The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (29 page)

These two conspiracies may have constituted clear and present dangers to Charles and his government, but disclosure of a new plot in 1678 had a much greater political impact, even though it proved utterly bogus.

One of the magistrate William Waller's cronies was Titus Oates, a former naval padre in the forty-gun fourth-rate frigate
Adventure
who had been dismissed from the service with ignominy in 1677 for homosexuality. Shunning Anglicanism, he was received into the Catholic Church later that year and managed to enrol at the English Jesuit College at Valladolid in Spain, despite his ignorance of Latin. As a noviciate priest, Oates proved less than suitable, or indeed successful; he was branded ‘a curse' by the college authorities and finally expelled. Undeterred by this rebuff, and still pursuing his own idea of a sacred vocation, he talked his way into a Catholic school at St Omer in the
Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, only to be thrown out again.

Rejection can metamorphose all too easily into an intense hatred. Oates was ugly, with sunken eyes and a harsh and loud voice, but was blessed with a photographic memory. He lived almost wholly in a frenzied world of rampant paranoia and fantasy, but his illusory claims and constant lies were camouflaged by an eminently believable manner. Scarred by his experiences in Spain and France, he harboured a fiery, fanatical loathing for the Catholic Church and became determined to wreak revenge on the papists who had so harshly turned him away.

In London he found a trusty ally in the shape of the half-crazed Israel Tonge, the former rector of the medieval parish church of St Mary's Staining in Oat Lane, north-east of St Paul's Cathedral, which was completely destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
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After claiming Thomas Blood was involved in starting the conflagration,
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Tonge had now convinced himself that responsibility for the destruction of the capital in the catastrophic inferno lay solely at the door of the Jesuit priests.

Oates and Tonge worked diligently to compile a manuscript or dossier implicating the Catholic Church in a Jesuit plot to assassinate the king. It contained the names of almost one hundred Catholics allegedly involved in the conspiracy. Upon completion, the document was bizarrely hidden behind the wainscot wall panels in the Barbican, London, home of the physician Sir Richard Barker,
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where Tonge was staying.
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Mirabile dictu
, the manuscript was ‘discovered' by Tonge the next morning and shown to Barker's friend Christopher Kirby, with no explanation as to why this incendiary document had been secreted in the home of such a rabid anti-Catholic. As a chemist who had sometimes assisted Charles II with his scientific experiments, Kirby was a carefully chosen messenger to make the government aware of Oates and Tonge's sensational accusations. The loyal apothecary breathlessly told the king about the plot as he took his morning royal constitutional in the verdant splendour of St James's Park on 13 August 1678. Charles was highly sceptical about the claims,
even though Kirby emphasised that those who intended to shoot him dead could be easily identified. Furthermore, he claimed that in the event of this attempt failing, Sir George Wakeman, the queen's own chief physician, would use a terrible poison to kill the king.

The lord high treasurer, Thomas Osborne, First Earl of Danby, a man renowned for his detestation of Catholics and opposition to any kind of religious toleration, did not share his monarch's incredulity. Danby urged a full investigation of the allegations, despite the robust opposition of Williamson, who was only too well aware of Tonge's bouts of insanity.

Oates duly appeared before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a Westminster magistrate of some repute, to swear his deposition, preparatory to a full audience with the king and Privy Council. He recalled attending a Jesuit meeting at the White Horse in the Strand on 24 April, where the efficacy of various methods to murder Charles was eagerly debated, including shooting, stabbing by itinerant Irish louts or poisoning by Wakeman.
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Then, on 12 October, the magistrate suspiciously disappeared without trace.

Five days later, his body was found face down in a muddy ditch at Primrose Hill, three miles (4.82 km) north of London. He had been strangled, his neck broken and, for good measure, his body had been impaled with his own sword – but this wound was inflicted some time after death, as there was no sign of bleeding. His money and rings had not been stolen, so there was little chance of robbery being the motive. His murder was immediately blamed on the Catholics and was used as proof of the truth of Oates's wild claims.
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The fantasist's associate, the convicted confidence trickster Captain William Bedloe, claimed the reward for tracking down Godfrey's killer or killers by denouncing Miles Prance, a Catholic servant-in-ordinary to Queen Catherine of Braganza. Under the agony of torture, he named three labourers called Henry Berry, Robert Green and Lawrence Hill as the culprits, all in the pay of three Catholic priests.
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Although entirely innocent, they were
found guilty and executed in February 1679 at the scene of the crime.
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It has also been suggested that Sir Robert Peyton may have been involved in Godfrey's death. The justice of the peace was a member of the MP's republican ‘gang' and he may have been murdered because he had betrayed his fellow members, or, more opportunistically, merely to stir up hatred of Catholics.

The magistrate's death certainly had that effect. Something approaching hysteria gripped the streets of London. Effigies of the pope were burnt by the angry mob. With revived memories of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Parliament ordered fruitless searches for non-existent explosives cunningly hidden in barrels within its cellars. Near panic ensued when it was discovered that a French physician called Choqueux was storing large quantities of black powder in a house near the Houses of Parliament. There were a few red faces when it transpired that he was no assassin but merely the king's firework-maker.

More seriously, the House of Lords demanded that, for the sake of public safety and maintaining Londoners' morale, all Catholics should be banished from an area within a radius of ten miles (16 km) around the capital and this proscription was imposed by the government on 30 October.

Thomas Blood had some dealings with Oates and Bedloe, but as he was always careful to cover his tracks, the evidence of his involvement is unclear. There is one contemporary report that he planned to destroy Oates's credibility by planting treasonous letters amongst his personal papers to demonstrate that the fanatic had been recruited by the nonconformists to damage Catholic interests. But the incriminating documents were discovered and shown to Williamson, who passed them on to the Privy Council.
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Blood was also on the fringes of a Catholic ‘sham plot' to discredit Bedloe as a witness and to point the finger at Buckingham and Anthony Ashley-Cooper (created First Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672), as the covert instigators of Oates's ‘Popish Plot'.
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An Irish Catholic called James Netterville, formerly a clerk in Dublin's Court of Claims and latterly one of Danby's informers, had been imprisoned
for seditious words he unwisely uttered in St James's Park. After appearing before the Privy Council at the Palace of Whitehall, he did not improve his chances of winning liberty by brawling in the corridor outside the chamber. After a spell in Newgate jail, he ended up as a debtor in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark.

There, he met the Dubliner Captain John Bury in January 1679 and dropped heavy hints to him about the conspiracy to undermine the veracity of Bedloe's testimony. If the good captain would help, he could expect a generous payment of up to £500 to make his efforts all the more worthwhile.
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Bury, who was a close friend of Blood's, immediately passed on this information to the colonel, who told him to play along with Netterville and endeavour to discover where this substantial sum of money was emanating from. The liberal donor turned out to be one Russell, a servant to the French ambassador Paul Barillon, and Blood imparted this intelligence to Williamson.

Another version of events came in a ten-page letter in Latin, purportedly written by the Spanish priest James Salgado of Vine Street, near Hatton Garden, to his own father confessor. This described Netterville's confession to Salgado in which he admitted being instructed to find someone who would swear that the Popish Plot was entirely the devious brainchild of Buckingham and Shaftesbury. Netterville ‘therefore bribed the man who stole the king's crown to swear to this effect for £500 and the man revealed the whole matter to the king's secretary'. The priest added: ‘I do not think [Netterville] is altogether innocent, but I leave him to God.'
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Getting wind of this scheming, Oates, Bedloe and Waller visited Netterville in the Marshalsea and browbeat him into revealing all he knew. This latest sham plot was thus neutralised. The prisoner was singularly unimpressed by Oates, who was ‘a villain', and recalled bitingly that ‘he was always wanting money from the superior when he was a Jesuit [in Spain] . . .'.
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Eventually, Charles personally interrogated Oates. Such is the sagaciousness of monarchs, he triumphantly detected a litany of inaccuracies and lies in his testimony, and ordered his arrest. However, only days later, Parliament forced Oates's release, and
rewarded his patriotism by the provision of an apartment in the Palace of Whitehall and payment of a handsome annual pension of £1,200.

After nearly three years of public unrest and phobia about treasonous Catholics permeating all sections of society, at least fifteen innocent men had been executed. Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, became the last to be entrapped by Oates's mesh of lies. He was accused in June 1681 of ‘promoting the Roman faith' and after only fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury brought in a guilty verdict. Plunkett was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 11 July, the last Catholic martyr to die in England.
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Oates at last received his richly deserved come-uppance. On 31 August, he was ordered to leave his grace-and-favour Whitehall apartment. Undeterred, he denounced the king and the Duke of York and was arrested, fined the huge sum of £100,000 and thrown into prison.
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Blood meanwhile was receiving some extraordinary signs of royal favour. In March 1679, he was sent for ‘early' by Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, who had replaced Williamson as secretary of state the previous month. The minister had been instructed to tell the spy ‘that the king looked upon him as his friend and therefore sent for him to come to him [and] to communicate it to all his friends that his majesty would cast himself upon his Parliament'.
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It seemed that his reputation had reached a new pinnacle in the highest office in the land; but, unknown to him, Blood was now rapidly approaching his nemesis.

In January 1680, Jane Bradley, the barmaid of the St John's Head or ‘Heaven' tavern in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, asked him to call on her, as she believed there was a major conspiracy afoot against the government. She told him that ‘two shabby fellows' had told her that ‘they had something of great consequence, in reference to the public welfare, to reveal but that they wanted a discreet person to manage it'. Blood told her that he would meet them and that she should pass on to them that ‘if there was anything fit to
take notice of, he would bring them to those that had sufficient authority to take notice of it'.

The more suspicious among us might well believe this was some form of trap, or in modern parlance a ‘sting'. Blood probably shared this disquiet but treated it as an occupational hazard for a spy and informer.
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A meeting was arranged, but the two men, later identified as Samuel Ryther and Philemon Coddan, both Irish, fled when they saw Blood, ‘averring they would have nothing to do with him for that he was the Duke of Buckingham's friend'. Jane Bradley went to Blood's house in Westminster and told him the men were ‘rogues and trepans
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and advised him to seize them and carry them before a magistrate'.

The colonel had them up before a Middlesex justice called Dr Chamberlain, who was well known to Blood. Both claimed Buckingham owed them money and one said he was willing to swear that the duke was guilty of sodomy. The justice did not believe them and the matter was apparently forgotten.
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What Blood was stumbling into was a conspiracy to bring down Buckingham initiated by his enemies, notably Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. He had been languishing in the Tower since April 1679 after being impeached for corruption and embezzlement from the Treasury, exceeding his powers ‘in matters of peace and war' and ‘traitorously concealing' the Oates plot. That gossipy envoy Barillon believed that Buckingham had deliberately absented himself from Danby's impeachment proceedings in the Lords because the earl had ‘threatened him with prosecution for sodomy'.
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So clearly the plot against him had been under way for some time; indeed, the previous February, Ossory – Ormond's eldest son and no friend to Buckingham – had confided to Danby that he still cherished hopes ‘of procuring something very material' against the proud and arrogant courtier.
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The chief protagonist in the plan was probably Edward Christian, Buckingham's one-time chamberlain, who had been fired for stealing large sums of money from his master in 1673.
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He had worked for Danby for three years as his steward and was the ideal
man to organise an assault on the duke's reputation and to banish him from court. Blood had reviled Christian, from his time as Buckingham's agent, to the stage of coldly refusing him ‘the civility of either drinking publicly or privately with him'.
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The feeling was mutual.