground. For example, Edmund Ludlow, exiled in faraway Switzerland, could not, for the life of him, perceive ‘what advantage there would have been to the public cause, should they have succeeded in their enterprise’.41
While Blood always insisted that he was driven by purely financial gain, the difficulties of breaking up and converting such high-profile swag into ready money would have worked against his expectations of a healthy profit from the theft. The gold could have been easily melted down but too many people would have expected a generous payment for their risk in handling such recognisable gemstones. Anyway, did he have the necessary contacts within the London underworld to enable him to sell on all those diamonds, sapphires and rubies prised off the crown’s gold mounting? As this was his first taste of the world of base criminality, probably not.
Then there is the purely symbolic motive aimed at damaging the monarchy: stealing the crown might allegorically remove some of the visible power from the king. This may well have appealed to a former parliamentary officer and a consort of the Fifth Monarchists who, after all, saw Charles II as an agent of Satan, but it seems too abstruse for a man of action such as Blood.
Was he trying to redeem himself with his radical Presbyterian community? There were indications that the Ormond episode had badly injured his reputation among his fellow conspirators in London. One informer reported gleefully that ‘those congregations of nonconformists which [Blood and his accomplices] . . . have formerly frequented, abhor [the attack on the duke] and would be glad to bring them to punishment if it were in their power’.42 If that adverse reaction had troubled Blood, the Crown Jewels escapade failed to restore his good name as a fervent radical. The postponed attack on the House of Lords, caused by the jewel robbery, would not have endeared him to them either. William Dale, one of Williamson’s informers, reported in early August that a ‘dangerous and disaffected person and a man of great design’ called William Thompson, an alias of the former Parliamentarian Captain Povey, had journeyed from London to Loughton in Essex ‘muffled up and [said] that Blood should be stabbed and the rest – for they were false’.43
Was Blood paid to undertake the robbery? Was the theft of the regalia part of one of Buckingham’s strange machinations? A precursor perhaps to the assassination of Charles II and the proclamation of a usurper whose standing would have been enhanced by his possession of the royal regalia? This particular conspiracy theory was reinforced at the time by the news of a burglary in Great Ormond Street, London, the Tuesday after the attempted robbery of the Jewel House. This was the home of the lord high chancellor, Sir Orlando Bridgeman. All his valuables were ignored by the thieves and only the Great Seal of England was stolen. Its loss was highly significant: an impression of it was routinely affixed to important state documents and its disappearance meant that much of the machinery of government would cease to function. A new one had to be made hastily.44
For centuries, there has been persistent speculation that Charles II himself was complicit in the crime.45 Some believed that Blood’s paymaster was the king – hence the colonel’s unusual, princely treatment. One version was that Charles, perennially short of money, conceived a desperate plan to steal his own Crown Jewels and to sell them overseas to raise the required hard cash. He cast around for a suitable criminal to perform the commission and Blood’s derring-do credentials fitted the royal requirements precisely. Buckingham, with his track record of employing Blood, was asked to secretly arrange the crime.
Buckingham probably did undertake disreputable missions at Charles’s behest, providing a valuable cut-out to avoid direct connection with the throne in case anything went disastrously wrong. However, there is no direct evidence to support this notion, attractive as it may appear to those romanticists amongst us, and it sadly must stay firmly in the realm of conjecture.
Another, still less plausible, theory had the king swearing, having partaken too freely at the banqueting table, that after all his painful years of exile in Europe, no one would now deprive him of the crown of England. In a moment of boisterous madness, he unwisely backed this pledge with a recklessly generous wager that none could ever make away with it. Blood heard of this bet and took the king literally at his word – intending to eventually return the regalia and claim his royal winnings with true brio. As conspiracy theories go, this fits the bill precisely: ingenuity coupled with just a smidgeon of lunacy.
On 6 June Sir John Robinson reported an unexpected visit to the Tower by Sir William Morton, a judge of the King’s Bench, who was not only renowned for his loyalty to the monarchy but who revelled in a fearsome and well-deserved reputation for exacting harsh, exemplary justice on any wrongdoers who came up before him in court. (It was Morton who condemned to death the daredevil French ‘gallant highwayman’, Claude Duval, in the teeth of popular protest in January 1670.) After having played a prominent and dogged role in investigating the attack on Ormond the previous year, he was now, terrier-like, demanding to interrogate Blood.
On this occasion, Morton was thwarted again. One can imagine his frustration at being turned away by what he saw as sheer bureaucracy. Robinson told Williamson that, not having received an order allowing the judge’s visit, he had to deny him permission to see his notorious prisoner. The lieutenant added, with just a hint of understatement: ‘Blood, seeing him out of the window, was startled a bit.’46
There was great excitement over what would be made public during the trial of the colonel, his former highwayman son and Perrot. On 12 June, the Venetian ambassador wondered what revelations the colonel had produced in the course of his interrogation: ‘The secrets revealed by Blood, the robber of the Crown Jewels, are hidden among the acts of his examination.’ Here was a ‘faithful and good servant of the late king [Charles I]’ who had become a ‘professed rebel . . . Universal curiosity is excited by his [forthcoming] trial’.47
At the end of the month, Blood and his son submitted humble petitions to Arlington to allow their wife and mother to visit them – the men complaining that ‘close confinement’ in the Tower was impairing their health. Ever loyal, Mary Blood, apparently recovered from her illness and returned from Lancashire, concurrently sought permission to see her husband and son ‘who have been now near eight weeks so closely imprisoned . . . that I can neither hear of their health nor receive any directions from them’.48
Behind the scenes, Arlington was working assiduously to win a free pardon for Blood. This was an ancient and merciful prerogative inherent in the English monarchy. A pardon presupposes guilt or the conviction of a miscreant for a crime committed and discharges the recipient from all penalties. The process is said to make him a novus homo or ‘new man’ in the eyes of society and the law.49 Arlington’s objective was, to use the modern espionage jargon, to ‘turn’ Blood; to employ him as a government double agent and a major player in his campaign to defeat the ever-present menace posed by Presbyterian and other nonconformist dissidents. After the conversation with Charles II, the minister knew he was pushing at an open door as far as the outlaw was concerned.
With a third Anglo-Dutch war looming on the horizon, Arlington had to swiftly neutralise any domestic threats to the stability of the realm. The last thing he wanted was an informal alliance between the religious dissenters at home and the enemy in the Netherlands. A Dutch attack, synchronised with an insurrection by republican nonconformists, was an alarming prospect that would stretch government resources and divert attention away from a successful prosecution of the war at sea and abroad. Arlington must have already been working on drafts of a regulatory measure to provide greater religious liberty to nonconformists and Catholics as a timely sop to dissident opinion.50
Meanwhile, he required reliable intelligence on the intentions, plans and movements of the major players in the dangerous sectarian groups. Blood, characterised by Ludlow as ‘having been acquainted with most of the secret passages [activities] that have of late been transacted in order to [revive] the Lords’ witnesses’,51 was the ideal informer within this shadowy world, having worked for the secret service before on an ad hoc basis.52
Arlington’s plan for Blood’s employment was endorsed by his fellow secretary of state Joseph Williamson, who had rated his value as a spy to be ‘ten times the value [of the] crown’. Although the colonel was never to win the complete trust of the two spymasters, Williamson patently believed that he and Arlington, as Blood’s new masters, now possessed an agent of extraordinary power and ability.
Not content with his life being spared, the colonel tried to haggle over the terms and conditions of his pardon. Denzil Holles, First Baron Holles – that ‘stiff and sullen man’, according to the king – and Anthony Cooper, Lord Ashley, a supporter of official moderation towards Protestant dissenters, negotiated with the renegade immediately after his release about the agreement to spy for the government. At one point Blood apparently sought an appointment as governor of one of the North American colonies in exchange for his services, but these aspirations went unrequited. Instead, Williamson noted simply that the king ‘would provide for him’.53
Charles placed one inviolable condition on his agreeing to Blood’s pardon. The colonel must apologise humbly to the Duke of Ormond for his attack.
Apologies cost nothing and Blood happily wrote the required letter to Ormond in apparent abject atonement for his assault. The lyrical terms he employed may indicate that he included some suggested phrases – possibly offered by Arlington or Williamson – although its contents, a rambling single sentence covering sixteen lines with almost no punctuation, required some skilful editing (if not careful reading).
His one-page note says:
The greatness of my crimes so far exceeds expression that were not my burdened soul encouraged by finding vent to its grief, though by such an acknowledgement as bears little proportion to my guilt, I had forborn this further trouble to Your Grace, but overcharged with increasing sorrow by the consideration of your renowned excellency which, I unworthy monster was so regardless of, has produced this eruption of the humble acknowledgement of my most heinous crime the which as I have a deep impression of heart compunction, so should I count it my happiness to have an opportunity in the most demonstrative way to manifest it Your Grace, who am unworthy to be accounted, though, in reality, I am
Your Grace’s most humble Servant Thomas Blood54
Arlington went to visit the duke on behalf of Charles II and asked him to forgive Blood, probably bringing this letter with him. He told Ormond that the king ‘was willing to save [Blood] from execution for certain reasons which he was commanded to give him’.55 As befits a faithful old courtier, Ormond was magnanimous in his response. The duke replied that if ‘the king could forgive an attempt on his crown, I myself may easily forgive an attempt on my life and since it is his majesty’s pleasure, that is reason sufficient for me and your lordship may well spare the rest of the explanations’.56
The condition thus fulfilled, Arlington dined with Sir John Robinson at the Tower of London on 14 July. In his pocket was a signed warrant for the release of Blood and Perrot. Thomas Blood junior was to remain a prisoner in the Tower for a little while longer, probably as a hostage to guarantee his father’s immediate good behaviour and to test his commitment to his new career as a government spy.57 The warrant for his release was finally signed on 30 August, and his free pardon, with that of Perrot, the following day.58
Blood was free.
On 1 August 1671, Blood was graciously granted his pardon. The six-line record in Arlington’s papers read: ‘Pardon to Thomas Blood the father of all treasons, misprisons59 of treason, murders, homicides, felonies, assaults, batteries60 and other offences whatsoever at any time since 25 May 1660,61 committed by himself alone or together with any other person or persons . . . ’.62
Crime sometimes does pay.
Furthermore, Blood was granted a pension of £500 a year from lands in Straffan, Co. Kildare63 and the return of his Irish and English properties from attainder in return for his informing the government of dissident conspiracies; improving relations between the crown and nonconformists and endeavouring to ‘reduce or disperse’ the ‘absconded persons’ within that community.64
Blood emerged joyfully from out of the shadows. Shortly after his release from the Tower, Thomas Henshaw saw him walking in the courtyard of Whitehall Palace resplendent ‘in a new suit and periwig . . . exceedingly pleasant and jocose. He has been at liberty this fortnight. He is nothing like the idea I had made to myself of him for he is a tall, rough-boned man, with small legs, a pock-freckled face65 with little hollow blue eyes.’66
The diarist John Evelyn was horrified to find the colonel attending a dinner at the home of Sir Thomas Clifford, the comptroller of the royal household,67 with ‘several French noblemen’. As far as Evelyn was concerned, here was the fellow dinner guest from hell. He was mortified to see him free and so blatantly enjoying the delights of polite London society. Afterwards, he wrote:
Blood, that impudent bold fellow who not long before attempted to steal the imperial crown itself out of the Tower, pretending only curiosity of seeing the regalia there, when stabbing the keeper, though not mortally, he boldly went away with it through all the guards, taken only by the accident of his horse falling down.
How he came to be pardoned, and even received into favour, not only after this, but several other exploits almost as daring both in Ireland and here, I could never come to understand.
Some believed he became a spy of several parties, being well with the sectaries and enthusiasts, and did His Majesty services that way, which none alive could do as well as he; but it was certainly the boldest attempt, so the only treason of this sort that was ever pardoned.
This man had not only a daring but villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken and dangerously insinuating.68
Worse yet, Blood had adopted the habit of ‘perpetually’ attending the court and was frequently seen happily promenading in the royal apartments of the Palace of Whitehall. With his usual arrogance and audacity, he ‘affected particularly to be in the same room where the duke of Ormond was, to the indignation of all others, though neglected and overlooked by his grace’.69 Such snubs had no effect on a man of such ego and self-confidence.
There is little doubt that Blood’s release – and reward – astonished many. In Paris, William Perwich, secretary of the British embassy there, wrote to Williamson on 5 September, reporting that there were two major topics of conversation in diplomatic circles there. The first was the sorry saga of Captain Thomas Crowe, commander of the eight-gun yacht Merlin, who failed in his duty in not firing upon a Dutch man-of-war which discourteously ‘refused to strike to the king’s flag’. This had ‘made a great noise here – but nothing so much as talk [about] Blood being forgiven’.70
In London, Sir Roger Burgoyne, up from his Bedfordshire estates and staying with his friend Sir Nathaniel Hobart in Chancery Lane, could not believe that Blood had received a pardon after ‘all his villainy’ and warned darkly that ‘some designs, more than ordinary are on foot’.71
That enfant terrible among courtiers, the often drunken satirist poet John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, may have been the author of twenty-eight stanzas attacking Charles II over a broad spectrum of complaint about his policies and personal behaviour, later described by Arlington as ‘this seditious and traitorous libel’.72 It included this acerbic passage:
Blood that wears treason in his face
Villain complete in parson’s gown
How much he is at court in grace
For stealing Ormond and the crown!
Since loyalty does no man good,
Let’s steal the king and outdo Blood!
There was little hope that Blood’s reincarnation as a government spy could be kept secret; indeed, his showy behaviour after his release stripped away his greatest protection as an agent – anonymity and the ability to merge into his surroundings.
But this was intentional. His public rehabilitation was a conscious decision by Arlington to demonstrate the power of royal mercy to Blood’s friends still on the run and to indicate that, if only they dropped their opposition to the crown, they too could expect lenient treatment and the enjoyment of normal life in open society.
That normality meant the acquisition of a home for Blood’s reunited family. Now restored to funds, he acquired a house on the corner of Great Peter Street and Tufton Street in Westminster, overlooking Bowling Alley, and moved there soon after his release from the Tower.73 This was a prosperous area of new development and the colonel enjoyed the pleasure of having a number of high-status personages from Parliament and the court as his near neighbours. He may also have bought a property in the country: an unsubstantiated tradition suggests that he lived in the manor house at Minley, a hamlet in the parish of Yateley in Hampshire.74
On 26 September 1671, warrants were made out for payments of royal bounty to those who had saved the Crown Jewels. After all his tribulations, the handsome sum of £200 was awarded to the faithful Talbot Edwards and further sums of £100 were each paid to Captain Martin Beckman and Wythe Edwards ‘for resisting the late villainous attempt made to steal the crown’.75
Inevitably, with the parlous state of Charles’s Exchequer, Talbot Edwards did not receive a penny. He was forced to sell on the warrants for ridiculously small amounts of cash to pay his medical expenses in treating the injuries he had sustained at the hands of Blood and his accomplices.
On 30 September 1674 he died, probably from the effects of his wounds.