by Angus Donald
By 1670, Blood was back in England, living in Romford Market, a few miles northeast of London, under the alias Doctor Thomas Allen. Despite having no medical qualifications at all, he made a good living treating the people of Romford for their various ailments. On December 6 of that year, on a rainy night, Blood and his confederates attacked the Duke of Ormonde’s coach in St James Street as it was heading up the hill to Piccadilly. Blood and his gang pulled Ormonde from the vehicle but instead of killing him immediately, they decided to take him to Tyburn, west along Piccadilly, and hang him there like a common criminal. Ormonde was tied to the back of a horse but managed to wriggle free and he was rescued by footmen coming out with torches from Clarendon House. Ormonde, who suffered no more than a few cuts and bruises, and his fiery son Lord Ossory were convinced that it was their political rival the Duke of Buckingham who was behind the assault. Ossory openly accused Buckingham in the presence of the King and threatened to shoot him if his father was murdered. I’ve used Ossory’s actual words in the scene in this book.
After the failure of the Ormonde assassination attempt, Blood lay low, probably in Romford, planning his next move. Sometime in April 1671, Blood, disguised as a well-to-do country parson, calling himself Thomas Ayliffe, and accompanied by his beautiful ‘wife’, an actress called Jenny Blaine, paid a visit to the Tower of London and asked if he might be allowed to see the famous Crown Jewels of England.
At that time, Talbot Edwards, the elderly Assistant Keeper of the Jewels, made a small income from showing visitors the King’s coronation regalia, which were kept in the basement of the Irish Tower (now called the Martin Tower). He showed Blood and his charming companion the jewels and, when she feigned an illness and fainted, he kindly took them upstairs to his private apartments to recover under the care of his wife and daughter. A few days later Blood returned with a gift of four pairs of gloves – a thank-you for the Edwards’ kindness. Over the next few weeks, Blood wormed his way into the affections of the family and dangling a rich ‘nephew’ as bait, he began negotiations with the Edwards’s for the hand of their ugly daughter Elizabeth.
Early in the morning on 9 May, 1671, Blood and three companions arrived at the Irish Tower: his eldest son Thomas – an unsuccessful highwayman who had been posing as the rich nephew – and two accomplices called Hunt and Parrot (or Halliwell and Paris, according to some reports). Edwards unwisely allowed them to view the jewels and even went so far as to open the the cage that guarded them, whereupon he was struck on the head with a heavy mallet, knocked to the floor and stabbed several times. But Edwards, a former soldier in the service of the Talbot family, was made of stern stuff. While the thieves were cutting up the regalia and filling their pockets with jewels, he revived himself and began to scream for help. By sheer chance, Edwards’s soldier son Wythe happened to return home on leave from his regiment in Flanders that day and he arrived with a friend called Captain Beckman at the exact time that Edwards was screaming from inside the Jewel House.
The thieves made a run for it, spilling jewels as they went, and were pursued by Wythe, Captain Beckman (who for simplicity’s sake I have excluded from my story) and the Tower guards. There was a running fight as the gang tried to reach their horses which were tied up at the end of Tower Wharf at the Iron Gate. Blood was captured. As the soldiers seized him, he apparently said: ‘It was a gallant attempt, however unsuccessful! ’Twas for a crown!’
Blood was imprisoned in the White Tower and questioned by the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Robinson, but he refused to give away any details of the plot or the names of the other people involved. Quite outrageously, Blood insisted that he would only give an account of himself in a personal audience with the King.
There is no absolute proof that either the King or the Duke of Buckingham were involved in the scheme to steal the Crown Jewels but there are some rather tantalising pieces of evidence that point in this direction. Firstly, the King was extremely short of money. Despite the subsidies from France (about which more later) and the money granted to him annually by Parliament, he lived far beyond his means and was always looking for ways to make ends meet. Secondly, Blood wrote a letter to the King, quoted in this novel, in which he claims that Sir Thomas Osborne and Sir Thomas Littleton, who were protégés of the Duke of Buckingham, persuaded him to make the attempt on the Crown Jewels and that Littleton’s brother James, who worked at the naval pay office, had paid him and his gang hundreds of pounds to fund the preparations for the job. It is an extraordinary, almost preposterous claim – that he was hired by the Duke of Buckingham’s men and paid with government money to undertake the robbery – yet I cannot see any plausible reason why Blood would make it unless it were in fact quite true. The last piece of evidence is that, even though he was caught in flagrante delicto with the Crown Jewels stuffed down his boot-tops, Blood was pardoned and even handsomely rewarded for his crimes with Irish lands.
Clearly something strange went on during that private audience with the King – of which there is no official record. Some historians have suggested that the ‘Merry Monarch’ was so amused by Blood’s audacity, wit and charm that he just let him off. That doesn’t ring true to me. I think it was blackmail, pure and simple. I think the Irish lands were a pay-off to keep him quiet. I think Blood let the King know that if he was to hang for the crime he would embarrass not only the Duke Buckingham, one of Charles’s chief ministers at the time, but the King himself and, who knows, maybe he had more concrete proofs of their involvement that he threatened to use in extremis.
I should in good conscience mention here that I have changed some of the events of history to make the narrative run more smoothly. After all, while I do prefer to stick to the facts most of the time, I’m a historical novelist writing fiction, not an historian. I have Blood incarcerated in the Tower for about two weeks, in truth he languished there for some months. I’ve made hardly any mention of Lord Arlington, who was a powerful player in Whitehall (in maps of London of the time it was written White Hall) and who was deeply involved in Blood’s case and who brokered his pardon and release from the Tower. It was Lord Arlington who delivered a written apology from Blood to Ormonde for attacking him that night in St James’s Street.
For simplicity’s sake, I wanted to portray the political landscape as divided into two camps, pro-Dutch and pro-French, and ruled over by two big beasts, the dukes of Ormonde and Buckingham. But politics in any age is never simple and, if I have neglected Lord Arlington, I have equally ignored Lord Lauderdale, Lord Ashley and Sir Thomas Clifford, who were the other political heavyweights of the day. While I am making my little confession, I should also say that, for plot purposes, I also have Blood as the sole member of the gang who was captured and slung in the Tower, when in fact Parrot was captured too, and later released, as was Thomas Blood junior. I have no evidence of William Hunt being a traitor either. Mea culpa. If you want to read up on the subject, The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood by Robert Hutchinson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), gives a much fuller picture.
So while I have admittedly made some accommodations with the truth, I did learn something that filled me with enormous excitement about the Treaty of Dover when I was researching this book. There really was a secret treaty, sometimes called the Treaty of Madame because it was arranged by Charles’s sister Henrietta, Duchess of Orléans, and signed on June 1 1670. In it, Charles agreed to make a public profession of the Catholic faith in exchange for a great deal of money from Louis XIV and the promise to attack the Dutch. Six months later, the Duke of Buckingham, who was kept in the dark about the secret treaty, was asked to conduct negotiations with the French and he was amazed how smoothly the talks went. The public Treaty of Dover, which omitted the politically inflammatory paragraph about Charles professing his Catholicism, was signed on 21 December 1670. What is more amazing is that the Treaty of Madame remained secret for another hundred years.
Which brings us to Holcroft Blood, the Colonel’s unusual third son. He is the hero of thi
s series, and he was a real person born around 1655, but I have taken rather a lot of liberties with his character and life story. He was never a page in the service of the Duke of Buckingham, as far as I know. It is extremely unlikely that he would have known anything about the secret treaty, and even more unlikely that he would have been able to blackmail the King with his knowledge. Also, I have described him as someone with mild Asperger’s syndrome – which may be taking more than just a liberty. On the other hand, we will never know, as that modern diagnosis would not have been possible in the seventeenth century. Someone with Asperger’s would just have been considered a bit odd and probably rather stupid and I can easily imagine someone like that being bullied by other children and held in contempt by adults. The little we know of the real Holcroft indicates that he was rather shy and awkward as a young man, but also remarkably clever with a gift for numbers, indeed, a pronounced mathematical bent – he went on to become a celebrated gunner in the British Army, and a brilliant artillery general under the Duke of Marlborough (the man Jack Churchill will become). The real Holcroft may not have been anywhere on what we now call the autistic spectrum but I think giving him this slight disability makes my fictionalised hero a good deal more interesting. That’s my excuse, anyway.
Holcroft Blood’s military career will be the focus of future books in this series, as will Jack Churchill’s. And the story of the future Duke of Marlborough’s rise is, I think, an instructive one. He was the son of Sir Winston Churchill, a Royalist from an old Dorset family of gentry, who was impoverished when the war was lost. It may have been this early experience of poverty that fuelled Churchill’s later urge to accumulate wealth, which his detractors described as excessive greed. The family fortunes turned with the Restoration and, through his sister Anne, young Jack secured a place as a page in the household of James, Duke of York, King Charles’s brother.
Such was his great personal charm and beauty that young Churchill was described as ‘irresistible to either man or woman’ and it was not long before he caught the eye of the King’s mistress Barbara Villiers, who was also a distant cousin. Barbara had borne five children to the King but was being eclipsed by the actress Nell Gwyn, who was ten years younger. Barbara took Churchill into her bed around this time (she gave birth to a daughter by him in July 1672) and was very supportive of the impecunious but handsome young man, giving him a present of £5,000 in cash – with which he bought an annuity from Lord Halifax worth £500 a year.
There is a story that the King paid an unexpected visit to Barbara Villiers’s apartments while she was entertaining Jack Churchill. The young gallant was forced to hide naked in a wardrobe when the King arrived (in some versions he had to jump out of the window). The King discovered him hiding there but when Churchill fell to his knees begging mercy, Charles laughed and pardoned him saying: ‘You are a rascal but I forgive you because you do it to get your bread.’
There is another story about this incident, which I have appropriated in this book, which says that the Duke of Buckingham, hoping to bring Barbara Villiers down, paid a servant £100 to tell him when Churchill and his mistress would meet. When he had this information, he urged the King to visit her at precisely this time.
Jack Churchill might have been forgiven by the King – who had basically called him a male whore to his face – but he was out of favour at court and unlikely to receive any advancement in his career from the monarch. His patron the Duke of York, who had arranged for him to receive a commission as ensign in the First Regiment of the King’s Foot Guards (much later to become the Grenadier Guards), now had him transferred away from White Hall to the Admiral’s Regiment for service with the fleet. We know that Holcroft also fought at sea in the Anglo-Dutch war and so at the end of the book, I have them leaving London together to serve on the same ship.
One of my favourite characters in the book is Aphra Behn, who was another extraordinary figure of the time. Aphra was the widow of a Dutch (or possibly German) merchant who traded with Surinam and was lost at sea. She was a spy for the British Crown in Antwerp (not for the Duke of Buckingham) and spent some time in a debtor’s prison on her return to England, which suggests that she was not well paid for her espionage. She was also one of the first women ever to have made her living as a writer, which endears her to me. She wrote plays for the Duke’s Company which were performed at their theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, including the two plays mentioned in this book, although they were rather better and more successful than I have described them. Indeed, she was a prolific playwright, occasionally using the pen-name Astraea, but was mocked for writing in a masculine style. She also wrote a bestselling novel which expressed surprisingly progressive views on gender, race and class. She was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1689. As a British spy, successful writer and proto-feminist, Aphra was a character that leaped out of my research and forced her way into the book. I hope I’ve done her memory justice.
The code that Astraea uses to communicate with the Duke of Buckingham, which Holcroft finds so easy to read, is in fact a real, if rather simple code, used during the English Civil War. The vowels A E I O U are the numbers 1 to 5 with an apostrophe against them. V is also 5’, W is 5’5’ and Y is 6’. The letters B to L are the numbers 1 to 9; and the letters M to Z are also 1 to 9 but with an asterisk beside them. I suspect that Buckingham would have used something a bit more challenging to the code-breakers of the day, but I wanted to allow the readers who like that sort of thing to be able to work out what was written in the letter Holcroft discovers in the duke’s desk. Likewise, the card games Holcroft plays – Slamm, Trump and Ruff and Honours – are real games of the period, all variants of Whist, which emerged as the most popular variety at the end of the seventeenth century. The extraordinary final hand in the Whist game with Buckingham is finessed from ‘The Quality of Evil’ by Gustavu Aglione in More Bedside Bridge (Collins Willow) edited by Elena Jeronimidis.
I have to confess to one last bit of historical jiggery-pokery when it comes to the sundial in the Privy Garden of White Hall. The sundial, erected in 1669 by the Jesuit priest Francis Hall, was the mechanical wonder of its age, the King’s pride and joy and a Royalist symbol of authority. It was attacked and ruined by the poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and some of his friends in a drunken frenzy in June 1675. I moved the date of Rochester’s infamous action to May 1671 because I wanted the sundial to stand as a physical symbol of Holcroft’s orderly worldview and to be wrecked when his personal life falls apart; after his mother’s death, the capture of his father and his own ignominious dismissal from Buckingham’s service. For this and my other historical transgressions, many abject apologies. But I am no longer a journalist. I am a storyteller, a writer of fiction, one who uses history to weave tales, and if those pesky historical facts threaten to get in the way of a good story, well . . .
About the Author
Angus Donald was born in China in 1965 and educated at Marlborough College and Edinburgh University. For over twenty years he was a journalist in Hong Kong, India, Afghanistan and London. He now works and lives in Kent with his wife and two children.
www.angus-donald.com
Returning in 2018 . . .
BLOOD’S REVOLUTION
In an age of treachery everyone must pick a side
Newly returned from years of secret work in Paris, Lieutenant Holcroft Blood, a brilliant but unusual gunnery officer in His Majesty’s Ordnance, must now face King James II’s enemies on the gore-drenched battlefields of the British Isles.
But after the victory at Sedgemoor – and its cruel aftermath, the Bloody Assizes, in which the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion was ruthlessly crushed – many powerful men have grown tired of Catholic James’s brutal, autocratic rule and seek to invite William, the Protestant Prince of Orange, to seize the thrones of the Three Kingdoms.
While revolution brews in the gentlemen’s clubs of London, Holcroft discovers that a sinister French agent, known only by his code name Narrey, has followed
him across the Channel and intends to murder him. Worse, Holcroft must decide whether to join the conspirators, including his old friend Jack Churchill, now Lord Marlborough, and support Dutch William’s invasion – or remain loyal to his unpopular king.
On the banks of the River Boyne in Ireland, William of Orange and James Stuart meet in bloody conflict. There, Holcroft must face his own enemies as well as those of his sovereign, and triumph over both if he hopes to survive.
Publishing in Hardback and eBook in Autumn 2018. Pre-order now!
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Zaffre Publishing
This ebook edition published in 2017 by
Zaffre Publishing
80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE
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Copyright © Angus Donald, 2017
Map © Rachel Lawston, Lawston Design 2017
Jacket design by Richard Augustus
Jacket photographs © Alamy Images (guns);
Arcangel Images/Liubomir Paut-Fluerasu (Tower of London);
All other images Shutterstock.com
The moral right of Angus Donald to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
