The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (25 page)

Crime sometimes does pay.

Furthermore, Blood was granted a pension of £500 a year from lands in Straffan, Co. Kildare
⁶³
and the return of his Irish and English properties from attainder in return for his informing the government of dissident conspiracies; improving relations between the crown and nonconformists and endeavouring to ‘reduce or disperse' the ‘absconded persons' within that community.
⁶⁴

Blood emerged joyfully from out of the shadows. Shortly after his release from the Tower, Thomas Henshaw saw him walking in the courtyard of Whitehall Palace resplendent ‘in a new suit and periwig . . . exceedingly pleasant and jocose. He has been at liberty this fortnight. He is nothing like the idea I had made to myself of him for he is a tall, rough-boned man, with small legs, a pock-freckled face
⁶⁵
with little hollow blue eyes.'
⁶⁶

The diarist John Evelyn was horrified to find the colonel attending a dinner at the home of Sir Thomas Clifford, the comptroller of the royal household,
⁶⁷
with ‘several French noblemen'. As far as Evelyn was concerned, here was the fellow dinner guest from hell. He was mortified to see him free and so blatantly enjoying the delights of polite London society. Afterwards, he wrote:

Blood, that impudent bold fellow who not long before attempted to steal the imperial crown itself out of the Tower, pretending only curiosity of seeing the regalia there, when stabbing the keeper, though not mortally, he boldly went away with it through all the guards, taken only by the accident of his horse falling down.

How he came to be pardoned, and even received into favour, not only after this, but several other exploits almost as daring both in Ireland and here, I could never come to understand.

Some believed he became a spy of several parties, being well
with the sectaries and enthusiasts, and did His Majesty services that way, which none alive could do as well as he; but it was certainly the boldest attempt, so the only treason of this sort that was ever pardoned.

This man had not only a daring but villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken and dangerously insinuating.
⁶⁸

Worse yet, Blood had adopted the habit of ‘perpetually' attending the court and was frequently seen happily promenading in the royal apartments of the Palace of Whitehall. With his usual arrogance and audacity, he ‘affected particularly to be in the same room where the duke of Ormond was, to the indignation of all others, though neglected and overlooked by his grace'.
⁶⁹
Such snubs had no effect on a man of such ego and self-confidence.

There is little doubt that Blood's release – and reward – astonished many. In Paris, William Perwich, secretary of the British embassy there, wrote to Williamson on 5 September, reporting that there were two major topics of conversation in diplomatic circles there. The first was the sorry saga of Captain Thomas Crowe, commander of the eight-gun yacht
Merlin
, who failed in his duty in not firing upon a Dutch man-of-war which discourteously ‘refused to strike to the king's flag'. This had ‘made a great noise here – but nothing so much as talk [about] Blood being forgiven'.
⁷⁰

In London, Sir Roger Burgoyne, up from his Bedfordshire estates and staying with his friend Sir Nathaniel Hobart in Chancery Lane, could not believe that Blood had received a pardon after ‘all his villainy' and warned darkly that ‘some designs, more than ordinary are on foot'.
⁷¹

That
enfant terrible
among courtiers, the often drunken satirist poet John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, may have been the author of twenty-eight stanzas attacking Charles II over a broad spectrum of complaint about his policies and personal behaviour, later described by Arlington as ‘this seditious and traitorous libel'.
⁷²
It included this acerbic passage:

Blood that wears treason in his face
Villain complete in parson's gown
How much he is at court in grace
For stealing Ormond and the crown!
Since loyalty does no man good,
Let's steal the king and outdo Blood!

There was little hope that Blood's reincarnation as a government spy could be kept secret; indeed, his showy behaviour after his release stripped away his greatest protection as an agent – anonymity and the ability to merge into his surroundings.

But this was intentional. His public rehabilitation was a conscious decision by Arlington to demonstrate the power of royal mercy to Blood's friends still on the run and to indicate that, if only they dropped their opposition to the crown, they too could expect lenient treatment and the enjoyment of normal life in open society.

That normality meant the acquisition of a home for Blood's reunited family. Now restored to funds, he acquired a house on the corner of Great Peter Street and Tufton Street in Westminster, overlooking Bowling Alley, and moved there soon after his release from the Tower.
⁷³
This was a prosperous area of new development and the colonel enjoyed the pleasure of having a number of high-status personages from Parliament and the court as his near neighbours. He may also have bought a property in the country: an unsubstantiated tradition suggests that he lived in the manor house at Minley, a hamlet in the parish of Yateley in Hampshire.
⁷⁴

On 26 September 1671, warrants were made out for payments of royal bounty to those who had saved the Crown Jewels. After all his tribulations, the handsome sum of £200 was awarded to the faithful Talbot Edwards and further sums of £100 were each paid to Captain Martin Beckman and Wythe Edwards ‘for resisting the late villainous attempt made to steal the crown'.
⁷⁵

Inevitably, with the parlous state of Charles's Exchequer, Talbot Edwards did not receive a penny. He was forced to sell on the
warrants for ridiculously small amounts of cash to pay his medical expenses in treating the injuries he had sustained at the hands of Blood and his accomplices.

On 30 September 1674 he died, probably from the effects of his wounds.

8

Coming in from the Cold

Blood sees privately and cunningly [James] Innes and his friends but of that not a word, not to the king

Notes made by Sir Joseph Williamson, 9 November 1671
¹

Thomas Blood's first task in his new guise on the government payroll was to operate as a spy or intermediary to support his masters' attempts to weaken the radical nonconformist underground and neutralise their threat to the Stuart crown. Arlington outlined part of his mission in evidence to the Committee of Foreign Affairs on 22 October 1671 by relating that ‘upon the pardoning of Blood he went away among his brethren to bring in some of his friends on assurance of pardon'.
²

With the prospect of war with the Dutch looming ever nearer on the horizon, accompanied by the unacceptable risk of concurrent sedition and insurrection being fomented amongst religious dissidents, it was imperative not only to deactivate the known renegades but also to quieten nonconformist resentment and anger at the congregations' treatment at the hand of government. Here Blood could make his mark by spying on his former friends and also by facilitating behind-the-scenes dialogue between government and dissenters.

While he still met Sir Joseph Williamson, Blood's main contact with his new paymasters, initially at least, was his old jailer, Sir John Robinson at the Tower of London. At the end of December, Sir John, profitably engaged in catching Quakers – those ‘besotted people, fools and knaves' – reported that ‘Mr Blood sometimes
visits me and tells me he has been faithful in keeping his promises'.
³

During the mid-166os there was growing popular opposition to nonconformists being hauled up before the courts for flaunting the Act of Uniformity's insistence that none other than Church of England rites should be employed in worship. At Hereford, a grand jury presented only 150 of these ‘Neros kneaded up of blood and dirt' who refused to conform
⁴
and similar refusals to indict continued throughout England, as at Norwich, Newcastle and Yarmouth. This general unwillingness to prosecute mirrored the king's own unease over the prosecutions: Sir Thomas Bridges of Bristol was summoned to appear before the Privy Council and told plainly that rigorous proceedings against nonconformists were not agreeable to his majesty.
⁵

In the face of the continual threats posed by conspiracies and egged on by senior Anglican clergy, Charles II's government had been forced to take a firmer grip on illegal nonconformist activity. The Act to Prevent and Suppress Seditious Conventicles (or assemblies) of 1670
⁶
imposed stiff fines on those who attended religious services other than those of the Church of England. A fine of five shillings (25 pence) was imposed on a first offender and ten shillings (50 pence) for a subsequent breach of the law. In addition, a preacher or any other person who allowed his premises to be used for such illegal purposes risked a fine of twenty shillings (£1), or £140 in today's purchasing power, which doubled up for a second offence.

Other punishments were harsher. Two Norfolk men were arrested at an illegal conventicle at Beeston for the third time and sentenced to be transported for ten years' hard labour on one of the Caribbean islands. They were sent to the Dorset port of Lyme Regis but, no ship being available to take them overseas, they were thrown into prison and had remained there ever since. Jonathan Jennings of London also had been incarcerated for three years but eventually offered hard cash as a surety to guarantee his future behaviour as a loyal subject. An endorsement to the record of these men's miseries reads: ‘Three conventiclers to be discharged; Mr Blood' – so the old reprobate, in his new role, was trying to right some natural injustices.
⁷

By this intervention, Blood may have been trying to redeem his standing in the nonconformist community which, after the attack on Ormond, the attempted theft of the Crown Jewels, and his very public rehabilitation with Charles II, remained at a low ebb. The Presbyterian Arthur Annesley, First Earl of Anglesey, was still going around London ‘blasting' Blood amongst the nonconformists.
⁸
The colonel was also unsettled by an unexpected visit to his home by a sinister stranger whom he suspected was sent ‘by some ill-wisher to ensnare him'. He desired to know how the king wanted him to handle ‘such cases'.
⁹

Blood's activities on behalf of the government can sometimes be discerned through a series of frustratingly cryptic notes written in barely decipherable handwriting by the always frantically busy Williamson, as a kind of journal and aide-memoire for the everyday proceedings of his department. Early on, Blood was busy promoting the government's policy in the City of London ‘in relation to our affairs [with] Holland and France' but was also asked to examine letters from exiled radicals in the Low Countries as ‘Blood knows the key [cipher] and the [handwriting]'.
¹⁰

He soon fell in with an Anglican clergyman named Dr Nicholas Butler, who at the time was commonly despised for his ‘placeseeking and hanging [about] in the [royal] court through Prince Rupert and others'.
¹¹
His other main associate was a Mr Church, the clerk at the Fleet prison, off what is now Farringdon Road, on the eastern bank of the River Fleet,
¹²
who was keen for his assistance in obtaining intelligence from Irish sources.

The colonel also began meeting James Innes, a Scottish nonconformist and former rector of the parish of St Breock, near Wadebridge in Cornwall, who was seeking to negotiate with the king to allow his brothers and sisters in the church greater religious freedom. The nonconformists had been divided in their response to the Conventicles Act. Many of their elders believed they had no choice but to obey this draconian law, as their pockets were not deep enough to defy it on a regular basis. This group of clergy, who elected to avoid holding illegal assemblies, became known in popular parlance as ‘Dons'. Other brethren, often younger and
more militant, chose to continue with their religious conventicles, literally at all costs. These were nicknamed, rather bizarrely, ‘the Ducklings', and Innes became their main spokesman.

In early November 1671, he pleaded with Blood to humbly request the king to allow greater religious liberty. Blood refused. Innes then met Charles and begged him to permit the larger groups to openly hold their services in their meeting houses. While the king expressed sympathy with Innes' cause and showed ‘all tenderness', he could not promise anything to help or comfort them in the short term. But he told him ‘that they must order their meetings discreetly, that you may strengthen my hands and not weaken them'.
¹³
If the royal eye did not see, plainly the sheriff's officers would not be calling. But this was not enough. Basic religious freedom still went unacknowledged or, more importantly, enshrined in law.