The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (31 page)

The colonel needed that religious belief and fortitude now, as never before. He returned to his home on the corner of Great Peter and Tufton streets in Westminster and here ‘reflected upon his condition, both as to his personal reputation and the interests of his family'.

His faithful wife Mary was already dead, as was his eldest son, Thomas. His two daughters were prosperously married and his other sons were gainfully engaged in careers in the service of the king. But Blood's standing in society had been ‘extremely blasted' by the ‘malice of enemies' and was ruined by the failure of his debtors to reimburse him – a particular blow when he was faced
with having to pay a gigantic bill for damages to Buckingham.

Blood could not now see any means of ‘getting out of the mire by his former methods of contriving and daring'. In the past, he had ‘trusted to his hands' and his sagacity to rescue him in any emergency but now he realised he was completely ‘manacled'.

These ‘dismal thoughts' degenerated into ‘a pensive melancholy' and this, combined with the hot weather of the season, caused a ‘fatal, though not violent distemper' – a disturbed condition of the mind.

His sickness lasted fourteen days and throughout this period Blood was visited by his loyal friends and a Presbyterian minister who found him in a ‘sedate temper as to the concerns of his soul' and not ‘startled by the apprehension of approaching death'. Blood told him he had set his thoughts in order and ‘was ready and willing to obey, when it pleased God to give him the last call'. These were the only words he uttered, as he seemed unwilling to talk to his other visitors, and the only noises he made were ‘involuntary sighs' between increasingly frequent spells of sleep. On the Monday before his death, he was struck speechless and barely able to move, presumably having suffered a stroke, and his breathing grew ever more laboured.

On Monday, 22 August he dictated his last will and testament, ‘being at the time sensible of the frailty and mortality of man' and afflicted by ‘a weariness of body'. Blood therefore bequeathed his soul ‘into the hands of almighty God . . . in full assurance of that blessed resurrection held forth in the Holy Scriptures' and his body ‘to the earth from whence it came'.

As a debtor, the terms of his will were necessarily curtailed. Long gone were the halcyon days of riches and affluence, with Blood strutting arrogantly around town dressed in the latest fashions and wearing the finest periwig. His ‘small temporal estate' now consisted only of the simple goods and chattels that he still possessed. Everything else of value had been pawned or disposed of. Those items ‘capable of being sold' were to be turned into cash immediately and the proceeds were to be divided equally into three parts. His daughters Mary and Elizabeth were to receive one part each
and the third was to be shared by his three surviving sons Holcroft, William and Charles and his daughter-in-law, the widow of Thomas Blood junior. The only bequest outside the family was the twenty shillings (£1) to be paid ‘to my old friend John Fisher'. His executors were named as ‘my faithful and loving friends' Robert Blakeys, of London, clerk, and Thomas Lisle of Westminster, ‘not doubting their old friendship and kindness in undertaking' these duties. The will was witnessed by Sarah [?Frend] and John Ward, Blood's servant.
⁶⁶

An inventory of his remaining goods and chattels in May the following year lists the items left in each room of his house: ‘the dining room'; ‘the little parlour and entry'; ‘the little chamber backward' and the like. There was precious little remaining: a few chairs, a leather jack (a jug for beer), some hangings, a chopping knife and some brass candlesticks in the kitchen, a bedstead, blankets and some rugs. All in all, they were valued at £300 14s 2d, which was probably more than Blood realised.
⁶⁷

At three o'clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, 24 August, Colonel Thomas Blood died. He was aged sixty-two.

After a life of striving to ‘make a noise in the world' by assiduously courting popular notoriety and infamy, his passing was marked more by a pathetic whimper than the anticipated bang.

Or was it? One last event that caught the public's imagination marked his demise.

The old colonel would have been gratified that lurid rumours about his death swept London. Some gossips maintained that he had used a ‘narcotic and stupefying' drug to hasten his end, but his contemporary biographer believed this was a harsh judgement on a man ‘who had the courage not to despair in the worst circumstances of life and far less should be thought to do it on a deathbed of no painful sickness'. Others claimed he died a devout Catholic after a last-gasp conversion. This again was untrue: ‘It would be needless to produce the testimonies of persons beyond exception who were constantly with him in his sickness to refute this . . . calumny raised by those enemies of his'.
⁶⁸
At least Blood did not die alone and friendless.

Two days later Blood was ‘decently interred' a few hundred yards away from his home in the chapel in Tothill Fields
⁶⁹
near the grave of his wife.

If he had pious hopes of a joyful resurrection awaiting him, these were realised sooner than he could have wished.

As we saw at the beginning, there was much talk that his final illness, death and burial were nothing more than another trick to throw off his enemies and avoid paying Buckingham his punitive damages. Some people testified that they had seen him alive and well in his familiar haunts in Westminster and the Palace of Whitehall. Was his apparent death nothing but a devious ‘farce and piece of pageantry to carry on some design' planned by Blood? Such was the pitch of excitement in London that the authorities decided the only way to scotch such uncontrolled speculation was to exhume Blood's body, to prove, once and for all, that he was truly dead.

Accordingly, the grave was reopened on the following Thursday. A coroner and jury from Westminster – made up of twenty-three honest citizens who knew him in life – were convened in an inquest to view the disinterred and odorous body.

Such civic duties can never be pleasant and this was particularly gruesome. After six days below ground in that warm season, the jurymen were horrified to find his ‘face so altered and swollen' and so ‘few lineaments and features of their old acquaintance' remaining that they were unable to recognise the corpse formally, or even informally. An army captain was called in who maintained, under oath, that the thumb of the cadaver's left hand demonstrated conclusively that this was Blood's body. All who knew him had ‘taken notice' of this distinguishing feature which had grown ‘to a prodigious bigness' after an old injury. However, this was not enough to convince the sceptical jury and no verdict was returned.
⁷⁰

The body was decently returned to its grave, although some reports long afterwards suggested that the colonel was reburied not in Tothill Fields, but in the graveyard of St Andrew's parish church in Hornchurch, Essex. Alongside the church on the High Street side is an anonymous grave marked only by a weather-beaten and
effaced slab bearing a skull and crossbones which is pointed out as that of Blood. Despite Hornchurch's proximity to his old stomping ground in Romford, this seems highly unlikely.

A number of satirical broadsheets marking his death were quickly published by those wanting to capitalise on the end of someone quite so infamous. The seventy-six lines of doggerel verses
An Elegy on Colonel Blood, Notorious for Stealing the Crown
, rushed out by J. Shorter only six days after Blood's death, began with the damning:

Thanks, ye kind fates for your last favour shown
Of stealing BLOOD who lately stole the Crown
We'll not exclaim so much against you since
As well as BEDLOE you have fetched him hence,
He who has been a plague to all mankind
And never was to anyone a friend . . .

and ended with the suggestion that this should be his epitaph:

Here lies the man who boldly has run through
More villainies than ever England knew
And nere to any friend he had was true
Here let him then by all unpitied lie
And let's rejoice his time was come to die
.
⁷¹

Unkind words indeed.

Perhaps a more appropriate epitaph would be the summary of his life written by Richard Halliwell, his contemporary biographer, who generously declared that Blood never pursued

mean . . . and sneaking actions that leave an indelible character of ignominy upon those who would be thought gentlemen when they tread in the steps of villains.

He was indeed for forbidden game, but never on the king's highway, always in royal parks and forests. Crowns, sceptres and government were his booty and the surprising of castles and viceroys his recreation.

His exploits, he wrote, were ‘to live in story for [their] strangeness, if not by the success of his attempts'.
⁷²

They do indeed. His arrogance and daring were spellbinding, particularly so as, despite the plaudits of his former accomplice, he rarely enjoyed any real success in his adventures. Some might see the colonel as a psychologically flawed attention-seeker, perhaps wholly narcissistic, as the symptoms of this personality disorder apparently include an exaggerated sense of one's own abilities and achievements, a constant need for affirmation and a sense of entitlement and expectation of special treatment. When examining his exploits, these may sound uncannily familiar.

But aside from the complexities of his psychology, a strong case can also be made that his primary motivation was a volatile mix of religious fervour, a sense of injustice and the burning need for vengeance – like so many others in seventeenth-century Britain. However, the colonel stands out as a different kind of desperado to those grim-faced fanatics that populated his twilight world of espionage and treachery in Dublin and London.

Unlike them, Blood was an eccentric gambler who was never daunted by the odds that fate threw up against him and who took a rash delight in staging an outrage purely for its own sake. In his turbulent career, Blood tried to assassinate viceroys, rescue friends and stole the unthinkable (or unattainable) just because the challenges were perceived as too great by other mere mortals. What drove him on was the same irrepressible motivation that later forced people to climb mountains purely because they were there.

Fame was his spur.

He ranks high in the pantheon of true adventurers, with his escapades frequently the excited talk of three kingdoms. His colourful, madcap exploits enliven and enrich the pages of seventeenth-century British history. We remain amazed by his daredevil audacity, his astonishing effrontery and smile at his harum-scarum escapes from the hand of destiny.

Although the governments of Ireland and England of the time would disagree, thank God he was there.

Epilogue

Most dangerous conspiracies are still carrying on against your person and interest, [made] far more general and dangerous . . . by the incredible numbers of the commonalty and gentry of both city and country.

Charles Blood to James, Duke of York, 1681
¹

George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, was finally restored to Charles II's favour in 1684 but his enjoyment of this royal approval was short-lived as the king died on 6 February the following year, a few days after suffering an apoplectic fit. After the accession of the Duke of York as James II of England and James VII of Scotland, the old schemer returned briefly to public life, diligently attending routine parliamentary business and writing
A Short Discourse on the Reasonableness of Man's having a Religion
in 1685, a pamphlet that advocated greater religious freedom for both Catholics and Protestants.

Because of ill-health and his omnipresent financial troubles, Buckingham retired to the relatively cloistered world of his small estate at Helmsley, Yorkshire and lived there quietly for eighteen months. He died on 16 April 1687, supposedly from a chill caught while out hunting,
²
at the home of one of his tenants in Kirkbymoorside, believing himself ‘despised by my country and, I fear, forsaken by my God'. Buckingham was aged fifty-nine. His was a life of wanton dissipation, coupled disastrously with serial embezzlement by those he imprudently trusted. By 1671, all his properties had been mortgaged, sometimes three or four times
over, and that year a trust was established to administer what remained, yielding him an annual income of only £5,000. Buckingham died intestate, his once grand estates dispersed and his fortune long gone. Without a legitimate male heir, his title became extinct. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

That indomitable old republican Edmund Ludlow felt that with William III's accession to the throne in 1688, it might be safe to quit the protective haven of Switzerland and return to London. Accordingly on 25 July 1689 he formally bade farewell to the obliging magistrates of Vevey, declaring that God had called him home ‘to strengthen the hand of the English Gideon'. No doubt the city fathers nodded approvingly at this righteous motive.