In 1656, Downing was appointed special emissary to the Netherlands, where one of England’s principal concerns was the threat
from royalist exiles. Large numbers of them were clustered there, mostly around the great ports of Amsterdam and Rotterdam,
existing in various states of desperation and hope, dreaming and plotting Cromwell’s downfall. The Netherlands was ‘the nursery
of Cavalierism’, declared Secretary of State John Thurloe, who directed Downing to set up a spy network there. The former
chaplain was a huge success in the dark arts of espionage and his network eventually spread beyond Europe and into England.
A study of intelligence in this period paints a picture of Downing’s blithe ruthlessness: ‘He was engaged in entrapment, hiring
spies, harassing exiles as well as the bribery and chicanery to which he appears to have been well suited.’
10
The study judges that most of Downing’s ‘talents as a spymaster’ emerged in this earlier period, but that ‘one or two refinements
were to be added after 1660 such as more scope for
assassination attempts, kidnappings and even suggestions of grave robbery’.
The royalists were terrified of Downing – ‘that fearful gentleman’, one called him – and he himself claimed that he was a
target for royalist assassins. A Major Whitford, one of the royalists suspected of killing the regicide Isaac Dorislaus, was
seen with others lurking around Downing’s house. The emissary called on the Dutch to provide him with protection.
All in all, this feared spy chief and dyed-in-the-wool Cromwellian would seem to have much to fear from a return of the Stuarts.
Yet, at the restoration, far from being thrown into prison or worse, George Downing was knighted by Charles II in the very
month that the king returned. What was behind this astonishing turn of fortune? One story, possibly apocryphal, might explain
it. During his frustrating years of exile in France, Charles had several times slipped over the border into Dutch territory,
either on a secret visit to his sister, the wife of William of Orange, or to rendezvous with exiled supporters. The story
goes that, very shortly before the restoration, Charles made one of these visits and an ‘old reverend like man in a long grey
beard and ordinary grey clothes’ succeeded in forcing his way into his presence. The old man then pulled off his beard to
reveal himself as the feared George Downing, come to warn the king that the Dutch planned to arrest him and hand him over
to the English. Charles promptly terminated his visit. Downing had saved his life.
11
Whatever the truth, we do know that on the eve of the restoration Downing set out to worm his way into royal favour. He used
an intermediary, Thomas Howard, a brother of the Earl of Suffolk and a close intimate of Charles and his sister, the Princess
of Orange. Howard had been one of Downing’s informants since 1658, after making the mistake of entrusting potentially damaging
private papers to the keeping of a mistress and then falling out with her. Downing somehow acquired the papers and blackmailed
the young aristocrat – or, as he put it, ‘gained’ him. ‘I think I can hardly pitch
for one better instrument than Tom Howard, he being the master of the horse to the Princess Royal’, Downing boasted in a report
to London. From then on Howard was his creature, passing on every titbit about the Stuarts.
12
Two years on, in April 1660, when General Monck’s army was in London and astute men were changing allegiances, Downing summoned
Tom Howard and instructed him to tell the still exiled king that he now desired ‘to promote His Majesty’s service’. To prove
his new allegiance Downing showed Howard intelligence material that he wanted communicated to the king. This included a letter
in cipher from Secretary Thurloe reporting feeling in the army and among the general populace. Downing begged for a royal
pardon and promised that if he got it, he would ‘work secretly on the army in which he has considerable influence’. As for
his own past as a Roundhead, Downing told Howard to relay his repentance for taking up arms against Charles I. He wanted it
understood that he had been misled as a youth in New England, where he had ‘sucked in principles that since his reason had
made him see were erroneous’.
13
As Downing awaited the king’s reply, his good friend John Milton was publishing two anti-monarchist tracts which three months
later would be ritually burned by the common executioner, and would see the poet jailed and in danger of joining the regicides
on the scaffold. A kinder future was in store for George Downing. In the second week of June the reply came back from the
king that he was forgiven. Howard conveyed that Charles would forget past ‘deviations’ and would accept ‘the overtures he
[Downing] makes of returning to his duty’. Three weeks afterwards, the new monarch knighted Downing and paid him £1000.
On his reappointment to The Hague, the man who had wished Oliver Cromwell king now oozed loyalty to Charles. He vowed to the
king’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon, that on pursuing the regicides he would do ‘as much as if my life lay at stake’. Indeed,
‘if my father were in the way I would not avoid him for my loyalty.’
Downing’s first task was to locate the regicides’ bolt-holes, ‘that I may know where they are and what they do’ – far from
easy in a country flooded with English fugitives. ‘It is not to be credited what numbers of disaffected persons come daily
out of England into this country’, he reported in his first dispatch, describing the new arrivals from across the Channel
as ‘well funded and confident … [they] do hire the best houses and have great bills of exchange come over from England for
them’.
In prising out the regicides from among these exiles, Sir George knew he could expect little co-operation from the Dutch.
During his previous incarnation in the Netherlands he had been the agent of a fellow republic and, to an extent, approved
of. As the agent of a king, particularly one engaged in the execution of republicans, he was now in hostile country. Decades
of bloody war with the Spanish monarchy for control of the Low Countries had left the Dutch more wholeheartedly republican
than any people in Europe except perhaps the Swiss. A guide to the Netherlands published in England in 1662 warned: ‘The country
is a democracy … Tell them of a King and they cut your throat in earnest. The very name carries servitude in it and they hate
it more than a Jew doth images, a woman old age and a nonconformist a surplice.’
Anti-royalism ran in the veins of the Dutch authorities. Father O’Neill, the Catholic priest dispatched to the Netherlands
in the autumn of 1660 to sound out officials about extradition, had got nowhere. Clarendon complained at the Dutch refusal
to co-operate, only to receive a lecture from Johan de Witt, the ruling hand in the United Provinces, on his country’s tradition
of sanctuary. ‘Nothing could be done against the liberties of the state’, he was told. Dutch resolve was then put to the test
by royalist agent Sir William Davidson. In December 1660 Davidson asked the aid of the burgomaster in Amsterdam to apprehend
English fugitives there. The burgomaster’s response was an order forbidding local police to offer any help at all.
At this early stage we do not know who Downing used as agents to
discover the regicides, but presumably many old informants were still present in Holland and Germany and there were potentially
many more among new refugees. By no means were all of these as well funded as Downing suggested. Some exiles were in dire
financial straits and a few guilders bought their loyalty. Others were suborned and blackmailed into spying while still in
England, then sent abroad to mix in exile circles.
Downing would ultimately accumulate a rich mix of informants. Along with the unpredictable adventurer Joseph Bampfield, who
had once rescued Charles’s younger brother James from the Roundheads dressed as a girl before switching sides to spy for the
same Roundheads, and then switching sides again, they included an Irish cutthroat called James Cotter who gloried in his reputation
as an assassin. And there was also the bewitching Mata Hari figure of Aphra Behn.
A memorable picture of the efficiency of Downing’s agents was later made by his former clerk, Samuel Pepys. Downing had boasted
to Pepys of his intelligence coups in the mid-1660s, during the second Anglo-Dutch war. Pepys’ diary for 27 December 1668
records:
Met with Sir G. Downing, and walked with him an hour talking of business, and how the late war was managed, there being nobody
to take care of it; and he telling, when he was in Holland … that he had so good spies, that he hath had the keys taken out
of de Witte’s pocket when he was abed, and his closet opened and papers brought to him and left in his hands for an hour,
and carried back and laid in the place again, and the keys put into his pocket again. He says he hath always had their most
private debates, that have been but between two or three of the chief of them, brought to him in an hour after, and an hour
after that hath sent word thereof to the king.
In June 1661 Downing’s informants reported sightings of five fugitives, some in the Netherlands and others in Germany – George
‘Cornet’ Joyce, Edward Dendy, John Barkstead, John Hewson and John Okey.
14
Of the five only Barkstead, Hewson and Okey had been among the king’s judges, but the other two were each considered sufficiently
implicated in Charles’s fate to deserve a traitor’s death.
Joyce, the young officer responsible for seizing Charles I from custody at Holmby House, thus arguably setting off the chain
of events that led to the king’s trial and execution, had fled to Rotterdam in the summer of 1660. He was living there with
his wife and children when spotted by Downing’s men.
15
Like Joyce, Edward Dendy was not among the king’s judges. His part in Charles I’s death was as master of ceremonies. He was
the House of Commons sergeant-at-arms in 1649 who proclaimed the indictment against Charles with much pomp. Unlike some other
servants of the republican cause, he appears to have received little reward for his unique service. In the 1650s he was granted
some land in Ireland plus part of the profits from the sale of royal forests. He was also made governor of the Marshalsea
prison, which housed government prisoners, who had to pay him for their keep. At other times and in other prisons governors
made fortunes from prisoners’ fees. Dendy claimed that he didn’t. He complained that he received only £80 over two and a half
years because the government sent its richest prisoners not to him but to the Tower.
16
The keeper of the Tower at the time, and a far richer man, was John Barkstead, the second fugitive spotted in Europe by Downing’s
spies. Barkstead was said to have made a colossal £2000 a year from fees. A contemporary complained that his exactments were
so extortionate that ‘it stinks in the nostrils of both good and bad’. Barkstead was one of the king’s judges and had signed
the death warrant in a strong, decisive hand. The son of a goldsmith, he took up arms for Parliament at the outset of the
Civil War and rose from the rank of captain to become a major-general and governor of several strategic towns. According to
Edmund Ludlow, Barkstead joined the struggle because of ‘the invasions which had been made upon the liberties of
the nation’. That meant political liberties, certainly not behavioural liberties. Barkstead was one of the major-generals
appointed in 1655–7 to give ‘Godly rule’ to England and he strove enthusiastically to do so, personifying the grim, killjoy
Puritan. His bailiwick was Westminster, Middlesex and London. In what was a whirlpool of ungodliness, Barkstead tried to banish
not only the more barbarous pleasures but the more innocent too. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was pulled down. Prostitutes
were arrested, with some shipped to America into virtual slavery. The bear garden in Bankside was closed. The horses of those
caught riding on Sundays were confiscated. Cock-fighting and cock-throwing (stoning a cockerel tied to a stake) were banned.
Maypoles were cut down. Under Puritan jurisdiction a woman caught in adultery faced death. The wealthy, money-grabbing, misery
Barkstead was not a popular figure. Wisely, Barkstead had joined the exodus in the summer of 1660 and was now living in the
prosperous Prussian town of Hanau, twenty-five kilometres from Frankfurt, becoming a burgess of the town and thus securing
some measure of protection.
One-eyed John Hewson was if anything an even more unpopular figure, a man particularly hated in Ireland and in London too.
Never allowed to forget his humble origins as a shoemaker, Hewson had proved an outstanding soldier in the Civil Wars. He
was also a ruthless bigot. In Ireland, where he lost an eye in battle, he took a leading part in the terrible sack of Drogheda
in which at least two thousand royalist and Catholic troops were killed after refusing to surrender. Like Cromwell, Hewson
justified the massacre as God’s will. He warned after Drogheda that if the Irish did not submit, ‘the Lord by his power shall
break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’ When Cromwell appointed Hewson to the peerage, royalists sneered at the idea
of a former cobbler sitting in the House of Lords. It was claimed that the Earl of Warwick, the senior peer on Parliament’s
side, was so affronted at the appointment of one of such low blood that he refused to take his seat. As for the hatred that
Londoners bore for him, this stemmed from that incident in December 1659 when he ordered
troops to fire on rioting apprentices and there were a number of deaths. The apprentices had used old shoes as ammunition
to throw at Hewson’s soldiers. Now in frail health, Hewson was living in Rotterdam.
The fifth exile to have been sighted in Europe by Downing’s informants was John Okey, his old commanding officer. An altogether
more attractive figure than Barkstead or Hewson, Okey’s record suggests him to have been heroic both in battle and in politics,
but inconsistent and a poor disciplinarian. A brilliant cavalry leader, like most of the regicides Okey was an ardent Puritan,
sometimes too much so for his men. He attempted to sack a captain suspected of holding the anarchistic views of the Ranters,
who rejected all authority, believing God to be in every living thing. Okey charged the officer with singing bawdy songs.
However, the captain was backed by his men and Cromwell himself had to be brought in to resolve the matter, which he did by
persuading the officer to resign.