The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (30 page)

The heart and substance of the conspiracy was the accusation that Buckingham had sodomised a London gentlewoman called Sarah Harwood and had packed her off to France to preserve her silence and to prevent the scandal becoming public.

Buckingham's reputation for violence was well known. He acknowledged that some had talked of his ‘cruel, insolent, injurious carriage to my inferiors'. There was the case of the ‘poor old fellow' angrily beaten by the duke after the farmer had complained that he had trampled through his cornfield while hunting. ‘I protest that the story itself is wholly mistaken as some honest men, my servants that were present, are ready to witness . . . If breaking a hedge be so great a crime, I wonder what huntsmen can ever be innocent?' he asked disingenuously. Buckingham also denied categorically that he was a poisoner, even though some who had crossed him – like the informer William Leving – had died by this silent means. The attempted sodomy charge was equally serious as it had remained, since Thomas Cromwell's Buggery Act of 1533, a capital crime. Buckingham blithely, if not eloquently, denied the allegation: ‘There was mention made of my attempting a crime of so horrid a nature that it ought not to be named amongst Christians.

But for my innocency in this I can only call God to witness and rely upon the charity of all men . . . God knows I have much to answer for in the plain way but I never was so great a virtuoso in my lusts.
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Christian now had witnesses lined up, ready to testify that this was a wicked lie.

Philip Le Mar and his mother Frances Loveland were the first two. Le Mar was to claim that six years before Buckingham had committed buggery with him, although it was suggested that the
Countess of Danby had offered him £300 to make the allegation.
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Coddan and Ryther were the others. All were unlikely to appear credible figures in the witness box.

Coddan and a fellow Irishman called Maurice Hickey, alias Higgins, had settled in Long Acre, near Covent Garden, where their heavy drinking and energetic arguments in Gaelic had aroused suspicions.
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The plan was for them to convince Ryther that, in return for a large bribe, he would swear that Buckingham had sodomised the woman. If this means of persuasion failed, he would sign a confession while drugged by some narcotic. Coddan was to become the second witness who would support Ryther's allegations in court. Unfortunately, the star witness tended towards the mercurial: he agreed to testify one minute and refused the next. Another voice was necessary to steady Ryther on the difficult road to plausibility in court.

That man was Thomas Curtis, a cloth worker from Lancashire, who had earlier been briefly jailed because of his embroilment in another sham conspiracy, the so-called Meal-tub plot, named after the fact that incriminating documents had been hidden in the bottom of such a receptacle. He enjoyed an unenviable reputation for heavy drinking and, as most of his efforts to coerce the unwilling Ryther into giving evidence took place at the Crown in Ram Alley, south of Fleet Street,
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or the Bear tavern on the Southwark shore of the Thames near London Bridge,
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he must have relished his work.

Blood appeared at one of these meetings and pressed Coddan and Ryther about their testimony. He became persuaded that both could certainly have their day in court and would produce the required evidence.

However, both potential witnesses then suffered an attack of cold feet. Coddan promised Ryther that ‘we will do this rogue Blood's business for him and get enough to swear against him by the time Sir William Waller comes to town'.
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The next meeting was at a tavern in Bloomsbury and Hickey was given a paper for both men to sign. He was instructed to offer them £300 in gold coins but to threaten to murder them if they did not make their
marks on the document as signatures. Arriving first, Ryther heard the alternatives on offer, snatched up the paper and fled out into the darkness.

He and Coddan visited Buckingham's lawyer, a Mr Whitaker, and told him what had transpired. Danby's cat was unfortunately dragged out of the bag.

On 20 January 1680, Blood was summoned by Waller to a meeting at the Buffalo Head tavern in Westminster, near the Gatehouse prison, and confronted by Coddan and Ryther's sordid tale of subornation. He was startled to see his would-be witnesses now smartly dressed ‘in a genteel equipage and à la mode accoutrements'. Also present at this meeting were Whitaker, Buckingham's attorney, and the linen draper Francis Jenks, another of Buckingham's radical activists. Blood tried to bluff his way out, but Whitaker urged him to be honest, just and confess. The colonel replied: ‘You have been these last two years employed to asperse me. Could you find no better invention than this?' They pressed Waller for justice and the magistrate ‘very civilly' asked the colonel to find bail.
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Blood resisted detention until 22 January when he met a constable at the upper end of King Street, Westminster, who told him he had a warrant for his arrest. Remarkably, they both went to the Dog tavern, alongside the Gatehouse, and over the next few hours had several drinks together. Waller meanwhile discovered the officer was armed only with a
mittimus
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and hurriedly sent over a warrant as the constable was worried that it was in the power of Mr Blood ‘to bring me under great trouble for my inadvertency in the thing'
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by bringing action for false imprisonment. Addressed to ‘all constables', the warrant read:

Whereas oath has been made by two witnesses that Colonel Thomas Blood has been a confederate in a late conspiracy of falsely accusing and charging his grace the Duke of Buckingham of sodomy and has refused to give bail for his appearance at the next general sessions to be held for the city and liberty of Westminster.

These are therefore to will and require that you seize and apprehend the said Colonel Thomas Blood and if he shall refuse to give
in bail, to carry him and deliver him into the hand of Mr Church, keeper of the Gatehouse in Westminster, according to the tenor of the
mittimus
in your hands.
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Blood, in default of bail, was taken to prison.

The colonel, Christian, Curtis and Hickey were tried for blasphemy, confederacy and subornation in King's Bench court and found guilty. They were fined and imprisoned. Later in May 1680, Le Mar and his mother were convicted of being suborned to swear sodomy against Buckingham.
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Le Mar had been made drunk and given drugs during the conspiracy and he was later to die from the effects of these narcotics in the Marshalsea prison.
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His mother was put into the pillory on 19 June, ‘where she was severely dealt with by the people throwing dirt and rotten eggs at her'.
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The attorney general, Sir Creswell Levinz, investigated the Le Mar case and the examining magistrate, called Barnsley, was removed from the commission of the peace for his ‘undue practices'.
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Sir William Waller was also sacked as a magistrate for similar irregularities and misdemeanours and he later fled to Holland.

Buckingham meanwhile was intent on vengeance against his erstwhile employee Blood. He brought an action for defamation – a civil suit for
scandalum magnatum
– against the colonel, Christian and Curtis claiming £10,000 damages.
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The jury found for Buckingham.

Blood was growing desperate. Whenever a situation becomes especially fraught, one calls in favours from every quarter, so on 14 July he sent his son Charles to see James, Duke of York, to seek his royal intercession on his behalf. The next day, Blood wrote to the duke politely thanking him for ‘the great favour' in granting the audience and asking if his brother the king would order the Treasury to pay his salary, which ‘Lord Sunderland has often done without effect'. The hard-pressed colonel could not possibly find the wherewithal for a bail payment and he wondered if the king ‘would encourage some to [stand] bail for me'.

He was becoming ever more frustrated by Whitehall's bureaucratic ineptitude. ‘You ordered my son to go to Sir Leoline Jenkins [
appointed secretary of state in April 1680] to understand what instructions he had from the king concerning me – and he said he knew not a word of it.

I therefore humbly beg that I may not be left in this cause to fall, which is because I keep the Commonwealth party in awe and broke the neck of Sir William Waller.

I intend to have a
habeas corpus
today and to put in bail before Judge Dolben.
⁵⁵

If you can favour me with any interest in him, it will be my great advantage.
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The ever-dilatory Treasury still failed to come up with his salary and three days later Blood, frustrated and fuming, wrote to Jenkins with a frantic plea for his immediate assistance.

I have been left destitute of the usual supply of money from the court and tantalised from day to day and week to week . . . [The] lords of the Treasury have promised me from three days to three days the payment of that £600
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which the king allowed me for my salary to enable me to do his business. [This has] all ended in words, [so] they may be effectively spoken to.

Next I desire an immediate supply of thirty or forty guineas to bear the charges of my disentanglement for I am quite destitute, having pawned my [silver] plate. I would also entreat you to encourage some persons to be bail for me.

Blood was writing from within the walls of the Gatehouse prison in Westminster. The sheriff's officers would not acknowledge or accept ‘his privilege' and dragged him off into the prison, leading to a complaint about his treatment being made to the king. Blood angrily maintained that Buckingham and the Commonwealth party had spent £10,000 ‘to get me out of their way, knowing I have been a check on their disloyal actions these nine years and remain so still'. Having got the ‘better of them as to the criminal part of the cause, in spite and envy, they arrest me in an action for £10,000,
supposing that sum was so great that it would fright any tradesman from bailing me'.
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He received his writ of
habeas corpus
on 21 July and removed himself to the King's Bench prison for debtors in Southwark.
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Happily he was bailed the following morning. Some well-disposed individual put up a surety for his release (did the money come from secret service funds?) and he was freed, amid voluble protests that he had been illegally proceeded against.
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When Blood was incarcerated in the Tower, following his abortive attempt to steal the Crown Jewels, a small book of his was confiscated by his jailers. The original is now lost but a copy is preserved in the Pepys papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
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It seems to have been compiled during Blood's more ruminative moments while still in captivity or just after being released in 1671 – there is one line on the first page that mentions ‘my son who is wont [to be known] by the name of Thomas Hunt, now a prisoner in the Tower'.
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Under the heading ‘Deliverances since I was for the Lord's cause', his seventy escapes from arrest or danger are listed for the period 1663–71, annoyingly with a frustrating lack of detail. These include his adventures in Dublin after the coup attempt (‘I escaped when most were taken'), boarding a ship ‘when none knew me' and arriving at a port where he was well known; eluding capture when visiting his mother-in-law in Lancashire and again during his wanderings around Manchester and being pursued by a pack of dogs.

His exploits also included being ‘a prisoner [in] Zeeland' and escaping arrest in Bishopsgate Street during the Great Fire of London. There are other escapades, the circumstances of which we can sadly only guess at: ‘my swimming'; ‘the guard at the bridge' the ‘Life Guard man'; ‘from friends at Ipswich' and being ‘taken by a constable at Essex'. His rescue of Captain Mason is probably covered by the entries: ‘from the trepan beyond Newark'; ‘from them in the little hours'; ‘in the battle'; ‘Leving confession' and being ‘healed of my wounds'. Even after going into semiretirement as a quack apothecary, he faced ‘discovery at Romford'; ‘a design by some to cast me off' and from ‘discontented friends'.
There was also another deliverance at the ‘Bull in the Strand'.
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Interleaved in these notes are two entries referring to his son's decision to take to a life of crime, clearly a source of great disappointment to his father: ‘my son's wickedness – this was Hunt's robbing on ye highway' and ‘My son's being stopped and coming before [Justice] Keeling'. Were these deliverances or trials?
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All these feats created the absolute certainty in Blood's mind that he should never ‘forsake the cause of God for any difficulties'. His notes also contain twenty-two one-line moral and religious tenets for life that he plainly tried to adhere to and which also indicate Blood's belief in the existence and power of Providence (which had served him so badly at the Martin Tower). These included: ‘To [spend] each day in serious consideration of my interest in Christ and what he has done'; ‘To avoid disputing or crossing in discourse or undervaluing of persons in religious or civic things' and ‘To labour to be content with my condition, considering nothing comes by chance'. These precepts also urged his avoidance of strong wine and drink and any ‘recreations or pomps or excess in apparel . . . quibbling or joking . . . all obscene and scurrilous talk'. There were also three rules, very pertinent to the uncertain life of a spy: ‘To be faithful in trust remitted and wary to whom I commit it'; ‘Not to reveal secrets' and ‘Not to break engagements'. Blood was clearly a deeply religious man, inclined to searing self-analysis and the need to discover some pattern in his life and personal objectives, laid down by God Himself.
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