The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (26 page)

Williamson was made aware of Blood's frequent covert meetings with Innes through the Post Office's interception of the letters between them. His notes of 9 November confirm this: ‘They may not smell out we have correspondence with Innes by Blood.' He was shocked by his agent's duplicity:
‘Nota bene
[mark well]. Blood sees privately and cunningly Innes and his friends but of that not a word, not to the king.'
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By 11 November, the secretary of state was worried by the growing prospect of a widespread uprising by the nonconformists. His jotted notes mused that the real key to suppressing the crisis was the role of the gentry: ‘Gratify the gentry, for no great disturbance can be, unless they be [at the head]. The people stir not without the gentry. They are dissatisfied (1) as mostly all men are, not to be as high as others at court and (2) especially for being unrewarded for their sufferings.' After these sociological ramblings, he turned his attention to the increasingly problematical Blood, who ‘disgusts his two friends [Butler and Church] by disappointing them. They think him too high and [he] values himself too much'.
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Then sometime between 16 November and 4 December, Blood suddenly switched his allegiance from Arlington and Williamson to the unscrupulous and licentious secretary of state for Scotland, John Maitland, Second Earl of Lauderdale. It was a strange decision
to desert his paymasters, but was probably caused by Blood's realisation of the strength of Lauderdale's influence with Charles, as he was said to be ‘never far from the king's ear or council' despite his responsibilities for the northern kingdom. It was also symptomatic of Blood's increasing tendency to meddle in the perilous world of court politics.

Williamson recognised the shift in his agent's loyalties very quickly. Blood, he noted, ‘is going in to Lord Lauderdale, cries him up everywhere'. Faced with continuing evidence of Blood's scheming, the spymaster's patience was beginning to run very thin. His scribbled memorandum noted that the colonel ‘has left himself notably to fantasies'. It was known that he had received money from secret service funds to pay off his debts, ‘but [he] pays none but [only] huffs to them', the secretary of state added acidly. Blood was boasting that

I dine once or twice a week with the archbishop of Canterbury and he did not know what should be done.

He also believed it was easy to go over Williamson's head and deal direct with Arlington. Contemptuously, the spymaster added: ‘His head is turned with wine and treats and the fanatics that keep company with him take advantage of him.'
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So much for Blood shunning strong drink and ‘recreations, or pomps . . . quibbling or joking' and the other joys of good company.
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Williamson now harboured grave doubts about Blood's effectiveness and his value as an informer or intermediary with the dissident underground. He noted: ‘Any that are known to join with him are lost to the fanatics.' He pondered whether it would be wise to end all dealings with the former outlaw: ‘To break with Blood – for if he be thus mutable [fickle] as to Lord Arlington, then whether he be lost with the fanatics or no, it is not safe. To what purpose . . . to meet longer with him?' Then he added the damning four words: ‘Not to be trusted.' Williamson concluded: ‘That we may break off meeting with Blood for they [the nonconformists] will not absolutely trust him any longer.'
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This memorandum seemed to have an awful note of finality.

Three days later, Williamson recorded in his notes a meeting between Blood, Butler and Church at the clergyman's lodgings. Blood had ‘magnified Lauderdale, saying that they understood one another and he was the great man . . . He clapped his hand on his heart and said “[He] had not only the king but Lord Lauderdale here!'” Williamson noted: ‘By all means break off with Blood. He leaps over all heads and his company may ruin them [Butler and Church] to the fanatics.'
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Two Scots informers then came forward to offer information about the nonconformist threat in Scotland to the privy counsellor Sir Robert Moray, a one-time spy for Cardinal Richelieu in France, a prominent Freemason and one of the founders of the Royal Society. His vocal calls for moderacy towards dissenters explains their otherwise strange choice for a point of contact within the government. He passed them on to Sir John Baber, a physician in ordinary to the king, a man well known for his absolute discretion, who was frequently used by Charles as a secret conduit for messages from the throne to the dissenters.
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(Pepys believed him so cautious that he would ‘not speak in company unless acquainted with every stranger present' in a room.)
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The Scots were directed to Arlington, who passed them back to Baber for further questioning. With all these pillar-to-post meetings, the informers must, by now, have wondered whether their journey south was really necessary.

They told the physician that Lauderdale had lost the trust of the Scottish nonconformists and his only status in Scotland ‘was by the king's favour' – his job title as secretary of state. He had ‘disgusted all the nobility' and ‘generally all the body of the people'. There was a ‘great fermentation' in the kingdom which would ‘if not prevented break out'.
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Blood became convinced that Baber was trying to discredit him with Arlington and he probably incited Lauderdale's bile against the despondent Scottish informants.
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He still faced opprobrium among the dissenter community; one member warned, ‘Have a care of Blood, he is a rogue', Williamson noted.
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The colonel needed to rebuild his fences with his paymasters and
demonstrate his continuing usefulness. Williamson had earlier acknowledged that he ‘had great converse of old officers', and Blood had enjoyed some success in convincing those former parliamentary army men who had a history of conspiracy and rebellion to come in from the cold, using his own treatment at the hands of the king as an example of the royal clemency that could be expected.

Now he wrote to Arlington, reminding him of his efforts to convince the nonconformist radicals exiled in the Netherlands to return home under promise of pardon to prevent them being utilised as fifth columnists by the Dutch in the event of war. One of them was Jonathan Jennings, who had been committed to Aylesbury prison in 1666 but had escaped overseas. Blood pointed out that Jennings ‘having met with a stop at present in having his pardon perfected and proving a hearty friend to the king's service, I ask that some intimation be given to the jailer of the King's Bench that he has a warrant for his pardon and is suing it out, that he may not bear hard on him'.
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He added: ‘I had some other things to intimate by word of mouth to your lordship, but reserve them till I have an opportunity' of meeting.
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Blood's first triumph in this specific task was in September 1671 and involved Major John Gladman, said by Williamson to be ‘hearty to Blood's way'.
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Gladman agreed to seek a private audience with Charles to swear the oath of allegiance in return for a royal pardon. Captain John Lockyer (one of Blood's accomplices in the rescue of the ‘general Baptist' Captain John Mason in 1667) also accepted a pardon through his intervention, although ‘Mene Tekel', alias Captain Roger Jones, stoudy refused to wait on the king for his act of clemency.
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In November 1672 Blood reported to Arlington on the audience of another radical, Major William Low, with the king:

according to your direction I brought the gentleman to the king . . . [who] was satisfied in him and bade me take care about his pardon in order to which I request your order for a warrant.

Hardly anyone that has been pardoned will turn to a better account, for he is a man of parts and esteem in that [militant] party in Ireland and is so passionately taken with the king's condescending
grace that I am persuaded nothing shall stir there to his majesty's prejudice that he can hinder.

With an eye to the recruitment of a potential new agent in Dublin, Blood added: ‘He shall wait on you, if you think it necessary.'
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He was less successful with Mason himself, now a keeper of a London coffee house and still an inveterate plotter, or with the Fifth Monarchist William Smith, who had guarded Blood's horses during the raid on the Crown Jewels. Both stuck to their radical guns and would have nothing to do with the government amnesty.

In April 1675, Blood petitioned Williamson on behalf of Captain Humphrey Spurway, of Tiverton, Devon, who was involved in the conspiracy led by Thomas Tonge (another parliamentary officer who, after the Restoration, was forced into the twin evils of selling tobacco and distilling spirits).

Spurway had planned to kill Charles while he was on his way to visit his mother at Greenwich and to seize the Dukes of York, Albermarle and Sir Richard Browne, now lord mayor of London. The conspiracy came to nothing and he fled out of the country. Financed by a small group of London merchants, he had travelled on to an overseas plantation. Now Blood wanted to win him a pardon. He was one of those ‘absconded persons I took charge of to reduce or disperse who chose to remove to a remote plantation being persuaded that he might be incapable of endeavouring to promote sedition or disturbances to the government'.

His crimes were the same [as] the common drove of those his majesty pardoned at my coming out of the Tower and no other.

His is employed by [James] Nelthorpe
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and other merchants in a remote plantation where he resolves to settle and never to return but become a loyal subject, if he may be delivered from his fears by a pardon.

I suppose his merchants will engage [vouch] for him, if there be any occasion.
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Spurway's pardon was granted two days later.
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With some of these dangerous radicals now neutralised, Charles II tried implementing a new, diametrically opposed, policy to quell the disquiet and dissatisfaction among the sombre godly ranks of his nonconformist subjects. Where coercion and oppression had failed, decriminalisation might work more effectively Deploying his royal prerogative, the king signed the Declaration of Indulgence at the Palace of Whitehall on 15 March 1672, suspending the penal laws banning unlawful religious meeting:

Our care and endeavours for the preservation of the rights and interests of the [Anglican] Church have been sufficiently manifested . . . by the whole course of our government since our happy restoration, and by the many and frequent ways of coercion that we have used for reducing all erring or dissenting persons . . .

But it being evident by the sad experience of twelve years that there is very little fruit of all those forcible courses, we think ourself obliged to make use of that supreme power in ecclesiastical matters . . .

And that there may be no pretence for any of our subjects to continue their illegal meetings and conventicles, we do declare that we shall from time to time allow a sufficient number of places, as they shall be desired, in all parts of this our kingdom, for the use of such as do not conform to the Church of England, to meet and assemble in order to their public worship and devotion, which places shall be open and free to all persons.

But to prevent such disorders and inconvenience as may happen by this our indulgence, if not duly regulated, and that they may be the better protected by the civil magistrate, our express will and pleasure is that none of our subjects do presume to meet in any place until such place be allowed, and the teacher of that congregation be approved by us.

The timing was tight: twelve days later, England, in alliance with Louis XIV of France, declared war on the Dutch United Provinces. Arlington sent a copy of the king's new religious policy to Sir Bernard Gascoign, the English ambassador in Vienna: ‘I add also
a late Declaration his Majesty has made in favour of the nonconformists, that we might keep all quiet at home whilst we are busiest abroad.'
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Unwilling to face the likely wrath of Parliament, Charles prorogued the session set for 1 April to October and then to February 1673.
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The longed-for official toleration of nonconformist worship had at last arrived. The framework of a means to operate this new policy seems to have originated with the assertive Dr Butler, who forwarded a scheme to Williamson that envisaged a system of distributing government licences for private and public devotions. Allowing their worship to emerge from the dark shadows of secrecy and illegality would make the nonconformists respond to this ‘little kindly treatment' by becoming more loyal to the Stuart crown. ‘A little love', he told the secretary of state, ‘obliges more than great severity' and by this means ‘all will have a dependency on his majesty' Butler was fully confident that the threat of religious extremists would be neutralised: ‘I think it would be beyond the power of the devil or bad men to give [the king] any disturbance in his kingdoms.'
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There were three kinds of licences that congregations had to apply for. One permitted the use of a building as a meeting house, the second covered preachers at such assemblies and the third those itinerant ministers who travelled from town to town devoutly spreading the Word of God.

While some nonconformist ministers were wary about the impact of the Declaration, most of their flocks were jubilant at their new-found freedom to worship. One humble and loyal address to the king declared: ‘We cannot but look on your majesty as the breath of our nostrils, as a repairer of our breaches and a restorer of paths to dwell in.' Another professed that by this ‘unparalleled act of grace, you have made our hearts to leap and our souls to sing for joy of heart and have laid such a sense of your royal condescension and indulgence upon us if we cannot but now always, and in all places, acknowledge and celebrate the most worthy deeds done to us your poor subjects and as men raised out of the grave from every corner of the land, stand and call your majesty blessed.'
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One of those
soon to receive a licence to preach was Jonathan Jennings, having returned to England under pardon.
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