Notes

PROLOGUE

1     Vol. 2, p.818. This was the first ‘who was who’ of major figures in British history, published by Andrew Kippis in six volumes between 1747 and 1766. As an indication of Blood’s enduring notoriety, his biography takes up nine pages, sandwiched between those of Admiral Robert Blake, the Cromwellian founder of British naval supremacy, and ‘the very ancient, once noble and still truly honourable’ family of Blount.

2     TNA, SP 44/34/110, f.111.

3     Blood was thus described in the London Gazette, issue no. 572, 8–11 May 1671, p.2, col.2.

4     Adam the Leper’ was the leader of a gang of robbers in the 1330s–40s who specialised in stealing the property of members of the royal court and their retainers, mainly in towns in south-east England. Adam and his gang besieged the London home of a merchant who was safeguarding the queen’s jewels. When he refused to hand them over, the house was set ablaze and the jewels were seized. See: William Donaldson, Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (London, 2005), pp.6–7 and Luke Owen Price, A History of Crime in England, illustrating the Changes in Laws in the Progress of Civilisation (2 vols., London, 1873–6), vol. 1, p.245. Adam died in the 1360s.

5     Edward I was away fighting the Scots when the burglary occurred. See: Dean Stanley’s Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 3rd ed. (London, 1869), pp.428–30. English monarchs had stored their treasure in the Chapel of the Pyx from a few years after the Norman Conquest in 1066. The name ‘Pyx’ comes from the wooden chests stored there, which held randomly chosen samples of the coinage of the realm. These are still tested for metal content (and thus value) annually in a ceremony presided over by an official with the impressive title of ‘Queen’s Remembrancer of the Royal Courts of Justice’. This was undertaken in the Palace of Westminster, but in 1870 the ceremony was transferred to the Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London and continues there today.

6     Richard of Pudlicott or ‘Dick Pudlicote’ was a wool merchant who, having fallen on hard times, decided to undertake a little grand larceny to better his lifestyle. His haul from Edward’s wardrobe treasury was valued at £100,000 or £73,350,000 in today’s monetary values. He was executed in 1305. See: Paul Doherty, The Great Crown Jewel Robbery of 1303: The Extraordinary Story of the First Big Bank Raid in History (London, 2005) and T. F. Tout, A Medieval Burglary (Manchester, 1916), pp.13–5. Sadly for the more bloodthirsty amongst us, expert analysis in 2005 found the skin on the wooden door to be cow hide. The door is probably the oldest surviving one in Britain – dating from the 1050s.

7     Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, ff.473v–474r.

8     Montgomery-Massingberd (ed.), Burke’s Irish Family Records, p.142. Duffield is five miles (8 km) from Derby. England’s first smelt mill to extract lead from its galena ore was established at Makeney in 1554 by the German mining engineer Burchard Kranich and in 1581 Sir John Zouch, of nearby Codnor Castle, built a wire-drawing works there. Perhaps Edmund Blood decided to escape the noise and smells of early industrialisation and seek pastures new? See: Brian Cooper, Transformation of a Valley: The Derbyshire Derwent (London, 1983).

9     More than 18,000 English troops fought against the Irish rebels – the largest military operation on land conducted during Elizabeth’s reign. (The English expeditionary force assisting the Dutch rebels against Spain in the Low Countries under the Treaty of Nonsuch of August 1585 was never more than 12,000-strong.) Like other Irish rebellions, this one failed to oust the English from Ireland.

10   The confusingly named Murrough McMurrough O’Brien (1562–97), fourth baron Inchiquin, was a member of one of the oldest families in the Irish peerage. In 1597, during a skirmish, he was shot under the arm while fording the River Erne near Sligo. He fell off his horse and, encumbered by his armour, drowned. Inchiquin was buried in Donegal Abbey. His two-year-old son Dermot succeeded to the title.

11   Kilnaboy Castle was destroyed in 1641 by Cromwellian forces. The site is off the R476 Kilfenora-Ballyvaughan road, north of Inchiquin Lough.

12   Burke, Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland, p.56.

13   NAI, MS 12,816, f.29. Catholic resentment at this gerrymandering spilled over when the new Parliament first met on 18 May 1613, resulting in an unseemly brawl in the Commons chamber in Dublin Castle. As a result of these protests, some constituencies were scrapped, leaving a Protestant majority of only six seats.

14   The arms of Blood are: Or, 3 bucks couchant vulned with arrows proper, with the crest A buck’s head erased with an arrow in its mouth.

15   NAI, MS 12,816, f.32 includes a family tree, dated 1879, that adds a fourth brother, Robert, with the comment: ‘supposed to have settled at Tamworth [Staffordshire]. Buried there 16 September 1646. The Bloods of Birmingham claimed descent from this Robert Blood.’ However, there is no other mention of Robert Blood in this MS but he appears in another family tree in NAI, MS 451, f.11.

16   NAI MS 451, f.11; MS 12,816 f.18. Mary Holcroft was supposedly related to the Hyde family of Norbury, Cheshire, from whom descended Sir Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, lord chancellor to Charles II. Her relationship to the Holcroft family into which Thomas Blood married is uncertain.

17   NAI, MS 12,816, f.7.

18   CSP Domestic 1671–2, pp.372–3.

19   Hanrahan, Colonel Blood . . ., p.2.

20   The chalice at Kilfenora has this inscription engraved upon it: ‘Calix Ecclesia Cathedralis Fineboensis empt[or] expensa diocensis valet £4 15s 3d Neptuna Blood decanoAnno Domini 1665’ – ‘This chalice from St Fin Barr’s Cathedral was purchased for £4 15s 3d by Neptune Blood, dean, 1665’. See: NAI MS 12,816, f.30. Neptune married three times and died in 1692, three years short of his 100th birthday. He was succeeded as dean of Kilfenora by his fourth son by his third wife, another Neptune. His brothers and sisters, with ages ranging from five to sixteen, are commemorated by a large tablet with a long Latin inscription on the north wall of the cathedral. See: Jnl of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. 30 (1900), p.396.

21   NAI, MS 12,816, f.35.

22   Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood’ in ODNB, vol. 6, p.270. Other authorities suggest Blood was born ten years later, e.g. Montgomery-Massingberd (ed.), Burke’s Irish Family Records, p.142, but this seems unlikely.

23   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.219.

24   NAI, MS 12,816, f.21. A survey in 1654–6 indicated that Thomas Blood, ‘Protestant’, had held 220 acres (89 hectares) of land in Sarney since at least 1640. Robert Simington (ed.), Civil Survey 1654–6; County of Meath, vol. 5, p.126.

25   Civil Survey 1654–6; County of Meath, vol. 5, p.129; NAI, MS 12,816, f.35.

26   CSP Ireland 1666–9, P.88. NAI, MS 12,816, f.20 in an account dated 1791 also records 120 acres (48.5 hectares) in ‘Seatown and Beatown’ and 103 acres (41.3 hectares) in Westfieldstown, East Fingal. Glenmalure is a remote wooded valley in the Wicklow Mountains, with the River Avonbeg running through. It was the site of a battle on 25 August 1580 when an English force under Arthur Grey, Fourteenth Baron Grey of Wilton, was routed as they advanced to capture Balinacor, the stronghold of the rebel chieftain Fiach McHugh O’Byrne. See: Richard Brooks, Cassell’s Battlefield of Britain and Ireland (London, 2005), p.331–2.

27   NAI, MS 12,816, f.35.

28   The Irish Confederation rebellion is also known as the ‘Eleven Years War’.

29   Frost, History and Topography of the County of Clare, pp.369–70.

30   Tibbutt (ed.), Life and Letters of Sir Lewis Dyve 1599–1669, p.148. A Captain Blood was reported as serving in ‘the old King’s army under Sir Lewis Dyves’ in 1671 (BL Add. MS. 36,916 f.233) and a ‘Capt Bludd’ was noted as quartermaster in his regiment in the indigent officers’ list of 1663 (Anon., A List of Officers Claiming to the Sixty Thousand Pounds Granted by his Sacred Majesty . . ., p.39). However, Blood is absent in the published regimental lists of both the Royalist and parliamentary armies in 1642, so he must have rallied to the king’s colours after this date. See: Peacock (ed.), The Army Lists of the Roundheads and Cavaliers.

31   Blood’s name does not appear in the brief account of the Sherborne siege by a parliamentary author. John Rylands Library, Manchester, Tatton Park MS 68.20, f.210.

32   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.220.

33   Also spelt ‘Rainsborough’.

34   Paulden and Col. Morrison, wearing disguises, had gained entry to the fortress by fooling the parliamentary sentries and snatched control of Pontefract Castle on 3 June 1648.

35   Bod. Lib. Clarendon MS 34, f.27v. ‘R.H.’ in his account of Blood’s life, maintained that Rainborowe had been ‘pistolled [shot] in his chamber’. See ‘Remarks . . .’, p.220. Rainborowe’s fellows in the Leveller faction (which advocated religious tolerance, extended suffrage and equality under the law) claimed that he had been assassinated on Cromwell’s orders. A subsequent investigation produced no evidence to support this allegation. Three thousand people took part in his funeral procession through the streets of the City of London before Rainborowe was buried at Wapping. Subsequent street pamphlets, such as Colonell Rainborowe’s Ghost, vociferously demanded revenge to be inflicted upon the royalists.

36   The defeat at the Battle of Preston quashed any lingering hopes of a Royalist victory. Pontefract, the last cavalier stronghold, hung on grimly. After Charles I was executed, his son was proclaimed king within the besieged castle. This is the origin of Pontefract’s motto, Post mortem patris pro filio – ‘After the death of the father, support the son’. The 100 survivors of the garrison finally surrendered on 25 March 1649 and the castle was slighted.

37   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.220. Blood’s entry in Andrew Kippis’ Biographia Britannica (vol. 2, p.817), written seven decades after his death, implies his involvement in the Rainborowe attempted kidnapping by pointing out that ‘he was in England’ in 1648 when the colonel ‘was surprised and killed at Pontefract’ [sic].

38   Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.111.

39   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p. 373; RCHM Sixth Report, p.370.

40   John Rylands Library, Manchester, Tatton Park MS 68.20, f.210.

41   Kippis, Biographia Britannia, vol. 2, p.817. For more information on those who switched allegiance, see Andrew Hopper’s Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil War (Oxford, 2012). A cornet is the most junior commissioned rank in a cavalry regiment.

42   Cromwell remains a figure of intense odium in Ireland because of the sheer brutality of this campaign. Irish Catholic Confederate battlefield casualties probably totalled almost 20,000. After the fall of Drogheda, Cromwell commented: ‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’ In total, around 200,000 civilians died in the famine and in a bubonic plague pandemic that followed the fighting – although some authorities estimate that Ireland’s then population of 1.6 million was reduced by as much as half a million. In addition, 50,000 Irish were forcibly deported to the West Indies as indentured labourers. See: Sean O’Callaghan: To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dingle, Co. Kerry, 2000), p.85. The last Irish and Royalist troops surrendered in Co. Cavan in 1653.

43   W. Johnson-Kaye & E. W. Wittenburg-Kaye (eds.), Register of Newchurch in the Parish of Culcheth: Christenings, Weddings and Burials, p.217.

44   Off Holcroft Lane, Culcheth, Warrington, Lancashire. National Grid Reference: SJ 67979 95162. Postcode: WA3 4ND. Holcroft’s wife was the daughter of John Hunt of Lymehurst and his wife Margaret: BL Harley MS 2,161, f.158.

45   Hanrahan, Colonel Blood . . ., p.14.

46   An action for recovery of £200 debt was brought in 1367 in the Chancery Court against Thomas, son of John de Holcroft of Lancashire, by his creditor, Henry de Tildeslegh of Ditton [Widnes]. See: TNA, C/241/147/39; 17 February 1367.

47   VCH Lancs, vol. 4, fn. p. 161.

48   Manchester Archives MS L89/1/23/1.

49   Douglas Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (London, 1954), p.234, and Browne Willis, Notitia Parliamentaria: Part II – A Series of Lists of the Representatives in the Several Parliaments held from the Reformation 1541 to the Restoration 1660, pp.229–39. Dissident troops under the command of Colonel Thomas Pride had forcibly removed opponents to their political aims. Some forty-five were imprisoned for a time, initially in a nearby tavern called ‘Hell’. It is difficult to determine how many MPs were prevented from sitting: there were 471 active members before the events of 6 December and 200 afterwards. Some eighty-six had absented themselves voluntarily and a further eighty-three were allowed back. The way had been cleared for Parliament to establish a Republic and to try the king for treason. Holcroft’s name does not appear on the list of those excluded but neither does it appear in the HoC Jnl reports of the proceedings of the Rump Parliament.

50   Lancashire Civil War Tracts, pp.32–3; Lancashire Record Office MS DDX 2670/1.

51   Lancashire Civil War Tracts, p.85.

52   W. Johnson-Kaye & E. W. Wittenburg-Kaye (eds.), Register of Newchurch in the Parish of Culcheth: Christenings, Weddings and Burials, p.15.

53   Montgomery-Massingberd, Irish Family Records, p.142.

54   Kippis, Biographia Britannia, p.817.

55   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.219–20.

56   Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.112.

CHAPTER 1: CAPTURE THE CASTLE

1     TNA, SP 63/313/168, f.346.

2     The Commonwealth Parliament was perennially short of money to pay its troops. In 1646, it resolved to sell the gilded bronze effigy of Henry VIII that lay on top of the black marble sarcophagus marking his grave in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Around £600 for the statue was paid to ‘Colonel [Christopher] Whichcot, governor of Windsor Castle, to be by him employed for the pay of that garrison’. (In one of those delicious ironies of history, Henry had filched the sarcophagus from the unfinished tomb of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey after his downfall in 1529 and the tomb-chest was recycled in 1808 for the huge monument to Nelson in St Paul’s Cathedral, where it remains today.) See Robert Hutchinson, Last Days of Henry VIII (London, 2005), pp.268–70.

3     See C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–60, vol. 2, pp.598–603 (3 vols. London, 1911), for more information on this draconian legislation and pp.722–53 for the subsequent Act of Satisfaction. Under the so-called Adventurers’ Act, passed 19 March 1642, funds for the suppression of the Irish rebellion could be solicited from speculators. Anyone who invested £200 would receive 1,000 acres (404.7 hectares) of property confiscated from rebel landowners – or four shillings (twenty pence in modern English money), an acre. Cromwell subscribed £600.

4     John Scott, an English traveller in the West Indies during the Commonwealth period, saw Irish labourers working in gangs in the fields, alongside black slaves ‘without stockings under the scorching sun’. He reported that the Irish were derided by ‘the negroes and branded with the epithet “white slaves’” (TNA, CO 1/21,1667, no. 170). See: Hilary Beckles, ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”: Irish indentured servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 47 (1990) pp.503–22. Irish traditions and heritage survive in the Caribbean – St Patrick’s Day is still celebrated as a national holiday in Montserrat, the only nation to do so outside Ireland.

5     A star fort known as ‘Cromwell’s Barracks’, dating from this period, defends the harbour of Inishbofin.

6     Sir William Petty (1623–87), who had leave of absence from his position as professor of anatomy at Brasenose College, Oxford, was paid £18,532 for his pains, but had to accept 30,000 acres near Kenmare, Co. Kerry, in lieu of the last £3,181 of his fee as, inevitably, Parliament’s treasury was bare.

7     For full details of Blood’s holdings after the Down Survey and previous landowners, see the Trinity College, Dublin, website: http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/landowners.

8     Irish House of Commons 14 & 15 Car 2 cap. 2.

9     See: Wilson, ‘Ireland under Charles II’, p.79.

10   The commissioners appointed were: Sir Richard Rainsford, Sir Thomas Beverley, Sir Edward Dering, Sir Edward Smith, Sir Allan Broderick, Winston Churchill and Colonel Edward Cooke, ‘all men of good parts, learned in the law and clear in their reputation for virtue and integrity’, Carte, Life of . . . Ormond, vol. 4, book 6, p.123.

11   Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.114 and Greaves, God’s Other Children, p.21. Leckie is described in a number of sources as Blood’s ‘brother-in-law’, but we have no firm record of Blood having had a sister.

12   Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood . . ., p.42.

13   Lancashire Record Office MS, DDX 2670/1.

14   TNA, E 134/1652/Mich2. Pursfurlong had been purchased by Sir John Holcroft in 1549 and it was sold in 1605 to Ralph Calveley but later reverted to the Holcrofts. See: VCH Lancs., vol. 4, pp. 159–60.

15   Lancashire Record Office DP 397/25/4, f.4.

16   Lancashire Record Office QSP/147/3.

17   TNA, E 134/12Chas2/Mich6.

18   TNA, E 134/13Chas2/East21 and E 134/13/Chas2/Trin6.

19   13 & 14 Car 2 cap. 4.

20   TNA, SP 63/313/230, f.465; 13 June 1663.

21   Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.159.

22   CSP Ireland 1663–65, pp. 22–7.

23   Carte, Life of . . . Ormond, vol. 4, book 6, p.129.

24   CSP Ireland 1663–65, p.31. The king to the commissioners, Whitehall, 28 February 1663.

25   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.31. Ormond to the king, Dublin Castle, 7 February 1663.

26   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 44, ff.708–9, with a fuller version in Carte MS 64, ff.392v–339v.

27   Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, pp.140–41. Ludlow had been appointed lieutenant general of horse during Parliament’s war against the Irish Confederation. After Henry Ireton died in November 1651, he became commander in chief. During the bitter counter-insurgency campaign of 1651–2, Ludlow complained of his operations in the ninety-seven square miles (250 sq. km) of the Burren, Co. Clare, that it was ‘a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang him, nor earth enough to bury him’. A small portion of the area is now an Irish national park. Ludlow later became one of the four commissioners imposing the land seizures under the Act of Settlement of Ireland 1652. In September 1660 a proclamation ordered the apprehension of ‘Edmund Ludlow esquire, commonly called Col. Ludlow’; SAL Proclamations, vol. 13, 1660–06, f.27.

28   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.448. Vernon was told of the conspiracy by an unidentified correspondent, a member of the Pigott family (?Thomas Pigott, an Irish MP) in a letter of 11 March: ‘I suppose you will hear from others of the late design of surprising the castle here by some fanatic. The design was desperate and would have been bloody in its execution for most as yet observed to be engaged in it were formerly officers and since discontented tradesmen. Every day makes new discoveries so that many know not and most fear where it will end.’ Addressed to Colonel Edward Vernon ‘at Mr Henry Nutings, his house in Plow Yard, in Fetter Lane, London’. CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.37.

29   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.446; in cipher with decoded text interleaved. Minute in the hand of Sir George Lane, Irish Secretary. Dublin Castle, 4 March 1663.

30   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 2, p.251.

31   Abbott, ‘English Conspiracy and Dissent 1660–74’, p.519.

32   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, book 6, pp.124–5.

33   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 143, ff.96–7; Dublin Castle, 7 March 1663.

34   On 30 January 1649 Hewlett was the officer in charge of the troops providing security at the execution of Charles I. After the restoration of the monarchy, he was convicted for his part in the king’s beheading but was not executed with the two other officers who were found guilty at the same time – Daniel Axtell and Francis Hacker. Another prisoner in Dublin Castle was Henry Porter, who had been locked up for two years, charged with being one of the two disguised and masked executioners of Charles I in Whitehall in 1649. On 29 April, Ormond and his Irish Council wrote to Secretary Bennet pointing out that if he was on the scaffold, ‘he should be tried in England and he is clamouring for a habeas corpus’ – a court appearance to free him without charge. They added: ‘We are anxious for his majesty’s direction in the matter’ (TNA, 63/313/120, f.243). The issue was apparently ignored in Whitehall. The public executioner at the time of Charles’s death was Richard Brandon (son of Gregory Brandon, the common hangman), who had beheaded Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford in 1641 and Archbishop Laud in 1645. Initially, he reportedly refused to behead the king, but was persuaded otherwise and was paid £30, all in half-crowns, within an hour of the execution – and was given a handkerchief taken from the king’s pocket and an orange, which he sold for £10 at his home in Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel. Brandon died on 20 June 1649 and was buried at Whitechapel. See: H.V. Morton, In Search of London (London, 1951) pp. 198–9. In 1813, the vault in St George’s Chapel, Windsor containing the body of Charles I was opened and it was confirmed that the king had been decapitated with one clean strike – surely the work of an experienced executioner.

35   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.34.

36   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.37.

37   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.442; Dublin Castle, 18 March 1663.

38   ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 3, p.67; 20 March 1663. A token from a coffee house at the west end of St Paul’s is described in Boyne’s Trade Tokens issued in Seventeenth-century London, ed. G.C. Williamson (2 vols., London, 1889) vol. 1, p.736.

39   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.51.

40   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.51. Ormond to the king, 28 March 1663. Later, he told Charles that he had found out no more about the earlier plot. ‘There certainly was one and if I decided to let it come to a head, as one of my spies [? Alden] suggested, I might have made great discoveries. But Parliament was sitting at the time in very ill humour and there were many dangerous people in Dublin and I did not care to let the game go so long’; CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.83. Ormond to the king, 8 May 1663.

41   The mythical circular island of Brasil or Hy-Brasil, rumoured to be located in the Atlantic Ocean, west of Ireland, was said to be cloaked in magical mists which cleared for only one day in seven years, the only time it could be seen by sailors. In 1674 Captain John Nisbet claimed to have seen it, finding it inhabited only by giant black rabbits and a solitary sorcerer who lived alone in a stone castle. Porcupine Bank, a rocky shoal in the Atlantic about 120 miles (200 km) west of Ireland, which was charted in 1862, has been suggested as the site of Hy-Brasil.

42   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.47. In fact, the ship had Colonel Henry Pretty, former parliamentary governor of Carlow, on board, who was also under suspicion of involvement in the conspiracy. The ship escaped from Limerick but was captured in mid-May while hiding among the Aran Islands off Ireland’s west coast. Ludlow was not on the ship. See: Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.141.

43   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 34, f.674r – ‘Advice of Incidents in Ireland’. The information was sent anonymously to Ormond.

44   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 143, f.128–31. Ormond to the king, 8 May 1663.

45   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, ff.51–2. Bennet to Ormond, Whitehall, 15 May 1663.

46   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.188.

47   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.111.

48   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 2, p.252.

49   ‘Veitch & Brysson Memoirs’, appendix 9, pp.508–9.

50   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.115.

51   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.79. Vernon to Bennet, Dublin, 6 May 1663.

52   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, ff.384–5 and 388.

53   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.92. Ormond to the king, Dublin Castle, 18 May 1663.

54   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, f.580; Dublin Castle, 19 May 1663.

55   The commander of an army’s reconnaissance troops.

56   Donagh MacCarthy, First Earl of Clancarty, Second Viscount Muskerry (died 1665), was among the last Irish commanders to surrender to the English after Cromwell’s invasion. He was defeated by Roger Boyle, later Earl of Orrery, at the Battle of Knocknaclashy in 1651 and retreated into the Kerry Mountains. He surrendered the following June, his 5,000-man army disbanded, and he fled Ireland. Charles II granted MacCarthy the title of Earl of Clancarty and his estates were restored under the Act of Settlement 1662. He died in London.

57   RCHM Eighth Report, Appendix, pt. 1, pp.263–4; Bod. Lib. Carte MS 118, f.63.

58   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 2, p.253.

59   Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.144.

60   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.112.

61   CSP Ireland 1663–5, pp.97; TNA, SP 63/313/170, f.351 and Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, f.564.

62   TNA, SP 63/313/164, f.335.

CHAPTER 2: ESCAPE AND EVASION

1     TNA, SP 63/313/221 f.451.

2     Following damage caused by a munitions explosion in the castle armoury in 1764, the Bermingham Tower was demolished down to its first-floor level and rebuilt in 1777.

3     Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.145.

4     Blood was exaggerating for effect. Sir William Petty estimated the Protestant death toll in the Irish Confederation rebellion to be 37,000 (Sir Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the different Rebellions in Ireland [London, 1801] p.30).

5     This is a reference to the 1643 agreement between the English and Scottish Parliaments to preserve the Presbyterian religion in Scotland and its adoption in England. After the restoration of the monarchy, the Sedition Act of 1661 (13 Caro II St.1 cap. 1) declared the agreement unlawful and it was burnt publicly in London by the common hangman.

6     ‘Veitch & Brysson Memoirs’, pp.508–9.

7     ‘Veitch & Brysson Memoirs’, p.509. A letter to Ormond of 11 June 1663 with information on the conspirators refers to him as ‘Cornet Blood’ – the lowest officer rank in the cavalry. See: Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.553. The rebels’ declaration was later burnt in Dublin by the public executioner.

8     TNA, SP 63/313/170, f.351 and Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, f.564.

9     TNA, SP 63/313/225, f.458.

10   TNA, SP 63/313/173, f.355; Ormond to [Secretary Bennet], Dublin Castle, 23 May 1663; SP 63/313/174, f.357; Ormond to Bennet, Dublin Castle, 24 May 1663.

11   TNA, SP 63/313165 f.340.

12   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.446. Sir Arthur Forbes to Ormond, 22 May 1663.

13   Aungier was created Viscount Longford in the Irish peerage in 1675 and Earl of Longford two years later.

14   TNA, SP 63/313/172, f.354.

15   Churchill, one-time MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, was knighted in 1664. He was the father of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, and ancestor of his namesake, the twentieth-century statesman and prime minister.

16   CSP Ireland 1663–5, pp.104.

17   TNA, SP 63/312/174, f.357. Ormond to Bennet, Dublin Castle, 24 May 1663.

18   TNA, SP 63/313/221, f.451. Talbot to Williamson, 13 June 1663.

19   CSP Ireland 1663–5, pp.97–8; Dublin Castle, 21 May 1663.

20   TNA, SP 63/313/164, f.335.

21   SAL Proclamations, Ireland 1572–1670, vol. 17, f.75. Another copy is in Bod. Lib. Carte MS 54, f.537.

22   TNA, SP 63/313/169, f.349. Vernon to Secretary Bennet, Dublin, 23 May 1663.

23   An adherent of the religious group founded in Germany and Switzerland in the sixteenth century which only recognised the baptism of adult believers and rejected Anglican doctrines.

24   TNA, SP 63/313/168, f.346.

25   SAL Proclamations Ireland 1572–1670, vol. 17, f.75 and Bod. Lib. Carte MS 71, ff.388–9; ‘Proclamation upon the occasion of the late conspiracy by the lord lieutenant and council of Ireland’.

26   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 49, f.193.

27   Morrice, Collection State Letters of Roger Boyle . . ., pp.69–70.

28   The suspects ‘ride always by night and on Sunday mornings, but never by the highways. Sometimes there are six or seven in a company’. Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.460, Dublin, 25 May 1663.

29   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.608, Loughbrickland, 29 June 1663.

30   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.438, Dublin, 22 May 1633.

31   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 165, f.111. Warrant to evict Dublin citizens from accommodation overlooking the city’s quays and replacing them with soldiers; Dublin Castle, 30 May 1663.

32   TNA, SP 63/313/180 f.366; Bod. Lib, Carte MS 143, f.133v.

33   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 143, f.133r.

34   TNA, SP 63/313/186, f.376. Vernon to [Secretary Bennet] Dublin, 30 May 1663.

35   TNA, SP 63/313/187, f.378. Deposition of James Tanner; Dublin, 31 May 1663.

36   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.116; Ormond to Bennet, Dublin Castle, 3 June 1663.

37   TNA, SP 63/313/193, f.395; Sir Nicholas Armorer to Joseph Williamson, Dublin, 3 June 1663. Armourer was a Royalist spymaster during the English Civil Wars and after the Restoration was appointed a captain in the Irish Guards and governor of Duncannon fort, a star-shaped fortification built to protect Waterford harbour at New Ross in Co. Wexford.

38   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.117; Sir Thomas Clarges to Secretary Bennet, 3 June 1663.

39   TNA, SP 63/313/198, f.430. Vernon to Joseph Williamson, 5 June 1663.

40   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 221, ff.52–3. Bennet to Ormond, Whitehall, 6 June 1663; Carte MS 46, f.55; 1 June 1663.

41   TNA, SP 63/313/207, f.419. Ormond to Bennet, Dublin Castle, 10 June 1663. Ormond, worried about successfully prosecuting the conspirators, had toyed with the idea of trying them under martial law unconstrained by normal legal requirements. But he concluded that ‘in time and place of war it was, and could be again, practised without scruple but in time of peace, a court martial will hardly be found that will sentence a soldier to death . . .’ Bod. Lib. Carte MS 143, ff.142r and v. Ormond to Bennet, 13 June 1663.

42   Little Britain connects St Martin’s Le Grand in the east with West Smithfield in the northern part of the City of London.

43   TNA, SP 63/313/209, f.422. Dublin Castle, 10 June 1663.

44   TNA, SP 63/313/209, f.425.

45   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 114, f.505. Edward Tanner to Lieutenant Colonel Staples, 15 June 1663.

46   Proudfoot’s Castle was formerly known as Fyan’s Castle, from its previous owners: Thomas Fyan was sheriff of Dublin in 1640. Later in the seventeenth century, the tower was acquired by the merchant George Proudfoot, cousin to the chief justice, Sir James Barry, First Baron Santry (Gilbert, History of the City of Dublin, vol. 1, p.375). Proudfoot apparently rented the structure to Francis Sleigh, a Dublin tanner, who agreed, in turn, to lease it to Philip Carpenter, the sergeant-at-arms, at £30 a year and on payment of £70 ‘for keeping therein such prisoners as shall be committed to Carpenter’s charge’ (CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.138).

47   Darcy (1598–1668) was a Catholic lawyer who was admitted as a student at London’s Middle Temple in July 1617 before practising on the Connacht circuit from c.1627. He was instrumental in drawing up the constitution of the Irish Catholic Confederation in 1642 and, after Cromwell’s invasion, was imprisoned in the Marshalsea jail, Dublin. He was buried in Kilconnell Abbey, Co. Galway, with this epitaph inscribed upon his tomb: Hic misera patria sola columna jacet – ‘Here, wretched country, lies your sole support’.

48   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, ff.666, 668 and 669.

49   Santry (1603–72) was the eldest of three sons of Alderman Richard Barry of Dublin. He was recorder of the City of Dublin, sergeant-at-law, second baron of the Irish Exchequer, before being appointed chief justice of the court of King’s Bench in November 1660 as a reward for his ‘many good services to Charles I and his eminent loyalty to Charles II’. He was created First Baron Santry of Santry, Co. Dublin, in February 1661. See: E. Barry, Records of the Barrys of Co. Cork, p.135 and Ball, ‘Notes on the Irish Judiciary in the Reign of Charles II’, p.90.

50   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.131. Ormond to Secretary Bennet, Dublin, 13 June 1663.

51   TNA, SP 63/33/245, f.495. Ormond to Secretary Bennet, Dublin Castle, 25 June 1663.

52   The Irish Parliament, sitting at Drogheda, passed two laws in 1495 relating to treason. The first (10 Henry VII, cap. 25) made it treason to ‘stir the Irishry to war’ and the second (10 Henry VII, cap. 37) decreed that murder ‘of malice pretensed’ was also treason. It seems likely that the former legislation was used against the conspirators. See David B. Quinn, ‘Bills and Statutes of Irish Parliament of Henry VII and Henry VIII’ in Analecta Hibernica, no. 10 (July 1944), pp.71–169.

53   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.138. Vernon to Williamson, 17 June 1663.

54   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 3, pp.57–8. Eleven ministers were arrested in Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, and sent to Carlingford, but nine could not be found, including two – ‘Henry Hunter and Mr Bruces’ – who had escaped to Scotland. The troops also failed to find one of the named plotters, the ‘pretended minister’ Andrew McCormack (Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.655).

55   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 59, f.86 and TNA 63/313/226, f.460.

56   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 43, f.192. King to Ormond, [10] June 1663.

57   Ormond was probably not a party to Vernon’s plans to free Alden. On 20 June, the lord lieutenant reported the informer’s escape; ‘owing to the negligence of the constable of the castle I believe he is gone into England but hope to have news of him through one of my spies’. CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.142.

58   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.139; 19 June 1663. The previous day Ormond signed a warrant for the recapture of Alden ‘late a prisoner in Dublin Castle, under charge of high treason’; Bod. Lib. Carte MS 165, f.116v.

59   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, f.562. It was housed in the Four Courts building, so called because cases in the Chancery, King’s Bench, Exchequer and Common Pleas courts were heard there. The present building was constructed in 1786–96.

60   TNA, SP 63/313/243, f.491. Sir George Lane to [Secretary Bennet], Dublin Castle, 25 June 1663.

61   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.121. Vernon to [Joseph Williamson], 6 June 1663.

62   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.602, Dublin, 22 June 1663.

63   Ponsonby (c.1609–78), from Haile in Cheshire, came with Cromwell to Ireland in 1649 as a colonel of horse and received substantial lands around Bessborough in Co. Kilkenny as a reward for his military service. He was also MP for the county in the Dublin Parliament and was active in seeking to maintain Protestant domination of Ireland.

64   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.604r. The letter is marked: ‘For your grace only’.

65   The ancient law of the Hebrews, attributed to Moses and contained in the Pentateuch or Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

66   TNA, SP 63/314/2, f.3. Vernon to Joseph Williamson, 1 July 1663.

67   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.673; Dublin, 3 July 1663.

68   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, ff.691–4. Lord Santry’s speech in passing judgment upon Jephson and others; Court of King’s Bench, Dublin, 7 July 1663.

69   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.169. Robert Leigh to Joseph Williamson, 8 July 1663.

70   TNA, SP 63/314/11, f.32. Sir George Lane to Secretary Bennet, Dublin Castle, 11 July 1663.

71   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.167. Robert Leigh to Williamson, Dublin, 11 July 1663.

72   Thompson is also referred to as a ‘major’ or a ‘captain’ in contemporary documents.

73   Campbell (c. 1607–61) was accused of treason for collaborating with the Commonwealth during the interregnum and his role in the suppression of the Royalist uprising in Scotland in 1653–4, led by William Cunningham, Eighth Earl of Glencairn. Campbell was beheaded in Edinburgh on 27 May 1661 by ‘the Scottish Maiden’, an early form of guillotine which was used to execute more than 150 persons in the city between 1564 and 1710. One is preserved today in the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

74   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.688; Dublin Castle, 5 July 1663.

75   Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.149. Early the following November, a widow called Mary Roberts petitioned Ormond for payment of a debt owed her by Thompson, out of his estate that had become forfeit to the crown. Bod. Lib. Carte MS 144, f.123v.

76   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, ff.589–90. Certificate by the borough masters of Rotterdam about the residence in that city of Colonel Gibby Carr; Rotterdam, 10–20 June 1663.

77   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.166. Ormond to Bennet, Whitehall, 10 July 1663.

78   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, ff.61–4. Bennet to Ormond, Whitehall, 27 June 1663.

79   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.202. Examination of James Milligan of Antrim by the Earl of Mount Alexander and William Leslie esq., in relation to the concealment of Thomas Blood; Antrim, 24 August 1663.

80   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.202r. Interrogation of James Milligan.

81   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 214, f.534. Earl of Mount Alexander to Ormond, Newtown, 25 August 1663. In early August, a former soldier E[dward] Bagot, wrote to Ormond from Blithfield in Staffordshire to warn the lord lieutenant that former parliamentary troops in Ireland were plotting to kill him. ‘Some of these men have told my intelligencer [spy] that, when their blow shall be struck in Ireland, there [is] a party in England ready to second them.’ Bod. Lib. Carte MS 33, f.18.

82   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, f.374r.

83   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.210. Blood to John Chamberlin. ? August 1663.

84   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.211. Undated, but endorsed: ‘Copied, 14 August 1663 at Wicklow’.

85   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, f.473.

86   TNA, SP 63/314/16, f.42. Ormond to the king, 14 July 1663.

87   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 49, f.216.

88   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.181.

89   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, f.574. Alexander Jephson’s last speech on the scaffold.

90   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, ff.576–8.

91   CSP Ireland 1663–5, pp.176–7.

92   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 159, f.66.

93   TNA, SP, 63/315/25, f.49. Sir George Lane to Bennet, Dublin Castle, 18 November 1663.

94   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.220–21.

95   Morres, History of the Principal Transactions of the Irish Parliament 1634–66, (2 vols., London, 1742), vol. 2, p.136.

96   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.308. His mother, Charity, wrote to Ormond in August 1663, prostrate at his feet and ‘knowing scarcely how to articulate her anguish’, that her son ‘should have had his hand in treason’ and blaming his ‘tenderness of years and to the frailty of a nature beguiled by the subtlety of some grand imposter’. Bod. Lib. Carte MS 33, f.90.

CHAPTER 3: A TASTE FOR CONSPIRACY

1     CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.662.

2     For information about the Elizabethan intelligence organisation, see my Elizabeth’s Spymaster (London, 2006).

3     Both Houses of Parliament decided on 19 December 1644 to impose the observance of Christmas Day as a fast day, banning such fripperies as mince pies. They decreed that ‘this day in particular is to be kept with more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins and the sins of our forefathers who turned this feast, pretending the memory of Christ into extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights’ (‘Lords Jnls’, vol. 7, p.106). The Royalist satirist and poet John Taylor (1580–1653) wrote a book ridiculing this ordinance, having Father Christmas visit the ‘schismatic and rebellious’ cities and towns of London, Yarmouth, Newbury and Gloucester and finding ‘All the liberty and harmless sports, with the merry gambols, dances and friscals [capers] [by] which the toiling plough-swain and labourer were wont to be recreated and their spirits and hopes revived for a whole twelve month are now extinct and put out of use in such a fashion as if they never had been. Thus are the merry lords of misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad rule at Westminster.’ (Complaint of Christmas, Oxford, 1646). The performance of plays had been banned in 1642. Maypole and Morris dancing accompanied Charles II’s triumphal entry into London in May 1660.

4     Later King James II.

5     J. R. Magrath (ed.), The Flemings in Oxford, being the Documents selected from the Rydal Papers in illustration of the Lives and Ways of Oxford Men 1650–7 (3 vols., Oxford Historical Society, 1904–24), vol. 1, p.160.

6     An Act for Erecting and Establishing a Post Office, 12 Car II, cap. 35. Postal charges were levied at the rate of two, four and six old pence for a single-sheet, folded letter carried up to 80, 140 or more miles to the addressee.

7     His father was in charge of the post after 1635 when the service was created by Charles I. Witherings the elder wrote to the Mayor of Hull announcing the posts which would be carried along the five principal roads in the kingdom: to Dover, Edinburgh, Holyhead, Plymouth and Bristol (TNA, POST 23/1; 28 January 1636). For further information see: Turner, ‘The Secrecy of the Post’, EHR, vol. 33, pp.320–27

8     TNA, SP 29/168/151, f.158. ? 24 August 1666.

9     Wallis (1616–1703) was the third Savilian professor of geometry at the University of Oxford. He had worked as a cryptographer for Cromwell’s spymaster John Thurloe during the republic in 1659–60 and then for Williamson after the Restoration, being described as a ‘jewel for a Prince’s use and service’ in code-breaking. Later he was accused of deciphering the correspondence of Charles I, captured by parliamentary forces after the Royalist defeat at the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645 – charges which he vehemently denied in a letter to his friend, John Fell, Bishop of Oxford in a letter dated 8 April 1685 (BL Add. MS. 32,499, f.377). For details of Wallis’ life, see an eighteenth-century account in Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS C. 978.

10   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.79–80. Oldenburg (c.1619–77) was secretary of the Royal Society, founded on 28 November 1660, and founding editor of its peer-reviewed Philosophical Transactions, the world’s oldest scientific journal, which is still going strong today. Oldenburg, who was harshly critical of the government’s handling of the Second Dutch War in 1665–7, fell foul of the government because of his views, expressed in intercepted correspondence with his Royal Society contacts. It was a case of the biter bit, as he spent two months imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1667 as a salutary lesson.

11   Morland’s Brief discourse containing the nature and reason of intelligence, Egmont Papers vol. 214, BL Add MSS 47,133, ff.8–13.

12   A seventeenth-century description of Morland’s ‘speaking trumpet’ was sold at Sotheby’s in London on 4 November 1969, lot. 260.

13   See: Susan E. Whyman, Postal Censorship in England; HMC ‘Finch’, vol. 2, p.265; HMC ‘Downshire’, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp.594–5.

14   A customs officer who boarded and inspected ships on arrival and collected the dues on their cargoes.

15   BL Egerton MSS 2,539, f.101.

16   There was a private entrance to Bennet’s and Williamson’s offices from the privy garden of the palace. Otherwise, a visitor would have to enter from the Stone Gallery through an outer door into a porch, guarded by a door-keeper. See: Marshall, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson and the Conduct of Administration in Restoration England’, HR, vol. 69, pp.21–2.

17   Was one safe house the home of the astronomer Sir Paul Neale (1613–86)? He received £38 from secret funds for his ‘lodging in Whitehall’ from 23 November 1678 to 31 July 1679. Neale had become MP for Newark in 1673 but because the election was contested, he was not allowed to take his seat in the Commons and the vote was declared void in 1677. See Akerman (ed.), Moneys received and paid for Secret Services of Charles II and James II from 30 March 1679 to 25 December 1688, p.5. Williamson had his own house in Scotland Yard, off Parliament Street.

18   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.160.

19   Expenditure on Britain’s three intelligence agencies – the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) the Security Service (MI5) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the equivalent of the USA’s National Security Agency) – is contained in the ‘Single Intelligence Account’ which totalled £1.9 billion in 2014–15, plus a further £123 million for cyber-security funding. For security reasons, the individual budgets of the agencies are not published.

20   BL Add. MS. 28,077, f.139. The hearth tax was imposed in 1662–89 and involved a householder paying one shilling (5 pence) for every hearth or stove twice a year, at Michaelmas (25 September) and on Lady Day (25 March). In 1674, John Cecil, Fifth Earl of Exeter, had to pay for seventy hearths in Burghley House, at Stamford, Lincolnshire.

21   Akerman (ed.), Moneys received and paid for Secret Services of Charles II and James II from 30 March 1679 to 25 December 1688, pp. x and 7.

22   RCHM Fifteenth Report, appendix, pt. 7, p.170.

23   Book of Daniel, chapter 2, verse 44.

24   Book of Revelations, chapter 13, verses 17–18.

25   At least they were consistent in the vilification of their rulers: Cromwell, they declared, had been a Babylonian tyrant.

26   Samuel Pepys records in his Diary for 9 January 1661: ‘Waked in the morning about six o’clock by people running up and down . . . talking that the fanatics were up in arms in the City. So I rose and went forth, where in the street I found everybody in arms at the doors. So I returned (though with no good courage . . .) and got my sword and pistol, [for] which I had no powder to charge . . .’. The next day, he was horrified to hear that the ‘fanatics . . . have routed all the Trained Bands [London militia] that they met with, put the king’s life guards to the run, killed about twenty men . . . and all this in the daytime when all the City was in arms’. ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 1, pp.298–9.

27   Capp, ‘A Door of Hope Re-opened: the Fifth Monarchy, King Charles and King Jesus’, Jnl of Religious History, vol. 32, pp.16–30. For more information on the Fifth Monarchists, see Capp’s The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth century English Millenarianism (London, 1977) and Champlin Burrage, ‘The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections’, EHR, vol. 25, pp.741–3.

28   The first issue of the newspaper, on 7 November 1665, was published under the title Oxford Gazette, as the court had fled to that city because of the epidemic of bubonic plague raging in London. It reported that the ‘bill of mortality’ (or death toll) in London that week was 1,359, of which 1,050 were from plague – a decrease of 428. It became the London Gazette on 5 February 1666.

29   ‘Magalotti, Relazione,’ pp.44–5.

30   ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 3, pp.30–31. 6 February 1663.

31   ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 5, p.223. 1 March 1666.

32   ‘Evelyn Diary’, vol. 2, p.300.

33   ‘Magalotti, Relazione,’ p.44, although the Italian’s estimate was probably exaggerated. See also Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.36 and, by the same author, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson’, ODNB, vol. 59, pp.352–6 and ‘Sir Joseph Williamson and the Conduct of Administration in Restoration England’, HR, vol. 69, pp.18–41.

34   B. L. Egerton MS 2,539, ff.142–3. For details of the pay of the secretaries of state, see F. M. Greir Evans, ‘Emoluments of the Principal Secretaries of State in the seventeenth century’, EHR, vol. 35, pp.513–28.

35   Marshall, ‘Henry Bennet, first earl of Arlington, ODNB, vol. 5, p.102.

36   Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, p.174.

37   Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, pp.178–9.

38   For more information on the northern rebellion, see Gee, ‘A Durham and Newcastle plot in 1663’, Archaeologia Aeolian, third s., vol. 14 (1917), pp.145–56 and Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Plot, 1663’, Yorkshire Archaeological Jnl, vol. 31 (1932–4), pp.348–59, who notes that the fears of Whitehall officials seemed to have ‘caused something in the nature of a panic which were not justified’ (pp.358–9). For the grisly fate of some of those caught up in the northern rebellion, see Raine, J. (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York relating to Offences Committed in the Northern Counties . . ., Surtees Society, vol. 40.

39   CSP Domestic 1663–4, p.652.

40   Marshall, ‘William Leving’, ODNB, vol. 33, p.345. Jones was the author of the radical underground pamphlet verbosely titled ‘Mene Tekel or the Downfall of Tyranny wherein liberty and equity are vindicated, and tyranny condemned by the law of God and right reason, and the people’s power and duty to execute justice without and upon wicked governors, asserted by Laophilus Misotyrannus’. This angry, seditious document, published earlier in 1663, argued that kings were the servants of the people, were set up by the people and therefore could be removed by the people. With memories of the bloody fate of Charles I still fresh, it was inevitable that its publication touched a raw nerve in the Restoration government.

41   Lambert (1619–84) was accused of high treason at the Restoration and spent the last twenty-four years of his life a prisoner, firstly in the Channel Island of Guernsey and latterly on Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound where he died in March 1674.

42   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.156.

43   TNA, SP 29/97/41, f.54; Sir Roger Langley to Bennet, 3 April 1664. SP 29/97/201, f.32; Sir Roger Langley to Secretary Bennet, York, 23 April 1664.

44   TNA, SP 29/97/75, f.130. One of the earliest documented examples of a career as an informer in England was George Whelplay, a London haberdasher, who conceived the idea after being sent to Southampton to investigate the customs service in the port, by Henry VIII’s enforcer, Thomas Cromwell. See G.R. Elton, ‘Informing for Profit: A Sidelight on Tudor Methods of Law Enforcement’, Cambridge Hf, vol. 11 (1954), pp.149–67. Elton points out that Whelplay received ‘precious little out of bustling activity which, despite its essentially sordid air, had not a little of the pathetic about it’.

45   CSP Domestic 1663–4, p.629.

46   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.221. If this story is true, Blood must have met de Rutyer before his departure in early May on a naval expedition to the coast of West Africa where he recaptured some of the Dutch slave stations briefly held by the English. He then crossed the Atlantic to raid English colonies in North America. In April 1665, de Rutyer was in Barbados.

47   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.222.

48   TNA, SP 29/102/48, f.57.

49   TNA, SP 29/102/49, f.59. Order by the commissioners for the repair of the Tower of London; 12 September 1664.

50   CSP Ireland 1663–3, p.459. Major Rawdon to Viscount Conway, Lisburn, 20 December 1664.

51   TNA, SP 29/121/131, f.175. List of thirty-one disaffected persons in London.

52   CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.259. Williams to Secretary Bennet, 18 March 1665.

53   CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.259. Williams to Secretary Bennet, 18 March, 1665.

54   The alias of the Fifth Monarchist Captain Edward Carey, who escaped from a messenger (an arresting officer) in 1664.

55   CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.259. Williams and John Betson to Sir Roger Langley, London, 18 March 1665.

56   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.158. Petty France was so called because of the number of French merchants who lived there. The street was later renamed York Street.

57   This was probably the chamber mentioned during the interrogation of William Ashenhurst, a prisoner in the White Lion prison in Southwark. He said the conspirators ‘sometimes stayed there all night and some bring arms [and] looking through the keyhole, he heard them in earnest discourse [about] something to be done’ the following April (TNA, SP 29/115/44, f.124). The White Lion was one of four prisons located between Newcomen Street and St George’s church on the east side of Borough High Street, Southwark, the others being the King’s Bench and Marshalsea (both dating back to the fourteenth century) and the House of Correction.

58   Blood’s notebook suggests that the court martial was held there (Bod Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, ff.473–5). Coleman Street runs from Gresham Street to London Wall and a congregation of Anabaptists was active there during this period. Swan Lane was also a known haunt of Fifth Monarchists. (See: Champlin Burrage, ‘The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections’, EHR, vol. 25, pp.724–5.

59   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.222–3; Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.183.

60   The winter of 1664/5 was particularly cold, with the ground frozen from December to March and the River Thames twice blocked to river traffic by thick ice.

61   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.161–2; CSP Domestic 1664–5, p.271.

62   TNA, SP 29/103/21, f.13.

63   Marshall, ‘William Leving’, ODNB, vol. 33, p.545. The earliest cases occurred in the spring of 1665 in a parish outside the city walls called St Giles-in-the-Fields. The death rate began to rise during the summer months and peaked in September when 7,165 Londoners died in one week.

64   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, f.474.

65   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.101. Browne was involved in the Dublin Castle plot, liaising between ‘the fanatics of England and Ireland’.

66   The French periwig or ‘peruke’ became fashionable for men of high social standing after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. Wearing the wig, which had shoulder-length or longer human hair, had its own problems. Pepys, in his Diary for 18 July 1664, noted: ‘Thence to Westminster to my barber’s [Mr Jervas] to have my periwig [that] he lately made me cleansed of its nits which vexed me cruelly that he should put such a thing into my hands.’ (vol. 4, p.178).

67   CSP Ireland 1663–5, p.662. Orrery to Secretary Arlington, Dublin, 8 November 1665.

68   The naval war against the United Provinces of the Netherlands was fought between 4 March 1665 and 31 July 1667. The Royal Navy won an initial victory at the Battle of Lowestoft on 13 June 1665 and although both sides claimed victory in the so-called ‘Four Days Battle’ of 1–4 June 1666, the English ships suffered considerable damage. After the Dutch had blockaded the Thames estuary, the St James’s Day Battle (25 July 1666) off Kent’s North Foreland was another victory for the English fleet. When fighting resumed in the spring of 1667 the Dutch sailed into the Thames and destroyed warships in the River Medway in one of the most humiliating defeats suffered by the Royal Navy.

69   TNA, SP 29/147/115, f.147.

70   This area, once in the suburbs of Dublin, surrounds a small valley with a tributary of the River Poddle, otherwise known as the Coombe Stream. In the late seventeenth century it was the centre of the local weaving or clothing industry.

71   TNA, SP 63/320/45, f.1. Earl of Orrery to Ormond, Charleville, Co. Cork, 12 February 1666. Charleville was founded by Orrery in 1661 and named after Charles II.

72   TNA, SP 63/320/45, f.2. ?Dame Dorcas Lane to her husband, Sir George Lane, 8 February 1666.

73   Was this Blood’s little joke? Morton was the name of an assiduous London magistrate.

74   In April 1662, the canton of Berne granted Ludlow protection for him to live in the area.

75   Blood’s notebook records him being ‘a prisoner in Zeeland’. Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185 f.473v. entry no. 39.

76   Phelps (c. 1619–after 1666) was clerk of the high court trying Charles I for his life. At the Restoration, he escaped prosecution. He lived in exile in Lausanne and Vevey, Switzerland. A black marble monument to his memory was erected in the Swiss Reformed church of St Martin, Vevey, in 1882 by William Phelps of New Jersey, American ambassador to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Dr Charles A. Phelps of Massachusetts, ‘descendants from across the seas’.

77   TNA, SP 9/32/313. Williamson’s address book.

78   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.201–2 and, by the same author, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, HJ, vol. 32, pp.576–8.

79   CSP Ireland 1666–9, p.80. Ormond to Arlington, Dublin Castle, 2 April 1666. The matter had taken some time to reach this stage: Captain Barnes had petitioned Ormond to become custodian of Blood’s lands in February 1664 (Bod. Lib. Carte MS 159, ff.175 and 175v).

80   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 43, f.505. The king to Ormond, Whitehall, 11 April 1666. TNA, SP 63/320/129, f.2.

81   Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, Hf, vol. 32, p.576; TNA, 84/180/62, intercepted letter from Ludlow.

82   All three were executed in London on 19 April 1662. At the Restoration, Downing had been rewarded for his loyalty by the grant of land adjoining St James’s Park which became Downing Street.

83   Blood’s opinion of Ludlow appears in A Modest Vindication, p.2.

84   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, ff.357. Arlington to Ormond, Whitehall, 26 August 1666.

85   TNA, SP 29/168/148, f.148. Grice to [Williamson], 24 August 1666. Grice clearly had been involved on the periphery of the Dublin Castle plot, as he named seven of its conspirators (including Lieutenant Colonel Jones, late governor of the castle) on condition the promise to him that he would not be called as a witness was kept. Grice, a former parliamentary cavalry cornet, had spied for Sir Arthur Heselrige, governor of Newcastle, during the Civil War. See: TNA, SP 46/95/72 and 46/95/78.

86   CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.64. Grice had his enemies. The marshal, Gilbert Thomas, told Arlington the following October that Grice ‘is too large in his discourses’ and was a ‘babbling fellow’. Ibid., p.178.

87   A note from Gilbert Thomas, marshal of the Gatehouse prison in Westminster, to Arlington, dated 2 May 1666 reports where ‘Allen, if he be Blood, doth lodge or lye’. TNA, SP 29/155/17, f.24.

88   TNA, SP 63/321/164, f.55. Orrery to Arlington, Charleville, 22 September 1666.

89   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.52r. Notes on persons suspected of complicity in seditious plots in Ireland.

90   It destroyed 13,200 homes, eighty-seven parish churches and St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as a number of official buildings such as the Royal Exchange.

91   London Gazette,no. 85,Monday, 10 September 1666, p.1, col.1. Some of the French and Dutch had ‘little hand-grenades about the size of a ball which they carried in their pockets’ (HMC, ‘le Fleming’, p.41). Patrick Hubert, a French-born watchmaker, claimed to have started the fire as an agent of Pope Alexander VII. Despite doubts about his mental state and fitness to plead, he was hanged on 28 September.

92   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 4, p.462. Sir Robert Southwell to Ormond, 22 October 1678.

93   TBA, SP 29/173/132, f.206. Arlington also told Ormond on 7 September that ‘we are reasonably secure the quiet of the kingdom will not be discomposed [by the fire] not being able, by any of the circumstances, to trace out or suspect that it was either contrived or fomented by any of the discontented party’ (Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, ff.363–4). A correspondent of Lord Conway also assured him ‘there was nothing of a plot in this, though the people would think otherwise and lay it on the French or Dutch or on the fanatics breaking out so near 3 September their celebrated day of triumph. Others lay it on the papists because some of them are said to be now in arms but it is merely as militia men. The stories of making and casting of fireballs, when traced, are found to be fictitious.’ TNA, SP 29/450/712, f.46.

94   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.54v. Arlington to Sir George Lane. Blood had been in Lancashire and had come close to arrest after the Great Fire of London. Whitehall, 6 September 1666.

95   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 46, f.383. Arlington to Ormond, Whitehall, 12 October 1666.

96   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.128.

97   CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.349. Leving to Arlington, 15 December 1666.

98   London Gazette, issue 106, 19–22 November 1666, p.2 col.2; HMC ‘le Fleming, p.43.

99   B.L. Add. MS 23,125, f.198r. Declaration by the Pentland rebels.

100 B.L. Add. MS 23,125, f.149r. Sir Peter Wedderburn, clerk to the Privy Council, to the Duke of Lauderdale.

101 London Gazette, issue 110, 3–6 December 1666, p.2, cols. 1 and 2.

102 Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.125.

103 Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.75.

104 TNA, SP 29/196/6, f.6. Sir P. M[usgrave] to Williamson, 1 April 1667. Lady Burghclere, in her biography of Ormond, maintains that Blood ‘was present at the Battle of Pentland Hills on 26 November 1666 and when the insurgents were routed, he contrived, after his usual fashion to make good his escape’ (Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.184).

105 Bod. Lib. Carte MS 35, f.146r. List of persons declared rebels [in Scotland] by proclamation.

106 CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.545.

107 CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.463.

108 ‘Remarks . . .’, p.223.

CHAPTER 4: A FRIEND IN NEED

1     ‘Remarks . . .’, p.225.

2     CSP Domestic 1666–7, p.537: ‘All proclaimed persons [were] to be brought before Lord Arlington, should [they] be found in London and Westminster. It should also warrant a search for arms in the houses where they are taken’. The warrant was granted on 2 March.

3     Leving claimed to be paid £20 a year as a spy – equivalent in modern purchasing power to just over £2,500 per annum.

4     Thomas Gardiner, controller of the Post Office in London, had reports of ‘several robberies about Leeds lately. Leving, one of the thieves is taken; Freer, another, has gone to London and has been several times with Lord Arlington.’ CSP Domestic 1667, p.114. A warrant for Freer’s arrest ‘for dangerous and seditious practices’ had been issued earlier that month; ibid., p.114

5     CSP Domestic 1667, p.114. A reward of £10 was offered for Freer’s arrest. A warrant for his detention was issued ‘at court at Whitehall’ in May, for his ‘dangerous and seditious practices’. TNA, SP 29/201/93, f.108.

6     TNA, SP 29/201/39, f.46. John Mascall to Williamson, York, 18 May 1667.

7     TNA, SP 29/209/44, f.54. W.L[eving] to Lord Arlington, Newgate, 11 July 1667.

8     CSP Domestic 1667, p.310. Mason had been held in the Tower since 15 June. Two weeks later, his married sister Joan Prestwood received permission to visit him. CSP Domestic 1667, pp.193 and 245.

9     Now the Life Guards, the senior regiment of the British Army, which, with the Blues and Royals, forms the sovereign’s Household Cavalry. The regiment was formed in 1658 and its third troop, made up of exiled Royalists, became the Duke of York’s troop. It was originally recruited from gentlemen and its corporals were commissioned, and had a rank equivalent to lieutenants in the remainder of the army.

10   Darririgton is split in two by the London-Scotland A1 trunk road (or the old Great North Road), with the M62 motorway junction nearby.

11   HMC ‘le Fleming’, p.52.

12   TNA, SP 29/211/60, f.61.

13   It has been claimed, without evidence, that Lockyer was married to one of Blood’s sisters (Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, fn. p.236).

14   Possibly the present-day Spread Eagle, or the demolished Crown Inn, once located on the crossroads in Darrington.

15   Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.184.

16   From the now illegal sport of cock-fighting (popular in the seventeenth century in England), meaning to fight pluckily.

17   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.223–5.

18   Under the Statute of Winchester of 1285 (13 Edward 1, caps. 1 & 4) the ‘Hue and Cry’, under common law, required every able-bodied citizen to assist in the arrest of someone witnessed in committing a crime. This pursuit could run from town to town and county to county until the felon was detained and handed over to a sheriff. In Mason’s case, the crime would be escaping from custody.

19   TNA, SP 29/210/151, f.173. William Leving to Arlington, 25 July 1667.

20   TNA, SP 29/211/17, f.18. Mascall to Williamson, York, 27 July 1667.

21   Wheeler was also an MP, having defeated Sir Christopher Wren by a narrow majority in a by-election for the Cambridge University seat on 8 March that year.

22   TNA, SP 29/211/60, ff.61–2. Darcy to Sir Charles Wheeler, York, 29 July 1667. Some of the troopers reportedly died later from their wounds (Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood . . ., p.60).

23   Andrew Browning (ed.), Memoirs of Sir John Reresby (Glasgow, 1936) pp.69–70.

24   Bod. Lib. English History MS C.487, Ludlow, Voyce from the Watch Tower, f.1265

25   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.225–6.

26   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, f.473v, entries 47–53.

27   CSP Domestic 1667, p.285.

28   TNA, SP 29/212/6, f.6, Betson to Arlington, 1 August 1667.

29   TNA, SP 45/12/246 (damaged); SAL Proclamations, Charles II, vol. 14 (1667–84), f15. Whitehall, 8 August 1667.

30   CSP Domestic 1667, p.345.

31   TNA, SP 2/212/70, f.74. Leving to Robert Benson, York Castle, 5 August 1667.

32   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, f.473v, entry 51.

33   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.167–8.

34   Buckingham had been accused of ‘holding secret correspondence about the raising of mutinies’ within the army and ‘seditions among the people, he having resisted the messenger sent to apprehend him and withdrawn to some obscure place’ according to the proclamation seeking his arrest. CSP Domestic, 1666–7, p.553

35   A Pritchard, ‘A Defence of His Private Life by the Second Duke of Buckingham’, HLQ, vol. 44, pp. 157–77 and Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.168.

36   CSP Domestic 1667, p.427. Freer to Williamson, Bradford, 31 August 1667.

37   TNA, SP 29/218/18, f.27. Freer to Arlington, York Castle, 28 September 1667.

38   CSP Domestic 1667, p.465.

39   CSP Domestic 1667, p.465.

40   Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood . . ., p.63.

41   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.226.

42   HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e6). Testimony of Samuel Holmes.

43   Ibid., (e7). Testimony of Holmes’s servant.

44   Ibid., (e9). Testimony of Samuel Weyer.

45   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.85, f.474.

46   HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e5). Testimony of Mrs Elizabeth Price.

47   TNA, ASSI 35/111/5, f.4 and HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(g3).

48   HoL Record Office HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e13). Testimony of Barnaby Bloxton, tailor.

49   Ibid., (e10) and (e11). Testimonies of William Gant and William Mumford.

50   Ibid., (g4). Receipt of Thomas Hunt for sword, belt and pistol.

51   Its first appearance in literature seems to have been in Eugene Sue’s novel Memoirs of Matilda, published in 1846, although it was being used in common parlance much earlier.

CHAPTER 5: AN INCIDENT IN ST JAMES’S

1     TNA, SP 29/281/75 f.101. Benson to Williamson, Wrenthorpe, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire, 24 December 1670.

2     The curious name of ‘Piccadilly’ is traditionally believed to be a reference to the ruff collars called ‘pickadels’ made in the area in the seventeenth century. An alternative explanation refers to its location on the outskirts of built-up London, from the old Dutch pickedillekens, meaning the extremity or utmost part of anything. Dasent, Piccadilly in Three Centuries, pp.8–9. The first reference to it as a street name is about 1673, although there is a reference in the rate-book of St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1627 to ‘Picadilly’. Part of it was officially known as Portugal Street, named in honour of Charles II’s Portuguese-born queen Catherine of Braganza, although this name was not used by the general populace.

3     Tyburn Lane is today’s Park Lane. Executions were staged here from the twelfth century. In 1571, the ‘Tyburn Tree’ was erected on the execution site. This consisted of a horizontal wooden triangle supported by three tall uprights which allowed three felons to be hanged simultaneously. In January 1661, the disinterred corpses of Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw (who presided over the trial of Charles I) and the parliamentary general Henry Ireton, who died of a fever at Limerick in November 1651, were hanged from this triple gibbet in a macabre act of royal revenge. The name of Tyburn originated in the stream that rises in South Hampstead, flows south through Regent’s Park and empties in St James’s Park. Today its course runs through underground conduits.

4     In today’s purchasing power, the cost would be between £5,240,000 and £6,550,000. Clarendon had bought stone originally purchased to repair the medieval St Paul’s Cathedral, destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Doubtless the price for this building material was cheap. Sir Roger Pratt, the architect, employed more than 300 masons, bricklayers and labourers.

5     Clarendon House was demolished in 1683 and speculative builders constructed Bond, Dover and Albermarle Streets on its site.

6     Ormond was removed as lord lieutenant in March 1669, largely through the intrigues of his political enemies, Buckingham and the Earl of Orrery. See: Barnard, ‘James Butler, first duke of Ormond’, ODNB, vol. 9, 153–63; Beckett, ‘The Irish Viceroyalty in the Restoration Period’, TRHS, vol. 20, pp.53–72 and McGuire, ‘Why was Ormond Dismissed in 1669?’ Irish Historical Studies, vol. 18, pp.295–312. In the early 1660s, Ormond purchased Moor Park in Hertfordshire and sold it at a profit in 1670, briefly renting Clarendon House as his London base.

7     Dasent, Piccadilly in Three Centuries, pp.38–9.

8     The hospital was dedicated to St James the Less, hence the name both of the palace and this area of London.

9     Ben Weinreb & Christopher Hibbert (eds.), London Encyclopedia, p.721; Norman Brett-James, Growth of Stuart London, p.369. In 1670 an Act was passed for the repair of London’s highways ‘now generally soiled by the extraordinary and unreasonable loading of waggons and other carriages and the neglect of repairing and preserving the same’ (London Streets, Paving, Cleansing Act, 22 Caro. II, cap. 17).

10   The treaty formally recognised English claims to the Dutch colony of New Netherlands on the eastern seaboard of North America. New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Manhattan River, was captured by a small English naval force in 1664 and was renamed New York, after James, Duke of York. It was retaken by Dutch forces in August 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, but returned to England by the Treaty of Westminster in February 1674.

11   Charles II eventually had fourteen illegitimate children by seven mistresses.

12   They married in 1677 and the Dutch prince became William III of England and Orange in 1689. See: Trost, William III the Stadtholder King: A Political Biography, pp.62–4.

13   HMC ‘le Fleming’, p.73.

14   Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p186; Chancellor, Memorials of St James’s Street, p.188.

15   CSP Venice 1669–70, p.305.

16   The forerunner of the Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market was located at the southern end of this piazza from 1657.

17   Livesey was rumoured to have been murdered by Royalists in the Netherlands in 1660 but he was reported alive and well in Hanau in Hesse, Germany, soon after and later in Rotterdam in 1665, where he probably died in the same year.

18   ‘Lords Jnls’, vol. 12, 1666–75, p.448. 9 March 1671.

19   Sometimes called the ‘Buffalo Head’ tavern.

20   The Bull Head tavern, which occupied the eastern portion of the tenement at 57 Charing Cross, had been a public house since at least 1636. See: G. H. Gater and E. P. Wheeler (eds.), Survey of London, vol. 16, ‘St Martin-in-the-Fields. 1 – Charing Cross’ (London, 1935), p.122. The diarist Samuel Pepys was an occasional imbiber within its portals. He recorded on 1 September 1660 that he dined at the Bull Head with friends ‘upon the best venison pasty that ever I eat of in my life and with one dish more, it was the best dinner I ever was at’ (‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 1, p.216). The pasty was so good, he returned three days later to finish it off.

21   Canary wine, or ‘sack’ was a fortified white wine with a yellowish tint, imported from the Canary Islands off the north-western coast of Africa. It must have resembled present-day malmsey. Shakespeare refers to canary wine in Twelfth Night (Act 1, scene 3, line 74) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act 3, scene 2, line 83).

22   A person who grazes or feeds cattle up for market.

23   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(b). The affidavit was signed by William Pretty, but William Wilson, who plainly could not write, could only scrawl an ‘X’ as his mark. It was witnessed by Robert Joyner, landlord of the Bull Head tavern, and his wife Margery.

24   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(o): Information ‘given to Arlington concerning the persons who assaulted the duke of Ormond’. The persons named were ‘all . . . desperate men, who shelter themselves under the notion of Fifth Monarchy men’.

25   RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.155.

26   Ormond’s account of the attack unfortunately does not survive.

27   Knight, Encyclopaedia of London, pp.230–2 and Caulfield, Portraits, Memoirs and Characters . . ., vol. 2, pp.177–81.

28   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.206.

29   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.226.

30   Berkeley House was constructed in 1665 for Lord Berkeley of Stratton, a Royalist army officer in the Civil Wars whose name appears in Berkeley Square, Berkeley and Stratton Streets in the vicinity. In 1733, Berkeley House was gutted by a fire started when a workman’s pot of glue boiled over. The shell was pulled down and Devonshire House erected on the site in 1734–7 for William Cavendish, Third Duke of Devonshire, as his London residence. It was sold by the Ninth Duke in 1918 and was demolished in 1924, with a new block, also called Devonshire House, built on frontage overlooking Piccadilly, opposite the Ritz Hotel.

31   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, pp.188–9; Chancellor, Memorials of St James’s Street, p.189.

32   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.443.

33   The horse ferry, originally owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, was leased to Mrs Leventhorpe in 1664 and operated by her family for many years. Lambeth Bridge was first built in 1862. The nearby Horseferry Road takes its name from the ferry.

34   RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.155.

35   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.189.

36   CSP Domestic 1670, p.571.

37   An old term for the hindquarters of a horse.

38   CSP Venice, p.36.

39   CSP Domestic 1670, p.567.

40   Frying Pan Alley, between Bell Lane and Sandy’s Row, remains today, a narrow thoroughfare overshadowed on its eastern end by the thirty-three floors of the modern Nido Tower. It got its name because it was originally occupied by numerous ironmongers and braziers who hung frying pans outside their shops as a symbol of their trade.

41   ‘Stuff’ is a coarse, thickly woven cloth formerly manufactured in Kidderminster, Worcestershire. Originally it was probably made entirely of wool, but later with a warp of linen, yarn and a worsted web. Lawyers’ gowns in England are still made of ‘stuff’ while those worn by queen’s counsels are of silk – hence the distinguishing nickname for QCs of ‘silks’.

42   This refers to a row of red-brick houses erected by the Earl of Craven in 1665 to receive victims of the Great Plague of London on the site of a defensive battery and breastwork erected in 1642 by order of Parliament to protect the western outskirts of London. The pest houses were also known more prosaically as ‘Five Houses’ or ‘Seven Chimneys’.

43   Tothill Fields occupied a roughly diamond-shaped area, south of St James’s Park, which today would be bounded by Vauxhall Bridge Road, Francis and Regency Streets. Vincent Square occupies the central portion. The name ‘Tothill’ is probably derived from a ‘toot’, or beacon mound, and the name was most likely given to this district from a beacon being placed here on the highest spot in the flat lands of Westminster. See: Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, Old and New London, vol. 4, pp.14–26.

44   Smitham Bottom, which today is part of Coulsdon and has the A23 Brighton Road running through it, is located at the junction of three dry valleys which flooded in the seventeenth century. It expanded greatly in the nineteenth century because of the construction of the London-Brighton railway.

45   London Gazette, issue 529, 8–12 December 1670, p.2, col. 2.

46   London Gazette, issue 531, 15 December–19 December 1670, p.2, col. 2.

47   Viner lent large sums of money to pay for the extravagances at court. He showed Pepys over his fine mansion at Swakeleys at Ickenham in Middlesex, including ‘a black boy that he had [as a servant] that died of a consumption. He caused him to be dried in an oven and lies there entire in a box.’ ‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 5, p.64; 7 September 1665.

48   RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.155.

49   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e3). Deposition of Margaret Boulter, 10 December 1670.

50   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352 (h4). Halliwell’s letter, endorsed: ‘Fifth Monarchy’, seized by Sir Robert Viner at Halliwell’s home in Frying Pan Alley.

51   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h1) and (h2).

52   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h8).

53   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h6). Halliwell’s letter to Howell, a constable.

54   The Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion (12 Caro. II, cap. 11) became law on 29 August 1660 and pardoned all those fighting for Parliament during the Civil War, save those with a direct hand in the execution of Charles I.

55   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(h7) – Halliwell’s letter to Sir Richard Ford, lord mayor. Halliwell was a cavalry cornet in the parliamentary army. The ‘Act of Free and General Pardon’ forgave treasons and other offences committed since 1 January 1637.

56   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352 (e12 and h9). Statement by Katherine Halliwell before Arlington, 10 December 1670, and petition of Katherine Halliwell, 26 January 1671.

57   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(c1). Information of William Done and (c2) information of John Jones, victualler of the White Swan.

58   Arundel House, demolished in the late 1670s, was located between the Strand and the River Thames, near the church of St Clement Danes.

59   The ‘Heaven’ tavern adjoined Westminster Hall. There were two other alehouses nearby, called ‘Hell’ and ‘Purgatory’, that dated from the Tudor period.

60   RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, pp.155–6.

61   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(c4). Information of Thomas Trishaire and W. Taylor.

62   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(d1). Examination of John Hurst, taken before Arlington on 17 December.

63   HMS Portland was a fifty-gun fourth-rate frigate launched at Wapping in 1653 and burnt to avoid capture in 1692. The eighth Royal Navy ship to bear this name, a ‘Duke’ class Type 23 frigate, was launched in 1999 and commissioned in May 2004.

64   TNA, SP 29/281/77 f.103.

65   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e6). Evidence of Samuel Holmes.

66   The Gatehouse prison was built in 1370 as the gatehouse of Westminster Abbey and first used as a prison by the abbot. It was used to detain those awaiting trial for felonies and petty offences as well as state prisoners. It was demolished in 1776 and its site is now marked by the column of Westminster School’s Crimean War and Indian Mutiny memorial, erected in 1861 in Broad Sanctuary.

67   CSP Domestic 1670, p.573.

68   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(e2 and e4). Evidence of John Buxton.

69   CSP Domestic 1670, p.573.

70   RCHM, Eighth Report, part 1, appendix, p.156.

71   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(l). Examination of Francis Johnson by Arlington, 19 December 1660.

72   This was Sebastian Jones, who had been condemned in Ireland for producing counterfeit coins and was afterwards convicted, with eight others, of stealing £1,500 of silver plate from the Earl of Meath and from Alderman Pennington’s home in Dublin. The others were executed, but Jones was due to be transported to the West Indies. He was pardoned, bailed and fled to England. He had offered a man called Sharpe, living in Soho, £50 to go to Ireland and retrieve the stolen plate ‘which was hidden underground’. Judge Morton employed Jones to find Blood and Moore in London ‘since he knew them in Ireland . . . and knew some acquaintances of theirs here’. CSP Domestic 1671, p.37.

73   Henry Davis, ‘one of the guards in the Queen’s troop’, had a sword which Thomas Peachy, one of Williamson’s informers, believed ‘to be the same as was taken from the attempted assassin of the Duke of Ormond and is deposited at Clarendon House’ (TNA, SP 29/281/24, f.28). Later, he retracted his suspicions of Davis’s involvement ‘in the horrid business connected with the Duke of Ormond’ and begged Williamson: ‘Do not inform Davis that I gave information against him.’ (TNA, SP 29/281/99, f.132.)

74   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p. 208.

75   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(g1). Judge Morton to Ormond.

76   The committee was nominally led by the lord chamberlain of the royal household, the sixty-eight-year-old Edward Montague, Second Earl of Manchester. It consisted of two marquises, twenty-three earls, two viscounts, twenty-seven dukes, the archbishops of Canterbury and York and ten Anglican bishops. Not all would have attended the committee hearings.

77   ‘Lords Jnls,’ vol. 12, 1666–75, p.404.

78   CSP Domestic 1670, pp.576 and 582.

79   RCHM, Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, pp.156 and 158.

80   An alcoholic drink made by infusing cherries and sugar in brandy. Perhaps Dixey’s brother was an imbiber?

81   CSP Domestic 1670, pp.615–16.

82   RCHM, Eighth Report, part 1, appendix, p.156.

83   TNA, SP 29/289/283 f.284. Petition ofThomas Drayton, constable, and Henry Partridge of Lambeth for £100 reward. ? April 1671.

84   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(g4). Receipt of Thomas Hunt, dated 17 October 1670, for sword, belt and pistol, from the custody of Thomas Drayton, constable of Lambeth.

85   Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood, p.19

86   ‘Lords Jnls’, vol. 12,1666–75, pp.447–8.

87   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.424.

88   Haley, The First Earl of Shaftsbury, p.188.

89   In November 1668, Sir Ellis Leighton, Buckingham’s secretary, told the French ambassador that Ormond was about to be removed and that this demonstrated the extent of Buckingham’s power and influence. (McGuire, ‘Why was Ormond Dismissed in 1669?’ Irish Historical Studies, vol. 18, p.299.)

90   Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, Hf, vol. 32, p.565.

91   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, p.448.

92   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, p.424.

93   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, pp.447–8.

94   HoL Record Office MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/344/352(g6). Thomas Allen to Mrs Mary Hunt at Mr Davies’ house at Mortlake, Surrey, 17 November 1670.

95   Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, Hf, vol. 32, p.566.

96   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.449.

97   ‘HoC Jnls’, vol. 9, 1667–87, p.188.

98   ‘Burnet’s History’, vol. 1, p.488 and Kennett, Compleat History of England . . ., vol. 3, p.280.

99   22 & 23 Caro. II, cap. 1. It was repealed in 1828.

100 Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.208.

101 TNA, SP 29/281/74, f.100. Robert Pitt to Prince Rupert, 23 December 1670.

102 TNA, SP 29/281/911, f.120.

103 Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.209.

CHAPTER 6: THE MOST AUDACIOUS CRIME

1     London Gazette, issue 572, 8–11 May 1671, p.2, col.2

2     Sitwell, Crown Jewels . . ., p.79.

3     ‘HoC Jnls’,vol. 6, p.276, 9 August 1649. Other royal regalia were stored in the Tower Wardrobe, the department of state that held hangings, jewellery and other items for the royal court.

4     These were purchased by a private individual at the sale of King Charles’s goods in 1649 and returned to his son Charles II after he was restored to the throne in 1660.

5     Sitwell, Crown Jewels . . ., p.79 and Cole, ‘Particulars relative to that portion of the Regalia of England which was made for the Coronation of King Charles the Second’, Archaeologia, vol. 29, p.262–5. Sitwell, Crown Jewels . . ., p.48.

6     Sitwell, Crown Jewels . . ., p.48 and p.44.

7     The ‘Black Prince’s Ruby’ was worn by Henry V on his helmet at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and was incorporated in the state crown by James I early in the seventeenth century. After the Crown Jewels were broken up under the Commonwealth, the gem was purchased by a London jeweller and goldsmith who sold it back to the monarchy at the Restoration. The Imperial State Crown was remodelled for the coronation of George VI (the present Queen’s father) in 1937, and incorporates more than 3,000 gemstones. See Treasury order for payment to Viner (BL Add. MSS 44,915, ff.1–2 and his receipt on f.3) and the list of regalia provided for Charles II’s coronation in Sir Gilbert Talbot’s custody (ibid., ff.5–12).

8     No regalia for the coronation of a queen was made as Charles II had not then married. When James II was crowned on 23 April 1685, new regalia had to be made for his queen, Mary of Modena. Lists of regalia for this coronation and their valuation are in BL Add. MSS 44,915, ff.43r.

9     Impey and Parnell, The Tower of London . . ., p.106.

10   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.97.

11   Dixon, Her Majesty’s Tower, vol. 2, pp. 244–7. Eleven German spies were imprisoned in the Martin Tower in 1914–16 and executed in the Tower of London, nine of them shot in the fortress’s indoor rifle firing range. Hence, the First World War saw more executions in the Tower than occurred in the reigns of the Tudors.

12   John Talbot was the nephew of Sir Gilbert Talbot. For Wythe Edwards’ wife, see Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.98.

13   TNA, WORK 31/22. Plans of Jewel House in Tower of London, 15 August 1702, and plan of first storey showing dining room, parlour, kitchen and staircase, dated 1668, both bearing the stamp ‘I.G.F.’ for Inspector General of Fortifications. A second drawing, WORK 31/68, shows a plan and section of the Jewel Tower in the early eighteenth century.

14   ‘Remarks . . .’,p.227.

15   Charlton, Tower of London: Its Buildings and Institutions, p.63.

16   The king gave with one hand and took away with the other. Talbot expected annual profits of £1,200 from the post, but received only £200 a year.

17   Younghusband, The Jewel House: an Account of the Many Romances connected with the Royal Regalia . . ., pp.177 and 247.

18   Charlton, Tower of London: Its Buildings and Institutions, p.63.

19   The Tower’s Royal Menagerie was founded in 1200 during the reign of King John (1199–1216) and was established for 600 years, drawing hundreds of visitors each year to see the animals there. In 1251 a ‘white bear’ was brought from Norway which was allowed to fish in the River Thames on the end of a stout cord. Four years later, Louis IX of France donated an African elephant. Acknowledging the menagerie’s value as an attraction, James I built stone viewing platforms in 1622. Finally, in 1831–2 the animals were transferred to the Zoological Society of London’s new buildings in Regent’s Park and the menagerie was closed in 1835.

20   Herostratus sought notoriety by burning down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. He was executed and mere mention of his name thereafter was forbidden under penalty of death. ‘Herostratus’ therefore has become a metonym for anyone who commits a crime in order to become notorious.

21   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.227.

22   Harrison was hung, drawn and quartered as a regicide at Charing Cross on 13 October 1660, ‘he looking as cheerful as any man who could do in that condition’ according to the diarist Samuel Pepys, who witnessed his execution (‘Pepys Diary’, vol. 1, p.241).

23   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.209.

24   BL Lansdowne MS 1,152, vol. 1, f.238r A former parliamentary colonel, John Rathbone, and seven other New Model Army officers and soldiers were found guilty at the Old Bailey in April 1666 of conspiring the death of Charles II and the overthrow of his government. The plot involved capture of the Tower of London, setting fire to the City of London and the Horse Guards being surprised in the inns where they were quartered, several ostlers having been suborned for that purpose. Alexander, who escaped capture, had acted as paymaster for the conspirators. The date of 3 September was chosen for the attempt because Lilly’s Almanack deemed this date to be especially lucky, as a ruling planet predicted the downfall of the monarchy.

25   BL Harley MS 6859, f.1. Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, f.471r.

26   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.227.

27   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, f.471r.

28   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.97; Hanrahan, Colonel Blood . . ., p.110.

29   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, ff.471v–472v.

30   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.97.

31   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, ff. 471v. Some accounts say it was four pairs of gloves.

32   Blood visited three or four more times, according to one account. (Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, ff. 471v).

33   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.97.

34   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.97.

35   BL Harley MS 6,859, f.5.

36   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.97.

37   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.227.

38   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.97.

39   A wooden tool with a heavy head and handle for ramming, or driving wedges.

40   London Gazette, 8–11 May 1671, issue 572, p.2, col. 2.

41   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, ff. 471r.

42   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.228.

43   Throughout Beckman’s life he had been fascinated by loud bangs and was injured in an accidental explosion which occurred while he was rigging up a firework display to celebrate the coronation of Charles II at Westminster on 23 April 1660. Later he turned to military engineering and mapped the defences of Tangier (the Moroccan port held by the English in 1661–84 after it had been ceded as part of the dowry of Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza. See BL Sloane MS 2,448, f.15 – ‘Necessities for fortifying Tangier’ by ‘T. S. Bekman’). In October 1663, he traitorously offered to help Spain capture Tangier and accepted part-payment for his information from the Duke of Medinaceli and later supplied the duke’s letters to the English consul at Cadiz. In early 1664 he returned to England, expecting a warm welcome. However, Arlington had been alerted about his dubious character, being warned by Colonel John Fitzgerald, deputy governor of Tangier, that ‘Beckman the intelligencer is to be feared’. His suspicions were confirmed when, unaware of the surveillance both he and the envoy were under, he visited the Dutch ambassador in London, offering a ‘free discourse of Tangier’. Charles himself ordered an investigation of Beckman’s movements and loyalties to be undertaken (Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MSS D.916, f.101. Marshal, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.180 and 184). Beckman found himself in the Tower for six months, from where he complained: ‘I have been a near half year a close prisoner only from one person’s [?Colonel Fitzgerald’s] malicious and false tongue.’ After this period in prison, Beckman was released and sent back to Tangier to draw up plans for stronger defences of the city, together with the Dutch engineer Bernard de Gomme (Jonathan Spain, ‘Sir Martin Beckman’, ODNB, vol. 6, p.741).

44   London Gazette, 8–11 May 1671, issue 572, p.2, col. 2; de Ros,Memorials of the Tower of London, p.198.

45   BL Harley MS 6,859, f.5; Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.98.

46   Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.142; ‘Remarks . . .’, p.228; Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.210. While other gems were recovered by a yeoman warder and ‘faithfully restored’, some were lost for ever. (Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.99). See also Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, ff.472v and Nigel Jones, ‘Blood, Theft and Arrears: Stealing the Crown Jewels’, History Today, vol. 61, pp.10–17.

47   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.98.

48   TNA, SP 29/289/187, f.366. Newsletter to Mr Kirke at Cambridge; Kennett, A Compleat History of England . . ., vol. 3, p.283.

49   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.98.

50   Robinson (1615–80), was lieutenant of the Tower of London in 1660–79 when he was dismissed. One of his duties was acting as jailer to political prisoners and he was accused in 1664 of taking ‘excessive fees’ from them. He was lord mayor of London in 1662–3 and Samuel Pepys was scornful of his talents, describing him as ‘a talking bragging bufflehead [fat-headed, foolish or stupid] . . . as very a coxcomb as I would have thought had been in the City . . . nor has he brains to outwit any ordinary tradesman’ (‘Pepys Diary’, 16 March 1663, vol. 3, p.65).

51   The larger knife remains in the Royal Armouries at Leeds, with the number X.214a. The smaller, which had the number X.214b, has been missing since 1983 and was finally deemed lost in 2002. Both daggers were deposited in the Armouries by the Royal Literary Fund in 1926, having being bequeathed to them in 1807 by Thomas Newton, a descendant of the scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac may have come by them through his post as firstly warden (1696) and later master of the Royal Mint (1699) located within the Tower of London. My grateful thanks are due to my good friend Philip J. Lankester and to Robert C. Woosnam-Savage, Curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries, for much help and assistance with the issue of the daggers. See also: Ffoulkes, ‘Daggers Attributed to Colonel Blood’, Antiquaries Jnl, vol. 7, pp. 139–40 and Caldwell and Wallace, ‘Ballocks, Dudgeons and Quhingearis: Three Scottish Daggers recently acquired by the Scottish Museum’, History Scotland, November-December 2003, pp.15–19.

52   Bod. Lib. English Letters D.37, f.84.

CHAPTER 7: A ROYAL PARDON

1     Hervey Redmond Morres, Second Viscount Mountmorres, History of the Principle Transactions of the Irish Parliament, vol. 1, p.273.

2     CSP Domestic 1671, p.244.

3     TNA, SP 29/289/187, f.366. Newsletter to Mr Kirke at Cambridge. London; 9 May 1671.

4     CSP Domestic 1671, p.247.

5     CSP Venice 1671–2, p.49. Alberti to the Doge and Senate of Venice. London, 22 May 1671.

6     The belt fastening clerical garb.

7     Humanity or sympathy.

8     Egmont Papers. BL Add. MS 47,128, f.13r. Poem attributed to Andrew Marvell.

9     See copies in the papers of Dr Nehemiah Grew of London (BL Sloane MS 1,941, f.18, in English and Latin) and in the papers of Dr Walter Charleton (d.1707) of Norwich (BL Sloane MS 3,413, f.29r, also in English and Latin).

10   BL Harley MSS 6,859, ff.1–17.

11   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.99.

12   Younghusband, The Jewel House . . ., p.187.

13   London Gazette, issue 572, 8–11 May 1671, p.2, col.2. HMC ‘le Fleming’, p.78. One account maintains that Perrot, not Thomas Blood junior, accompanied the colonel to the audience with Charles II.

14   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.194.

15   HMC ‘le Fleming’, p.78.

16   ‘Evelyn Diary’, vol. 2, p.259, 1 March 1671.

17   See Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, pp. 190–91.

18   Bod. Lib. MSS English Letters D.37, f.84.

19   Burghclere, Life of Ormond, vol. 2, p.190.

20   Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood, p.76.

21   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.228–9.

22   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.99.

23   RCHM, Sixth Report pt. 1, appendix, p.370. MSS of Sir Henry Ingilby, Ripley Castle, Yorkshire.

24   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.99; Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, pp.422–3; RCHM, Fourth Report, pt. 1, report and appendix, p.370.

25   In the seventeenth century, the waters of the River Thames were still so clean that noblemen who lived in the string of great houses along the Strand in Westminster used to bathe in it frequently. In the reign of Charles I this was the regular practice of Lord Northampton; and Sir Dudley North swam so ‘constantly that he could live in the water an afternoon with as much ease as others walk upon land’ (Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 3, p, 309). Charles II was a keen swimmer.

26   Because the Thames was broader and shallower before it was embanked in the Victorian period, its flow was much slower and it was frequently frozen over for some days in the seventeenth centuries, as in 1663, 1666 and 1677. The mean temperatures in centigrade for November and December 1670 have been estimated at 6^° and 3^°, and for January, February and March 1671, 4^°, 3.5^° and 5^° respectively (see: Gordon Manley, ‘Central England Monthly Mean Temperatures 1659–1973’, Quarterly Jnl Royal Meteorological Society, vol. 100 (1974), p.393.

27   TNA, SP 29/293/28, f.31. ‘Notes by Williamson of information received by Blood and others’, 21 September 1671.

28   ‘Lords Jnls’, vol. 12, p.514, col. 2. 22 April 1671.

29   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.210.

30   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.99.

31   Kippis, Biographia Britannia, vol. 2, p.823.

32   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.229.

33   Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, p.89; Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, pp.210–1.

34   John Oldmixon, History of England during the reigns of the House of Stuart (London, 1730), vol. 1, p.500.

35   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.228.

36   RCHM Sixth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.370.

37   TNA, SP 44/34/86, f.87. Warrant to keeper of Gatehouse prison to receive John Buxton, 15 May 1671.

38   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.212.

39   CSP Domestic 1671, p.244.

40   TNA, SP 29/290/11, f.15. ‘Colonel Blood to the King’. The Tower, 19 May 1671.

41   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.205.

42   RCHM Eighth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.159.

43   CSP Domestic 1671, p.413.

44   J. Hartley, History of the Westminster Election . . . (second edn., London, 1765), p.79.

45   For example, N&Q, vol. 154 (1928), p.10; Jones, ‘Blood, Theft and Arrears: Stealing the Crown Jewels’, History Today, vol. 61, pp.10–17.

46   CSP Domestic 1671, p.300. Ironically, Morton wanted to question Blood and Perrot about a Colonel Barrow, alias Johnson, who was suspected of sedition and conspiracy. He had called at Barrow’s home but the suspect escaped. Later Morton applied to Williamson for a warrant to question Perrot, citing Barrow’s involvement in the plot to capture Dublin Castle and also naming him as an associate of Blood ‘in the intended rising on the plague time in London’ (Sergeant, Rogues and Scoundrels, p.147).

47   CSP Venice 1671–2, p.74. Alberti to the Doge and Senate, London, 12 June 1671.

48   CSP Domestic 1671, p.351.

49   ‘R.S.P.’ – ‘Free pardon’, N&Q, vol. 175 (1938), p.104.

50   This measure became the Declaration of Indulgence in March 1672, which the following year was withdrawn, following parliamentary pressure. For further information see Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence 1672 . . .

51   Bod. Lib. MS English history, C.487, Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch-tower, f.1265.

52   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp. 195–6.

53   Hanrahan, Colonel Blood . . ., p.136; Abbott, Colonel Thomas Blood . . ., p.88. CSP Domestic 1671, p.496.

54   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 69, f.164r. Blood’s apology to Ormond.

55   Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster . . ., vol. 1, p.100.

56   Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, pp.446–7.

57   CSP Domestic 1671, p.385.

58   CSP Domestic 1671, pp.457 and TNA, SP 44/34/115, f.116. Their lands were also restored: see Shaw (ed.), Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 3 (1669–72), p.1168.

59   The crime of failing to report a treasonable offence.

60   The unlawful striking or beating of one person by another.

61   The date of Charles II’s landing at Dover at the beginning of the restoration of the monarchy.

62   TNA SP 44/34/110 f.111. Pardon of Thomas Blood, 1 August 1671.

63   NAI, MS 12,816, f.27. Straffan is a village on the River Liffey, sixteen miles (25 km) north-west of Dublin.

64   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.214.

65   Blood had suffered from smallpox which can leave pock-marks from the scabs on the face.

66   RCHM, Sixth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.370.

67   ‘Williamson Letters’, vol. 1, p.14 fn.

68   ‘Evelyn Diaries’, vol. 2, pp.259–60.

69   RCHM, Sixth Report, pt. 1, appendix, p.370; Carte, Life of Ormond, vol. 4, p.447.

70   Curran, Dispatches of William Perwich . . ., p.165.

71   RCHM, Seventh Report, pt. 1, report and appendices, p.464.

72   History of Insipids is commonly attributed to Wilmot. For a discussion on attribution, see Vivian de S. Pinto, ‘The History of Insipids: Rochester, Freke and Marvell’, Modern Language Review, vol. 65 (1970), pp.11–5. Wilmot (1647–80) was notorious for his drunken behaviour and extravagant frolics at court. At Christmas 1673 at Whitehall Palace, he delivered a satire about Charles II, entitled In the Isle of Britain, in which he criticised the king’s ‘obsession’ with sex at the expense of his kingdoms. He was exiled from court for a month. In January 1675, Wilmot, in a drunken frolic, destroyed the sundial in the middle of the Privy Gardens at Whitehall ‘which was esteemed to be the rarest in Europe’.

73   This was south of College Street, where there was a bowling green. The house, distinguished by a shield and a coat of arms raised in relief in the brickwork of the front, was reported to be ‘no longer standing’ in 1820 (Thornbury and Walford, Old and New London, vol. 4, p.35). Fifty-three houses in Bowling Alley and thirty-six in Great Peter Street were recorded in this period (H.F. Westlake, St Margaret’s Westminster [London, 1914], p.79).

74   See note by ‘R.C.’ in N&Q, second s., vol. 7,18659, p.131. The present manor house at Minley was built in the French style in 1858–60 for Raikes Currie, a partner in Glynn Mills bank.

75   Shaw (ed.), Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 3, 1669–72, p.937.

CHAPTER 8: COMING IN FROM THE COLD

1     TNA, SP 29/294/14, f.20.

2     Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.196.

3     TNA, SP 29/294/16, f.274. Sir John Robinson to Williamson, Tower of London, 23 December 1671. He had just closed down two Quaker meeting houses ‘and if any preach, I take them up and send them to Newgate [prison] for six months . . . Some are rich men and there’s no further way to proceed against them but to . . . seize their estates and imprison them during the king’s pleasure. If this rule was generally followed, it would break them without any noise or tumult.’

4     CSP Domestic 1663–4, p.295.

5     CSP Domestic 1663–4, p.287.

6     The so-called ‘Coventicles Act’. 22 Caro. II cap. 1.

7     TNA, SP 29/140/93 f.136: ‘Discharge of three conventiclers’. The original document is dated December ?1665, but the discharge was almost certainly granted in late 1671.

8     TNA, SP 29/293/28 f.31. Notes of Williamson about information received from Blood and others, 21 September 1671.

9     TNA, SP 29/29/12, f.15. Blood to Williamson, London, 18 September 1671.

10   TNA, SP 29/293/28, f.31.

11   Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence, fn, p.91.

12   The Fleet prison was burnt down on the third day of the Great Fire of London in September 1666, the prisoners escaping the flames at the last possible moment. The warden, Sir Jeremy Whichcote, purchased Caroon House in south Lambeth (once the residence of the Dutch ambassador in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I) to house the prison’s debtors while it was rebuilt on the original site at his own expense.

13   TNA, SP 29/294/15, f.21. Notes in Williamson’s hand, 11 November 1671.

14   TNA, SP 29/294/14, f.20.

15   TNA SP 29/294/15 f.21. Notes in Williamson’s hand, 11 November 1671.

16   TNA, SP 29/294/139, f.169. Notes in Williamson’s hand, 4 December 1671.

17   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A.185, f.474, entries 10, 15 and 16.

18   TNA, SP 29/294/139, f.169.

19   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.14.

20   Baber (1625–1704) lived in King Street, and was a near neighbour to Dr Thomas Manton, the nonconformist rector of St Paul’s church in Covent Garden. Baber’s son John was not nearly so discreet; in 1683 he eloped with the daughter of Sir Thomas Draper and married her. See John Wilson, Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus, Ohio, 1976), p.95.

21   Eliot, ‘A new MSS of George Saville, first marquis of Halifax’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 36, p.456.

22   TNA, SP 29/293/235, f.295. Notes by Williamson, 27 December 1671.

23   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.221.

24   TNA, SP 29/293/235, f.295.

25   ‘Suing it out’ means the completion of a legal process, i.e., in this case, the drawing up of a document granting a free pardon to the recipient.

26   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.47. Blood to Arlington, 28 December 1671.

27   TNA, SP 29/293/28, f.31.

28   Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.221.

29   CSP Domestic 1672, p.111.

30   Nelthorpe’s son Richard was a conspirator against the government in the 1680s. See: Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet, p.222.

31   CSP Domestic 11 March 1675–29 February 1676, p.56.

32   CSP Domestic 11 March 1675–29 February 1676, p.60.

33   Brown, Miscellanea Aulica, p.66. Arlington to Gascoign, resident at the imperial court at Vienna, Whitehall, 19 March 1672.

34   Abbott, ‘English Conspiracy and Dissent’, American Historical Review, vol. 14, p.719.

35     Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence, p.92.

36   CSP Domestic 1671–2, pp.37 and 184.

37   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.201.

38   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.343. The Coleman Street application was unsurprisingly rejected, given its reputation for sedition.

39   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.434.

40   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.568.

41   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.366.

42   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.589.

43   A writ of præmunire charged a sheriff to summon a person accused of asserting or maintaining papal jurisdiction in England, so denying the monarch’s ecclesiastical supremacy. The statute of Richard II, on which this writ was based, was later applied to actions seen as questioning or diminishing royal jurisdiction. This probably was the case here.

44   CSP Domestic 1672, p.45. A total of 480 Quakers were released in May 1672.

45   CSP Domestic 1672, p.589.

46   Langley was appointed by Parliament in 1647 but ejected by the University visitors in 1660.

47   Bod. Lib. Western MSS 28,184, f.250.

48   ‘An Act for Preventing Dangers which may Happen from Papist Recusants’, 25 Caro. II, cap. 2.

49   The doctrine of transubstantiation declares that the blessed bread and wine used in the Sacrament of the Eucharist is in reality the Body and Blood of Christ, while appearing unchanged in appearance to worshippers’ sight. The oath attached to the Act read: I, [name] do declare that I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or in the elements of the bread and wine at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever.

50   The monk responsible for handing out alms to the poor before the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. The Presbyterian congregation may have used the old disused chapel of St Ann within the almoner’s house. See: H. F. Westlake, St Margaret’s Westminster (London, 1914), p.6.

51   HMC ‘Leeds’, p.15.

52   CSP Domestic 1678, pp.226–7.

53   TNA,SP 84/188/125.

54   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.372.

55   CSP Domestic 1672, p.683.

56   TNA, SP 29/333/181, f.245. Notes in Blood’s handwriting, ?February 1673.

57   CSP Domestic 1672, p.601, Colonel Thomas Blood to Williamson, 12 September 1672.

58   ‘Williamson Letters’, vol. 1, pp.14–5. Henry Ball to Williamson, Whitehall, 2 June 1673. The lord lieutenant, Arthur Capell, First Earl of Essex, told Arlington from Dublin that ‘Mr Blood arrived here last Saturday but I have not yet seen him’. CSP Domestic January 1663-August 1664, p.335.

59   Peter Talbot (1620–80) had been appointed queen’s almoner after Charles’s marriage but was accused of conspiring, with four Jesuit priests, and planning to assassinate the Duke of Ormond. He resigned his office and retired to France, but was appointed archbishop of Dublin in 1669. He convened a meeting of Irish Catholic gentry which decided to make representations to the king about Catholic grievances and this so alarmed Irish Protestants that harsher measures against the Catholic population were imposed and Talbot sought exile in Paris.

60   ‘Essex Papers’, pp.90–1. Earl of Essex to Arlington, Dublin Castle, 17 June 1673.

61   TNA, SP 29/366/181, f.11.

62   CSP Domestic January 1663–August 1664, p.410.

63   CSP Domestic January 1663–August 1664, p.304.

64   CSP Domestic 1671–2, p.373. In August 1677, Neptune Blood petitioned the Duke of Ormond to grant him the two rectories of Castletown Kindalen and Churchtown, Co. Clare, formerly belonging to the Abbey of Mullingar, at an annual rent of £6 (CSP Domestic 1677–8, p.234).

65   CSP Domestic January 1663–August 1664, p.502. Were his voyages with the East India Company?

66   An officer on board ship who keeps the accounts and sometimes has charge of the provisions.

67   In March 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys, a member of the Navy Board, was temporarily named captain of Jersey as a legal manoeuvre to render him eligible to become a member of a court martial over the loss of HMS Defiance. The appointment gave him ‘much mirth’. HMS Jersey, the first of eight ships to bear the name in the Royal Navy, was captured by the French in the West Indies on 18 December 1691 and renamed, rather unimaginatively She remained in French naval service until 1716. See: Brian Lavery, The Ship of the Line, vol. 1, Development of the Battlefleet 1650–1850 (London, 2003), p.160. Her name comes from one of the Channel Islands and an image of the ship appeared on a 23p Jersey stamp in 2001. See also: BL Add. MS. 10,115 (Williamson papers on projected war with France in 1677), f.73 – Blood’s two sons serving in Royal Navy.

68   CSP Domestic March-December 1678, p.20.

69   Henry Ball told Williamson in June 1673 that Blood ‘pretends to have a great estate left his wife but Dr Butler tells me this was “a flam [a deceit] and he has none at all on that side”.’ ‘Williamson Letters’, vol. 1, p.15.

70   Place or take under the control of a court.

71   Lancashire Record Office MS DDX 26/70/1. This petition is also calendared in the State Papers under the year 1665 but as Charles Holcroft died in December 1672, it must date from 1673 at the earliest.

72   Kaye, Romance and Adventures of Colonel Blood . . ., pp.250–3; Lancashire Record Office MS QSP/547/15.

73   ‘Williamson Letters’ vol. 1, p.15 fn.

74   TNA, SP 29/294/235, f.295.

75   Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, p.639.

76   Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, Hf, vol. 32, p.571.

77   Fifty-six pounds or 25.4 kg.

78   TNA, SP 29/333/82, f.126. Richard Wilkinson to Colonel John Russell, Appleby, 10 February 1673.

CHAPTER 9: THE WAYS OF THE LORD

1     Explained in a sermon, preached at Colchester [Essex] by Edmund Hickeringill, rector of All Saints, p.1.

2     ‘T.S.’, The Horrid Sin of Man-catching . . ., p.1.

3     To deceive or trick.

4     ‘Sham Plots’, p.1. Samuel Bold (1649–1737), the vicar of Shapwick in Dorset and an earnest advocate of religious toleration preached a sermon against religious persecution when a brief was read out in support of Huguenot refugees in 1682, declaring that informers were the ‘brutish and degenerate part of mankind’ and were men ‘of desperate fortunes’. His sermon was subsequently published as A Sermon against Persecutions, preached 26 March 1682 (London, 1682), pp.7–9. For an excellent overview, see Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.207.

5     ‘Sham Plots’ p.1.

6     Allen, ‘Political Clubs in Restoration London’, Hf, vol. 19, pp.563 and 566.

7     CSP Domestic 1667–8, p.89.

8     Waller (c. 1637–99) was the son of the parliamentary general of the same name who fought in the Civil War and his second wife.

9     Dryden, Absalom andAchitophel, pt. 2, line 53.

10   Waller’s club is mentioned in the Catholic midwife Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated. For Blood’s infrequent attendances there, see ‘Counter-plots’, 1679, p.6.

11   After Richard Cromwell’s fall from power, he was unkindly nicknamed ‘Queen Dick’ by Royalists and was now exiled in France.

12   TNA, SP 29/397/7, f.7. Williamson’s notes of information received from Mr Blood, 2 October 1678.

13   Peyton (c. 1633–89) fled to Holland after the succession of James II but a botched attempt to kidnap him and bring him back to England caused a diplomatic incident between the two countries. In 1688, he commanded a regiment in William of Orange’s invasion force after it landed in Dorset. The following year Peyton died in London from a fever, reportedly two days after drinking bad claret.

14   CSP Domestic 1677–8, p.571. Williamson to Boyle, Whitehall, 12 January 1678. It may have been connected with his old lands at Sarney. On 5 June 1679, a note was issued to the lord lieutenant of Ireland about ‘the petition of Thomas Blood for a grant of the chief rent payable out of land belonging to him called Sarney, Co. Meath, of £6 per annum, not claimed for thirty-eight years and the arrears thereof’. See: CSP Domestic January 1679–August 1680, p.164.

15   CSP Domestic 1678, p.290. Blood to Duke of York, 16 July 1678.

16   CSP Domestic 1677–8, pp.30–1. Ralph Burnett, the postmaster at Lincoln, sent on North’s letter to the king two days after it was written with a note saying the ‘enclosed is upon life and death and on other great concerns. I therefore pray you to take special notice that it may be delivered very carefully so that answer may come by Thursday’s post.’

17   The church was not rebuilt after the fire and the parish was united with that of St Michael, Wood Street in 1670. Since 1965, there has been a garden on its site.

18   HMC, ‘Ormond’, vol. 4, p.462.

19   Barker was fined £50 for ‘illegal practice’ by the College of Physicians in 1656. In December 1673 he was appointed a physician in ordinary to Charles II – an honorary position, apparently without any fees.

20   Pollock, The Popish Plot . . ., p.13.

21   Williams, ‘The Pope-Burning Processions of 1679, 1680 and 1681’, Jnl Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 21, p.108.

22   Kenyon, The Popish Plot, p.78.

23   That old gossip Aubrey believed that Hill was also a member of the queen’s household (Aubrey’s Brief Lives, vol. 1, p.320). The murder had been committed in the courtyard of Somerset House, off the Strand, and the body later dumped at Primrose Hill (Kenyon, The Popish Plot, p.150). Miles Prance pleaded guilty to perjury in 1686 and was fined £100 and ordered to stand in the pillory (ibid., p.295).

24   Primrose Hill was popularly known afterwards for a short time as ‘Greenberry Hill’ after the names of the men executed there. Their corpses would have been suspended on the gallows for some time afterwards.

25   ‘T.S.’, The Horrid Sin of Man-catching . . ., p.20.

26   HMC ‘Fitzherbert’, pp.114–5.

27   See: Bury, A True Narrative of the Late Design of the Papists . . ., p.8; Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.211.

28   HMC ‘Fitzherbert’, pp.114–5.

29   HMC ‘Fitzherbert’, p.115.

30   He was canonised in 1975.

31   Oates was retried for perjury in 1685 and sentenced to be whipped through London twice, imprisoned for life and pilloried every year. At the accession of William of Orange and Mary in 1689, he was pardoned and granted an annual pension of £260. Oates died on 12 or 13 July 1705.

32   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 228, f.151. Newsletter addressed to Thomas Wharton at Winchendon, Buckinghamshire, reporting Lord Sunderland’s interview with Blood, 3 March 1679.

33   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.229 and ‘Narrative’ p.4.

34   A ‘trepan’ is a seventeenth-century noun for a person who lures or tricks another into a disadvantageous or ruinous act or position.

35   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.222.

36   Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain . . ., vol. 2, p.231.

37   HMC ‘Ormond’ vol. 4, pp.328–9. Hester Chapman has claimed that Blood was the chief protagonist of the plot against Buckingham, but this seems unlikely. See her Great Villiers . . ., pp.262–4.

38   Melton, ‘A Rake Reformed . . .’, HLQ, vol. 51, pp.300–1.

39   ‘Narrative’, p.28.

40   Pritchard, A Defence of His Private Life . . .’, HLQ, vol. 44, pp.164 and 168.

41   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 5, pp.296–7.

42   ‘Narrative’, p.18.

43   Ram Alley, later renamed Hare Place, was a place of sanctuary for debtors in the seventeenth century and a very insalubrious area.

44   More properly known as the ‘Bear at Bridgefoot’.

45   ‘Le Mar’, p.14.

46   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.231.

47   A written precept, under a magistrate’s seal, directing a constable to take a suspected felon to prison. From the Latin, meaning ‘we send’.

48   ‘Narrative’, p.10.

49   ‘Narrative’, p.12.

50   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 5, p.324.

51   Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.222.

52   CSP Domestic 1679–80, p.521.

53   London Gazette, issue 1500, 1–5 April 1680, p.2, cols. 1 and 2.

54    CSP Domestic 1679–80, p.560. Newsletter to Sir Francis Radcliffe at Dilston, Northumberland, 18 July 1680.

55   Sir William Dolben (c. 1625–94) was appointed a justice of the Court of King’s Bench on 23 October 1678. He was a man of small stature with a surprisingly loud voice and was known popularly as ‘an arrant old snarler’.

56   TNA, SP 29/414/23, f.40. Blood to James, Duke of York, 15 July 1680.

57   There was clearly some arrears in this payment.

58   TNA, SP 29/414/26, f.46. Blood to Secretary Jenkins, 18 July 1680.

59   The prison, situated in Angel Place, off Borough High Street, had been rebuilt in Henry VIII’s reign with a high brick wall enclosing a courtyard and buildings. This was demolished in 1761 after the completion of a new prison on a four-acre (1.62 hectare) site close to St George’s Fields, Southwark.

60   CSP Domestic 1679–80, p.568. Newsletter to Roger Garstell, Newcastle, 22 July 1680.

61   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MSS A.185 (Pepys Papers), ff.473r–475 – Copy of notes from Blood’s pocketbook.

62   Bod. Lib. A.185, f.474r.

63   Bod. Lib. A.185, ff. 473r–474r, entries 2, 5, 6, 16, 18, 21, 33, 39–43, 47–52, 54, 59, 67. The Bull’s Head tavern was located between Maiden Lane and the Strand. It was pulled down in 1897 and replaced by the Nell Gwynne public house.

64   Bod Lib. A.185, f.474r.

65   Bod. Lib. A.185, f.473v–474r, entries 4–7, 10, 15–16, 21. See also Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., pp.198, 202, 204.

66   TNA, PROB/11/364/248. Probate was granted on 4 November 1680.

67   TNA PROB 4/5301. Inventory of Thomas Blood of the parish of St Margaret, Westminster, 7 May 1681.

68   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.233–4.

69   This was built in 1638–42 as a chapel of ease and burial ground for St Margaret’s church, Westminster. It was demolished and replaced in the nineteenth century by a new church, Christchurch. This was destroyed by bombing in the 1941 London Blitz and the burial ground was converted into a public garden in 1950 at the junction of Broadway and Victoria Street and designated a conservation area in 1985. A monument commemorating the Suffragette Movement was erected in the gardens in 1970.

70   ‘Remarks . . .’, p.234.

71   Chappell, Roxburghe Ballads, Ballad Society, vol. 6, pp.787–8.

72   ‘Remarks . . .’, pp.235 and 227.

EPILOGUE

1     TNA, SP 29/417/207, f.443.

2     Buckingham founded the Bilsdale Hunt in Yorkshire in 1668, reputedly the oldest hunt in England.

3     ‘HoC Jnls’, vol. 10, p.280, 6 November 1678

4     Firth (rev. Blair Warden), ‘Edmund Ludlow’, ODNB, vol. 34, p.717.

5     Bod. Lib. MS English Letters C.53, f.131. P. Maddocks to Sir Robert Southwell, 14 November 1684.

6     Diana, Princess of Wales, was one of his descendants.

7     Marshall, ‘Henry Bennet, first earl of Arlington’, ODNB, vol. 5, pp.101–5.

8     Kenyon, The Popish Plot, p.155.

9     Marshall, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson’, ODNB, vol. 59, p.356.

10   The anniversary of the accession of Protestant Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1558 on the death of her Catholic half-sister Mary I.

11   CSP Domestic January–June 1683, pp.66 and 104.

12   Now known as Red Cross Way.

13   CSP Domestic January–June 1683, pp.382–3.

14   See: Peter Earle, Monmouth’s Rebels . . ., p.32; BL Lansdowne MS 1,152, vol. 1, f.238v – Nicholas Cooke and Henry Lavening to Sir Bourchier Wrey, MP for Devon, reporting the capture of Perrot, 30 July, 1685.

15   HMC ‘Ormond’, vol. 2, p.253.

16   See: CSP Domestic 1671, p.267; CSP Domestic 1670, p.174 and Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage . . ., p.140.

17   A town on the border of England and Scotland.

18   Spain, ‘Martin Beckman’, ODNB, vol. 6, pp.740–3.

19   TNA, SP 29/417/207, f.443.

20   A pole arm, with an axe head below the spear-like point.

21   TNA, SP 29/417/207 f.445.

22   CSP Domestic January–June 1683, p.66.

23   They were both serving in the navy in 1677. See BL Add. MSS, 10,115, f.73.

24   The warship was launched as the fifty-gun third-rate frigate Speaker in the Commonwealth navy in 1650 and renamed Mary after the Restoration. In 1677 she was refitted as a sixty-two-gun ship and was rebuilt in 1688. Mary was lost on the Goodwin Sands shoals, off the coast of Kent, during the Great Storm of 1703.

25   Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke’s Irish Family Records, p.142

26   TNA, PROB 4/54/476. Dated November 1688.

27   TNA, PROB 11/360/467, ff.304–5. Will of Edmund Blood.

28   CSP Domestic March 1676–February 1677, p.77.

29   CSP Domestic 1678, p.241.

30   Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke’s Irish Family Records, p.143. Today, the battle is commemorated in Northern Ireland on 12 July, the day after its date under the ‘New Style’ Gregorian calendar, adopted in Britain in 1752.

31   CSP Domestic William III 1696, p.33. Warrant for Lieutenant Colonel Holcroft Blood to be second engineer in place of Captain Thomas Philips deceased. Kensington, 1 February 1696.

32   Porter, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. 1, p.111.

33   Spain, ‘Holcroft Blood’, ODNB, vol. 6, pp.268–70.

34   Holcroft Blood junior died in 1724.

35   TNA, PROB 11/504/89, will of Holcroft Blood.

36   Thomas Blood had two children, according to Edmund Blood’s will (TNA SP PROB 11/360/467, f.304); presumably one died young.

37   NAI MS 12,816, f.20, calls him ‘Tobias Baines’.

38   Lisburne (1647–91) also commanded an English regiment during the Williamite wars in Ireland and was killed outright by a cannonball at the siege of Limerick in September 1691.

39   NAIMS 12,816, f.21.

40   NAIMS 12,816, ff.31–2.

41   TNA, WORK 14/2/1. Paper on the adaption of the Wakefield Tower as a new jewel house and the provision of glass cases to display the regalia, 1852–69.

42   Impey and Parnell, The Tower of London . . ., pp.108–10.

43   Literally, ‘St Peter in chains’, a reference to the prisoners held in the Tower of London.

44   The burial register entry reads: ‘1674: Mr Edwards ye crown keeper, buryed October ye second’.

45   TNA, War Office papers WO 94/58/24, f.1. Letter from a Mr Wray Hunt, of Wargrave, Berkshire, 3 December 1936.

46   Bell, Notices of the Historic Persons buried in . . . St Peter ad Vincula . . ., p.37. Lord de Ros, perhaps modestly, provides a different version of the way Edwards’ gravestone was rescued. It was recognised by a Colonel Wyndham ‘in a heap of rubbish and by the [Tower of London] constable’s order fixed against in safety against the south wall. In one of those reckless reparations which so often were allowed in the Tower, the masons employed in repairing the chapel floor threw this tablet aside but it was luckily observed’ (de Ros, Memorials of the Tower of London, p.202).