The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (32 page)

He arrived safely without let or hindrance and his London home inevitably attracted visits by the last survivors of the old republican party. It was just as predictable that his presence in the capital would cause scandal and unrest in political circles. On 6 November, Sir Joseph Tredenham, MP for St Mawes in Cornwall, stood up in the Commons and drew its attention to Ludlow's unashamed residence so close to Westminster and the seat of government. The MPs needed little debate on the issue and almost immediately resolved

that a humble address be presented to his majesty that he will be pleased to issue out a proclamation for the apprehending of Colonel Ludlow who stands attainted of high treason by Act of Parliament for the murder of King Charles I.

And that he will be pleased to propose an award to such as apprehend him.

The Commons ordered that a loyal address should be presented to the king by Tredenham's brother-in-law, Sir Edward Seymour, MP for Exeter and a former speaker of the house.
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William III thought the Commons had an entirely reasonable and just point of view and therefore published their sought-for proclamation, offering £200 for Ludlow's arrest. The fugitive fled England for the second and final time, again finding refuge in the
Netherlands before returning to Switzerland. He died at Vevey on 26 November 1692, aged seventy-three. His life in lonely exile far from home was filled with pathos after his heady days in the godly Commonwealth and this is reflected in the inscription he hung up over the door of his home at 49 Rue du Lac. It read:
‘Omne solum forti quia patris
' which Ludlow had adapted from a line by the Roman poet Ovid: ‘To the brave man, every land is a fatherland because God his Father made it.'
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Ludlow, like his fellow regicide John Phelps, was buried in the Swiss Reformed church of St Martin in Vevey, where his widow erected a monument to his memory in 1693.

Ormond was restored to the viceroyalty of Ireland in 1667 but his caution and conservatism hindered progress towards the long-overdue reform of the standing army and English administration in Dublin. One contemporary told the Anglo-Irish diplomat Sir Robert Southwell that the ‘diverse reforms to be made in Ireland . . . his majesty thinks will be too hard a thing to put on my lord of Ormond'.
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He clung grimly on to office until the death of Charles II automatically terminated his commission.

On 9 November 1682 he had been created an English duke and this rarefied status impelled him to buy the grandest mansion in St James's Square, London, at the cost of £9,000. He retired to Cornbury in Oxfordshire and died on 21 July 1688 at Kingston Lacey, Dorset, aged seventy-seven. Ormond had survived a tumultuous career with his honour firmly intact. He always had an eye for the judgement of history and wrote: ‘However ill I may stand at court, I am resolved to lie well in the chronicle.' Leaving debts estimated at between £100,000 and £150,000, he too was buried in Westminster Abbey.

As we saw earlier, Arlington resigned as secretary of state on 11 September 1674 after a ‘burdensome employment . . . [of] almost twelve years, with more labour and envy than I would willingly undergo, or indeed can support in my declining age'. He was appointed lord chamberlain of the royal household and five years later a commissioner of the Treasury. His five-year-old daughter was betrothed on 1 August 1672 to nine-year-old Henry Fitzroy (later
created Duke of Grafton),
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the second illegitimate son of Charles II and Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. They married in November 1679. Arlington died on 28 July 1685, aged sixty-seven, finally acknowledging his adherence to Catholicism. He was buried at Euston, Suffolk where he had a large estate.
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His London residence was Arlington House in St James's, which burned down in 1674 and was on the site of the south wing of today's royal residence, Buckingham Palace.

Williamson was dismissed as secretary of state in 1679 when, for the first time, he dramatically (and fatally) overreached himself. During the furore over the Popish Plot, he had ordered a search of Catherine of Braganza's official residence at Somerset House in the Strand, without obtaining permission from the king.
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Williamson was an MP in both the English and Irish Houses of Commons and died at Cobham, Kent, on 3 October 1701, aged sixty-eight, He left £6,000 and his library to his old,
alma mater
, Queen's College, Oxford, and £5,000 to found Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School at Rochester, Kent.
⁹

The plots against the government by Blood's old associates continued unabated after his death. In 1683, James Harris of Paved Alley in St James's warned Secretary Jenkins of a conspiracy involving, amongst others, Ralph Alexander, Robert Perrot, John Mason (now a brewer in Wapping) and Richard Halliwell (who had moved to Spitalfields). Under the pretence of being Catholics, they planned to rouse the population on the symbolic date of Sunday, 5 November (in memory of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605) and seize the king, the Duke of York, the Dukes of Ormond and Albermarle and members of the government and Privy Council. Most of the miscreants had previously been pardoned, but, as Harris pointed out, ‘Any spark of loyalty may see that his majesty's pardons have made no impression of honesty or gratitude upon them.'

However, Halliwell objected vociferously to the coup being mounted on a Sabbath day for religious reasons: ‘We cannot fall on the fifth, according to our covenant', he told his fellow plotters. ‘But we steadfastly resolve to secure as many as we can of the court party on the seventeenth (being Bess' Day)
¹⁰
and we will deal with
them and Ormond as we formerly intended against him.' Grudges clearly ran very deep.

Sir Robert Viner, whom we last met hunting down Ormond's assailants and recreating the Crown Jewels, had a trusted informer familiar with the ‘fanatics' and details of their conspiracy. This spy, a tobacconist called John Harrison, nursed his own grudge: he had revealed plans for an attempt ‘some years ago' on the lives of Charles and the Duke of York when they were travelling by boat up the Thames. He had supplied this information to Blood, ‘who had a reward and, he heard, was commanded to reward him, but he never had anything'. The sum involved was £100, half of which was to come to Harrison, ‘but Blood was in trouble and died not long afterwards, but [he] never had a penny for the service'.
¹¹

One of the conspirators, William Hone, who lived near Redcross Street,
¹²
Southwark, was questioned by the king and Privy Council on 30 June and talked about another plot ‘within these last seven years' to kill Charles by firing a crossbow bolt at him from the tower of Bow church (St Mary-le-bow in Cheapside) as the procession of the annual lord mayor's show passed by. Hone denied any involvement in this: ‘A fellow talked something of it that was a butcher once and belonged [was in the pay] of Blood.'

Another more active plan envisaged kidnapping the king and Duke of York at Newmarket ‘three weeks or a month ago', according to Hone, who acknowledged he was on the fringes of the conspiracy. For security reasons, the royal victims were codenamed ‘Blackbird' and ‘Bullfinch' by the conspirators.
¹³
This was the so-called ‘Rye House' plot, named after the moated house near Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, where the attack was to be staged.

There was no royal abduction planned here. The plotters intended to murder Charles and his heir presumptive. Assassins were to be hidden in the Rye House grounds to ambush the royal party with muskets or carbines as they returned to London by coach from the horse races at Newmarket, now in Suffolk, on 1 April 1683. However, there was a major fire in the town on 22 March, which destroyed the north side of its High Street. As a result of this disaster, the races were cancelled so Charles and the Duke of
York returned a week early and the planned attack never took place. Eleven were executed as conspirators, including two MPs, and the same number imprisoned. Arthur Capell, First Earl of Essex, the former lord lieutenant of Ireland, was caught up in the hunt for plotters and committed suicide horribly by cutting his throat in the Tower of London on 13 July 1683.

Most of Blood's old comrades seemed to escape scot-free. Robert Perrot, however, ended up on the gallows. When the Duke of Monmouth staged his insurrection against the Catholic James II, Perrot joined his army as a major in the rebels' Yellow Regiment, commanded by the former Guards officer Colonel Edward Matthews, who was something of a hard-drinking tearaway. Perrot's luck finally ran out when he fought on the losing side at the Battle of Sedgemoor, at Westonzoyland, near Bridgwater, Somerset, on 6 July 1685 and was wounded. He was captured while hiding in the Brendon Hills some weeks later and executed with 144 of his comrades at Taunton, Somerset.
¹⁴
Monmouth himself was beheaded on Tower Hill on 15 July by the notoriously cack-handed public executioner Jack Ketch, who reportedly took five blows to complete the messy decapitation.

One really cannot like the government spy Philip Alden, and not just because he was an opportunistic shady lawyer. This reprehensible creature had lived in London and spied on religious radicals after his adventures in Ireland. Afterwards he smugly boasted of his successes in 1665–6, ‘being so skilful and serviceable . . . [and] having a constant correspondence from Ludlow and others out of Switzerland and having mixed again with that villain Blood and his partners and more considerable rebels, so that most of their designs . . . were discovered [by Alden] to his majesty or ministers'.
¹⁵

However, in 1666 his loyalties came under increasing suspicion by those he regularly informed upon and he felt himself coming under threat of exposure and terrible retribution. What finally sealed his fate was when an officer attached to the staff of General George Monck, Duke of Albermarle, found a trunk of Alden's in a house near Moor Park, Hertfordshire, while he was searching for the disaffected. Inside were letters from Colonel Ned Vernon
and the Irish Secretary Sir George Lane to the spy, making his undercover activities painfully apparent. Unfortunately, the officer made the contents public before he showed them to Albermarle. Alden's cover was finally and irrevocably blown. For ‘his safety [he] was taken off that employ' and he was forced to return to Ireland. A grateful government granted him a pension of £100 a year, which predictably was paid only erratically by the Treasury. He experienced great difficulty in claiming back his sizeable arrears in payment.
¹⁶
Perhaps there is some justice in this world after all.

The former spy Martin Beckman, the fast-running military engineer who apprehended Blood in his attempt to steal the coronation regalia, married Talbot Edwards' daughter Elizabeth. They had several children, of whom none sadly lived to adulthood, and she died in 1677. He later remarried. That year Beckman was appointed ‘chief engineer of all of his majesty's castles, forts, block-houses and other fortifications in England, Wales and Berwick',
¹⁷
coupling his military work with organising impressive firework displays. He died at the Tower on 24 June 1702.
¹⁸

If Blood's old accomplices could not shake off their proclivity for traitorous plots, one of his family continued the established family business of spying. His fifth son Charles was an informer for the Duke of York after his father's death, and sent at least two reports, probably in 1681–3, warning him of current plots against his life and potential insurrections when he succeeded his brother on the throne.

His first warning was of

most dangerous conspiracies . . . still carrying on against your person and interest, far more general and dangerous than the late association [plot], not only by the members of the same but by incredible numbers of the commonalty and gentry of both city and country. If you be pleased that I shall communicate their wicked intentions to you, I am fully assured that I can have information, though not without difficulty, of every circumstantial part of their proceedings.
¹⁹

Like father, like son. Charles understood full well how to sell his value as a spy, and to hint that the collection of intelligence was an expensive activity, worthy of generous remuneration.

Charles Blood's second surviving report warned that Protestants were determined to oppose James's accession, ‘to the hazard of their lives and fortunes'. Buckingham and his associate Francis Jenks were among those who had ‘formed an association' and had recruited ‘great numbers' who were ‘qualified to provide arms as [well as] bear them'. These weapons, which had been given free to those who could not buy them, included one resembling a halberd
²⁰
‘but far more dangerous'. Blood claimed ‘vast quantities' had been manufactured to be given to those who did not know how to use a musket. The revolutionaries had purchased horses and firearms, including blunderbusses, and were protected by a kind of silk armour ‘that would resist a carbine bullet'.
²¹

Therein lies a clue. Captain Ralph Alexander was famous for inventing ‘silk armour', presumably metal plates covered by the material, ‘which he has made many suits for the richer sort . . . as well as some for the court'.
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His armour and the manufacturer of halberds featured in the reports of the 1683 conspiracy by the gang of Blood's old associates and his son's intelligence must relate to the same plot.

Charles later became a barrister in London.

Of Blood's two sons serving in the navy,
²³
William died in 1688 in
Mary
,
²⁴
at sea off the coast of the present-day Republic of Guinea in West Africa.
²⁵
An inventory of his goods and chattels, taken later that year and approved by his younger sister Elizabeth Everard, valued them at only £15.
²⁶
Edmund had died in 1679 in London, leaving half his estate to William and the other to Thomas Chamberlain, son of Matthew Chamberlain, silk thrower of London.
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