The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (11 page)

The most zealous opponents, if not fanatics (to use a word frequently employed in official correspondence) were the Fifth Monarchists. They based their religious and political beliefs on the prophecy in the Bible's Book of Daniel
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that four ancient monarchies (the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian and Roman civilisations) would precede the new kingdom of Christ. The year ‘1666' held especial significance for them because of its resemblance to ‘666', or the ‘Number of the Beast', described in the Book of Revelations
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– which identified the Antichrist whose kingdom would herald the end of worldly rule by wicked mortals. When Christ appeared, as King of Kings, in His Second Coming, the Fifth Monarchists keenly anticipated becoming the new generation of saints in a thousand-year reign.

There was nothing in their creed to gainsay a pre-emptive strike on England's body politic to prepare for this longed-for Second Coming. As far as they were concerned, Charles II was both a despot and a traitor to King Jesus.
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Over four days from Sunday, 6 January 1661, fifty well-armed Fifth Monarchists, wearing full armour, roundly defeated musketeers sent to disarm them in the City of London. They later fought 700 troopers from the Life Guards, as well as an infantry regiment, for more than half an hour in running battles in Wood and Threadneedle streets in the heart
of the city. Forty were killed in the fighting, including six Fifth Monarchists, one with the spine-chilling nickname of ‘Bare-bones', who had barricaded themselves in the Helmet tavern in Thread-needle Street and refused any quarter.
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Their leader, the wine cooper Thomas Venner, who had been shot three times in this last, desperate stand, was hung, drawn and quartered as a traitor on 19 January 1662 at Charing Cross. Twelve of his brethren were also executed.
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Through this crazy world of violent religious fervour strode Thomas Blood, whose assorted allies constantly crossed the nonconformist religious divides. Standing four-square in the way of his political and personal aims and objectives were the establishment figures of Ormond in Ireland and the two secretaries of state and spymasters, Bennet and Williamson.

Like Walsingham before him, Williamson sought to manipulate public opinion by the use of information, or propaganda, to promote the government's standing through the medium of newsletters and the
London Gazette
, its official journal, ‘published by authority' and sent by post to subscribers up and down the country.
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Regular news from up to fifty sources in the British Isles, notably customs officers, governors of garrisons and postmasters, filled its columns and short precis of dispatches from English embassies overseas yielded intriguing snippets of foreign news.

In 1668, Lorenzo Magalotti, an Italian philosopher, author and later a diplomat, met Williamson during a hectic week-long trip to Windsor, Hampton Court and Oxford. He described him as ‘a tall man, of very good appearance, clever, diligent, courteous and . . . very inquisitive in getting information'.
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Samuel Pepys first met him in February 1663 at the dinner table of the well-heeled Thomas Povey. He was not impressed: Williamson, he confided to his diary, was ‘a pretty knowing man and a scholar but it may be [he] thinks himself to be too much'.
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Three years later, Pepys had changed his opinion dramatically, declaiming enthusiastically: ‘Mr Williamson, who the more I know, the more I honour'.
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However, that other great Restoration diarist, John Evelyn, sneered at Williamson's rapid promotion up through the tiers of
government and his burgeoning influence at court. In July 1674, Evelyn was at Windsor and wrote that Sir Henry Bennet had let Williamson ‘into the secret of affairs, so that there was a kind of necessity to advance him and so by his subtlety, dexterity and insinuation he got now to be principal secretary, absolutely [Bennet's] creature – and ungrateful enough'.
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Like so many others in Tudor and Stuart public service, Williamson, knighted in 1672, managed cunningly to exploit every available opportunity to create wealth for himself: in 1668, he was said to be worth £40,000 a year in ready cash, or nearly £6 million at today's values.
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God, Williamson pointed out piously, was the ‘real author of every good and perfect gift'.
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The senior secretary of state, Henry Bennet, was a son of the landowner Sir John Bennet who owned property in Harlington, Middlesex. He was another Oxford man, going up to Christ Church, and he had fought in the Civil War, suffering an honourable scar across the bridge of his nose during a brutal skirmish at Andover on 18 October 1644, when the king's vanguard drove William Waller's parliamentary troops helter-skelter out of the Hampshire market town. Bennet joined the exiled royal court at St Germain, near Paris, three years later and was knighted in 1657. Fluent in Latin, Spanish and French, on 15 October 1662 he became secretary of state, despite the opposition of his many enemies at court such as Lord Chancellor Clarendon and Buckingham, who became ever more jealous of the influence Bennet, with his Catholic sympathies, wielded so dexterously with the king. For his faithful services, he was created First Earl of Arlington on 14 March 1665.
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As far as intelligence-gathering was concerned, Bennet was ultimately responsible for all espionage and surveillance activity, but it was Williamson who ran the agents and other operations on a day-to-day basis.

According to Clarendon, in the early 1660s, Charles II had grown so weary of the incessant rumours of potential uprisings, ‘that he had even resolved to give no more countenance to any such information, nor to trouble himself with inquiry into them'.
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A case, perhaps, of ‘wolf' being cried too many times by his spymasters.
But growing evidence of a potential insurrection in the north of England captured even the king's jaded attention.

When the would-be rebels met in Durham in early March 1663, they took a ‘sacramental engagement or vow, not only of secrecy but also to destroy without mercy all those who [would] oppose [them]' especially Albemarle and Buckingham. Agents were sent to Dublin, to London (where a council of radicals had been set up) and to the west of England to synchronise the timings of rebellion. They drew up a manifesto, bursting with righteous indignation, containing a veritable litany of the terrible evils they saw about them – blasphemy, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, the all-pervasive papists, the Anglican Church's worship of idols, unemployment and unfair taxes (ironically, including that on chimneys). The green and pleasant realm of England had now become a vivid reincarnation of biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. To eradicate such widespread sinfulness, they were ready to risk their lives ‘for the reviving of the good old cause' – as it was better ‘to die like men than live worse than slaves'.
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Local officials knew full well that 12 October had been set as the date for the rebels to make their move and two days earlier, in a carefully orchestrated operation, the ‘principal officers and agitators' were arrested across north-east England while the militia mobilised near Pontefract in Yorkshire, reinforced by 1,000 men from Buckingham's own regiment. Apart from a few minor acts of violence, the rebellion was surgically cut out before it could even spring into life.
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Most of its leaders were captured, such as Captain John Mason, detained while hiding in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, but who later managed to escape from Clifford's Tower in York in July 1664 with three other men involved in the abortive uprising.
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Others remained dangerously at large, like John Atkinson, a former soldier turned stocking-weaver, who, having stained his face, masqueraded as a labourer in Co. Durham.

Durham-born William Leving was among the conspirators arrested and thrown into York Castle. Together with his father, he was to raise his native city under Captain Roger Jones, alias ‘Mene Tekel'.
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Leving had been a junior officer in Sir Arthur Heselrige's
Parliamentarian regiment and served with him when he was governor of Newcastle. Leving supported the vain and ambitious General John Lambert
⁴¹
over his failed attempts to resist the House of Commons' control of the New Model Army in 1659. As a consequence, Leving forfeited both his commission and the back-pay owed him.
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Such ill-luck, or more pertinently, his frequent bad judgement, was to dog him in his future career as a government spy.

Sir Thomas Gower, governor of York, whose own all-pervasive spy network in north-east England had been a major factor in the suppression of the insurrection, claimed to have two witnesses ready to testify against Leving, with incontestable evidence that would hang him. But Sir Roger Langley, high sheriff of Yorkshire, believed his prisoner would be of more value to Charles II's government alive and well, serving as an informer, than as a rotting corpse hanging from a gibbet as a deterrent to would-be rebels. He suggested to Bennet:

If a way could be found to get Mr Leving out of the jail so that he would not be suspected by his own party, he might be of great use, for he assures me he would not question to let you know some of the names of some of the [rebel] council now in London.
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Langley gave him £10 as pocket money and dispatched him to London in May 1664, where he spent some time in the Tower. From there he wrote enthusiastically to the secretary of state, boasting that, in return for his freedom, he could ‘give an account of every plot that may be hatched between London and the [River] Tweed' on the Scottish borders. To cloak his espionage activities, he suggested that his escape should be faked and he could then ‘shift as a banished man'.
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To outwardly confirm his undying loyalty to the cause of rebellion, he still corresponded with his fellow conspirators, pledging he would happily accept any suffering before betraying them.
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His ‘escape' being successfully contrived sometime in July 1664, Leving was soon about his business. Employing the alias ‘Leonard Williams', he quickly infiltrated the radical Presbyterian council in
the capital, which was busy planning an attack on the king and court at Whitehall Palace, as well as seizing the Tower of London. Blood was named as one of the leading lights in this audacious conspiracy.

The adventurer had left Ireland, probably in the last three months of 1663, and arranged a clandestine meeting with his mother-in-law Margaret Holcroft in Lancashire, when he was almost captured. After travelling about the north of England with Williamson's agents hard on his heels, Blood fled to Holland at the beginning of 1664, where he was befriended by the Dutch admiral and naval hero Michiel de Rutyer, who was ‘pleased to admit [him] into his society and honoured with an entertainment answerable to that respect and affection which he bore the nation of England'.
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Sometime around March 1664, Blood returned to London and ‘fell in with the Fifth Monarchy men, resolving to venture all in . . . their interest' as he found them ‘to be a bold and daring sort of people like himself and their principles so suiting with his discontents'. Tellingly, Blood judged them ‘very proper for his management' as his maxim was always ‘never to put his confidence in any that were not engaged either by principle or interest to his designs'.
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The fanatical Fifth Monarchists matched that requirement precisely.

On 12 September 1664, Bennet's intelligence service produced a list of thirteen persons ‘now in London who go about in disguise and under other names'. Among those listed are John Atkinson (alias Peter Johnson) and Captain Lockyer (alias Rogers) and a Mr Allen. Above this last name is written, in the same hand but in a different ink: ‘His name is Blood'. Williamson added a note at the end of the list: ‘The chief meeting house is at a widow's in Petty France and my informer [says] they have got money for the imagining of a design which they intend to set in London and to that end are [planning] how they may become masters of the Tower.'
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This threat was taken seriously by the state. The same day, orders were issued for the repair of the Tower of London and for stretching chains across its access from the city – ‘the key to be kept by the Master of Ordnance'. The public were also prohibited from the Thames wharf alongside the fortress.
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In December 1664, there were unconfirmed reports that Blood and his two fellow conspirators in the Dublin Castle plot, the Presbyterian minister Andrew McCormack and Colonel Gibby Carr, had slipped into the north of Ireland, landing in the vicinity of Rostrevor in Co. Down. It was also rumoured that 300 muskets had been shipped in from Scotland for use by rebel forces. Despite strenuous searches, no traces of the fugitives could be found.
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A list of the following year, written on one sheet of paper, has the ‘names of various persons suspected to be in and about the City of London this 22 May'. ‘Blood alias Allen' is included in a list of seven men who met at the Swan near Coleman Street and sometimes at the home of ‘Robert Melborne, a silk thrower in Shoreditch'. Of these plotters, Timothy Butler and Christopher Dawson were the ‘persons entrusted to buy arms'.
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Leving's regular reports began in 1665, having received payments of £20 each for himself and a fellow informer, John Betson, for spying services rendered to Bennet. The spy complained about the miserliness of his pay: ‘The money is insufficient. I have run great hazards and spent much money in the cause. A good reward would encourage Mr Betson and tend much to the king's service', he told Bennet.
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Soon after, he repeated his pleas for more generous remuneration ‘having caused the taking of sixteen at once, some more considerable than [John] Atkinson',
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who had fled to London from Yorkshire after the collapse of the northern rebellion the year before.