The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (33 page)

Holcroft, the third son, enlisted in the Royal Navy without his father's knowledge or permission in 1672 and served at sea during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. He later joined Louis XIV's French Guards as a cadet, using the
nom de guerre
of ‘Leture', and studied engineering in the French military academy. His father obtained
him the post of clerk of the peace in Co. Clare in April 1676.
²⁸
Two years later, Charles II granted him a licence of absence as he had been ‘absent by the king's command and has remained in England on the king's service'.
²⁹

In 1686, he married Elizabeth Fowler, widowed daughter of the barrister Richard King, at St Pancras church, London, and in October 1688 was appointed captain of pioneers in James II's artillery train. After the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William of Orange and his wife Mary, Holcroft was promoted second engineer in the artillery and sent to Ireland. Holcroft fought in the major sieges and battles against James II's Jacobite forces in Ireland and was wounded at the capture of Carrickfergus in Co. Antrim in August 1689, at Cashel, in Co. Tipperary the following February and at the decisive Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690.
³⁰
In February 1696 he was unexpectedly promoted second engineer of England at a salary of £2 50 a year
³¹
and that May was rewarded with a payment of £180 for his role in arresting the chief protagonists in a conspiracy to assassinate William.

Under the Duke of Marlborough, he fought as colonel of the train of artillery in the war against France. At the siege of Venloo in south-east Holland in September 1702, Lord Cutts successfully stormed the town's outwork defences, reporting that engineers and pioneers

under Col. Blood, who acted as first engineer . . . was to have made the lodgment [captured position] continuous. When he saw that I had quitted that design, he showed the part of a brave officer, charging with the men, sword in hand, and killing an officer of grenadiers who made a vigorous opposition with his party.
³²

After successfully commanding the allied artillery at the victory of Blenheim on 2 August 1704, Blood was promoted brigadier general.

Holcroft had enjoyed a lengthy affair with a Mrs Mary Andrews and his wife had quit the marital home in London in disgust at his infidelity. In October that year, he attempted a reconciliation that ended fruitlessly and embarrassingly in a public brawl between
husband and wife. She tried to take out warrants for his arrest for assault but her attempts were thwarted by his barrister brother Charles. She then sued for separation for his adultery and cruelty in the London consistory court, but after Holcroft proved her own unfaithfulness, her suit was dismissed.
³³

Blood returned to military service in Flanders and died in Brussels on 19 August 1707, aged fifty. His will left £200 a year for ninety-nine years to his natural son Holcroft
³⁴
of St Anne's Soho, Westminster, and an annuity of £100 to his mother, ‘my dear and entirely beloved friend Mrs Dorothy Cook of the city of Dort in the province of Holland'. She also received ‘all money, plate, jewels, watches, household goods and camp furniture'.

His wife Elizabeth was left forty shillings (£2).
³⁵

Nothing further is known of the lives of Blood's two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, except that they were still alive in 1707, as they received bequests of £50 each in Holcroft's will.

Holcroft had taken Edmund, the eldest of his deceased brother Thomas's two offspring, into his protection when the child was only three or four months old.
³⁶
The child's mother died in Dublin while he was staying with his uncle in Holland. Edmund later served with the British army in Albany, the capital of New York state, and told a relative, a Mrs Mary Blood of Meath Street, Dublin in July 1734 that since he was aged eight, ‘I have been abroad in the service of the crown.'

The subject of his letter was the sad story of a long-lost inheritance: the Blood lands in Counties Meath and Wicklow granted by Charles I. After Colonel Blood's attainder, the property was granted to Captain Toby Barnes in April 1666
³⁷
for thirty-one years. After Blood's royal pardon, Charles II directed the lord lieutenant and justices of Ireland to allow him to bring an action for a writ of error to reverse the attainder for treason against him. Unfortunately, that reversal was either not provided or had been lost in the government archives in Dublin Castle.

Barnes died in 1688, with his heirs living in England. The tenants of the properties were ‘papists . . . and the [lands] became waste'. Adam Loftus, First Viscount Lisburne,
³⁸
master of the Court of
Requests, granted their title to a Mary Sloane, who afterwards made them over to a Joseph Henry who left them, presumably, to his son Hugh. By November 1734, they were worth £500 a year.
³⁹

Edmund Blood sought their return, as direct descendant, through his highwayman father, of his grandfather Colonel Blood. He told Mary Blood that Hugh Henry's title to the estates should be investigated and ‘if he is unwilling to show his title himself he must be compelled to discover the same by a short bill of equity'. Edmund's son-in-law [Richard] Williams ‘is lately come from Dublin . . . and together with your kind assistance may make the best inquiries and do whatever is requisite in the affair'.

I beg you . . . let me hear from you and know what is doing therein. Whatever expenses you are at in the affair be pleased to let me know and I shall make punctual remittances either to London or Dublin as conveniency offers.

He asked that her reply should be directed to ‘Capt. Edmund Blood at Mr Henry Holland, merchant, in Albany, North America, to be forwarded by Mr Joseph Nico, merchant in London'.
⁴⁰

Despite their best efforts, the Bloods apparently never recovered their lost lands in Ireland.

After the colonel's attempted theft of the Crown Jewels in 1671, new security arrangements were immediately put in place. In 1710, Zacharias von Uffenbach, a foreign tourist visiting the Tower, described entering a ‘gloomy and cramped den' that housed the regalia. After visitors had entered, the strong outer door was both bolted from inside and locked by sentries outside. He and his fellow tourists sat on wooden benches and viewed the jewels through ‘a trellis of strong iron'. More than seventy years later, William Hutton was taken to a ‘door in an obscure corner' of the Tower that led to a ‘dismal hole resembling the cell of the condemned'.

In the nineteenth century, visitors were confronted by a rather pompous lady custodian, carrying a candle, described somewhat unkindly by an American visitor as ‘an old hag' who ‘presided like a high priestess over the glories' of the Crown Jewels. These security
measures continued until 1840 when a new Gothic Revival Jewel House was built by the Royal Engineers, funded by visitors' admission fees to the fortress. Unfortunately the new building proved to be damp and not fireproof and it was demolished in 1870. Work on converting the Wakefield Tower to house the regalia began in 1867. Thereafter they were displayed behind a ‘great cage', together with railings and barriers.
⁴¹
In 1910–11 the ironwork was replaced by a reinforced glass case. However, by the 1960s the volume of visitors had increased enormously and a new purpose-built area was opened beneath the Waterloo Barracks in 1967 and this was succeeded by the Tower's current facility in 1994.
⁴²

One of the few casualties of Blood's exploits was Talbot Edwards, the aged custodian of the Crown Jewels. As we have seen, he died in 1674, probably as a result of his injuries at the hands of Blood and his accomplices, and was buried in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula,
⁴³
the parish church of the Tower of London, situated in the inner ward.
⁴⁴
The slab placed over his grave read:

Here lieth y
^e
body of Talbot Edwards gent
ⁿ
late keeper of his Mat
^s
Regalia who dyed y
^e
30 of September 1674 aged 80 yeares and 9 moneths

If nothing in life is uncertain, neither is anything after death.

Edwards' tombstone was ripped from his grave by the Home Secretary Sir James Graham ‘with others from the Tower' in 1842 to be used to repair the latrines in the Queen's Bench prison, Southwark, after the closure of the Fleet prison. The historic inscription was recognised during this recycling work and the resultant row caused it to be returned to the Tower.
⁴⁵

Unfortunately, it was not replaced in the Chapel Royal but instead was used as a paving stone in one of the houses in front of the Beauchamp Tower. There it was found in 1852 by General William FitzGerald-de-Ros, deputy lieutenant of the Tower, who caused it to be replaced in St Peter's, mounted on its south wall.
⁴⁶

Chronology

1595:
Edmund Blood, founder of the Irish branch of the family, sails to Ireland as a cavalry captain in Elizabeth I's army to fight against an Irish rebellion. He resigns his commission, acquires property in Co. Clare and is elected in
1613
as one of two members of the Irish Parliament for the borough of Ennis.

Early
1618:
Thomas Blood born at Sarney, Co. Meath, son of Thomas Blood, third son of Edmund.

1640:
Thomas Blood junior is appointed a justice of the peace in Co. Meath.

1641: October
Rebellion of Catholics in Ulster; the Irish Confederation becomes the
de facto
government of Ireland.

1642: 19 March
‘Adventurers' Act' (16 Caro I,
cap.
34–5) passed at Westminster authorising money to be raised to suppress the Irish rebellion; anyone subscribing £200 would receive 1,000 acres (404.7 hectares) of land confiscated from rebels.

1642: 22 August
Charles I raises royal standard at Nottingham; beginning of Civil War against Parliament in England. Blood probably serves on Royalist side as a captain from
May 1643
and probably fought at the siege of Sherborne Castle in Dorset in
August 1645
.

1648: 28 October
Blood probably a member of besieged garrison of Pontefract Castle, Yorkshire and may have been involved in the Royalists' botched attempted kidnap and death of the parliamentary commander Colonel Thomas Rainborowe at his billet in Doncaster.

1649: 30 January
Execution of Charles I outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall.

1649: 15 August
Cromwell lands at Dublin with 12,000 men of the New Model Army together with an extensive siege artillery train to put down the Irish Confederation rebellion.

1649: 11 September
Drogheda captured after eight-day siege; most of the 3,000-strong garrison are slaughtered, together with a number of Catholic priests and civilians.

1649: 11 October
Wexford captured after a nine-day siege; 2,000 defenders and around fifteen hundred civilians massacred.

1650:
Blood switches sides in the Civil War, serving initially as a cavalry cornet and then is promoted lieutenant in the parliamentary army, probably serving briefly with Cromwell in Ireland before going to Lancashire.

1650: 21 June
Blood marries seventeen-year-old Mary Holcroft, elder daughter of parliamentary MP and hero Lieutenant Colonel John Holcroft and his wife Margaret at Newchurch, Lancashire.

1651: 30 March
Baptism of the Bloods' first child, Thomas, at Newchurch, Lancashire.

1652: 12 August
Act of Settlement for Ireland passed at Westminster.

1653: April
Last Irish Confederation troops surrender to parliamentary forces in Co. Cavan.

1653: July
Order for the transplantation of Irish landowners to Connacht and other areas west of the River Shannon.

1655–8:
The ‘Down Survey' of Ireland ensures the most efficient redistribution of sequestered Irish lands.

1656: 22 April
Blood's father-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Holcroft, is buried at Newchurch, Lancashire, leaving a flurry of legal actions over his estates.

1658: 3 September
Death of Oliver Cromwell at Whitehall, aged fifty-nine.

1660: 8 May
Restoration of the monarchy: Charles II enters London (on his birthday) and is crowned at Westminster Abbey on
23 April 1661
.
New regalia is made for his coronation to replace that earlier sold or destroyed by the Commonwealth.

1662: 19 May
Act of Uniformity, reinforcing Anglican rites, passed at Westminster.

1662: 27 September
Act of Settlement passed by Irish Parliament in Dublin. Blood loses most of his property.

1662: September
Blood conceives plan to seize control of Ireland.

1663: 9/10 March
Original date of first attempt on Dublin Castle and coup d'état,
but news of the conspiracy leaks out and the attack is postponed.