ROYALIST AGENTS, CONSPIRATORS AND SPIES
Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies
Their Role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660
GEOFFREY SMITH
University of Melbourne, Australia
ASHGATE
© Geoffrey Smith 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Geoffrey Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Smith, Geoffrey, 1938–
Royalist agents, conspirators and spies: their role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660.
1. Great Britain—History—Civil War, 1642–1649. 2. Great Britain—History—Charles I, 1625–1649. 3. Great Britain—History—Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660. 4. Spies— Great Britain—History—17th century. 5. Royalists—Great Britain—History—17th century.
I. Title
942’.062-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Geoffrey, 1938–
Royalist agents, conspirators and spies : their role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660 / Geoffrey Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6693-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-1-4094-1262-5 (ebook)
1. Great Britain—History—Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660. 2. Espionage—Great Britain— History—17th century. 3. Intelligence service—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Great Britain—History—Civil War, 1642–1649—Military intelligence. 5. Great Britain—History— Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660. 6. Royalists—Great Britain—History—17th century. 7. Military intelligence—Great Britain—History—17th century. I. Title.
DA406.S623 2010
941.06’3—dc22
2010022178
ISBN 9780754666936 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409412625 (ebk)
ISBN 9781409482000 (ebk-ePUB)
Contents
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Maps
Introduction
1 Ill Carried Designs: The Army Plots 1640–1642
2 Manifold Plots, Conspiracies, Contrivances 1642–1643
3 War in the Three Kingdoms 1643–1646
4 Blasted Hopes 1646–1649
5 The Cavalier Winter 1649–1650
6 A Fading Crown 1650–1653
7 A Tangle of Knots 1653–1655
8 New Disturbances 1656–1658
9 The Coming of the Day 1658–1660
10 Restless and Invincible Spirits
Select Bibliography
Index
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
During the writing of this book I have received assistance and support from a number of individuals and institutions. I am particularly grateful to John Adamson for his encouragement and advice. During our long friendship there has been a gradual rearrangement of our original teacher–student relationship. I may have first introduced him to the seventeenth century, but he has played an important part in keeping me in it.
I also appreciate very much the advice and assistance I have received in various ways from John Morrill, Jean-Pierre Vander Motten, Jason McElligott, Nadine Akkerman, David Scott, John Reeve and Philip Major. The staffs of the Baillieu Library at Melbourne University, the State Library of Victoria, the British Library, the Bodleian, the National Archives at Kew and the Institute of Historical Research at London University have been unfailingly helpful when it came to meeting the sometimes difficult needs of an Australian scholar working in seventeenth-century British history. From the time of this book’s original proposal through to its publication, my editors at Ashgate, Tom Gray and Barbara Pretty, although communication has been principally by emails between Australia and England, have been unfailingly enthusiastic and helpful supporters.
My greatest debt remains to the members of my family, who have displayed patience and even occasionally enthusiasm at the eccentric determination of an Australian to spend long periods in seventeenth-century Britain and Europe. The forms of assistance and encouragement that they have shown have been so varied, ranging from technical help with the vagaries of computers to the provision of a welcoming second home in London, and the family is so large, that they cannot all be listed individually here. But this book is dedicated to all of them: to my now well and truly grown-up children, to their partners and the grandchildren, and especially, who must be mentioned specifically, to Margaret.
Dates are given in old style, except that the year is taken to begin on 1 January rather than on 25 March.
Geoffrey Smith
Melbourne, Australia
June 2010
List of Abbreviations
Add. MS(S)
Additional Manuscript(s)
BIHR
Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
BL
British Library
Bod.L.
Bodleian Library, Oxford University
CCC
Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding
CClSP
Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers
ClSP
State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon
CJ
Journal of the House of Commons
CSP, Foreign
Calendar of State Papers, Foreign
CSP, Ireland
Calendar of State Papers, Ireland
CSP, Venetian
Calendar of State Papers, Venetian
CSPD
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series
EHR
English Historical Review
HMC
Historical Manuscripts Commission
LBM
The Letter-Book of John, Viscount Mordaunt
LJ
Journal of the House of Lords
NA, SP
National Archives, State Papers
NP
The Nicholas Papers: Te Correspondence of Sir Edward Nicholas
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
TSP
A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq.
Underdown
D. E. Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660
Map 1 England and Scotland
Map 2 Ireland
Map 3 Europe
Introduction
I shall say verrie little, because I will refer myself to the faithfull relation of this honest bearer …. Commend me to Montrose and desyre him to give credit to what this bearer shall tell him in my name.
King Charles I to Lord Traquair, Windsor, 26 January 16421
On 6 May 1642 the deliberations of the House of Lords in what was to become known as the Long Parliament were interrupted by a terse message from the House of Commons. The peers were informed that ‘Daniel O’Neill, committed prisoner by this House to
the Tower of London, upon an accusation of High Treason brought against him from the House of Commons, is escaped out of the Tower and fled.’ Immediately, orders were sent to the Lord Admiral, the Warden of the Cinque Ports, the sheriffs of maritime counties and other officials to search ports and ships for the fugitive and to prevent his escape to the Continent. But the hue and cry unleashed by Parliament was unsuccessful, for Daniel O’Neill was a very resourceful young man. Somehow he managed to elude the various officials searching for him and found a ship to take him safely across the Channel to Holland.2
Almost exactly three months after this episode King Charles I raised the royal standard at Nottingham. Although minor skirmishes between royalists and parliamentarians had already broken out in several parts of the kingdom, this event marks the traditional and official beginning of the English Civil War. Among the fairly meagre turnout of Cavaliers who witnessed the brief and unimpressive ceremony ‘in the evening of a very stormy and tempestuous day’ was Daniel O’Neill, back in England despite the fact that, as far as Parliament was concerned, he was a wanted man. But for the time being O’Neill was no longer a fugitive; he was now a trusted officer of the king’s nephew, the dashing cavalry commander Prince Rupert of the Rhine.3
The English Civil War, which began officially at Nottingham in August 1642, was to drag on until June 1646, when the royalist capital of Oxford finally surrendered to General Sir Thomas Fairfax’s New Model Army. But the war fought between Cavaliers and Roundheads on English soil was merely a part of a much larger and more drawn-out conflict, now sometimes called the British Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, that raged intermittently for twenty years across England, Scotland and Ireland, spreading from these kingdoms to Wales, the Channel Islands and even to the West Indian and American colonies. The campaigns and invasions, the rebellions and conspiracies, the political coups and purges, which marked the rise and fall of several short-lived regimes, lasted for almost twenty years, and ended only with the collapse of the republican Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
This drawn-out conflict, loosely and somewhat inaccurately described as one between parliamentarians and royalists, was fought at several different levels. Charles I, and after his execution in 1649 his eldest son, whom the royalists recognised as Charles II, confronted their various enemies on many fronts and sought support and allies from many quarters. For this was a struggle that raged from the Western Isles of Scotland to the beaches of Jersey, with battles fought throughout Britain and Ireland, from Carbisdale in the remotest Highlands to Lostwithiel on the south coast of Cornwall, and in which cities as far apart as Galway and Colchester endured bitter sieges. Nor was this only a war between armies and fleets. The pen was a weapon as well as the sword. The talents of writers, of poets and journalists, were drawn upon, as well as those of politicians and soldiers. It was a conflict in which the output of printing presses in the streets of London and Oxford could be as important to the final outcome as victories won by armies in the fields of Munster or Yorkshire.
Not surprisingly, the conflict spilled out beyond Britain and Ireland to involve many of the states of Europe. Foreign princes and diplomats, mercenaries and merchants were all, for a variety of reasons, drawn into the British Civil Wars. As European diplomats and soldiers were a common sight in the camps and capitals of king and Parliament, so regiments of British and Irish soldiers, both royalist and parliamentarian, campaigned in northern France and the Netherlands, while ships flying the king’s flag confronted the king’s enemies at sea in the Channel, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. From Lisbon to Venice, European rulers were faced with rival embassies and diplomatic missions, each claiming to represent the legitimate governments of the distracted Stuart kingdoms. And as the fortunes of war gradually turned against the royalists, many of the king’s adherents were to make the melancholy discovery that the price of their too enthusiastic loyalty was to spend years of their lives in penurious exile on the Continent. When the Dorset Cavalier Colonel Alexander Keynes rode off confidently to fight for King Charles in 1642 he presumably had no idea that ten years later he would be a mercenary in the service of the Venetian Republic fighting the Turks in Crete.4
Studies of this tumultuous period in British and Irish history have understandably concentrated on the role of king and Parliament, on the political, religious and social factors that first contributed to the outbreak of the conflict and then determined the form that it took. The role of significant individuals, of various noble magnates and grandees, politicians and generals, courtiers and members of parliament, government ministers and diplomats, Anglican bishops and Puritan preachers, has been closely analysed by historians. There is a whole library of works on military campaigns and decisive battles. The impact of the civil wars on the populations of England, Scotland and Ireland and the ways in which ‘the affairs of each [kingdom] became inextricably bound up with the affairs of the others’ have in recent years been closely scrutinised by historians.5
Beneath this public world of parliamentary debates and military campaigns, of alliances and treaties, of the rise and fall of popular movements and political regimes, there was another world, a secret underworld that, on the royalist side at least, became increasingly important as the political and military leaders of the king’s party failed to deliver either a political or a military victory. The principal concern of this book is not to examine the actions of royal ministers or privy councillors, generals or prominent courtiers, but instead to look several rungs lower down in the hierarchy of the king’s supporters. For to maintain the Stuart cause in so many widely scattered theatres of conflict, at so many different levels and over such a long period, loyal, resourceful and courageous agents were needed, capable of dealing, for example, with such perilous circumstances as imprisonment in the Tower of London on a charge of high treason – men, in other words, like Daniel O’Neill. Such men were to be found principally among the officers in the king’s armies, captains and majors rather than generals, and among middle-ranking courtiers, drawn for example from the ‘grooms’ rather than the more aristocratic ‘gentlemen’ of the king’s bedchamber.
Those royalists who served the Stuart cause as the king’s agents on the king’s business not only had to cope with often dangerous and discouraging situations, they were also required to perform a variety of roles. At the most basic level they were employed as couriers to carry letters; to convey instructions, sometimes through enemy-held territory; to distribute writings by the king’s adherents, from serious literature to subversive and even obscene newsletters: simply, to maintain the lines of communication between the often widely dispersed centres of royalist authority and activity. But they were frequently expected to be much more than just ‘honest bearers’ of letters. From the comparatively simply role of courier it was often only a short step to the more demanding activity of gathering and forwarding intelligence, a step which could then easily lead an agent into the even more dangerous and secret world of organising conspiracy.
The example of one particular situation that confronted the royalist high command illustrates the nature of the challenge that confronted the agents who served the king. In the early months of 1645, as the English Civil War approached its climax, Charles I was based in Oxford, the royalist capital under threat from increasingly powerful parliamentary armies. The king’s eldest son, Charles Prince of Wales, aged 15, was nominal head of his own independent council in the West Country. At first this council was established in Bristol, until an outbreak of plague forced it to leave the city in May and then to move progressively further west before the inexorable advance of Parliament’s armies, a process that stretched dangerously the lines of communication with Oxford. By this time Charles I’s consort, Queen Henrietta Maria, accompanied by a small household, had returned to her native France, to Paris, where she was attempting to gather support – financial, military and diplomatic – for her husband’s faltering cause. And as the fortunes of the king’s
armies in England gradually declined, so Charles and his advisers looked with increasing desperation to aid from his other two kingdoms. It was optimistically believed in Oxford that the arrival of powerful royalist forces, despatched across the Irish Sea by the Marquess of Ormond, the king’s Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, or led across the northern border by the Marquess of Montrose, the king’s Lieutenant-Governor and Captain-General of Scotland, would be able to transform the military situation in England. With the key figures so widely dispersed, with Charles I, his court, his councillors and generals in Oxford, Prince Charles and his council retreating steadily into Cornwall, Henrietta Maria with her household and advisers in Paris, Ormond either in Dublin or on campaign in the heart of Ireland and Montrose constantly on the move somewhere in the Highlands, how on earth was the royalist war effort directed? This book attempts to answer that question.
Various versions of this 1645 situation – of a fragmented and scattered leadership of the royalist party attempting to direct and shape the course of events – that differ only in the details of key persons and geographical locations, can be reproduced for a number of other occasions between 1642 and 1660. Whether organising the conduct of a war, or planning the overthrow of the Commonwealth, the royalist leadership was frequently, even usually, widely dispersed. How, then, were decisions and policies communicated to the king’s supporters? The answer to this question lies not with the actions of generals and high-ranking royal advisers, those who formulated the policies, made the decisions and commanded the armies, but with those men, and occasionally women, who had the responsibility of communicating decisions, messages, instructions and intelligence between the widely scattered centres of royalist power and authority. Without their ‘long, dangerous and expensive journeys’ (the words are Daniel O’Neill’s), the Stuart cause could not have been sustained for so long, at so many levels, through so many vicissitudes.6
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