Blood sees privately and cunningly [James] Innes and his friends but of that not a word, not to the king
Notes made by Sir Joseph Williamson, 9 November 16711
Thomas Blood’s first task in his new guise on the government payroll was to operate as a spy or intermediary to support his masters’ attempts to weaken the radical nonconformist underground and neutralise their threat to the Stuart crown. Arlington outlined part of his mission in evidence to the Committee of Foreign Affairs on 22 October 1671 by relating that ‘upon the pardoning of Blood he went away among his brethren to bring in some of his friends on assurance of pardon’.2
With the prospect of war with the Dutch looming ever nearer on the horizon, accompanied by the unacceptable risk of concurrent sedition and insurrection being fomented amongst religious dissidents, it was imperative not only to deactivate the known renegades but also to quieten nonconformist resentment and anger at the congregations’ treatment at the hand of government. Here Blood could make his mark by spying on his former friends and also by facilitating behind-the-scenes dialogue between government and dissenters.
While he still met Sir Joseph Williamson, Blood’s main contact with his new paymasters, initially at least, was his old jailer, Sir John Robinson at the Tower of London. At the end of December, Sir John, profitably engaged in catching Quakers – those ‘besotted people, fools and knaves’ – reported that ‘Mr Blood sometimes visits me and tells me he has been faithful in keeping his promises’.3
During the mid-166os there was growing popular opposition to nonconformists being hauled up before the courts for flaunting the Act of Uniformity’s insistence that none other than Church of England rites should be employed in worship. At Hereford, a grand jury presented only 150 of these ‘Neros kneaded up of blood and dirt’ who refused to conform4 and similar refusals to indict continued throughout England, as at Norwich, Newcastle and Yarmouth. This general unwillingness to prosecute mirrored the king’s own unease over the prosecutions: Sir Thomas Bridges of Bristol was summoned to appear before the Privy Council and told plainly that rigorous proceedings against nonconformists were not agreeable to his majesty.5
In the face of the continual threats posed by conspiracies and egged on by senior Anglican clergy, Charles II’s government had been forced to take a firmer grip on illegal nonconformist activity. The Act to Prevent and Suppress Seditious Conventicles (or assemblies) of 16706 imposed stiff fines on those who attended religious services other than those of the Church of England. A fine of five shillings (25 pence) was imposed on a first offender and ten shillings (50 pence) for a subsequent breach of the law. In addition, a preacher or any other person who allowed his premises to be used for such illegal purposes risked a fine of twenty shillings (£1), or £140 in today’s purchasing power, which doubled up for a second offence.
Other punishments were harsher. Two Norfolk men were arrested at an illegal conventicle at Beeston for the third time and sentenced to be transported for ten years’ hard labour on one of the Caribbean islands. They were sent to the Dorset port of Lyme Regis but, no ship being available to take them overseas, they were thrown into prison and had remained there ever since. Jonathan Jennings of London also had been incarcerated for three years but eventually offered hard cash as a surety to guarantee his future behaviour as a loyal subject. An endorsement to the record of these men’s miseries reads: ‘Three conventiclers to be discharged; Mr Blood’ – so the old reprobate, in his new role, was trying to right some natural injustices.7
By this intervention, Blood may have been trying to redeem his standing in the nonconformist community which, after the attack on Ormond, the attempted theft of the Crown Jewels, and his very public rehabilitation with Charles II, remained at a low ebb. The Presbyterian Arthur Annesley, First Earl of Anglesey, was still going around London ‘blasting’ Blood amongst the nonconformists.8 The colonel was also unsettled by an unexpected visit to his home by a sinister stranger whom he suspected was sent ‘by some ill-wisher to ensnare him’. He desired to know how the king wanted him to handle ‘such cases’.9
Blood’s activities on behalf of the government can sometimes be discerned through a series of frustratingly cryptic notes written in barely decipherable handwriting by the always frantically busy Williamson, as a kind of journal and aide-memoire for the everyday proceedings of his department. Early on, Blood was busy promoting the government’s policy in the City of London ‘in relation to our affairs [with] Holland and France’ but was also asked to examine letters from exiled radicals in the Low Countries as ‘Blood knows the key [cipher] and the [handwriting]’.10
He soon fell in with an Anglican clergyman named Dr Nicholas Butler, who at the time was commonly despised for his ‘placeseeking and hanging [about] in the [royal] court through Prince Rupert and others’.11 His other main associate was a Mr Church, the clerk at the Fleet prison, off what is now Farringdon Road, on the eastern bank of the River Fleet,12 who was keen for his assistance in obtaining intelligence from Irish sources.
The colonel also began meeting James Innes, a Scottish nonconformist and former rector of the parish of St Breock, near Wadebridge in Cornwall, who was seeking to negotiate with the king to allow his brothers and sisters in the church greater religious freedom. The nonconformists had been divided in their response to the Conventicles Act. Many of their elders believed they had no choice but to obey this draconian law, as their pockets were not deep enough to defy it on a regular basis. This group of clergy, who elected to avoid holding illegal assemblies, became known in popular parlance as ‘Dons’. Other brethren, often younger and more militant, chose to continue with their religious conventicles, literally at all costs. These were nicknamed, rather bizarrely, ‘the Ducklings’, and Innes became their main spokesman.
In early November 1671, he pleaded with Blood to humbly request the king to allow greater religious liberty. Blood refused. Innes then met Charles and begged him to permit the larger groups to openly hold their services in their meeting houses. While the king expressed sympathy with Innes’ cause and showed ‘all tenderness’, he could not promise anything to help or comfort them in the short term. But he told him ‘that they must order their meetings discreetly, that you may strengthen my hands and not weaken them’.13 If the royal eye did not see, plainly the sheriff’s officers would not be calling. But this was not enough. Basic religious freedom still went unacknowledged or, more importantly, enshrined in law.
Williamson was made aware of Blood’s frequent covert meetings with Innes through the Post Office’s interception of the letters between them. His notes of 9 November confirm this: ‘They may not smell out we have correspondence with Innes by Blood.’ He was shocked by his agent’s duplicity: ‘Nota bene [mark well]. Blood sees privately and cunningly Innes and his friends but of that not a word, not to the king.’14
By 11 November, the secretary of state was worried by the growing prospect of a widespread uprising by the nonconformists. His jotted notes mused that the real key to suppressing the crisis was the role of the gentry: ‘Gratify the gentry, for no great disturbance can be, unless they be [at the head]. The people stir not without the gentry. They are dissatisfied (1) as mostly all men are, not to be as high as others at court and (2) especially for being unrewarded for their sufferings.’ After these sociological ramblings, he turned his attention to the increasingly problematical Blood, who ‘disgusts his two friends [Butler and Church] by disappointing them. They think him too high and [he] values himself too much’.15
Then sometime between 16 November and 4 December, Blood suddenly switched his allegiance from Arlington and Williamson to the unscrupulous and licentious secretary of state for Scotland, John Maitland, Second Earl of Lauderdale. It was a strange decision to desert his paymasters, but was probably caused by Blood’s realisation of the strength of Lauderdale’s influence with Charles, as he was said to be ‘never far from the king’s ear or council’ despite his responsibilities for the northern kingdom. It was also symptomatic of Blood’s increasing tendency to meddle in the perilous world of court politics.
Williamson recognised the shift in his agent’s loyalties very quickly. Blood, he noted, ‘is going in to Lord Lauderdale, cries him up everywhere’. Faced with continuing evidence of Blood’s scheming, the spymaster’s patience was beginning to run very thin. His scribbled memorandum noted that the colonel ‘has left himself notably to fantasies’. It was known that he had received money from secret service funds to pay off his debts, ‘but [he] pays none but [only] huffs to them’, the secretary of state added acidly. Blood was boasting that
I dine once or twice a week with the archbishop of Canterbury and he did not know what should be done.
He also believed it was easy to go over Williamson’s head and deal direct with Arlington. Contemptuously, the spymaster added: ‘His head is turned with wine and treats and the fanatics that keep company with him take advantage of him.’16 So much for Blood shunning strong drink and ‘recreations, or pomps . . . quibbling or joking’ and the other joys of good company.17
Williamson now harboured grave doubts about Blood’s effectiveness and his value as an informer or intermediary with the dissident underground. He noted: ‘Any that are known to join with him are lost to the fanatics.’ He pondered whether it would be wise to end all dealings with the former outlaw: ‘To break with Blood – for if he be thus mutable [fickle] as to Lord Arlington, then whether he be lost with the fanatics or no, it is not safe. To what purpose . . . to meet longer with him?’ Then he added the damning four words: ‘Not to be trusted.’ Williamson concluded: ‘That we may break off meeting with Blood for they [the nonconformists] will not absolutely trust him any longer.’18
This memorandum seemed to have an awful note of finality.
Three days later, Williamson recorded in his notes a meeting between Blood, Butler and Church at the clergyman’s lodgings. Blood had ‘magnified Lauderdale, saying that they understood one another and he was the great man . . . He clapped his hand on his heart and said “[He] had not only the king but Lord Lauderdale here!’” Williamson noted: ‘By all means break off with Blood. He leaps over all heads and his company may ruin them [Butler and Church] to the fanatics.’19
Two Scots informers then came forward to offer information about the nonconformist threat in Scotland to the privy counsellor Sir Robert Moray, a one-time spy for Cardinal Richelieu in France, a prominent Freemason and one of the founders of the Royal Society. His vocal calls for moderacy towards dissenters explains their otherwise strange choice for a point of contact within the government. He passed them on to Sir John Baber, a physician in ordinary to the king, a man well known for his absolute discretion, who was frequently used by Charles as a secret conduit for messages from the throne to the dissenters.20 (Pepys believed him so cautious that he would ‘not speak in company unless acquainted with every stranger present’ in a room.)21 The Scots were directed to Arlington, who passed them back to Baber for further questioning. With all these pillar-to-post meetings, the informers must, by now, have wondered whether their journey south was really necessary.
They told the physician that Lauderdale had lost the trust of the Scottish nonconformists and his only status in Scotland ‘was by the king’s favour’ – his job title as secretary of state. He had ‘disgusted all the nobility’ and ‘generally all the body of the people’. There was a ‘great fermentation’ in the kingdom which would ‘if not prevented break out’.22
Blood became convinced that Baber was trying to discredit him with Arlington and he probably incited Lauderdale’s bile against the despondent Scottish informants.23 He still faced opprobrium among the dissenter community; one member warned, ‘Have a care of Blood, he is a rogue’, Williamson noted.24
The colonel needed to rebuild his fences with his paymasters and demonstrate his continuing usefulness. Williamson had earlier acknowledged that he ‘had great converse of old officers’, and Blood had enjoyed some success in convincing those former parliamentary army men who had a history of conspiracy and rebellion to come in from the cold, using his own treatment at the hands of the king as an example of the royal clemency that could be expected.
Now he wrote to Arlington, reminding him of his efforts to convince the nonconformist radicals exiled in the Netherlands to return home under promise of pardon to prevent them being utilised as fifth columnists by the Dutch in the event of war. One of them was Jonathan Jennings, who had been committed to Aylesbury prison in 1666 but had escaped overseas. Blood pointed out that Jennings ‘having met with a stop at present in having his pardon perfected and proving a hearty friend to the king’s service, I ask that some intimation be given to the jailer of the King’s Bench that he has a warrant for his pardon and is suing it out, that he may not bear hard on him’.25 He added: ‘I had some other things to intimate by word of mouth to your lordship, but reserve them till I have an opportunity’ of meeting.26
Blood’s first triumph in this specific task was in September 1671 and involved Major John Gladman, said by Williamson to be ‘hearty to Blood’s way’.27 Gladman agreed to seek a private audience with Charles to swear the oath of allegiance in return for a royal pardon. Captain John Lockyer (one of Blood’s accomplices in the rescue of the ‘general Baptist’ Captain John Mason in 1667) also accepted a pardon through his intervention, although ‘Mene Tekel’, alias Captain Roger Jones, stoudy refused to wait on the king for his act of clemency.28 In November 1672 Blood reported to Arlington on the audience of another radical, Major William Low, with the king:
according to your direction I brought the gentleman to the king . . . [who] was satisfied in him and bade me take care about his pardon in order to which I request your order for a warrant.
Hardly anyone that has been pardoned will turn to a better account, for he is a man of parts and esteem in that [militant] party in Ireland and is so passionately taken with the king’s condescending grace that I am persuaded nothing shall stir there to his majesty’s prejudice that he can hinder.
With an eye to the recruitment of a potential new agent in Dublin, Blood added: ‘He shall wait on you, if you think it necessary.’29
He was less successful with Mason himself, now a keeper of a London coffee house and still an inveterate plotter, or with the Fifth Monarchist William Smith, who had guarded Blood’s horses during the raid on the Crown Jewels. Both stuck to their radical guns and would have nothing to do with the government amnesty.
In April 1675, Blood petitioned Williamson on behalf of Captain Humphrey Spurway, of Tiverton, Devon, who was involved in the conspiracy led by Thomas Tonge (another parliamentary officer who, after the Restoration, was forced into the twin evils of selling tobacco and distilling spirits).
Spurway had planned to kill Charles while he was on his way to visit his mother at Greenwich and to seize the Dukes of York, Albermarle and Sir Richard Browne, now lord mayor of London. The conspiracy came to nothing and he fled out of the country. Financed by a small group of London merchants, he had travelled on to an overseas plantation. Now Blood wanted to win him a pardon. He was one of those ‘absconded persons I took charge of to reduce or disperse who chose to remove to a remote plantation being persuaded that he might be incapable of endeavouring to promote sedition or disturbances to the government’.
His crimes were the same [as] the common drove of those his majesty pardoned at my coming out of the Tower and no other.
His is employed by [James] Nelthorpe30 and other merchants in a remote plantation where he resolves to settle and never to return but become a loyal subject, if he may be delivered from his fears by a pardon.
I suppose his merchants will engage [vouch] for him, if there be any occasion.31
Spurway’s pardon was granted two days later.32
With some of these dangerous radicals now neutralised, Charles II tried implementing a new, diametrically opposed, policy to quell the disquiet and dissatisfaction among the sombre godly ranks of his nonconformist subjects. Where coercion and oppression had failed, decriminalisation might work more effectively Deploying his royal prerogative, the king signed the Declaration of Indulgence at the Palace of Whitehall on 15 March 1672, suspending the penal laws banning unlawful religious meeting:
Our care and endeavours for the preservation of the rights and interests of the [Anglican] Church have been sufficiently manifested . . . by the whole course of our government since our happy restoration, and by the many and frequent ways of coercion that we have used for reducing all erring or dissenting persons . . .
But it being evident by the sad experience of twelve years that there is very little fruit of all those forcible courses, we think ourself obliged to make use of that supreme power in ecclesiastical matters . . .
And that there may be no pretence for any of our subjects to continue their illegal meetings and conventicles, we do declare that we shall from time to time allow a sufficient number of places, as they shall be desired, in all parts of this our kingdom, for the use of such as do not conform to the Church of England, to meet and assemble in order to their public worship and devotion, which places shall be open and free to all persons.
But to prevent such disorders and inconvenience as may happen by this our indulgence, if not duly regulated, and that they may be the better protected by the civil magistrate, our express will and pleasure is that none of our subjects do presume to meet in any place until such place be allowed, and the teacher of that congregation be approved by us.
The timing was tight: twelve days later, England, in alliance with Louis XIV of France, declared war on the Dutch United Provinces. Arlington sent a copy of the king’s new religious policy to Sir Bernard Gascoign, the English ambassador in Vienna: ‘I add also a late Declaration his Majesty has made in favour of the nonconformists, that we might keep all quiet at home whilst we are busiest abroad.’33 Unwilling to face the likely wrath of Parliament, Charles prorogued the session set for 1 April to October and then to February 1673.34
The longed-for official toleration of nonconformist worship had at last arrived. The framework of a means to operate this new policy seems to have originated with the assertive Dr Butler, who forwarded a scheme to Williamson that envisaged a system of distributing government licences for private and public devotions. Allowing their worship to emerge from the dark shadows of secrecy and illegality would make the nonconformists respond to this ‘little kindly treatment’ by becoming more loyal to the Stuart crown. ‘A little love’, he told the secretary of state, ‘obliges more than great severity’ and by this means ‘all will have a dependency on his majesty’ Butler was fully confident that the threat of religious extremists would be neutralised: ‘I think it would be beyond the power of the devil or bad men to give [the king] any disturbance in his kingdoms.’35
There were three kinds of licences that congregations had to apply for. One permitted the use of a building as a meeting house, the second covered preachers at such assemblies and the third those itinerant ministers who travelled from town to town devoutly spreading the Word of God.
While some nonconformist ministers were wary about the impact of the Declaration, most of their flocks were jubilant at their new-found freedom to worship. One humble and loyal address to the king declared: ‘We cannot but look on your majesty as the breath of our nostrils, as a repairer of our breaches and a restorer of paths to dwell in.’ Another professed that by this ‘unparalleled act of grace, you have made our hearts to leap and our souls to sing for joy of heart and have laid such a sense of your royal condescension and indulgence upon us if we cannot but now always, and in all places, acknowledge and celebrate the most worthy deeds done to us your poor subjects and as men raised out of the grave from every corner of the land, stand and call your majesty blessed.’36 One of those soon to receive a licence to preach was Jonathan Jennings, having returned to England under pardon.37
Another man to bless the name of the king was Thomas Blood.
He had more venal reasons to praise, laud and magnify the name of Charles Rex. The implementation of the Declaration of Indulgence, if properly arranged, might be a source of profit for someone who understood and could manipulate the intricate workings of government. With numerous contacts within the nonconformist communities, he could represent himself as a kind of broker or agent on behalf of individuals and congregations seeking licences to legitimise their regular church services. If Blood had any compunction about taking money from those pursuing the basic right of religious freedom, he did little to show it.
Within weeks, scores of applications for licences for worship were received in Whitehall from across England. Many were forwarded on by Blood, such as on 18 April:
Request by Mr Blood on behalf of the Anabaptists at Cranbrook, Kent, for licences for the houses of Thomas Beaty and Alexander Vines and for Richard Gun as their minister and also on behalf of the Anabaptist meeting in Coleman Street [London] for John Martin’s house in White’s Alley.38
There was another block application a few days later:
Request by Thomas Blood for licences for Mr Kitly, Essex, person and house; for the house of Mr Willis in Essex, his person being licensed [already]; for the houses of George Locksmith and William Mascall, both at Romford Essex; for Mr Gilson, Brentwood, Essex . . . for John Mascall’s house in Monis [sic] Essex, for Henry Lever of Newcastle; for Thomas Crampton of Toxteth Park . . . for a meeting house at Kingsland, Middlesex; for Richard Gilpin and Mr Pingell of Newcastle, all Presbyterians and for Mr Durant of Newcastle, and for James Simonds, at a house at Lamberhurst, Kent, both Congregational.39
Blood must have become acquainted with William Mascall, a surgeon of Romford, when he briefly (and fraudulently) practised medicine there in 1667. On 14 May he wrote to Mascall, enclosing the desired licences. As barefaced as ever, the colonel told him: ‘There is no charge for them, only it is agreed that five shillings for the personal licences be gotten.’ The machinery of government should be well oiled to make its wheels turn faster: ‘The doorkeepers and under-clerks should afterwards be remembered by a token of love’, Blood insisted. Doubtless those bribes would be rendered via the old renegade himself and one must wonder whether the money ever reached the officials. Confidently, he added: ‘If you need any other places to be licensed, you can have them.’40
Although the licences were initially free, the flood of applications severely tested the capacity of the Whitehall bureaucracy to handle the volume of paperwork. Dr Butler, who had originally insisted that the permits should be ‘large and free’, later changed his mind and advised Williamson that he was a fool to give himself trouble for no return.41 Thereafter, a small fee was charged for licences for preachers, but none at all for places of worship.
After this new arrangement was imposed, Thomas Gilson of Weald, Essex, complained bitterly that Blood had only sent down ‘licences for our houses which signify nothing without a parson . . . We should have taken it better if he had sent the personal licences and left it to our courtesy what we would gratify the clerks and doorkeepers with, rather than have a sum imposed contrary to the king’s express command that nothing should be required.’ Petulantly, Gilson added: ‘Therefore, we advise him to send down presently the personal licences for us, lest we make our address some other way.’42
Blood showed himself to be a trifle more altruistic ten days later when he wrote to Arlington urging the release of eighteen named prisoners held for ‘excommunication, nonconformity or præmunire,43 being Presbyterians, independents or Anabaptists’. Noting that a general pardon was to be offered to Quakers who were ‘imprisoned for conscience sake’, Blood sought the release, by special warrant, for those ‘of other persuasions [who] are like to remain in prison who are not Quakers . . . if imprisoned for no other crime’.44
The Declaration of Indulgence was implemented in the teeth of loud opposition from many in the Church of England. In September 1672, William Fuller, Bishop of Lincoln, complained to Williamson that ‘all these licensed preachers grow insolent and increase strangely. The orthodox poor clergy are out of heart. Shall nothing be done against the Presbyterians, who grow and multiply faster than the other?’45
The University of Oxford was also aghast that licences were granted to Presbyterians and Anabaptists in the city. The preacher for the former was Dr Henry Langley, an erstwhile master of Pembroke College,46 who delivered his first sermon in June and
held forth for two hours (possibly he was to eat roast meat after and so needed not to spare his breath to cool pottage) upon the [Holy] Spirit on which subject they say he preached in the late times near two years and they say he was all the while so unintelligible that from that time to this nobody could tell whence the sound came [from] or whither [it was] going.
The University’s scholars were invariably rude to these ‘parlour preachers’, but feelings began to run higher and its vice-chancellor, Peter Mews, had to appear in person that month to protect one preacher from the violence of the undergraduates – acknowledging that there were those ‘who would have hanged him had he fallen into their hands’.47
Opposition and growing discontent were also endemic in Parliament, where many interpreted the suspension of penal laws covering religion as a symptom of the king’s covert preferences not only for Catholicism but also for absolutist rule over his people. With an eye on the succession to the throne, many MPs were also fixated by the notion that, by slow degrees, the way was being paved for the Catholic faith to be officially approved in England. Inexorably, the delicate flower of religious tolerance withered and died in the political hothouse of Westminster. Parliament forced Charles to withdraw the Declaration in March 1673 and replaced it with the first of the so-called ‘Test Acts’,48 which required anyone entering public office, civil or military, to deny the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation,49 take Anglican communion within three months of appointment and swear the twin oaths of Church Supremacy and Allegiance to the king. In an angry response, James, Duke of York, the king’s brother and heir presumptive, openly acknowledged his Catholic faith that year and resigned all his public appointments.
At least some liberty remained for nonconformists to practise their religious beliefs. A list of conventicles in London in 1676 included details of a regular meeting of Presbyterians in the ‘great almry’ (the former house of the monastic almoner)50 located behind Westminster Abbey. The congregation regularly included ‘Mr Blood and his two sons’, probably Charles and William.51 Two years later they heard ‘Mr Cotton’ preach on a text taken from Psalms 144, verse 2: ‘My goodness and my fortress, my high tower and my deliverer; my shield and He in whom I trust who subdues my people under me.’ Listening in rapt attention, according to a government informer, were Sir John Hopton, ‘a Scotchman and his lady . . . Lady FitzJames and [again] Mr Blood and his two sons. He was much for the defence of the Kirk [the Scottish Presbyterian church] and they sang the Scotch psalms.’52
Now happily rehabilitated in the eyes of his paymasters, Blood continued his spying activities, both domestic and overseas, in prosecution of the Dutch war. Some of his efforts produced valuable military intelligence, albeit time-sensitive. In March 1672, Blood was in Amsterdam and spent some time on the island of Texel, monitoring the passage of Dutch warships.53 The following month he informed Arlington that a ‘person who came through the Dutch fleet last Wednesday saw sixty-three ships, men at war and fireships together, rendezvoused at the Weling [sic] but could not distinguish how many there were of each. The Zeeland squadron was not come in from last Friday. I had an account also from thence with the presumption that none of their fleet would stir till after today.’54
Two months later the State Papers record the departure of ‘Mr Newman, Blood’s friend’, sent to Holland ‘for intelligence’ on the Dover packet boat, armed with instructions and forty guineas in his purse.55 The following February, Blood reported that seditious ‘pamphlets from Holland’ were expected the next week on the packet-boats. ‘The bulk were to be sent to the Spanish ambassador, whose goods are to be searched by persons of the Customs house. They intend to put them in some small casks in barrels of butter . . . to the ambassador.’56
At home, he passed on a sealed letter in September 1672 that had come into his hands from an informant, promising that any reply could be sent via him ‘if you do not have a readier way’.57 In June 1673, Blood was back in Dublin, ‘as he pretended, by my lord Arlington’s leave’. Henry Ball told Williamson, now serving as a plenipotentiary at the Franco-Dutch Congress of Cologne, that Arlington was glad of Blood’s absence ‘because of his impertinence’, but the colonel faced an uncertain welcome: ‘The Presbyterian party all renounce him as one that has kept not very well his word with his majesty as to serving him.’58
In fact Blood had delivered a letter from Arlington to Arthur Capell, First Earl of Essex, the lord lieutenant of Ireland. The secretary of state, with his well-hidden Catholic sympathies, was worried that he had been accused of supporting the cause of Peter Talbot, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin,59 in his attempts to ease the grievances of the Catholic population of Ireland. Essex reassured Arlington: ‘I am sure there is nothing in it but of advantage to you and your lordship may be fully satisfied that there were no questions put leading to your lordship’s name.’60
For his espionage efforts, Blood was paid a salary of £100 a year, equivalent to £13,750 in today’s purchasing power, as well as receiving his £500 a year pension from Irish lands.61 The king also moved to restore him to his lost Irish estates, writing to Essex that Blood had not yet repossessed his property, as he required a licence for bringing a ‘writ of error for reversal of his outlawry’. The viceroy was now authorised to grant that licence.62
In May 1673, Blood also applied to the king for a grant of £1,400 which had been paid to the former treasurer of Ireland but ‘not yet disposed of by any order’.63 Whether he eventually received this lost money is unknown.
Blood was also willing to use his position at court and at the heart of government to advance the wider interests of his family. In April 1672, he wrote to Arlington, begging his lordship to remember ‘my uncle Dean [Neptune] Blood’s advance in Ireland . . . He has been dean thirty years and was with the king [Charles I] at Oxford and was an active person [on his behalf].’64 Unfortunately, in this instance, his pleas went unanswered. The following January, he suggested that his son, Thomas Blood junior, if serving alongside an ‘able’ lieutenant, ‘could manage a company in the army’ and that his third son Edmund ‘was fit for an ensign or a sea officer, having been twice to the East Indies’.65 Blood even recommended an ‘able lieutenant’ to act as mentor for his former highwayman son. Captain Nicholas Carter ‘is very fit for a lieutenant’, he observed. It is not known whether the eldest son took the king’s shilling as he died around 1675, leaving a wife and an infant son, of whom his brother Holcroft became guardian. Edmund, the fourth son, was appointed purser66 of Jersey,a forty-gun fourth-rate frigate of 560 tons built for the Commonwealth and launched at Maldon in Essex in 1654. Blood’s second son William was a steward on the same ship. Both are known to have been serving in the Royal Navy in 1677.67
He also sought to advance his third son Holcroft’s career in the army. In March 1678, Blood wrote to Williamson, having heard about a ‘vacancy of an ensign’s place in Captain Rook’s company in Sir Lionel Walden’s regiment. The captain accepted my son but the colonel preferred another, since he was accepted. Wherefore, I would request that he may not be put by.’68
There was, however, a more pressing issue preoccupying Blood’s time and attention. He petitioned the king about his father-in-law’s estates, still the subject of a wearying, tedious (and expensive) legal dispute. The property, he claimed, was now legally his in right of his wife, as the old parliamentary colonel’s last male heir, Charles, had died in December 1672.69 Blood had instituted his own legal proceedings against some of the Holcrofts to claim the estate, but matters had now got to the stage where violence and even two murders had been committed in attempts to finally decide the matter.
His petition pointed out that the Holcrofts ‘had laboured . . . to defraud [him] of his just right and finding their own title to be weak have combined with Richard Calveley to promote an old title to his part of the said estate which title for these forty years has been overthrown at law’.
Yet . . . the said Calveley [has] been so vexatious that when his title at law was rejected, they laboured by violence to get [a] footing in the estate . . .
About six years ago, they hired several obscure persons out of Wales that went to the house of a gentlemen, one Hamlet Holcroft . . . and with a pistol killed him dead for not giving them possession when they had no legal process nor officer to demand it by . . .
Some weeks since, Richard Calveley, being attached70 by some of the sheriff’s bailiffs according to law concerning the premises claimed by your petitioner, after they had him in custody . . . Calveley caught up a rapier and killed one of the bailiffs dead on the place.
Blood therefore begged Charles II
out of your princely grace and for the better enabling your petitioner to serve your majesty . . . to confer . . . what estate Richard Calveley lays claim to or lately seized of the estate of John Holcroft and his heirs (and consequently your petitioner’s) if, upon Calveley’s trial and conviction it shall become forfeited to your majesty.71
The outcome of Blood’s appeal is not known, although it seems likely to have failed, as the disputed estate passed to another relative and Calveley escaped justice. He is recorded as evicting a man and his mother eight years later in a case heard during the Epiphany term at Lancaster Quarter Sessions.72
There were other means of income for the old adventurer. Blood transformed himself into a freelance agent and ‘fixer’, not only involved in court rivalries and politics, but receiving fees for easing the path of those wishing to do business with the royal household. He had been ‘admitted into all the privacy and intimacy of the court’. If anyone was suffering delays in decision-making or any other hindrance to their business, ‘he made his application to Blood as the most industrious and successful solicitor and many gentlemen courted his acquaintance, as the Indians pray to the Devil – that he may not hurt them’.73
It was a hazardous career to pursue and one that earned him powerful enemies as well as friends. His overblown confidence and arrogance remained breathtakingly obvious. If he had aggrieved one powerful figure in government, there were many others who would seek his assistance in providing information or gossip to fulfil their ambitions. He had become indispensable and boasted:
‘It’s no matter. If one lets me fall, another takes me up. I’m the best tool they have.’74
Every day, he attended White’s coffee house near the Royal Exchange in the City of London, waiting for consultations with eager, well-heeled clients,75 who may have included such illustrious personages as James, Duke of York and Thomas Osborne, First Earl of Danby.76
His greed and self-importance were to cause his eventual downfall.
There was one already suffering because of his involvement with Blood. Richard Wilkinson, another of Williamson’s spies, claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy involving Blood ‘against his majesty’s person, crown and dignity’. (This presumably was Captain Roger Jones’s plot to assassinate Charles in the House of Lords.) In February 1673, he wrote from prison at Appleby, Westmorland, complaining about his unkind treatment.
When Wilkinson revealed the plot he was ‘promised not only my pardon, but a gratuity’, but he was betrayed and instead of being pardoned ended up in a horrible cell.
Since 23 September last I have been chained of my bed which is a dark stinking hole sixteen or seventeen hours out of every twenty-four, with such a weight, namely nearly four stone77 of iron on my legs.
If it were to save my life I cannot stir a yard from my bed.
Until recently he had neither fire nor candle, but now had one taper to light in the mornings to read by. Despite enduring these privations, he was still a faithful subject and felt obliged to warn of a planned rebellion, having been told that ‘in a very short time the prison doors would be set open for me and others if I would but fight, for there were many men in most counties in great readiness who wait but for a fit opportunity’.
His friends in London had promised him a pardon but he knew he was still living under a cloud of official disapproval: ‘I am very sorry that Lord Arlington is offended at me and that I am blamed because I did not manage the business better concerning Blood.’78
Thomas Blood still had powerful friends.