The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (40 page)

83
   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.210. Blood to John Chamberlin. ? August 1663.

84
   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 32, f.211. Undated, but endorsed: ‘Copied, 14 August 1663 at Wicklow'.

85
   Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS A. 185, f.473.

86
   TNA, SP 63/314/16, f.42. Ormond to the king, 14 July 1663.

87
   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 49, f.216.

88
   
CSP Ireland 1663–5
, p.181.

89
   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, f.574. Alexander Jephson's last speech on the scaffold.

90
   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 68, ff.576–8.

91
   
CSP Ireland 1663–5
, pp.176–7.

92
   Bod. Lib. Carte MS 159, f.66.

93
   TNA, SP, 63/315/25, f.49. Sir George Lane to Bennet, Dublin Castle, 18 November 1663.

94
   ‘Remarks . . .', pp.220–21.

95
   Morres,
History of the Principal
Transactions of the Irish Parliament 1634–66
, (2 vols., London, 1742), vol. 2, p.136.

96
   
CSP Ireland 1663–5
, p.308. His mother, Charity, wrote to Ormond in August 1663, prostrate at his feet and ‘knowing scarcely how to articulate her anguish', that her son ‘should have had his hand in treason' and blaming his ‘tenderness of years and to the frailty of a nature beguiled by the subtlety of some grand imposter'. Bod. Lib. Carte MS 33, f.90.

CHAPTER 3: A TASTE FOR CONSPIRACY

1
     
CSP Ireland 1663–5
, p.662.

2
     For information about the Elizabethan intelligence organisation, see my
Elizabeth's Spymaster
(London, 2006).

3
     Both Houses of Parliament decided on 19 December 1644 to impose the observance of Christmas Day as a fast day, banning such fripperies as mince pies. They decreed that ‘this day in particular is to be kept with more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins and the sins of our forefathers who turned this feast, pretending the memory of Christ into extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights' (‘Lords
Jnls
', vol. 7, p.106). The Royalist satirist and poet John Taylor (1580–1653) wrote a book ridiculing this ordinance, having Father Christmas visit the ‘schismatic and rebellious' cities and towns of London, Yarmouth, Newbury and Gloucester and finding ‘All the liberty and harmless sports, with the merry gambols, dances and friscals [capers] [by] which the toiling plough-swain and labourer were wont to be recreated and their spirits and hopes revived for a whole twelve month are now extinct and put out of use in such a fashion as if they never had been. Thus are the merry lords of misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad rule at Westminster.' (
Complaint of Christmas
, Oxford, 1646). The performance of plays had been banned in 1642. Maypole and Morris dancing accompanied Charles II's triumphal entry into London in May 1660.

4
     Later King James II.

5
     J. R. Magrath (ed.),
The Flemings in Oxford, being the Documents selected
from the Rydal Papers in illustration of the Lives and Ways of Oxford Men 1650–7
(3 vols., Oxford Historical Society, 1904–24), vol. 1, p.160.

6
     
An Act for Erecting and Establishing a Post Office
, 12 Car II,
cap.
35. Postal charges were levied at the rate of two, four and six old pence for a single-sheet, folded letter carried up to 80, 140 or more miles to the addressee.

7
     His father was in charge of the post after 1635 when the service was created by Charles I. Witherings the elder wrote to the Mayor of Hull announcing the posts which would be carried along the five principal roads in the kingdom: to Dover, Edinburgh, Holyhead, Plymouth and Bristol (TNA, POST 23/1; 28 January 1636). For further information see: Turner, ‘The Secrecy of the Post',
EHR
, vol. 33, pp.320–27

8
     TNA, SP 29/168/151, f.158. ? 24 August 1666.

9
     Wallis (1616–1703) was the third Savilian professor of geometry at the University of Oxford. He had worked as a cryptographer for Cromwell's spymaster John Thurloe during the republic in 1659–60 and then for Williamson after the Restoration, being described as a ‘jewel for a Prince's use and service' in code-breaking. Later he was accused of deciphering the correspondence of Charles I, captured by parliamentary forces after the Royalist defeat at the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645 – charges which he vehemently denied in a letter to his friend, John Fell, Bishop of Oxford in a letter dated 8 April 1685 (BL Add. MS. 32,499, f.377). For details of Wallis' life, see an eighteenth-century account in Bod. Lib. Rawlinson MS C. 978.

10
   Marshall,
Intelligence and Espionage
. . ., pp.79–80. Oldenburg (
c
.1619–77) was secretary of the Royal Society, founded on 28 November 1660, and founding editor of its peer-reviewed
Philosophical Transactions
, the world's oldest scientific journal, which is still going strong today. Oldenburg, who was harshly critical of the government's handling of the Second Dutch War in 1665–7, fell foul of the government because of his views, expressed in intercepted correspondence with his Royal Society contacts. It was a case of the biter bit, as he spent two months imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1667 as a salutary lesson.

11
   Morland's
Brief
discourse containing the nature and reason of intelligence
, Egmont Papers vol. 214, BL Add MSS 47,133, ff.8–13.

12
   A seventeenth-century description of Morland's ‘speaking trumpet' was sold at Sotheby's in London on 4 November 1969, lot. 260.

13
   See: Susan E. Whyman,
Postal Censorship in England
; HMC ‘Finch', vol. 2, p.265; HMC ‘Downshire', vol. 1, pt. 2, pp.594–5.

14
   A customs officer who boarded and inspected ships on arrival and collected the dues on their cargoes.

15
   BL Egerton MSS 2,539, f.101.

16
   There was a private entrance to Bennet's and Williamson's offices from the privy garden of the palace. Otherwise, a visitor would have to enter from the Stone Gallery through an outer door into a porch, guarded by a door-keeper. See: Marshall, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson and the Conduct of Administration in Restoration England',
HR
, vol. 69, pp.21–2.

17
   Was one safe house the home of the astronomer Sir Paul Neale (1613–86)? He received £38 from secret funds for his ‘lodging in Whitehall' from 23 November 1678 to 31 July 1679. Neale had become MP for Newark in 1673 but because the election was contested, he was not allowed to take his seat in the Commons and the vote was declared void in 1677. See Akerman (ed.),
Moneys received and paid for Secret Services of Charles II and James II from 30 March 1679 to 25 December 1688
, p.5. Williamson had his own house in Scotland Yard, off Parliament Street.

18
   Marshall,
Intelligence and Espionage
. . ., p.160.

19
   Expenditure on Britain's three intelligence agencies – the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) the Security Service (MI5) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the equivalent of the USA's National Security Agency) – is contained in the ‘Single Intelligence Account' which totalled £1.9 billion in 2014–15, plus a further £123 million for cyber-security funding. For security reasons, the individual budgets of the agencies are not published.

20
   BL Add. MS. 28,077, f.139. The hearth tax was imposed in 1662–89 and involved a householder paying one shilling (5 pence) for every hearth or stove twice a year, at Michaelmas (25 September) and on Lady Day (25 March). In 1674, John Cecil, Fifth Earl of Exeter,
had to pay for seventy hearths in Burghley House, at Stamford, Lincolnshire.

21
   Akerman (ed.),
Moneys received and paid for Secret Services of Charles II and James II from 30 March 1679 to 25 December 1688
, pp. x and 7.

22
   RCHM
Fifteenth Report
, appendix, pt. 7, p.170.

23
   Book of Daniel, chapter 2, verse 44.

24
   Book of Revelations, chapter 13, verses 17–18.

25
   At least they were consistent in the vilification of their rulers: Cromwell, they declared, had been a Babylonian tyrant.

26
   Samuel Pepys records in his Diary for 9 January 1661: ‘Waked in the morning about six o'clock by people running up and down . . . talking that the fanatics were up in arms in the City. So I rose and went forth, where in the street I found everybody in arms at the doors. So I returned (though with no good courage . . .) and got my sword and pistol, [for] which I had no powder to charge . . .'. The next day, he was horrified to hear that the ‘fanatics . . . have routed all the Trained Bands [London militia] that they met with, put the king's life guards to the run, killed about twenty men . . . and all this in the daytime when all the City was in arms'. ‘Pepys Diary', vol. 1, pp.298–9.

27
   Capp, ‘
A Door of Hope
Re-opened: the Fifth Monarchy, King Charles and King Jesus',
Jnl of Religious History
, vol. 32, pp.16–30. For more information on the Fifth Monarchists, see Capp's
The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth century English Millenarianism
(London, 1977) and Champlin Burrage, ‘The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections',
EHR
, vol. 25, pp.741–3.

28
   The first issue of the newspaper, on 7 November 1665, was published under the title
Oxford Gazette
, as the court had fled to that city because of the epidemic of bubonic plague raging in London. It reported that the ‘bill of mortality' (or death toll) in London that week was 1,359, of which 1,050 were from plague – a decrease of 428. It became the
London Gazette
on 5 February 1666.

29
   ‘Magalotti,
Relazione
,' pp.44–5.

30
   ‘Pepys Diary', vol. 3, pp.30–31. 6 February 1663.

31
   ‘Pepys Diary', vol. 5, p.223. 1 March 1666.

32
   ‘Evelyn Diary', vol. 2, p.300.

33
   ‘Magalotti,
Relazione,'
p.44, although the Italian's estimate was
probably exaggerated. See also Marshall,
Intelligence and Espionage
. . ., p.36 and, by the same author, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson',
ODNB
, vol. 59, pp.352–6 and ‘Sir Joseph Williamson and the Conduct of Administration in Restoration England',
HR
, vol. 69, pp.18–41.

34
   B. L. Egerton MS 2,539, ff.142–3. For details of the pay of the secretaries of state, see F. M. Greir Evans, ‘Emoluments of the Principal Secretaries of State in the seventeenth century',
EHR
, vol. 35, pp.513–28.

35
   Marshall, ‘Henry Bennet, first earl of Arlington,
ODNB
, vol. 5, p.102.

36
   Greaves,
Deliver Us from Evil
, p.174.

37
   Greaves,
Deliver Us from Evil
, pp.178–9.

38
   For more information on the northern rebellion, see Gee, ‘A Durham and Newcastle plot in 1663',
Archaeologia Aeolian
, third s., vol. 14 (1917), pp.145–56 and Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Plot, 1663',
Yorkshire Archaeological Jnl
, vol. 31 (1932–4), pp.348–59, who notes that the fears of Whitehall officials seemed to have ‘caused something in the nature of a panic which were not justified' (pp.358–9). For the grisly fate of some of those caught up in the northern rebellion, see Raine, J. (ed.),
Depositions from the Castle of York relating to Offences Committed in the Northern Counties
. . ., Surtees Society, vol. 40.

39
   
CSP Domestic 1663–4
, p.652.

40
   Marshall, ‘William Leving',
ODNB
, vol. 33, p.345. Jones was the author of the radical underground pamphlet verbosely titled ‘Mene Tekel or the Downfall of Tyranny wherein liberty and equity are vindicated, and tyranny condemned by the law of God and right reason, and the people's power and duty to execute justice without and upon wicked governors, asserted by Laophilus Misotyrannus'. This angry, seditious document, published earlier in 1663, argued that kings were the servants of the people, were set up by the people and therefore could be removed by the people. With memories of the bloody fate of Charles I still fresh, it was inevitable that its publication touched a raw nerve in the Restoration government.

41
   Lambert (1619–84) was accused of high treason at the Restoration and spent the last twenty-four years of his life a prisoner, firstly in the Channel Island of Guernsey and latterly on Drake's Island in Plymouth Sound where he died in March 1674.

42
   Marshall,
Intelligence and Espionage
. . ., p.156.

43
   TNA, SP 29/97/41, f.54; Sir Roger Langley to Bennet, 3 April 1664. SP 29/97/201, f.32; Sir Roger Langley to Secretary Bennet, York, 23 April 1664.

44
   TNA, SP 29/97/75, f.130. One of the earliest documented examples of a career as an informer in England was George Whelplay, a London haberdasher, who conceived the idea after being sent to Southampton to investigate the customs service in the port, by Henry VIII's enforcer, Thomas Cromwell. See G.R. Elton, ‘Informing for Profit: A Sidelight on Tudor Methods of Law Enforcement',
Cambridge Hf
, vol. 11 (1954), pp.149–67. Elton points out that Whelplay received ‘precious little out of bustling activity which, despite its essentially sordid air, had not a little of the pathetic about it'.