The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (12 page)

Atkinson was detained and questioned in the Tower. He admitted his acquaintance with Blood, Lockyer and other conspirators, as well as having been ‘engaged by the [Ana]baptists of desperate fortune'. But he had ‘wearied of their selfish designs and looked for an opportunity to [unmask] them'. He disclosed the addresses of some of the plotters – but warned that if any were arrested, the others would flee immediately and would be difficult to hunt down.

Leving also reported on his progress to his erstwhile mentor, Sir Roger Langley in York:

In March 1663, Atkinson was active in the design and got a [rebel] council together – namely Blood, Lockyer, Captain Wise, [Captain Roger] Jones, Carew
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and Major Lee. They mean to take houses near the Tower and Whitehall, gather arms, and destroy the king, [the] Dukes of York and Albemarle and lord chancellor [Clarendon]. Atkinson knows where most of these persons lodge and will tell anything else wanted [if] pinched . . . to a confession.
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Blood's first biographer, Richard Halliwell, describes the work of this secret committee ‘of which Mr Blood was head'. To ensure their security, they were protected by ‘a Court of Guard, seldom less than thirty [men] a day' while they met at the Widow Hogden's house in Petty France, Westminster.
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At this committee all orders were given out, all manner of intelligence brought, examined and all things sifted and debated in reference to their grand design.

Then Blood began to suspect that two of his fellow conspirators had become traitors to the cause. Either ‘out of remorse or [in] hopes of reward, [they] had begun to make some discovery of this project at court.

He appointed to meet the two persons at a certain tavern in the city, who were no sooner come according to their summons, but he took them both prisoners and from thence carried them to a certain place of darkness, which they had found out and hired for their convenience.
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This ‘place of darkness' was probably a room or cellar in a tavern in Coleman Street, a notorious ‘hotspot' of dissent and sedition in the seventeenth century, or its side street, Swan Lane.
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Harking back to his own career in the military, Blood ‘very formally' called together a court martial of his own ‘and tried the two men for their lives'. They were found guilty and sentenced to be shot dead by an impromptu firing squad within forty-eight hours.

When the time for execution came, they were both brought to the stake and being without any other hopes, were forced to prepare for death.

Then, at the very point of despair, Mr Blood was so kind as to produce them a pardon and so releasing them and giving them their freedom, bid them go to their master and tell them what they had done . . . and that they should ask him to be as favourable to his soldiers [plotters] when they fell under his mercy.
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It is very plausible that one of these two men was William Leving. His description of undergoing a similar ordeal at the hands of the conspirators, and Blood's biographer's account of his own kangaroo court, chime remarkably.

Leving's narrative begins one cold Sunday evening in February 1665,
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when he was asked by two friends to attend a secret meeting. They escorted him through ‘many turnings into an obscure place' where he was suddenly confronted by a group of men who, threatening him with pistols and swords, angrily accused him of being a spy. Leving, of course, denied this vehemently but was held a close prisoner for two days, always demanding to know the identity of his accuser. He later learned it was Henry North, a fellow government informer, and an ‘intelligencer' in the pay of Buckingham. As far as the conspirators were concerned, Leving was guilty of rank treachery and betrayal, but curiously they decided not to kill him. Instead, he was simply released, with his solemn promise not to meet Bennet or any of his agents.
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At the end of March 1665, Leving sought to return to his home city of Durham to induce his friends to confess to involvement in the abortive rebellion and accordingly requested Bennet, now Earl of Arlington, to provide him with ‘protection under the king's hand and seal'. The result was not nearly as grand as Leving had hoped: he was given a single sheet of paper, on which was written his ‘certificate of employment', to be waved under the noses of sheriffs and magistrates if he faced arrest or imprisonment:

This is to certify [to] all whom it shall concern that the bearer
hereof William Leving is employed by me and consequently [is] not to be molested or restrained upon any search or inquiry whatsoever.

Henry Bennet
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This document proved useful that May when Leving was arrested in Leicestershire but was released after proving his identity and credentials as a servant of the crown.

Despite his anxious protestations, Leving was ordered to remain in London that hot summer, all through the height of the epidemic of bubonic plague that killed 100,000 (or 20 per cent) of the capital's population. To forestall the risk of infection, the royal court fled first to Hampton Court in July, then moved on to Salisbury in Wiltshire and finally ended up in Oxford in September, accompanied by Parliament and the high courts of justice. Back in London, victims were locked in their houses and their doors daubed with the words ‘Lord have mercy' as a warning to others not to enter. Between one and three of the occupants died in most infected homes. Grass grew in the streets, and because domestic animals were believed to pass on the ‘Great Plague', special ‘dog killers' were employed, slaughtering 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats. Leving lost most of his family to the disease, which in reality was spread by fleas living on the city's prodigious population of black rats.
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Blood survived the plague, which he confidently saw as a sure and certain sign that God smiled on his involvement in sedition and rebellion aimed at transforming this ungodly nation.
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At the end of October 1665, the Presbyterian factions held a clandestine conference at the Liverpool home of Captain Brown, the former Cromwellian governor of the city,
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to plan new insurrections in England, Scotland and Ireland. Orrery, in Dublin, soon learned details of their deliberations from his ‘fanatic intelligencer', who sent him news of ‘the transactions of that wild people'. The Irish contingent was represented by Blood and his fellow Dublin Castle plotter, Lieutenant Colonel William Moore. The third member of this delegation was our old friend Philip Alden, still working undercover as an effective government informer.

As a result of this strategy meeting, two rebel agents were dispatched to Scotland ‘to revive their party there'. Moore also travelled to Ireland, ‘and having shaven his head, now wears a great bushy periwig
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and is gone into the borders of Munster. From thence, [he] is to go . . . to the Scots of Ulster to incite them into new rebellions', Orrery reported to Arlington:

I have sent some trusty spies after him, who, I hope, may apprehend him. They have had lately numerous meetings in [Dublin] at the house of Capt. Sands and at the house of one Mr Price where they rail bitterly against his majesty's authority and particularly against my lord lieutenant and myself by name.

They promise their party great things after Christmas.
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In February 1666, another of Orrery's spies reported that Blood could be found at the home of his old associate, Colonel Gibby Carr, ‘in the north of Ireland or at his wife's, near Dublin'. They planned to seize the city of Limerick in the province of Munster. Now came news that the Liverpool meeting of the ‘fanatics' had delayed any general uprising until the Royal Navy were busy fighting the Dutch (in the Second Anglo-Dutch War) and the government was distracted by this foreign threat.
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They claimed to have 10,000 cavalrymen on call but would march to Scotland ‘in small numbers'.
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Orrery informed Ormond that Blood and a man called George Aires were living under assumed names and ‘may be caught, if care is used, going out of the house of one Cock or Cooke, a brewer at the Coombe in [south] Dublin'.
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He suggested watching the brewer's house ‘by some who know their faces well. Otherwise they may escape the search.'
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He enclosed an extraordinary two-and-a-half-page letter which seems to have been written by Dame Dorcas Lane, wife of the Irish Secretary Sir George Lane, to her husband about an admission made to her by a conspirator regarding ‘a damnable plot which has been hatching this year or two against his majesty and all the nobility of the three nations'. All the castles and fortresses in Ireland would be surprised and all those who resisted ‘would be put to the sword'. It
had been postponed from New Year's Day but ‘is very soon to be put into execution'. Her informant had ‘laid out a sum of money to the promoting of this devilish design' and they ‘had corrupted the most part of all the soldiers that are in any strongholds' – including Dublin Castle, which had cost them ‘many a piece of gold'. He made Dame Dorcas swear a sacred oath to keep secret what she had heard.

When this man told me first of the business, truly I thought he was mad or drunk . . . that he should tell a silly woman a business of that great weight and therefore I thought little of it.

But a day or two after . . . he came here again . . . [and] implored me with fresh protestations to keep his counsel.

I [appeared] to like his design on purpose to sift him as well as I could, but I could not get from him the names of any of the plotters.

For all my oath, my conscience tells me I ought not to keep secret so damnable a design that threatened the death of so many innocent souls and knowing that the Great God of Heaven forced him to discover this business to me, [I ought] not to conceal it.

Dame Dorcas was only too well aware that she held her informant's life in her hands: ‘it is not fit that I should, by the discovery of the plot, be the cause of his death'. After all, she had only been told of its existence so that she could ‘provide for the safety of me and mine'. She told her husband:

I beg that my name may not be mentioned but that you will pretend that he heard this from some other source.

I forget to tell you that their pretences are for liberty and religion but I am sure [that] murder and treason never came from God.

They do believe that God has [had] a hand in it since they have not been discovered all this while.
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Perhaps finding counter-intelligence operations in Ireland too efficient, Blood returned to England. He had other important business to transact, seemingly to further the nonconformist cause. Under the alias of Morton,
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Blood landed in the United Provinces of the Netherlands in March 1666, accompanied by the Fifth Monarchist John Lockyer, en route for a meeting with the old parliamentary cavalry commander Edmund Ludlow, who was innocently engaged in writing his memoirs, safely exiled among the sympathetic Swiss in Lausanne under the name ‘Edward Phillips' – a pseudonym based on a variation of his mother's maiden name.
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The aim was to escort Ludlow to Paris, together with the fugitive regicide Algernon Sidney, to negotiate substantial funding from the French and their Dutch allies for yet another uprising in England. Unfortunately, Blood and Lockyer were arrested as suspected English spies by the Dutch in Zeeland, as they possessed no passports or other means of identity.
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However, they managed to talk their way out of detention, assisted by another exiled regicide John Phelps, who was making one of his periodic visits to the Netherlands from his home in Switzerland.
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Therein lies a mystery. Joseph Williamson's address book, covering the period 1663–7 and containing more than 150 names, includes a frustratingly vague entry concerning correspondence with a ‘Mr T.B.' in Zeeland
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who was writing letters from Holland to a ‘Thomas Harris' in London – one of the cover names then used for the secretary of state's office in Whitehall. Was this spy Thomas Blood? Had he become a double agent working for the government? Was he now involved in a covert operation to persuade Ludlow to move from the safety of Switzerland so he could be assassinated, or at least kidnapped and brought to trial in England? Some kind of subterfuge was patently under way, else why did Blood feel the need to use an alias when he was ostensibly amongst friends? There are more questions than answers – not surprising, given the elusive, enigmatic figure of Thomas Blood. The evidence is not wholly conclusive, but it may go some way to explaining why he so miraculously escaped capture so often and his later generous
treatment by Charles II and his government after the most outrageous of his adventures.
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Yet, at the same time, matters very damaging to Blood were being decided in Dublin. On 2 April 1666, Ormond sent a draft grant of lands to London ‘in favour of Captain Toby Barnes who served King Charles I and the present king in Ireland and abroad'.
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Those lands were Blood's remaining property, which had been forfeited to the crown since he was declared a traitor. Nine days later Charles II wrote back to Dublin, signifying his assent:

In remembrance of Sir Toby's service . . . we direct you to take steps for granting him, under the Great Seal, a lease at such rent and or a term as you think fit of the town and lands of Sarney, Braystown and Foylestown in the barony of Dunboyne, Co. Meath and five hundred acres of unprofitable mountain at Glenmalure, alias The Glinns, Co. Wicklow, formerly belonging to Thomas Blood of Sarney, lately attainted of high treason.
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This was hardly a sensible action to preserve the loyalty of a double agent. Or was it a case of purely bad timing and bureaucratic ineptitude – or, indeed, a method to preserve and enhance Blood's reputation within insurgent circles?