Some men are so crafty . . . they dare not preach against the sin of man-catching, or trepanning men by sham evidence, false witness, sham plots . . . setting snares to catch men, body and goods, life and estate . . .
The Horrid Sin of Man-Catching, July 16811
London in the late 1670s and early into the next decade was a hotbed of intrigue and conspiracy, involving not only the old discontented republicans but also suspected plots by Catholics wishing to restore England to her old pre-Reformation faith. Part of this subversion and sedition was entirely fabricated – merely a trick – designed as a weapon of terror with which to seize some ephemeral personal advantage in the fevered political posturing within the royal court and Parliament.
Some died pitifully on the scaffold or were ruined as a result of the communal hysteria triggered by at least one of these fictitious conspiracies. Sensational revelations piled up, one on top of another, to unsettle or disrupt both the corporate body politic and public confidence, particularly among the population of London. No sooner was ‘one sham discovered, but a new one [was] contrived to sham that’, one polemicist declared artlessly.2 Those who revealed these so-called plots were the lowest dregs of society – informers who were prepared ‘to swallow oaths with as nimble convenience as Hocus3 does . . . and ready to spew them up again to murder the innocent’.4 Their motivation or objectives were sometimes difficult to discern accurately, ‘for here you have him and there you will have him . . . [but] you [only] hug a cloud and embrace a shadow’.5
Much of this turmoil was fomented in the new political clubs that were the harbingers of today’s political party system in Britain. These met noisily in hostelries, coffee houses or private homes throughout London; one of the earliest (whose eighty members nurtured resilient republican beliefs) was founded by Major John Wildman and met at his Nonsuch House tavern in Bow Street, off Covent Garden, after 1658.6 The mercurial and devious Buckingham was a patron of Wildman, who hailed him as ‘the wisest statesman in England’.7 Catholics met at the White House nearby in the Strand or at the Pheasant in Fuller’s Rents, north of King’s Bench Walk in the precincts of the Inner Temple. The latter institution became notorious for some of its members’ alleged proclivity for sodomy. Buckingham’s supporters had their own club whose headquarters were at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside in the City of London, often frequented by visiting Baptist dissenters from the west of England and Scottish Presbyterians.
Although he despised him gready, Thomas Blood patronised the political club run by Sir William Waller,8 that ‘midnight magistrate’ wickedly satirised by John Dryden in 16829 who was a passionate pursuer of fugitive Catholic seminary priests and whose greatest delight came from his pastime of publicly burning confiscated Catholic books and vestments. His club met regularly at the newly built St James’s marketplace, between Haymarket and Piccadilly, possibly in the tavern called the Old Man’s Head, located underneath the market house.10
One of the most powerful cliques was the radical Green Ribbon Club, chaired by the opposition MP Sir Robert Peyton, another of Buckingham’s republican associates, who had been removed as a magistrate from the Middlesex Bench in 1676 for distributing seditious literature. In October the following year, Blood exposed a plot by ‘Peyton and his gang’ who had allied themselves with the Fifth Monarchists and the atheists in an attempt to overthrow the government and seize power. They planned that, initially at least, Richard Cromwell (third son of the Lord Protector, who succeeded him in that title for just nine months) would be appointed nominal ruler of the three kingdoms in the event of their coup succeeding.11 The king and the Duke of York were to be murdered at Newmarket or in London by Peyton and eleven accomplices while others simultaneously captured the Tower of London. According to Williamson’s notes of the information received from Blood, the group were strong opponents of the Anglo-French alliance and were aggrieved at the continuing diminution of English liberty. They also sought to impose even more punitive measures against Catholics. The spymaster believed the conspirators were
near something, not sure how soon.
Talk of the Tower, therefore look secretly to it . . . The guards to be well looked to.
Have sent into Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Bedfordshire to get their friends to a head.12
The MP was twice interrogated but eventually dismissed without charge. However, his colleagues in the Green Ribbon Club thought him far too dangerous a figure to continue as a member, so he was promptly dismissed as chairman and his membership terminated.13
Blood’s investigations of this conspiracy must have continued, for in early January 1678 Williamson wrote to Archbishop Michael Boyle, lord chancellor of Ireland, about a Dublin legal case concerning Blood’s interests on which he was about to adjudicate. The king had commanded that the colonel should be detained in England ‘on his particular service and by his command’ and Williamson earnestly requested that his enforced absence from Ireland should not prejudice his case.14
One of those implicated in the Peyton plot was Blood’s old comrade William Smith, whom he now interrogated. He told the Duke of York:
He has been concerned in most conspiracies that have been these fourteen years. He was with me in the business of Ormond and the business miscarried because he . . . did not follow him . . .
Then, though he was not one of the fighting party at the taking of the crown, he was employed by me as a scout and has often boasted of it.
He was not one of those that went with me to the rescue of Mason but, I suppose, was one that drudged about getting our horses and tack ready . . . and that he also boasted of.
When all my party accepted the king’s pardon, he did not, being a Fifth Monarchy person but a wet one.
Smith had been involved in new plots ‘contriving to assassinate persons and to surprise others’ and had been sent to Westminster to spy for ten days. Blood promised to make him ‘acknowledge’ his role and help ‘unravel the whole game . . . which, by reason of the preservation of my spies, we cannot go in a direct line to, but [should] sail with a side wind’.15 Smith was discharged from prison on 5 August.
More than a year earlier, one of Buckingham’s creatures, the spy Henry North, had revealed another conspiracy against Charles II, this time involving ‘diverse eminent persons’. Following the pattern of other informers, government or private, who had fallen on hard times, North had taken to the road to eke out a precarious living from preying on unwary travellers. After his arrest, he had been condemned to be hanged for highway robbery near Sleaford in Lincolnshire. Now he had decided to make a clean breast of what he knew, as ‘a sincere and candid demonstration of a Christian who shall write nothing in this dying hour but what he knows to be truth’.
North was a very frightened man, terrified, not only by the prospect of dying on the scaffold, but by his rashness in making disclosures involving personages of great power and influence. In a rambling and sometimes incomprehensible two-page letter, he admitted to the king that he had been employed by Buckingham ‘in a troublesome concern which I would cheerfully have performed to the utmost of my power. I sometimes spoke in his presence and understood some of his discontents.’ Then his words grew yet more opaque:
I am able to demonstrate to the Duke of Buckingham, who, I persuade myself, will now believe me, of the fallacy and fraud of such as were instrumental to abuse his heroic soul with notions discrepant to his own judgment and interest, which with great zeal, I have heard him express in reference to your majesty and all your well-wishers.
Frustratingly, he skirted around the great truth he wished to impart, dropping several obscure hints about what must have been Buckingham’s continuing treachery. North had long desired to tell Charles ‘a secret’ and had ‘applied to Mr Blood about it but was advised not to trust any person’.
He added, in a bizarre emblematic reference to the depth and complexity of the conspiracy: ‘The head of [the river] Nile with all his rivulets is not easily discovered.’ Then there was this final cryptic statement, tinted with just a touch of anguish: ‘I might have understood much more than I do and I wish had never understood anything thereof.’
Unfortunately he was executed before Williamson could discover anything more of his revelations. His letter had been delayed in the post.16
These two conspiracies may have constituted clear and present dangers to Charles and his government, but disclosure of a new plot in 1678 had a much greater political impact, even though it proved utterly bogus.
One of the magistrate William Waller’s cronies was Titus Oates, a former naval padre in the forty-gun fourth-rate frigate Adventure who had been dismissed from the service with ignominy in 1677 for homosexuality. Shunning Anglicanism, he was received into the Catholic Church later that year and managed to enrol at the English Jesuit College at Valladolid in Spain, despite his ignorance of Latin. As a noviciate priest, Oates proved less than suitable, or indeed successful; he was branded ‘a curse’ by the college authorities and finally expelled. Undeterred by this rebuff, and still pursuing his own idea of a sacred vocation, he talked his way into a Catholic school at St Omer in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, only to be thrown out again.
Rejection can metamorphose all too easily into an intense hatred. Oates was ugly, with sunken eyes and a harsh and loud voice, but was blessed with a photographic memory. He lived almost wholly in a frenzied world of rampant paranoia and fantasy, but his illusory claims and constant lies were camouflaged by an eminently believable manner. Scarred by his experiences in Spain and France, he harboured a fiery, fanatical loathing for the Catholic Church and became determined to wreak revenge on the papists who had so harshly turned him away.
In London he found a trusty ally in the shape of the half-crazed Israel Tonge, the former rector of the medieval parish church of St Mary’s Staining in Oat Lane, north-east of St Paul’s Cathedral, which was completely destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.17 After claiming Thomas Blood was involved in starting the conflagration,18 Tonge had now convinced himself that responsibility for the destruction of the capital in the catastrophic inferno lay solely at the door of the Jesuit priests.
Oates and Tonge worked diligently to compile a manuscript or dossier implicating the Catholic Church in a Jesuit plot to assassinate the king. It contained the names of almost one hundred Catholics allegedly involved in the conspiracy. Upon completion, the document was bizarrely hidden behind the wainscot wall panels in the Barbican, London, home of the physician Sir Richard Barker,19 where Tonge was staying.20
Mirabile dictu, the manuscript was ‘discovered’ by Tonge the next morning and shown to Barker’s friend Christopher Kirby, with no explanation as to why this incendiary document had been secreted in the home of such a rabid anti-Catholic. As a chemist who had sometimes assisted Charles II with his scientific experiments, Kirby was a carefully chosen messenger to make the government aware of Oates and Tonge’s sensational accusations. The loyal apothecary breathlessly told the king about the plot as he took his morning royal constitutional in the verdant splendour of St James’s Park on 13 August 1678. Charles was highly sceptical about the claims, even though Kirby emphasised that those who intended to shoot him dead could be easily identified. Furthermore, he claimed that in the event of this attempt failing, Sir George Wakeman, the queen’s own chief physician, would use a terrible poison to kill the king.
The lord high treasurer, Thomas Osborne, First Earl of Danby, a man renowned for his detestation of Catholics and opposition to any kind of religious toleration, did not share his monarch’s incredulity. Danby urged a full investigation of the allegations, despite the robust opposition of Williamson, who was only too well aware of Tonge’s bouts of insanity.
Oates duly appeared before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a Westminster magistrate of some repute, to swear his deposition, preparatory to a full audience with the king and Privy Council. He recalled attending a Jesuit meeting at the White Horse in the Strand on 24 April, where the efficacy of various methods to murder Charles was eagerly debated, including shooting, stabbing by itinerant Irish louts or poisoning by Wakeman.21
Then, on 12 October, the magistrate suspiciously disappeared without trace.
Five days later, his body was found face down in a muddy ditch at Primrose Hill, three miles (4.82 km) north of London. He had been strangled, his neck broken and, for good measure, his body had been impaled with his own sword – but this wound was inflicted some time after death, as there was no sign of bleeding. His money and rings had not been stolen, so there was little chance of robbery being the motive. His murder was immediately blamed on the Catholics and was used as proof of the truth of Oates’s wild claims.22
The fantasist’s associate, the convicted confidence trickster Captain William Bedloe, claimed the reward for tracking down Godfrey’s killer or killers by denouncing Miles Prance, a Catholic servant-in-ordinary to Queen Catherine of Braganza. Under the agony of torture, he named three labourers called Henry Berry, Robert Green and Lawrence Hill as the culprits, all in the pay of three Catholic priests.23 Although entirely innocent, they were found guilty and executed in February 1679 at the scene of the crime.24
It has also been suggested that Sir Robert Peyton may have been involved in Godfrey’s death. The justice of the peace was a member of the MP’s republican ‘gang’ and he may have been murdered because he had betrayed his fellow members, or, more opportunistically, merely to stir up hatred of Catholics.
The magistrate’s death certainly had that effect. Something approaching hysteria gripped the streets of London. Effigies of the pope were burnt by the angry mob. With revived memories of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Parliament ordered fruitless searches for non-existent explosives cunningly hidden in barrels within its cellars. Near panic ensued when it was discovered that a French physician called Choqueux was storing large quantities of black powder in a house near the Houses of Parliament. There were a few red faces when it transpired that he was no assassin but merely the king’s firework-maker.
More seriously, the House of Lords demanded that, for the sake of public safety and maintaining Londoners’ morale, all Catholics should be banished from an area within a radius of ten miles (16 km) around the capital and this proscription was imposed by the government on 30 October.
Thomas Blood had some dealings with Oates and Bedloe, but as he was always careful to cover his tracks, the evidence of his involvement is unclear. There is one contemporary report that he planned to destroy Oates’s credibility by planting treasonous letters amongst his personal papers to demonstrate that the fanatic had been recruited by the nonconformists to damage Catholic interests. But the incriminating documents were discovered and shown to Williamson, who passed them on to the Privy Council.25
Blood was also on the fringes of a Catholic ‘sham plot’ to discredit Bedloe as a witness and to point the finger at Buckingham and Anthony Ashley-Cooper (created First Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672), as the covert instigators of Oates’s ‘Popish Plot’.26 An Irish Catholic called James Netterville, formerly a clerk in Dublin’s Court of Claims and latterly one of Danby’s informers, had been imprisoned for seditious words he unwisely uttered in St James’s Park. After appearing before the Privy Council at the Palace of Whitehall, he did not improve his chances of winning liberty by brawling in the corridor outside the chamber. After a spell in Newgate jail, he ended up as a debtor in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark.
There, he met the Dubliner Captain John Bury in January 1679 and dropped heavy hints to him about the conspiracy to undermine the veracity of Bedloe’s testimony. If the good captain would help, he could expect a generous payment of up to £500 to make his efforts all the more worthwhile.27 Bury, who was a close friend of Blood’s, immediately passed on this information to the colonel, who told him to play along with Netterville and endeavour to discover where this substantial sum of money was emanating from. The liberal donor turned out to be one Russell, a servant to the French ambassador Paul Barillon, and Blood imparted this intelligence to Williamson.
Another version of events came in a ten-page letter in Latin, purportedly written by the Spanish priest James Salgado of Vine Street, near Hatton Garden, to his own father confessor. This described Netterville’s confession to Salgado in which he admitted being instructed to find someone who would swear that the Popish Plot was entirely the devious brainchild of Buckingham and Shaftesbury. Netterville ‘therefore bribed the man who stole the king’s crown to swear to this effect for £500 and the man revealed the whole matter to the king’s secretary’. The priest added: ‘I do not think [Netterville] is altogether innocent, but I leave him to God.’28
Getting wind of this scheming, Oates, Bedloe and Waller visited Netterville in the Marshalsea and browbeat him into revealing all he knew. This latest sham plot was thus neutralised. The prisoner was singularly unimpressed by Oates, who was ‘a villain’, and recalled bitingly that ‘he was always wanting money from the superior when he was a Jesuit [in Spain] . . .’.29
Eventually, Charles personally interrogated Oates. Such is the sagaciousness of monarchs, he triumphantly detected a litany of inaccuracies and lies in his testimony, and ordered his arrest. However, only days later, Parliament forced Oates’s release, and rewarded his patriotism by the provision of an apartment in the Palace of Whitehall and payment of a handsome annual pension of £1,200.
After nearly three years of public unrest and phobia about treasonous Catholics permeating all sections of society, at least fifteen innocent men had been executed. Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, became the last to be entrapped by Oates’s mesh of lies. He was accused in June 1681 of ‘promoting the Roman faith’ and after only fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury brought in a guilty verdict. Plunkett was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 11 July, the last Catholic martyr to die in England.30
Oates at last received his richly deserved come-uppance. On 31 August, he was ordered to leave his grace-and-favour Whitehall apartment. Undeterred, he denounced the king and the Duke of York and was arrested, fined the huge sum of £100,000 and thrown into prison.31
Blood meanwhile was receiving some extraordinary signs of royal favour. In March 1679, he was sent for ‘early’ by Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, who had replaced Williamson as secretary of state the previous month. The minister had been instructed to tell the spy ‘that the king looked upon him as his friend and therefore sent for him to come to him [and] to communicate it to all his friends that his majesty would cast himself upon his Parliament’.32
It seemed that his reputation had reached a new pinnacle in the highest office in the land; but, unknown to him, Blood was now rapidly approaching his nemesis.
In January 1680, Jane Bradley, the barmaid of the St John’s Head or ‘Heaven’ tavern in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, asked him to call on her, as she believed there was a major conspiracy afoot against the government. She told him that ‘two shabby fellows’ had told her that ‘they had something of great consequence, in reference to the public welfare, to reveal but that they wanted a discreet person to manage it’. Blood told her that he would meet them and that she should pass on to them that ‘if there was anything fit to take notice of, he would bring them to those that had sufficient authority to take notice of it’.
The more suspicious among us might well believe this was some form of trap, or in modern parlance a ‘sting’. Blood probably shared this disquiet but treated it as an occupational hazard for a spy and informer.33
A meeting was arranged, but the two men, later identified as Samuel Ryther and Philemon Coddan, both Irish, fled when they saw Blood, ‘averring they would have nothing to do with him for that he was the Duke of Buckingham’s friend’. Jane Bradley went to Blood’s house in Westminster and told him the men were ‘rogues and trepans34 and advised him to seize them and carry them before a magistrate’.
The colonel had them up before a Middlesex justice called Dr Chamberlain, who was well known to Blood. Both claimed Buckingham owed them money and one said he was willing to swear that the duke was guilty of sodomy. The justice did not believe them and the matter was apparently forgotten.35
What Blood was stumbling into was a conspiracy to bring down Buckingham initiated by his enemies, notably Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. He had been languishing in the Tower since April 1679 after being impeached for corruption and embezzlement from the Treasury, exceeding his powers ‘in matters of peace and war’ and ‘traitorously concealing’ the Oates plot. That gossipy envoy Barillon believed that Buckingham had deliberately absented himself from Danby’s impeachment proceedings in the Lords because the earl had ‘threatened him with prosecution for sodomy’.36 So clearly the plot against him had been under way for some time; indeed, the previous February, Ossory – Ormond’s eldest son and no friend to Buckingham – had confided to Danby that he still cherished hopes ‘of procuring something very material’ against the proud and arrogant courtier.37
The chief protagonist in the plan was probably Edward Christian, Buckingham’s one-time chamberlain, who had been fired for stealing large sums of money from his master in 1673.38 He had worked for Danby for three years as his steward and was the ideal man to organise an assault on the duke’s reputation and to banish him from court. Blood had reviled Christian, from his time as Buckingham’s agent, to the stage of coldly refusing him ‘the civility of either drinking publicly or privately with him’.39 The feeling was mutual.
The heart and substance of the conspiracy was the accusation that Buckingham had sodomised a London gentlewoman called Sarah Harwood and had packed her off to France to preserve her silence and to prevent the scandal becoming public.
Buckingham’s reputation for violence was well known. He acknowledged that some had talked of his ‘cruel, insolent, injurious carriage to my inferiors’. There was the case of the ‘poor old fellow’ angrily beaten by the duke after the farmer had complained that he had trampled through his cornfield while hunting. ‘I protest that the story itself is wholly mistaken as some honest men, my servants that were present, are ready to witness . . . If breaking a hedge be so great a crime, I wonder what huntsmen can ever be innocent?’ he asked disingenuously. Buckingham also denied categorically that he was a poisoner, even though some who had crossed him – like the informer William Leving – had died by this silent means. The attempted sodomy charge was equally serious as it had remained, since Thomas Cromwell’s Buggery Act of 1533, a capital crime. Buckingham blithely, if not eloquently, denied the allegation: ‘There was mention made of my attempting a crime of so horrid a nature that it ought not to be named amongst Christians.
But for my innocency in this I can only call God to witness and rely upon the charity of all men . . . God knows I have much to answer for in the plain way but I never was so great a virtuoso in my lusts.40
Christian now had witnesses lined up, ready to testify that this was a wicked lie.
Philip Le Mar and his mother Frances Loveland were the first two. Le Mar was to claim that six years before Buckingham had committed buggery with him, although it was suggested that the Countess of Danby had offered him £300 to make the allegation.41 Coddan and Ryther were the others. All were unlikely to appear credible figures in the witness box.
Coddan and a fellow Irishman called Maurice Hickey, alias Higgins, had settled in Long Acre, near Covent Garden, where their heavy drinking and energetic arguments in Gaelic had aroused suspicions.42 The plan was for them to convince Ryther that, in return for a large bribe, he would swear that Buckingham had sodomised the woman. If this means of persuasion failed, he would sign a confession while drugged by some narcotic. Coddan was to become the second witness who would support Ryther’s allegations in court. Unfortunately, the star witness tended towards the mercurial: he agreed to testify one minute and refused the next. Another voice was necessary to steady Ryther on the difficult road to plausibility in court.
That man was Thomas Curtis, a cloth worker from Lancashire, who had earlier been briefly jailed because of his embroilment in another sham conspiracy, the so-called Meal-tub plot, named after the fact that incriminating documents had been hidden in the bottom of such a receptacle. He enjoyed an unenviable reputation for heavy drinking and, as most of his efforts to coerce the unwilling Ryther into giving evidence took place at the Crown in Ram Alley, south of Fleet Street,43 or the Bear tavern on the Southwark shore of the Thames near London Bridge,44 he must have relished his work.
Blood appeared at one of these meetings and pressed Coddan and Ryther about their testimony. He became persuaded that both could certainly have their day in court and would produce the required evidence.
However, both potential witnesses then suffered an attack of cold feet. Coddan promised Ryther that ‘we will do this rogue Blood’s business for him and get enough to swear against him by the time Sir William Waller comes to town’.45 The next meeting was at a tavern in Bloomsbury and Hickey was given a paper for both men to sign. He was instructed to offer them £300 in gold coins but to threaten to murder them if they did not make their marks on the document as signatures. Arriving first, Ryther heard the alternatives on offer, snatched up the paper and fled out into the darkness.
He and Coddan visited Buckingham’s lawyer, a Mr Whitaker, and told him what had transpired. Danby’s cat was unfortunately dragged out of the bag.
On 20 January 1680, Blood was summoned by Waller to a meeting at the Buffalo Head tavern in Westminster, near the Gatehouse prison, and confronted by Coddan and Ryther’s sordid tale of subornation. He was startled to see his would-be witnesses now smartly dressed ‘in a genteel equipage and à la mode accoutrements’. Also present at this meeting were Whitaker, Buckingham’s attorney, and the linen draper Francis Jenks, another of Buckingham’s radical activists. Blood tried to bluff his way out, but Whitaker urged him to be honest, just and confess. The colonel replied: ‘You have been these last two years employed to asperse me. Could you find no better invention than this?’ They pressed Waller for justice and the magistrate ‘very civilly’ asked the colonel to find bail.46
Blood resisted detention until 22 January when he met a constable at the upper end of King Street, Westminster, who told him he had a warrant for his arrest. Remarkably, they both went to the Dog tavern, alongside the Gatehouse, and over the next few hours had several drinks together. Waller meanwhile discovered the officer was armed only with a mittimus47 and hurriedly sent over a warrant as the constable was worried that it was in the power of Mr Blood ‘to bring me under great trouble for my inadvertency in the thing’48 by bringing action for false imprisonment. Addressed to ‘all constables’, the warrant read:
Whereas oath has been made by two witnesses that Colonel Thomas Blood has been a confederate in a late conspiracy of falsely accusing and charging his grace the Duke of Buckingham of sodomy and has refused to give bail for his appearance at the next general sessions to be held for the city and liberty of Westminster.
These are therefore to will and require that you seize and apprehend the said Colonel Thomas Blood and if he shall refuse to give in bail, to carry him and deliver him into the hand of Mr Church, keeper of the Gatehouse in Westminster, according to the tenor of the mittimus in your hands.49
Blood, in default of bail, was taken to prison.
The colonel, Christian, Curtis and Hickey were tried for blasphemy, confederacy and subornation in King’s Bench court and found guilty. They were fined and imprisoned. Later in May 1680, Le Mar and his mother were convicted of being suborned to swear sodomy against Buckingham.50 Le Mar had been made drunk and given drugs during the conspiracy and he was later to die from the effects of these narcotics in the Marshalsea prison.51 His mother was put into the pillory on 19 June, ‘where she was severely dealt with by the people throwing dirt and rotten eggs at her’.52 The attorney general, Sir Creswell Levinz, investigated the Le Mar case and the examining magistrate, called Barnsley, was removed from the commission of the peace for his ‘undue practices’.53
Sir William Waller was also sacked as a magistrate for similar irregularities and misdemeanours and he later fled to Holland.
Buckingham meanwhile was intent on vengeance against his erstwhile employee Blood. He brought an action for defamation – a civil suit for scandalum magnatum – against the colonel, Christian and Curtis claiming £10,000 damages.54 The jury found for Buckingham.
Blood was growing desperate. Whenever a situation becomes especially fraught, one calls in favours from every quarter, so on 14 July he sent his son Charles to see James, Duke of York, to seek his royal intercession on his behalf. The next day, Blood wrote to the duke politely thanking him for ‘the great favour’ in granting the audience and asking if his brother the king would order the Treasury to pay his salary, which ‘Lord Sunderland has often done without effect’. The hard-pressed colonel could not possibly find the wherewithal for a bail payment and he wondered if the king ‘would encourage some to [stand] bail for me’.
He was becoming ever more frustrated by Whitehall’s bureaucratic ineptitude. ‘You ordered my son to go to Sir Leoline Jenkins [appointed secretary of state in April 1680] to understand what instructions he had from the king concerning me – and he said he knew not a word of it.
I therefore humbly beg that I may not be left in this cause to fall, which is because I keep the Commonwealth party in awe and broke the neck of Sir William Waller.
I intend to have a habeas corpus today and to put in bail before Judge Dolben.55
If you can favour me with any interest in him, it will be my great advantage.56
The ever-dilatory Treasury still failed to come up with his salary and three days later Blood, frustrated and fuming, wrote to Jenkins with a frantic plea for his immediate assistance.
I have been left destitute of the usual supply of money from the court and tantalised from day to day and week to week . . . [The] lords of the Treasury have promised me from three days to three days the payment of that £60057 which the king allowed me for my salary to enable me to do his business. [This has] all ended in words, [so] they may be effectively spoken to.
Next I desire an immediate supply of thirty or forty guineas to bear the charges of my disentanglement for I am quite destitute, having pawned my [silver] plate. I would also entreat you to encourage some persons to be bail for me.
Blood was writing from within the walls of the Gatehouse prison in Westminster. The sheriff’s officers would not acknowledge or accept ‘his privilege’ and dragged him off into the prison, leading to a complaint about his treatment being made to the king. Blood angrily maintained that Buckingham and the Commonwealth party had spent £10,000 ‘to get me out of their way, knowing I have been a check on their disloyal actions these nine years and remain so still’. Having got the ‘better of them as to the criminal part of the cause, in spite and envy, they arrest me in an action for £10,000, supposing that sum was so great that it would fright any tradesman from bailing me’.58
He received his writ of habeas corpus on 21 July and removed himself to the King’s Bench prison for debtors in Southwark.59 Happily he was bailed the following morning. Some well-disposed individual put up a surety for his release (did the money come from secret service funds?) and he was freed, amid voluble protests that he had been illegally proceeded against.60
When Blood was incarcerated in the Tower, following his abortive attempt to steal the Crown Jewels, a small book of his was confiscated by his jailers. The original is now lost but a copy is preserved in the Pepys papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.61 It seems to have been compiled during Blood’s more ruminative moments while still in captivity or just after being released in 1671 – there is one line on the first page that mentions ‘my son who is wont [to be known] by the name of Thomas Hunt, now a prisoner in the Tower’.62
Under the heading ‘Deliverances since I was for the Lord’s cause’, his seventy escapes from arrest or danger are listed for the period 1663–71, annoyingly with a frustrating lack of detail. These include his adventures in Dublin after the coup attempt (‘I escaped when most were taken’), boarding a ship ‘when none knew me’ and arriving at a port where he was well known; eluding capture when visiting his mother-in-law in Lancashire and again during his wanderings around Manchester and being pursued by a pack of dogs.
His exploits also included being ‘a prisoner [in] Zeeland’ and escaping arrest in Bishopsgate Street during the Great Fire of London. There are other escapades, the circumstances of which we can sadly only guess at: ‘my swimming’; ‘the guard at the bridge’ the ‘Life Guard man’; ‘from friends at Ipswich’ and being ‘taken by a constable at Essex’. His rescue of Captain Mason is probably covered by the entries: ‘from the trepan beyond Newark’; ‘from them in the little hours’; ‘in the battle’; ‘Leving confession’ and being ‘healed of my wounds’. Even after going into semiretirement as a quack apothecary, he faced ‘discovery at Romford’; ‘a design by some to cast me off’ and from ‘discontented friends’. There was also another deliverance at the ‘Bull in the Strand’.63
Interleaved in these notes are two entries referring to his son’s decision to take to a life of crime, clearly a source of great disappointment to his father: ‘my son’s wickedness – this was Hunt’s robbing on ye highway’ and ‘My son’s being stopped and coming before [Justice] Keeling’. Were these deliverances or trials?64
All these feats created the absolute certainty in Blood’s mind that he should never ‘forsake the cause of God for any difficulties’. His notes also contain twenty-two one-line moral and religious tenets for life that he plainly tried to adhere to and which also indicate Blood’s belief in the existence and power of Providence (which had served him so badly at the Martin Tower). These included: ‘To [spend] each day in serious consideration of my interest in Christ and what he has done’; ‘To avoid disputing or crossing in discourse or undervaluing of persons in religious or civic things’ and ‘To labour to be content with my condition, considering nothing comes by chance’. These precepts also urged his avoidance of strong wine and drink and any ‘recreations or pomps or excess in apparel . . . quibbling or joking . . . all obscene and scurrilous talk’. There were also three rules, very pertinent to the uncertain life of a spy: ‘To be faithful in trust remitted and wary to whom I commit it’; ‘Not to reveal secrets’ and ‘Not to break engagements’. Blood was clearly a deeply religious man, inclined to searing self-analysis and the need to discover some pattern in his life and personal objectives, laid down by God Himself.65
The colonel needed that religious belief and fortitude now, as never before. He returned to his home on the corner of Great Peter and Tufton streets in Westminster and here ‘reflected upon his condition, both as to his personal reputation and the interests of his family’.
His faithful wife Mary was already dead, as was his eldest son, Thomas. His two daughters were prosperously married and his other sons were gainfully engaged in careers in the service of the king. But Blood’s standing in society had been ‘extremely blasted’ by the ‘malice of enemies’ and was ruined by the failure of his debtors to reimburse him – a particular blow when he was faced with having to pay a gigantic bill for damages to Buckingham.
Blood could not now see any means of ‘getting out of the mire by his former methods of contriving and daring’. In the past, he had ‘trusted to his hands’ and his sagacity to rescue him in any emergency but now he realised he was completely ‘manacled’.
These ‘dismal thoughts’ degenerated into ‘a pensive melancholy’ and this, combined with the hot weather of the season, caused a ‘fatal, though not violent distemper’ – a disturbed condition of the mind.
His sickness lasted fourteen days and throughout this period Blood was visited by his loyal friends and a Presbyterian minister who found him in a ‘sedate temper as to the concerns of his soul’ and not ‘startled by the apprehension of approaching death’. Blood told him he had set his thoughts in order and ‘was ready and willing to obey, when it pleased God to give him the last call’. These were the only words he uttered, as he seemed unwilling to talk to his other visitors, and the only noises he made were ‘involuntary sighs’ between increasingly frequent spells of sleep. On the Monday before his death, he was struck speechless and barely able to move, presumably having suffered a stroke, and his breathing grew ever more laboured.
On Monday, 22 August he dictated his last will and testament, ‘being at the time sensible of the frailty and mortality of man’ and afflicted by ‘a weariness of body’. Blood therefore bequeathed his soul ‘into the hands of almighty God . . . in full assurance of that blessed resurrection held forth in the Holy Scriptures’ and his body ‘to the earth from whence it came’.
As a debtor, the terms of his will were necessarily curtailed. Long gone were the halcyon days of riches and affluence, with Blood strutting arrogantly around town dressed in the latest fashions and wearing the finest periwig. His ‘small temporal estate’ now consisted only of the simple goods and chattels that he still possessed. Everything else of value had been pawned or disposed of. Those items ‘capable of being sold’ were to be turned into cash immediately and the proceeds were to be divided equally into three parts. His daughters Mary and Elizabeth were to receive one part each and the third was to be shared by his three surviving sons Holcroft, William and Charles and his daughter-in-law, the widow of Thomas Blood junior. The only bequest outside the family was the twenty shillings (£1) to be paid ‘to my old friend John Fisher’. His executors were named as ‘my faithful and loving friends’ Robert Blakeys, of London, clerk, and Thomas Lisle of Westminster, ‘not doubting their old friendship and kindness in undertaking’ these duties. The will was witnessed by Sarah [?Frend] and John Ward, Blood’s servant.66
An inventory of his remaining goods and chattels in May the following year lists the items left in each room of his house: ‘the dining room’; ‘the little parlour and entry’; ‘the little chamber backward’ and the like. There was precious little remaining: a few chairs, a leather jack (a jug for beer), some hangings, a chopping knife and some brass candlesticks in the kitchen, a bedstead, blankets and some rugs. All in all, they were valued at £300 14s 2d, which was probably more than Blood realised.67
At three o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, 24 August, Colonel Thomas Blood died. He was aged sixty-two.
After a life of striving to ‘make a noise in the world’ by assiduously courting popular notoriety and infamy, his passing was marked more by a pathetic whimper than the anticipated bang.
Or was it? One last event that caught the public’s imagination marked his demise.
The old colonel would have been gratified that lurid rumours about his death swept London. Some gossips maintained that he had used a ‘narcotic and stupefying’ drug to hasten his end, but his contemporary biographer believed this was a harsh judgement on a man ‘who had the courage not to despair in the worst circumstances of life and far less should be thought to do it on a deathbed of no painful sickness’. Others claimed he died a devout Catholic after a last-gasp conversion. This again was untrue: ‘It would be needless to produce the testimonies of persons beyond exception who were constantly with him in his sickness to refute this . . . calumny raised by those enemies of his’.68 At least Blood did not die alone and friendless.
Two days later Blood was ‘decently interred’ a few hundred yards away from his home in the chapel in Tothill Fields69 near the grave of his wife.
If he had pious hopes of a joyful resurrection awaiting him, these were realised sooner than he could have wished.
As we saw at the beginning, there was much talk that his final illness, death and burial were nothing more than another trick to throw off his enemies and avoid paying Buckingham his punitive damages. Some people testified that they had seen him alive and well in his familiar haunts in Westminster and the Palace of Whitehall. Was his apparent death nothing but a devious ‘farce and piece of pageantry to carry on some design’ planned by Blood? Such was the pitch of excitement in London that the authorities decided the only way to scotch such uncontrolled speculation was to exhume Blood’s body, to prove, once and for all, that he was truly dead.
Accordingly, the grave was reopened on the following Thursday. A coroner and jury from Westminster – made up of twenty-three honest citizens who knew him in life – were convened in an inquest to view the disinterred and odorous body.
Such civic duties can never be pleasant and this was particularly gruesome. After six days below ground in that warm season, the jurymen were horrified to find his ‘face so altered and swollen’ and so ‘few lineaments and features of their old acquaintance’ remaining that they were unable to recognise the corpse formally, or even informally. An army captain was called in who maintained, under oath, that the thumb of the cadaver’s left hand demonstrated conclusively that this was Blood’s body. All who knew him had ‘taken notice’ of this distinguishing feature which had grown ‘to a prodigious bigness’ after an old injury. However, this was not enough to convince the sceptical jury and no verdict was returned.70
The body was decently returned to its grave, although some reports long afterwards suggested that the colonel was reburied not in Tothill Fields, but in the graveyard of St Andrew’s parish church in Hornchurch, Essex. Alongside the church on the High Street side is an anonymous grave marked only by a weather-beaten and effaced slab bearing a skull and crossbones which is pointed out as that of Blood. Despite Hornchurch’s proximity to his old stomping ground in Romford, this seems highly unlikely.
A number of satirical broadsheets marking his death were quickly published by those wanting to capitalise on the end of someone quite so infamous. The seventy-six lines of doggerel verses An Elegy on Colonel Blood, Notorious for Stealing the Crown, rushed out by J. Shorter only six days after Blood’s death, began with the damning:
Thanks, ye kind fates for your last favour shown
Of stealing BLOOD who lately stole the Crown
We’ll not exclaim so much against you since
As well as BEDLOE you have fetched him hence,
He who has been a plague to all mankind
And never was to anyone a friend . . .
and ended with the suggestion that this should be his epitaph:
Here lies the man who boldly has run through
More villainies than ever England knew
And nere to any friend he had was true
Here let him then by all unpitied lie
And let’s rejoice his time was come to die.71
Unkind words indeed.
Perhaps a more appropriate epitaph would be the summary of his life written by Richard Halliwell, his contemporary biographer, who generously declared that Blood never pursued
mean . . . and sneaking actions that leave an indelible character of ignominy upon those who would be thought gentlemen when they tread in the steps of villains.
He was indeed for forbidden game, but never on the king’s highway, always in royal parks and forests. Crowns, sceptres and government were his booty and the surprising of castles and viceroys his recreation.
His exploits, he wrote, were ‘to live in story for [their] strangeness, if not by the success of his attempts’.72
They do indeed. His arrogance and daring were spellbinding, particularly so as, despite the plaudits of his former accomplice, he rarely enjoyed any real success in his adventures. Some might see the colonel as a psychologically flawed attention-seeker, perhaps wholly narcissistic, as the symptoms of this personality disorder apparently include an exaggerated sense of one’s own abilities and achievements, a constant need for affirmation and a sense of entitlement and expectation of special treatment. When examining his exploits, these may sound uncannily familiar.
But aside from the complexities of his psychology, a strong case can also be made that his primary motivation was a volatile mix of religious fervour, a sense of injustice and the burning need for vengeance – like so many others in seventeenth-century Britain. However, the colonel stands out as a different kind of desperado to those grim-faced fanatics that populated his twilight world of espionage and treachery in Dublin and London.
Unlike them, Blood was an eccentric gambler who was never daunted by the odds that fate threw up against him and who took a rash delight in staging an outrage purely for its own sake. In his turbulent career, Blood tried to assassinate viceroys, rescue friends and stole the unthinkable (or unattainable) just because the challenges were perceived as too great by other mere mortals. What drove him on was the same irrepressible motivation that later forced people to climb mountains purely because they were there.
Fame was his spur.
He ranks high in the pantheon of true adventurers, with his escapades frequently the excited talk of three kingdoms. His colourful, madcap exploits enliven and enrich the pages of seventeenth-century British history. We remain amazed by his daredevil audacity, his astonishing effrontery and smile at his harum-scarum escapes from the hand of destiny.
Although the governments of Ireland and England of the time would disagree, thank God he was there.