Colonel Thomas Blood, says the DNB with typical understatement, lived a life with ‘few parallels’. He was born around 1617, in Meath, say some sources, but he is also claimed by county Clare (several Clare Bloods. including the Colonel, have been Justices of the Peace; his uncle – or maybe father – was called Neptune Blood). Blood did military service in Ireland and England during the Civil War, although which side he fought on, and for how long, remains unclear. His ‘colonelcy’ may have been self-awarded. By 1651, he had a Lancashire wife (and six children) and lands in both countries. He spent most of the 1650s in Ireland, and was regarded as a good Protestant landowner and Cromwellian loyalist.
The Restoration of 1660 saw many of Cromwell’s supporters lose assets to triumphant Royalists, and by 1662 Blood was involved with other malcontents in a bodged plot to capture Dublin Castle. The plot was structured like an Ealing comedy (and would make a great movie). As George MacDonald Fraser says in The Pyrates (1983), ‘Not many adventurers, planning to seize Dublin Castle, would have tried to divert the guards by hurling loaves of bread at them, in the hope that while they scrambled for food, Blood and his associates could sally in and seize the fortress’.
Blood escaped to England, where he associated with fellow nonconformists and conspirators: his attachment to the Fifth Monarchy movement in particular – Fifth Monarchists believed Jesus was returning to rule mankind soon – was sincere, indeed one of the few certainties about the man’s beliefs. In 1667, he rescued a friend being escorted to prison, killed several troopers, and then hid out for a few quiet years, practising as a physician in Kent .
In 1670, he abducted the Duke of Ormonde in St James’s Street, but Ormonde escaped. To quote Fraser again, ‘only a perverted artist, bent on the fairly straightforward task of assassinating the Duke of Ormonde, would have tried to do it by taking his victim on horseback to Tyburn with the intention of hanging him from the public gallows’ (Ormonde’s son publicly accused the Duke of Buckingham, a protector of nonconformists, of hiring Blood to kill his father)
The following year, Blood carried out one of the most audacious thefts in history: disguised as a clergyman, he was flukily caught leaving the Tower of London with the Crown Jewels (one of his accomplices was a noted Fifth Monarchy man). Blood was imprisoned – in the Tower – and refused to speak with anyone but the king. Charles II went to see him, and after the meeting, to general amazement, not only pardoned Blood but gave him a pension.
What Happened Next
Exactly what Blood said to Charles is unknown, which is why the preceding paragraph is so short, but it must have been persuasive. Certainly Blood was, by now, privy to many dark secrets of both state and dissident groups. In 1672, the government was to issue a ‘declaration of indulgence’ for nonconformists, who were everywhere and a great nuisance, especially with the Dutch war looming. Charles may have been the ‘merry monarch’, but he was equally certainly nobody’s fool and clearly decided a live Blood was of more use to him than a dead one, which Blood became in 1680, dying of natural causes aged 62. He was dug up again soon after burial, probably by someone checking he was really there, and really dead.