The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (2 page)

In April 1613, Edmund was elected as one of two members of parliament for the nearby borough of Ennis in the Irish House of Commons, as part of the Dublin government's cynical redrawing of constituencies to guarantee a permanent Protestant majority. Edmund was then described as
generosus
or gentleman.
¹³
After two years' service as an MP, he hauled himself further up the greasy pole of social status by receiving a grant of heraldic arms,
¹⁴
the choice of bucks' heads as charges probably inspired by his love of hunting.

He had two more sons, Edmund (died 1615) and Thomas, by Margaret.
¹⁵
On his wife's death, he married Mary Holdcroft, or Holcroft, of Lancashire
¹⁶
although family tradition suggests he had a third wife before he died
c.
1645.
¹⁷
By Mary, he had a fourth son, William, born at Kilnaboy in 1600.

Neptune, the eldest, was ordained a minister in March 1623 and became the dean of Kilfenora in 1663, as well as vicar general of the diocese thirteen years later. He was a feisty Protestant churchman, serving with King Charles I at Oxford during the first English Civil War,
¹⁸
and continued the lucrative family tradition of exacting money from hapless ships sailing along the coast of Co. Clare. After parliamentary forces stormed Drogheda and Wexford in September and October 1649 and put their citizens to the sword, Neptune's boats were burnt by Cromwell's troops, but he was given three grants of confiscated land as compensation for his loss of the coastal business.
¹⁹
He rescued the silver communion plate from both Christchurch and St Fin Barr's cathedral in the city of Cork to prevent its theft or destruction by the Ironside soldiers and, after the restoration of the monarchy, paid the two churches more than £18 in 1665 so he could continue to use the sacred vessels in his own cathedral at Kilfenora.
²⁰

Thomas, the third son, born at Kilnaboy in 1598, became an ironmaster in Sarney, Dunboyne, Co. Meath, eleven miles (17.9 km) north-west of Dublin. Some sources describe him as a blacksmith, but this belittles his status, as he enjoyed a profitable business exporting iron ingots to England. Unfortunately, nothing is known about his wife. In 1621 he purchased an estate in Co. Meath from William Cooke and seventeen years later bought 500 acres (202 hectares) in Co. Wicklow.
²¹

As befits a man of such mystery, the early life of Thomas Blood junior remains obscure and contradictory. He was born at Sarney in early 1618,
²²
probably the elder son of the marriage, as there are tenuous reports of a William Blood, born around 1620, who died some two decades later at Dunboyne. He apparently had at least one sister. Blood's parents were described as ‘serious, honest and of no inferior credit and possessions in the country where they lived' according to Colonel Blood's first biographer in 1680.
²³
He emphasised that they took care ‘that their offspring should not degenerate from the virtues and repute of his ancestors [
sic
] by forming and shaping his condition according to the rules of a strict and sober education . . . to preserve him from those extravagancies that usually attend metalled and active spirits'. The youngster may have been sent to Lancashire for his education, in the care of his stepgrandmother's family.

In March 1640, Charles I granted property in the barony of Dunboyne to the Bloods, including houses, quarries, orchards and gardens of the hamlet of Suppocke, amounting to sixty acres of arable land and ten acres of pasture (totalling twenty-eight hectares), together with five cottages, at an annual rent of 5s 6d (27.5P).
²⁴
(A cousin, Edmund, is recorded as owning a mill, seven tenements and seventy acres of land in Dunboyne at the same time, property he bought in July 1621.)
²⁵
Thomas Blood junior received further generous grants, in June 1643, of the ‘towns and lands of Sarney, Braystown and Foylestown in the barony of Dunboyne and five hundred acres of unprofitable mountain in Glenmalure, alias The Glinns, in Co. Wicklow,' the latter award sounding distinctly parsimonious.
²⁶
Our future adventurer lived not at Sarney but at Ashtown, in today's western suburbs of Dublin.
²⁷

This new mark of royal favour was probably a reward for Blood's support for the crown during the rebellion of Irish Catholics that broke out in Ulster in October 1641 over the loss of the best agricultural land to Protestant settlers and increasing fears over the future of the Catholic faith in Ireland.
²⁸
The Irish aristocracy and clergy formed a ‘Catholic Confederation' the following summer, based at Kilkenny, which became the
de facto
government of two-thirds of Ireland. There were other grave consequences across the Irish Sea. The means of restoring English rule in Ireland became one of the catalysts of the Civil War between King and Parliament, as the MPs sought control of the army sent to defeat the rebels and also the power of veto over royal appointees as its commanders.

Like all such Irish conflicts, it was a bloody affair with neighbour pitted against neighbour, and the opportunities for plunder and vengeance were eagerly seized by both sides. Blood's dour Protestant uncle Neptune later claimed mordantly that in Co. Clare he had goods worth £180 looted from him, as well as being deprived of church benefices worth £140 a year and his cattle stolen by ‘Hugh Hogan and Teige O'Brien of Caherminnane'. His home at Kilnaboy had been demolished and he had lost £120 in debts owed him by Catholics. More vividly, the clergyman reported the murder of two Presbyterian settlers, George Owens of Kilfenora and Michael Hunt of Moghna who, he claimed, had been killed by Teige and Simon Fitzpatrick of Ballyshanny.
²⁹

Thomas Blood had been appointed a justice of the peace at the remarkably early age of twenty-one in 1640 and probably had fought against the rebels in the spring of 1642 when James Butler, First Duke of Ormond, led a series of Royalist army attacks to clear the districts around Dublin of Confederation forces.

Although the Irish war was still continuing unabated, Blood heeded the clarion call to arms issued by his beleaguered monarch when Charles I defiantly raised his royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642.

A ‘Captain Bludd' served in Sir Lewis Dyve's regiment of Royalist infantry as quartermaster after May 1643. Although this unit was much reduced after the hard fighting of the Cornish campaign of August 1644, it formed the garrison of the twelfth-century Sherborne Castle, Dorset, in October that year. Many of his brother officers are known to have come from Dorset and Somerset, which suggests that hasty local recruiting had filled gaps caused by heavy casualties. More would fall when the walls were breached and the fortress surrendered to parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax after an eleven-day siege the following August.
³⁰

It may be that if Blood was at the siege of Sherborne, he either escaped or, if taken prisoner, was freed on parole to return to Ireland after his father's death at Sarney in 1645.
³¹
There is some circumstantial evidence that he rejoined the Royalist army when fighting was renewed in 1648 in what became the Second Civil War. His contemporary biographer and apologist ‘R.H.' – possibly Richard Halliwell, one of his cronies and fellow conspirators in the years to come – maintained that Blood ‘gave his prince all the assistance his personal valour was capable to afford him; wherein he performed several good pieces of good service'.
³²

One of these exploits may have been his role in an audacious (some may say recklessly foolhardy) attempt to kidnap Colonel Thomas Rainborowe,
³³
commander of the parliamentary forces besieging Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire.

A Royalist army had been defeated by Oliver Cromwell at the three-day battle at Preston, Lancashire on 17–19 August 1648 and one of their generals, Sir Marmaduke Langdale, was captured. He was taken to Nottingham and black rumours swept through Pontefract's 500-strong garrison that Langdale would be executed within sight of the castle walls unless they immediately capitulated.

Captain William Paulden, one of their more daredevil officers,
³⁴
decided to snatch Rainborowe and exchange his life for that of Langdale. He and twenty-two hand-picked volunteers crept out of the castle at midnight on 28 October and rode the twelve miles (19 km) to Doncaster where the parliamentary commander was billeted in an inn, preparing for godly worship on the Sabbath morrow. Blood may have been one of them.

Four assailants safely reached Rainborowe's lodgings and announced they held an urgent message for him from Cromwell. The ruse worked: they were admitted and promptly seized the parliamentary commander and his lieutenant, bundling both down into the street and their waiting horses. The colonel suddenly realised he was confronted by only four men and shouted ‘Arms! Arms!' to rouse his sleeping troops in the town. Amid the confusion, one of his would-be kidnappers grappled with Rainborowe, dropping his uncocked pistol on the ground. The lieutenant picked it up – but before he could open fire, was cut down ruthlessly. Rainborowe was stabbed in the neck and when he tried to stagger to his feet, was run through his body with a sword, killing him on the spot.
³⁵

The Royalists rode out of Doncaster, across the bridge over the River Don, and headed back north to Pontefract, sweeping up fifty prisoners on the way.
³⁶

Blood's biographer, ‘R.H.', maintained that most people believed that he was ‘the contriver and [an] associate' in ‘this bold and desperate adventure'. However, he acknowledged that Blood ‘frequently disowned the fact himself' and it would therefore ‘be a crime to impute the honours of other men to a valour that has no need of these shifts'.
³⁷

As we shall see, Blood never shrank from claiming the benefits of notoriety for his adventures, so it is strange that he should deny any part in such a daring escapade. And yet, this adventure bears some of the hallmarks of his later outrages: a grievance nurtured; a bold attempt to exact vengeance and a hostage taken.
³⁸
Years later, in 1671, Prince Rupert, the dashing and impetuous Royalist cavalry general, generously described Blood as a ‘very stout, bold fellow in the royal service'.
³⁹
Amid all those officers in the Royalist armies, why would he remember Blood, unless he had been involved in a remarkable feat of arms? There is one additional piece of circumstantial evidence that may link Blood with this botched and bloody attempted kidnapping. It is known that Rainborowe's regiment took an important role in the siege of Sherborne Castle in 1645
⁴⁰
and the attack on the parliamentary commander may well have satisfied a grudge, a personal desire for revenge for an incident during the fighting.

Afterwards Blood, always the realist with a cynical eye on the bigger picture, may have believed that the Royalists were finally and irrevocably defeated. Charles I had been beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall with one blow of an axe by a masked executioner on the bitterly cold afternoon of Tuesday, 30 January 1649. Any chance that the Stuarts would be restored to the crown of England and Scotland seemed nigh impossible. By 1650, Blood was in Lancashire and, self-betterment overcoming the niceties of hopeless loyalty, had switched sides, becoming a cavalry cornet, then promoted lieutenant in the parliamentary army.
⁴¹
He may have served briefly under Cromwell in Ireland after the Roundhead general landed with 8,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry of the New Model Army at Dublin in August 1649 at the start of a campaign which was to crush the Irish rebellion after four years' hard fighting.
⁴²

Blood had ended seven years of war still a junior officer in the military command structure. As the years passed, his well-developed ego allowed him to rise up through the ranks to self-appointment as a colonel. But now he had something else on his mind – his requirement for a wife.

The parish registers of Newchurch, Lancashire record the wedding there of
Thomas Bloud gen
[erosus]
et Maria Holcrofte
on 21 June 1650.
⁴³

Blood had done well for himself.

His seventeen-year-old bride was the elder daughter of Lieutenant Colonel John Holcroft and his wife Margaret, of Holcroft Hall, a late-fifteenth-/early-sixteenth century farmhouse with stone mullion windows which still stands today.
⁴⁴
He apparently had met her through Holcroft's eldest son Thomas, a fellow parliamentary soldier
⁴⁵
or possibly through connections with his stepgrandmother's family.

The Holcrofts came to this part of Lancashire in the midfourteenth century.
⁴⁶
Thomas Holcroft was a ‘gentleman servitor' at the coronation of Anne Boleyn at Westminster in 1533. Three years later his brother John Holcroft contributed fifty-three soldiers to the Earl of Derby's contingent fighting against the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace who sought an end to the suppression of the monasteries. The Holcrofts did well out of the Reformation: Thomas was granted local friaries at Warrington, Preston and Lancaster, and portions of the lands of Whalley Abbey, Cartmel Priory and Vale Royal Abbey in Cheshire.
⁴⁷
At the end of Henry VIII's reign, two members of the family served as commissioners evaluating the valuable chantries at Stretford and Manchester in February 1546.
⁴⁸

From 1640, Blood's father-in-law was MP for Liverpool in the Short Parliament and then mayor of the city in 1644. Two years later he was elected MP for Wigan but was excluded from Parliament in Pride's Purge on 6 December 1648, arguably the only successful military coup d'état in English history.
⁴⁹