The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (3 page)

John Holcroft was an important local parliamentary hero, having been involved in one of the first skirmishes in the prelude to the Civil War. On 15 July 1642, Holcroft, still a plain ‘Mr', together with his fellow local militia commissioners, tried to deny Manchester to the forces of the crown. The Royalist high sheriff of Lancaster, Lord Molyneux, and Lord Strange had just sat down to a convivial meal after a busy day recruiting troops in the city, when they heard that Holcroft was only streets away at the head of a large force ‘with soldiers armed with pikes and muskets, with their matches lighted and cocked, also a drum beating'. Molyneux ordered them ‘in his majesty's name to lay down their arms, keep the peace and cease the tumult but Mr Holcroft . . . charged him with disobedience to [the] law'. In the confusion that followed, Strange was shot at three times before he and the high sheriff fled the town. One of their pursuers, Richard Percival, a ‘linen webster' of Kirkmanshulme, was killed by a pistol bullet, supposedly the first man to die in the English Civil War.
⁵⁰
In March 1643, Holcroft commanded a small force of 600 musketeers defending Lancaster. After they were driven into the castle, the frustrated Royalists set the town ablaze.
⁵¹

Mary Holcroft was married from Holcroft Hall and, nine months later, the couple's first-born son, Thomas, was baptised at Newchurch on 30 March 1651.
⁵²
Over the years, the couple were to have six more children: four sons – William, Holcroft (born c.1657), Edmund and Charles – and two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth.
⁵³

Blood returned to Ireland and his wife joined him there later in 1651. He apparently received a grant of more land in lieu of army back pay and so impressed Henry Cromwell (Oliver's fourth son), lord deputy and later lord lieutenant of Ireland, that he was appointed a parliamentary commissioner.
⁵⁴
His biographer says Cromwell looked upon Blood ‘as a person fit for employment and promotion . . . the main use he made of his authority was to assert and uphold, as much as lay within his power, the Protestant and English interest in that kingdom'.
⁵⁵

So we leave Thomas Blood, happily chasing and chastising Irish Catholic rebels – or do we? There is one report that, around this time in his career, he served as a footman, under the alias ‘Allen', to one of the regicides
⁵⁶
– one of the fifty-nine who condemned the king at his trial in Westminster Hall and afterwards signed the death warrant. On one hand, this seems unlikely, as Blood would have been a man of some means in Ireland and would hardly have been employed as a mere retainer, even to a person of influence in the Commonwealth government. On the other, ‘Allen' was one of his favourite aliases in the years to come and possibly Blood cunningly believed that such employment might prove advantageous, close to the new egalitarian seat of power.

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the realm since December 1653, died in Whitehall on 3 September 1658 from the effects of malaria and a kidney infection. He was fifty-nine. His son Richard succeeded him, but stable governance descended into confusion as various factions fought for political supremacy. Many guessed correctly that the days of England as a republic were numbered.

On 8 May 1660, Parliament proclaimed that the exiled Charles II had been the lawful monarch since the execution of his father in 1649. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661.

These momentous events across the Irish Sea reached out and radically changed the lives of Thomas Blood and his growing family in ways they could hardly have dreamt of in their worst nightmares. Ruin was about to befall the Bloods of Sarney, Co. Meath.

1

Capture the Castle

Things of this nature, in my humble judgment, must not be dallied with, but be crushed in the very egg and a rebellion is easier prevented than suppressed.

Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery and president of Munster, to Charles II, 23 May 1663
¹

Wholesale state confiscation of Catholic and Royalist lands in Ireland followed Oliver Cromwell's brutal suppression of the Irish Confederation rebellion. Superficially, this seemed to be the action of an impecunious administration in London confiscating traitors' property simply to meet the vociferous demands of New Model Army veterans in Ireland for their eighteen months' arrears in pay.
²
English governments had taken this harsh step before and were prepared to repeat it in the future.

However, the objective was far more malevolent than a mere juggling of hard-pressed state budgets.

The Rump Parliament's Act of Settlement of Ireland in August 1652 authorised the summary execution of the leaders of the defeated uprising. It also established a legal framework to seize sufficient land to reward those ‘adventurers' (or rather speculators) who had funded English efforts to put down the insurrection to the tune of £10 million from 1642, as well as recompensing, in kind, the 12,000 English troops still serving in Ireland.
³

Many Royalist and almost all the Catholic landowners, particularly those living in Ulster, Leinster and Munster, lost all or part of their estates. Even those who played no part in the rebellion were
penalised. Those living in Ireland between 1 October 1649 and 1 March 1650 who had not ‘manifested their constant good affection to the interest of the Commonwealth of England' lost one third of their lands. Before these punitive measures were implemented, 60 per cent of Ireland's land was in Catholic hands. Afterwards, their holdings had plummeted to about 8 per cent – and much of this acreage produced poor agricultural yields.

Worse still, Cromwell planned a coldly calculated programme of ethnic cleansing, perhaps defined more accurately as social engineering. Around 50,000 Irish men, women and children were deported to Jamaica, Barbados and the smaller Caribbean islands of St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat to work as indentured labourers on sugar and tobacco plantations.
⁴
Landowners were told in July 1653 that they must move to Connacht (the smallest and poorest of the four Irish provinces) and its counties of Mayo, Galway, Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon, all west of the River Shannon. The only alternative offered to this banishment was to be summarily hanged; reputedly, Cromwell himself demanded that the Irish must go ‘to Hell or Connacht'.

These newly designated Irish homelands were intended to be tribal reservations, in all but name, their populations hemmed in by water – either by the river or the North Atlantic. To reinforce the point, a one-mile (1.61 km) wide security zone was established along the eastern perimeter of Co. Clare and reserved for armed military settlers ‘to confine the transplanted and to cut them off from relief by sea'.

Furthermore, a £20 bounty was offered for the arrest of Catholic priests. Assisting or sheltering them became a capital offence. In the forlorn hope that the faith would wither and die in their absence, priests were incarcerated in an internment camp on Inishbofin, a bare rocky island,
⁵
measuring 3.5 by 2.5 miles (5.7 by 4 km), seven miles (4.35 km) off the coast of Co. Galway.

With the massacres of Wexford and Drogheda of 1649 still vivid in their memories, it is no surprise that Catholic landowners upped sticks and left hearth and home to obey Cromwell's penal edict. Popular myth talks darkly of wholesale depopulation, but in reality
many remained on their former property as tenant farmers, serving absentee English landlords.

To ensure the profitable and most efficient distribution of the sequestered lands, a radical and intensive mapping survey of Ireland was undertaken by William Petty, one-time physician-general to the Commonwealth army in Ireland. Assisted by 1,000 men, the ‘Down Survey' took three years to complete from 1655 and its results allow us to see precisely how the riches of Ireland were divided up, as its scale was generally forty perches to an inch, one perch equalling twenty-one feet (6.4 metres).
⁶

Thomas Blood, as a former parliamentary soldier, was one of those who benefited from this redistribution of other people's assets. In addition to his old property in Sarney and in Co. Wicklow, the survey shows him with land holdings in the parish of Athboy in Driseog, Co. Meath, formerly owned by the Protestant Royalist Edward Scurlocke. These totalled 237 acres, which he shared with Trinity College, Dublin, and another old parliamentary comrade-in-arms, Nathaniel Vincent. Elsewhere in the county, at Moyagher, in the barony of Lune, Blood held a one-third share in 843 acres, formerly owned by Catholics named as James White, John Begs and another only identified as —Plunkett from Rathbone. At Kilpatrick, in the barony of Margallion, Blood now held 66 acres in his own right and shared 562 acres (of which 270 were categorised ‘unprofitable') at Brittas in the parish of Nobber in the same barony with James Watson, both parcels of land once owned by a Catholic called Patrick Cruice.
⁷

Together with the 500 acres of unprofitable mountainside at Glenmalure and his 220 acres in Sarney, Blood thus had ownership of or part share in a total of 2,428 acres.

Suddenly, by the shifting fortunes of war and the rich bounty of state intervention, he had become a very well-heeled gentleman indeed.

All this was to change dramatically after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Two years later, the Irish Parliament passed an Act of Settlement
⁸
which ordered that the Cromwellian settlers and the demobilised Commonwealth soldiers surrender some or
all of their allotted lands to ‘old English' Royalists and the so-called ‘innocent Catholics' who had played no part in the Irish Confederation rebellion but had lost their property.
⁹
All the plaintiffs had to do would be to lodge a formal claim and prove their original title to their lost acres. The new settlers would be compensated with awards of an equal amount of land elsewhere in Ireland, according to the legislators.

Each case was to be decided by a seven-man Court of Claims – made up of seven imported English gentlemen to allay Protestant misgivings about the process.
¹⁰
Within six months, between 5,000 and 6,000 Irishmen applied for restitution of their property, and of the 600 cases heard during this short period, more than 85 per cent were successful and their lands restored. On top of this flood of claims, it was discovered there was not nearly enough vacant land to hand over to the newly dispossessed. The plan was unworkable and the seeds of discord and resentment took root in the fertile soil of Irish bitterness.

As a direct result, Thomas Blood forfeited his possession of 1,426 acres granted under the 1652 Act of Settlement – or almost 85 per cent of the property handed over to him by a generous Roundhead Parliament. Of the lands left to him, the 270 acres at Brittas were acknowledged to be barren and unprofitable, as were those previously granted by Charles I in the Wicklow Mountains. He was left with just 220 acres at Sarney that could yield any kind of profit on which to live.

At one stroke, his wealth and hopes of future prosperity had been destroyed. He had been dispossessed by statute. One report says he was forced to move from his hometown of Sarney to Dublin and lodge with his Scottish brother-in-law William Leckie (or Lackey), a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, former Presbyterian preacher in Co. Meath and now a local schoolmaster.
¹¹
His landlord was a voluble and vocal advocate of using armed force to restore the lands of dispossessed Protestants.

Blood's continuing poverty is perhaps revealed by the later petition of a Dublin butcher called Dolman. On 30 June 1663, the slaughterman sought the legal assistance of James Butler, First
Duke of Ormond (lord lieutenant of Ireland since 1661), to recover an ‘outlandish bull and cow' of which he had been unlawfully deprived by Blood, described in the petition as a ‘lieutenant in the late army'. His petition was approved and presumably the butcher had his animals returned. As to whether they came back dead or alive, history is silent.
¹²

His financial and legal troubles were not confined to Ireland. In Lancashire, his father-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Holcroft, had died and was buried at Newchurch on 22 April 1656, virtuously bequeathing £80 a year to the curate of the village.
¹³

Holcroft's death came at an inopportune time, as far as the convenient settlement of his estate was concerned, for his executors found themselves confronted by an administrative nightmare. A legal action had begun four years earlier over the ownership of Holcroft's manor of Pursfurlong and property called ‘Great and Little Wooldens' in the hamlet of Cadeshead in Lancashire. This litigation stemmed from the estates, debts and last will of another local magnate, Edward Calveley, who died in November 1636.
¹⁴
Depositions had been taken from witnesses in 1652 which suggested that Holcroft had sustained Calveley when he was in straitened circumstances and the estate was bought by Holcroft, who raised the money by selling his rights to the tolls levied on the roads in Manchester. Evidence was given that ‘several great sums of money and gold' had been brought by horse and that the parliamentary officer had moved into the property ‘and was accounted the owner by the country'.
¹⁵
Events then became more menacing. At the Lancashire midsummer Quarter Sessions held at Ormskirk in 1657, the colonel's widow Margaret swore on oath that on