The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History

by Jordan, Don

  In 1665, Colonel Nicholas discovered the connection between Gookin and the ‘traitors’ Whalley and Goffe. The regicides’ whereabouts continued to mystify him. He issued an order to seize stock nominally owned by Gookin. Using the rights embodied in the colony’s charter, Gookin blocked the seizure.

  Dixwell moved to nearby New Haven and decided to dice with fate by living openly as a settler. He possibly calculated that the risk for him was low because the authorities in London had no idea where he had fled to. If so, he was correct. Under the alias James Davids, he married and, after his first wife died, married again. He raised a family and lived as a free man and a respected member of the community for another quarter of a century. Only on his death bed did he reveal his identity. He asked that no monument be erected at his grave ‘lest his enemies might dishonour his ashes’. A simple gravestone was erected, inscribed with his initials – ‘J. D. Esq.’ – his age and the time of his death.

  As for his friends in exile, one of them would become an American legend.

  18

  PLANS TO INVADE AND

  HOPES DASHED

  1665–1692

  Following the death of John Lisle, life for the exiles was filled with tension. Several decided to leave Switzerland for Germany; they included William Say, who tried to persuade Edmund Ludlow to go with him. Ludlow refused to budge, reasoning that there was no point in spending life on the run, always looking over one’s shoulder. Meanwhile, Algernon Sidney was trying to stay at least one step ahead of the assassins on his trail. Although not excepted from the Act of Oblivion, it was clear that his remarks in favour of the trial of Charles I, together with his publicly stated antipathy to monarchy, placed him high on Charles II’s list of enemies.

  During the next few years, the government in London was to rank Sidney and Ludlow as the most dangerous fugitives at large in Europe. They continued to be prime targets for royalist assassination squads. Of the two, Sidney was the more actively threatening. At the end of 1664, he was moving fitfully through northern Europe in search of support for an invasion plan. Early the next year, he settled at Augsburg in Germany where once more an attempt was made on his life. In April, a group of assassins tracked him down and planned to kill him. The squad was led by Andrew White, one of three Irish brothers who had become soldiers of fortune before taking up the precarious trade of secret agent. Sidney avoided White’s bullet or knife purely by chance – leaving for the Netherlands the day before the planned assassination. It was becoming clear to Sidney that his name was on a secret death list.

  Sidney’s invasion plans boiled down to gaining support in the Netherlands – both from the exile community there and from the government. The political climate in the Netherlands convinced many of the exiles that at long last the tide was turning in their favour. In 1665, skirmishing between England and the Dutch Republic had turned into outright war. For republicans like Sidney, this was a chance to get one of the few republics in Europe on their side to destroy the English monarchy. There even existed what might form the basis of an invasion force. The Dutch army had an English regiment, created from the remnants of English regiments that had served the Dutch until the outbreak of war in 1665.* The majority had returned home, but some were left behind who agreed to sign a pledge of allegiance to the Dutch Republic. With luck and persuasion, this Anglo-Dutch regiment might form the backbone of an army with which to invade England. William Say suggested the time had come to ‘feel the pulse of ye Dutch, touching their uniting with ye honest party in England against Charles Stewart’.1 He wrote to Sidney and they made for Holland, hoping to build up support for an Anglo-Dutch republican pact.

  In The Hague, Sidney brought all his charm and persuasive powers to work on Johan de Witt, assuring him that English officers and men would rally to the venture. De Witt was ambivalent. Like Ludlow, he had a long memory and recalled the beatings the Dutch fleet had taken at the hands of Admiral Blake and the Commonwealth navy. De Witt worried that by helping to create a new English Commonwealth he might be preparing the ground for the ruin of Holland.

  De Witt was unconvinced that the English exiles could deliver on their promises. He saw Sidney as a whipper-up of intrigue but not a man to lead an army. The man they needed was Ludlow. Ludlow had attained something like mythical status – largely by dint of keeping his head down for several years and thereby becoming the object of much speculation. From the moment he had left England, he was the subject of lurid press reports naming him as the leader of just about every plot, real or imaginary. From the shores of Lake Geneva, Ludlow remained sceptical. He had mistrusted the Dutch ever since de Witt had allowed George Downing to abduct three of his fellow judges and make a mockery of the Netherlands’ lauded policy of political asylum.

  Sidney wrote furious letters urging Ludlow to come to Holland. William Say, Slingsby Bethel and John Phelps all wrote too. The band of would-be rebels in Holland was growing. Even Cornet Joyce was in Holland, having come over with his family in 1660. Although not excluded from the Act of Oblivion, George Joyce knew his role in taking Charles I into army captivity would never be forgiven. As a lieutenant-colonel, he was just the sort of man a group of insurrectionists could do with in their ranks.

  While the exiles were gathering and plotting in Europe, England suffered a series of disasters. Bubonic plague took hold in London in 1665 and killed a hundred thousand people. This was followed by the great fire that swept through the city and destroyed it. When the fire took hold, Charles was swept up in the immediacy of the disaster. His youthful love of action returned and he launched himself into the fray. Abandoning his cosseted life, he engaged in the struggle to deal with the fire. Together with his brother James, he directed attempts to contain the blaze until it was too late. Only when all was lost did he retreat from the stricken city. This was Charles at his best: the fireman, the reactive man of action. Afterwards he relapsed into his more habitual mode of dreamer, excited by Christopher Wren’s plans for rebuilding the city and St Paul’s Cathedral. The notion of creating the sublime from disaster suited the king’s mindset better than did the more difficult flux of political life.

  With anti-monarchists still active on the Continent, the government felt it had to concoct some manner of dealing with the threat they posed. To make the best of a difficult task, it was decided that Charles would issue a form of amnesty with a threat attached: sixteen named revolutionaries and anti-monarchists should return to England immediately or suffer the penalty of being attainted for treason. Two key men on the list were former New Model Army hard men Thomas Kelsey and John Desborough. Kelsey was a Fifth Monarchist major-general strongly opposed to the Stuart monarchy, or any monarchy. Desborough, the former republican major-general who had shown his muscle in bullying Richard Cromwell out of office, had gone to Holland determined to lead an insurrection.

  Also on the list were William Scot, the son of the executed regicide and Cromwellian spymaster Thomas Scot, and Dr Edward Richardson, the cleric and leader of the doomed Yorkshire uprising. Three names originally on the list were struck off after lobbying: Sir James Harrington, who had been a judge in the king’s trial, Oliver St John, the lawyer and diplomat who had first risen to notice in 1640 urging Parliament to overturn Charles’s ship money tax, and Algernon Sidney. Richard Cromwell’s name was kept off the list by his wife who lobbied the court, saying that if her husband returned to England his creditors would bankrupt him.

  Unsurprisingly, Ludlow was not on the list. The plotters continued to turn to him for the leadership he was loath to give. De Witt decided to make an offer to test the resolve of the English opposition. He would put up £10,000 to raise an army of four thousand men to launch an invasion which was to land at Newcastle. There was one condition – Ludlow had to lead the invasion. When Say wrote to Ludlow telling him of this, the veteran general remained unconvinced.

  Meanwhile, Charles II’s spymaster set a honey trap aimed at one of the exiles. The chosen agent was the royalist spy and futur
e celebrated writer Aphra Behn. Her target was William Scot, with whom Behn was reputed to have had an affair at an English sugar plantation in Suriname in 1663 when aged twenty-three.* Three years later, Behn was sent to Antwerp in an attempt to rekindle their affair and recruit Scot as an agent. In preparation for her mission, spymaster Joseph Williamson gave her the code name Astrea. In the time-honoured way of managing secret agents, Astrea was kept on a very tight financial rein.

  In August 1666, she reported she had made contact with Scot, who was in an English regiment and based in Antwerp. Scot was given the code name Celadon. According to Behn, he agreed to spy for the English crown. ‘Though at first shy, he became by arguments extremely willing to undertake the service …’2

  Scot was playing a dangerous game and may have been a double agent, working for both London and The Hague. Among the English living in Holland were royalist sympathisers who would be more than happy to kill a republican spy. Behn discovered that a Cavalier named Coney was threatening to murder Scot. She reported that Coney ‘boasts as if he were the King’s right hand’ but spoke ‘such rhodomontades’ (vain boasting) she was unsure if he could be trusted.3 Wisely, Scot moved from Antwerp to Rotterdam, the heartland of much of English republican activity.

  Within a few weeks, Scot was proving a useful source. In mid-September he wrote to Behn that Sidney was ‘in great esteem with De Witt’ and that a parliamentarian captain named Thomas Woodman was offering to sink ships in the Thames to hinder the English fleet.4 He next wrote to report that he had visited a Quaker exile and found several other renegades there including John Phelps, the former clerk to the regicide court. He judged that ‘something is brewing.’

  Scot next sent word to Charles’s spymaster Joseph Williamson that the plan was to raise an army of twenty thousand men. Despite their fervour, the exiles’ plans were making little progress. The problem was that Ludlow would not take part without cast-iron assurances from the Dutch that they would hold to their offer of support, while the Dutch would not make those assurances unless Ludlow was willing to lead.

  Ludlow stubbornly refused to commit himself, saying: ‘truly to me, the Lord by his providences speaks to his people rather fitter for suffering than action.’5 Without Ludlow, the invasion plan from Holland was dead.

  There was another blow to hopes of insurrection: Desborough took advantage of Charles’s call to come home. He returned to England, was imprisoned in the Tower for a year and then allowed to retire, derided by royalists, despaired of by republicans and mocked in Samuel Butler’s satire Hudibras.

  A month after Desborough’s return home, the government in London relaxed. Secretary of State William Arlington was told, ‘There should be no great danger of uprisings now that the most dangerous men were secured.’6

  William Scot revised his opinion of the threat from Holland. On 14 September 1666, he wrote to Aphra Behn that he thought ‘the fanatics’ need not be feared ‘if due caution observed’.7 Within a week, Scot learned that all his work had paid off: he had been pardoned. According to Behn, he was ‘overjoyed’.

  In spite of all her work, Aphra Behn was never paid. After a spell in debtors’ prison, she took to writing to support herself. Her first book was Oroonoko, a novel about exotic lovers in exile.

  The exiles now became further embroiled in the murky world of European power politics. Just as the Dutch had toyed with using the exiles in their war with the English, the French now tried to do the same. In January 1666, an officer in the service of the French had visited Ludlow in Vevey to propose an alliance between the English radicals and the French and Dutch. The idea behind this was obviously to explore combining their forces against the English crown. Substantial funds were reportedly available. Ludlow responded diplomatically: ‘If any just and honourable way should be proposed for the restitution of the republic in England … I would hazard my life in that service.’8

  Ludlow learned that de Witt wanted him to go to Paris with Sidney to conclude a formal treaty with Louis XIV, to which Louis was said to have agreed in principle. Sidney travelled to Paris, where he hit a major snag: Ludlow refused to follow him. The indefatigable Sidney nevertheless managed to secure an audience with the Sun King. He asked Louis for 100,000 francs. Louis countered by offering 20,000 francs, with more to come when Ludlow was seen to be on board. Once Ludlow made it clear he would have nothing to do with the French, Sidney’s English supporters fell away like leaves in autumn and the exiles’ dreams of England slipped into eternal winter.

  With all chance of their revolution ended, Ludlow, the leader who refused to lead, turned to writing what he called a ‘history’ that would be ‘as true as the gospel’.9 In disappointment, Sidney also turned from action to writing. His major works on republican theory, though a significant influence on the American founding fathers, would not be published in his lifetime.

  As Charles’s reign moved into its second decade, he continued to seek out new mistresses with which to divert himself. He had long enjoyed the theatre, both for its entertainment value and as a means to see new young actresses he might fancy. One actress he had often spent time with was Nell Gwyn, a former prostitute who had become a theatrical star by virtue of her intelligence, talent and wit. Though not a great beauty, she had a vivacity and style that captivated her audience and she became the most celebrated actress of her age. In 1669, the king made her his mistress. In comparison to the greed and scheming of more aristocratic mistresses such as Barbara Villiers, Nell Gwyn had the advantage of not requiring so much money to be expended upon her; nor was she involved in the poisonous intrigue at court. A bawdy rhyme summed up her appeal:

  Hard by Pall Mall lives a wench called Nell

  King Charles the Second he kept her.

  She hath got a trick to handle his prick

  But never lays hands on his sceptre.

  Nell had one other advantage – she was genuinely fond of Charles and never asked him for anything. In turn, the king seems to have been fond of her and installed her in a mansion in Pall Mall so he could walk from the palace to her front door. Once he was safely behind Nell’s door, the king could lower his guard. While plotting a risky secret treaty with France* in the hope of at last gaining from Louis XIV the independent income he craved, Charles was able to relax into a simpler world with the uneducated actress from Coal Yard Alley.

  In America, the exiled regicides were to be hailed as apostles of liberty. Edward Whalley and William Goffe remained hidden with the Reverend Russell for another ten years, until Whalley’s death around 1674 or ’75. Goffe was to live on and become the centre of a hugely dramatic story – the legend of the Angel of Hadley, the white-haired stranger who in September 1675 appeared brandishing a sword, rallied the settlers, beat off an Algonquin attack and prevented a massacre, before disappearing as miraculously as he had come. The superstitious people of Hadley decided their saviour must have been a supernatural being. Ninety years after the incident, the president of Harvard, Ezra Stiles, wrote: ‘The inhabitants could not account for the phenomenon, but by considering that person as an Angel sent of God on that special occasion for their deliverance.’

  By the nineteenth century the angel incident was presented as fact and so too was William Goffe’s role as the angel. The story inspired many writers. The first to make use of the tale was Walter Scott, who based his novel Peveril of the Peak upon the legend of the Angel. He was followed by James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The cave that sheltered Goffe and Whalley is now a tourist attraction and bears a bronze plaque stating, ‘Opposition to Tyrants is Obedience to God’.

  In Whitehall, the question of the remaining fugitives ran like a secret river beneath the more pressing concerns of the kingdom’s domestic and foreign policies, only occasionally bobbing up into the light of day. One of these moments occurred in 1670. Despite the years that had elapsed since the events of 1648–9, some names still had the power to rankle with the king. One was that of George Joyce, he who as a lowly Cromwell
ian cornet had taken Charles I into the custody of the army and who had since fled with his family to Holland. Apart from his role in securing the late king, there had also been a rumour spread by the ludicrous gossip and astrologer William Lilly that Joyce had been one of the king’s executioners. Deciding it was best to remain abroad, Joyce had declined to accept London’s invitation to Cromwellian exiles to return and be pardoned. From the fate of others who had ‘come in’, he guessed he would at best be imprisoned and at worst hanged, drawn and quartered.

  Now, in 1670, the diplomat and politician Sir William Temple was dispatched on a secret mission to Holland, ‘charged to seize and secure Cornet Joyce, the person that removed by force King Charles I from Holmby Castle, who lived in Rotterdam’.10 The mission was clearly sanctioned by Charles himself for Sir William moved in the king’s inner circles. Charles must have been very anxious for the success of Sir William’s mission to abduct the fugitive, ‘for the transporting of whom to England one of the King’s yachts had been purposely sent to Holland’.

  Although Sir William had the king’s own ship lying ready to take his captive away, he was unsuccessful. On one occasion, he sat up through two consecutive nights keeping fruitless watch for Joyce. When he asked for the assistance of the Dutch authorities – as George Downing had done eight years before in the cases of Miles Corbet and his colleagues – help was unforthcoming. The Rotterdam magistrates declared that Joyce ‘was a kind of mad, extravagant fellow that having long resided in their town, could be guilty of nothing against his majesty unless it were of words; and amounted not to a crime that was thought to deserve imprisonment’. The Dutch magistrates ruled that by vociferously denouncing the king Joyce was only exercising freedom of speech. This was not an argument that would have stood up well in the legal atmosphere in Restoration England, where courts ruled that words signalled intent and intent was enough to condemn a man for treason.