The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (24 page)

He was a combative partisan on behalf of the established Church of England who firmly opposed any kind of official toleration of either Catholics or dissenters. In 1676 Osborne tried to suppress the London coffee houses because of the ‘defamation of his majesty's government' that was frequently uttered over the beverage cups. He was a man who made enemies easily. Indeed, after being created First Earl of Danby and serving as chief minister in 1673–9, Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, believed him to be ‘the most hated minister that had ever been about the king'.

The merchant James Lyttleton was a brother of Sir Thomas and cashier to the navy treasurers in 1668–71. Two years later he was employed in the unedifying task of pressing unwilling recruits into service as sailors on board Royal Navy warships.

No one accepted this forged confession as a true bill and Osborne and both the Lyttletons were not even questioned.

The key to Blood's fate must lie in the factors that drove him to try to steal the Crown Jewels. He was never a career criminal – indeed, he detested his son's felonious activities as a highwayman – and his previous adventures all had well defined political or religious objectives. His rationale in trying to steal the Crown Jewels puzzled his contemporaries and many of his friends and associates in the radical religious and republican underground. For example, Edmund Ludlow, exiled in faraway Switzerland, could not, for the life of him, perceive ‘what advantage there would have been to the public cause, should they have succeeded in their enterprise'.
⁴¹

While Blood always insisted that he was driven by purely financial gain, the difficulties of breaking up and converting such high-profile swag into ready money would have worked against his expectations of a healthy profit from the theft. The gold could have been easily melted down but too many people would have expected a generous payment for their risk in handling such recognisable gemstones. Anyway, did he have the necessary contacts within the London underworld to enable him to sell on all those diamonds, sapphires and rubies prised off the crown's gold mounting? As this was his first taste of the world of base criminality, probably not.

Then there is the purely symbolic motive aimed at damaging the monarchy: stealing the crown might allegorically remove some of the visible power from the king. This may well have appealed to a former parliamentary officer and a consort of the Fifth Monarchists who, after all, saw Charles II as an agent of Satan, but it seems too abstruse for a man of action such as Blood.

Was he trying to redeem himself with his radical Presbyterian community? There were indications that the Ormond episode had badly injured his reputation among his fellow conspirators in
London. One informer reported gleefully that ‘those congregations of nonconformists which [Blood and his accomplices] . . . have formerly frequented, abhor [the attack on the duke] and would be glad to bring them to punishment if it were in their power'.
⁴²
If that adverse reaction had troubled Blood, the Crown Jewels escapade failed to restore his good name as a fervent radical. The postponed attack on the House of Lords, caused by the jewel robbery, would not have endeared him to them either. William Dale, one of Williamson's informers, reported in early August that a ‘dangerous and disaffected person and a man of great design' called William Thompson, an alias of the former Parliamentarian Captain Povey, had journeyed from London to Loughton in Essex ‘muffled up and [said] that Blood should be stabbed and the rest – for they were false'.
⁴³

Was Blood paid to undertake the robbery? Was the theft of the regalia part of one of Buckingham's strange machinations? A precursor perhaps to the assassination of Charles II and the proclamation of a usurper whose standing would have been enhanced by his possession of the royal regalia? This particular conspiracy theory was reinforced at the time by the news of a burglary in Great Ormond Street, London, the Tuesday after the attempted robbery of the Jewel House. This was the home of the lord high chancellor, Sir Orlando Bridgeman. All his valuables were ignored by the thieves and only the Great Seal of England was stolen. Its loss was highly significant: an impression of it was routinely affixed to important state documents and its disappearance meant that much of the machinery of government would cease to function. A new one had to be made hastily.
⁴⁴

For centuries, there has been persistent speculation that Charles II himself was complicit in the crime.
⁴⁵
Some believed that Blood's paymaster was the king – hence the colonel's unusual, princely treatment. One version was that Charles, perennially short of money, conceived a desperate plan to steal his own Crown Jewels and to sell them overseas to raise the required hard cash. He cast around for a suitable criminal to perform the commission and Blood's derring-do credentials fitted the royal requirements precisely.
Buckingham, with his track record of employing Blood, was asked to secretly arrange the crime.

Buckingham probably did undertake disreputable missions at Charles's behest, providing a valuable cut-out to avoid direct connection with the throne in case anything went disastrously wrong. However, there is no direct evidence to support this notion, attractive as it may appear to those romanticists amongst us, and it sadly must stay firmly in the realm of conjecture.

Another, still less plausible, theory had the king swearing, having partaken too freely at the banqueting table, that after all his painful years of exile in Europe, no one would now deprive him of the crown of England. In a moment of boisterous madness, he unwisely backed this pledge with a recklessly generous wager that none could ever make away with it. Blood heard of this bet and took the king literally at his word – intending to eventually return the regalia and claim his royal winnings with true
brio.
As conspiracy theories go, this fits the bill precisely: ingenuity coupled with just a smidgeon of lunacy.

On 6 June Sir John Robinson reported an unexpected visit to the Tower by Sir William Morton, a judge of the King's Bench, who was not only renowned for his loyalty to the monarchy but who revelled in a fearsome and well-deserved reputation for exacting harsh, exemplary justice on any wrongdoers who came up before him in court. (It was Morton who condemned to death the daredevil French ‘gallant highwayman', Claude Duval, in the teeth of popular protest in January 1670.) After having played a prominent and dogged role in investigating the attack on Ormond the previous year, he was now, terrier-like, demanding to interrogate Blood.

On this occasion, Morton was thwarted again. One can imagine his frustration at being turned away by what he saw as sheer bureaucracy. Robinson told Williamson that, not having received an order allowing the judge's visit, he had to deny him permission to see his notorious prisoner. The lieutenant added, with just a hint of understatement: ‘Blood, seeing him out of the window, was startled a bit.'
⁴⁶

There was great excitement over what would be made public during the trial of the colonel, his former highwayman son and Perrot. On 12 June, the Venetian ambassador wondered what revelations the colonel had produced in the course of his interrogation: ‘The secrets revealed by Blood, the robber of the Crown Jewels, are hidden among the acts of his examination.' Here was a ‘faithful and good servant of the late king [Charles I]' who had become a ‘professed rebel . . . Universal curiosity is excited by his [forthcoming] trial'.
⁴⁷

At the end of the month, Blood and his son submitted humble petitions to Arlington to allow their wife and mother to visit them – the men complaining that ‘close confinement' in the Tower was impairing their health. Ever loyal, Mary Blood, apparently recovered from her illness and returned from Lancashire, concurrently sought permission to see her husband and son ‘who have been now near eight weeks so closely imprisoned . . . that I can neither hear of their health nor receive any directions from them'.
⁴⁸

Behind the scenes, Arlington was working assiduously to win a free pardon for Blood. This was an ancient and merciful prerogative inherent in the English monarchy. A pardon presupposes guilt or the conviction of a miscreant for a crime committed and discharges the recipient from all penalties. The process is said to make him a
novus homo
or ‘new man' in the eyes of society and the law.
⁴⁹
Arlington's objective was, to use the modern espionage jargon, to ‘turn' Blood; to employ him as a government double agent and a major player in his campaign to defeat the ever-present menace posed by Presbyterian and other nonconformist dissidents. After the conversation with Charles II, the minister knew he was pushing at an open door as far as the outlaw was concerned.

With a third Anglo-Dutch war looming on the horizon, Arlington had to swiftly neutralise any domestic threats to the stability of the realm. The last thing he wanted was an informal alliance between the religious dissenters at home and the enemy in the Netherlands. A Dutch attack, synchronised with an insurrection by republican nonconformists, was an alarming prospect that would stretch government resources and divert attention away from a
successful prosecution of the war at sea and abroad. Arlington must have already been working on drafts of a regulatory measure to provide greater religious liberty to nonconformists and Catholics as a timely sop to dissident opinion.
⁵⁰

Meanwhile, he required reliable intelligence on the intentions, plans and movements of the major players in the dangerous sectarian groups. Blood, characterised by Ludlow as ‘having been acquainted with most of the secret passages [activities] that have of late been transacted in order to [revive] the Lords' witnesses',
⁵¹
was the ideal informer within this shadowy world, having worked for the secret service before on an ad hoc basis.
⁵²

Arlington's plan for Blood's employment was endorsed by his fellow secretary of state Joseph Williamson, who had rated his value as a spy to be ‘ten times the value [of the] crown'. Although the colonel was never to win the complete trust of the two spymasters, Williamson patently believed that he and Arlington, as Blood's new masters, now possessed an agent of extraordinary power and ability.

Not content with his life being spared, the colonel tried to haggle over the terms and conditions of his pardon. Denzil Holles, First Baron Holles – that ‘stiff and sullen man', according to the king – and Anthony Cooper, Lord Ashley, a supporter of official moderation towards Protestant dissenters, negotiated with the renegade immediately after his release about the agreement to spy for the government. At one point Blood apparently sought an appointment as governor of one of the North American colonies in exchange for his services, but these aspirations went unrequited. Instead, Williamson noted simply that the king ‘would provide for him'.
⁵³

Charles placed one inviolable condition on his agreeing to Blood's pardon. The colonel must apologise humbly to the Duke of Ormond for his attack.

Apologies cost nothing and Blood happily wrote the required letter to Ormond in apparent abject atonement for his assault. The lyrical terms he employed may indicate that he included some suggested phrases – possibly offered by Arlington or Williamson – although its contents, a rambling single sentence covering sixteen
lines with almost no punctuation, required some skilful editing (if not careful reading).

His one-page note says:

The greatness of my crimes so far exceeds expression that were not my burdened soul encouraged by finding vent to its grief, though by such an acknowledgement as bears little proportion to my guilt, I had forborn this further trouble to Your Grace, but overcharged with increasing sorrow by the consideration of your renowned excellency which, I unworthy monster was so regardless of, has produced this eruption of the humble acknowledgement of my most heinous crime the which as I have a deep impression of heart compunction, so should I count it my happiness to have an opportunity in the most demonstrative way to manifest it Your Grace, who am unworthy to be accounted, though, in reality, I am

Your Grace's most humble Servant Thomas Blood
⁵⁴

Arlington went to visit the duke on behalf of Charles II and asked him to forgive Blood, probably bringing this letter with him. He told Ormond that the king ‘was willing to save [Blood] from execution for certain reasons which he was commanded to give him'.
⁵⁵
As befits a faithful old courtier, Ormond was magnanimous in his response. The duke replied that if ‘the king could forgive an attempt on his crown, I myself may easily forgive an attempt on my life and since it is his majesty's pleasure, that is reason sufficient for me and your lordship may well spare the rest of the explanations'.
⁵⁶

The condition thus fulfilled, Arlington dined with Sir John Robinson at the Tower of London on 14 July. In his pocket was a signed warrant for the release of Blood and Perrot. Thomas Blood junior was to remain a prisoner in the Tower for a little while longer, probably as a hostage to guarantee his father's immediate good behaviour and to test his commitment to his new career as a government spy.
⁵⁷
The warrant for his release was finally signed on 30 August, and his free pardon, with that of Perrot, the following day.
⁵⁸

Blood was free.

On 1 August 1671, Blood was graciously granted his pardon. The six-line record in Arlington's papers read: ‘Pardon to Thomas Blood the father of all treasons, misprisons
⁵⁹
of treason, murders, homicides, felonies, assaults, batteries
⁶⁰
and other offences whatsoever at any time since 25 May 1660,
⁶¹
committed by himself alone or together with any other person or persons . . . '.
⁶²