Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  The king’s principal adviser on Scottish affairs was his cousin, James, Marquess of Hamilton, one of the greatest nobles in Scotland, but by the 1630s an Anglicised courtier, much more at home in the royal court at Whitehall than on his own extensive estates near Glasgow. Out of touch with events and feelings in his own country, and increasingly frustrated by months of fruitless journeys and futile negotiations, Hamilton gradually abandoned his original moderate position in favour of a negotiated settlement. In June 1638 he advised Charles that ‘nothing can reduce that people to their obedience but only force’.4 The cultivated and elegant court of that cultivated and elegant, but also often aloof and inept, monarch was now entering its last days. The ‘Tourneys, Masques, Theatres’ celebrated by the poet Thomas Carew would not be staged for much longer.5 The elaborate designs and plans by Inigo Jones for costumes, palaces and stage sets were put away to wait for more propitious times that never came. There was no more commissioning of portraits by Van Dyck or buying of paintings by Rubens or by Titian and other Italian Renaissance masters. Courtier poets like Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace put aside their pens and looked to their swords as Charles set out to raise an army to teach his rebellious northern subjects a sharp lesson.

  The ambitious scope of the military enterprises that were intended to bring the Scots into submission was exceeded only by the range of administrative, strategic and organisational failures that turned the so-called first Bishops’ War into a debacle for Charles I. Inspecting the royal troops in York as they trudged unenthusiastically towards the border, Sir Edmund Verney, the king’s standard bearer, reported angrily that ‘our men are very raw, our arms of all sorts naught, our victuals scarce, and provisions for horses worse’.6 But the grand strategy being devised at Whitehall was not dependent solely on an invasion by the king’s army. Major diversions in support of the main assault were also planned: risings by the king’s supporters in Scotland, the Earl of Huntly and his Gordons in the northeast and the Catholic earls of Abercorn, Douglas and Nithsdale in the south. Landings by English troops in Aberdeen and an assault by the warlike clansmen of Clan Donald in Ulster and the Isles on their hated and hereditary Campbell enemies, who conveniently also happened to be Covenanters, were also parts of this elaborate network of ambitious and unrealistic plans.

  Only among some of the courtiers was service against the Scots greeted with any real enthusiasm. Aristocratic and gentry volunteers, like Sir John Suckling and George Goring, who had served under the Prince of Orange against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, on their return to England raised troops of horse for the campaign. The poet Sir John Suckling, according to John Aubrey ‘the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest Gamester’, had managed to fit into his short and colourful life some firsthand experience of the German wars.7 He now squandered most of what remained of a once great fortune in raising and lavishly equipping his own troop of horse. Traditional dislike and contempt for the Scots was clearly also an element in the enthusiasm of some courtiers for the war. Tom Elliot, a groom of the privy chamber who was later to become a groom of the bedchamber to Prince Charles, was notoriously short-tempered and prone to violence. ‘Insolent and over-active’ were just two of the negative terms Clarendon used for this future royalist agent. After stating that the Covenanters were all traitors, Elliot was with difficulty prevented from fighting a duel with a son of the Earl of Roxburgh ‘or anybody else that should say so much as his lordship had done’.8 Also, although the war against the Scots was massively unpopular with large sections of the English population, there were always young men keen to escape the humdrum existence of a country village and follow the drum. Joseph Bampfield belonged to a minor but long-established gentry family in Devon. He was 17 when he left his quiet country village to serve as an ensign in the regiment of the experienced veteran Sir Jacob Astley. Bampfield’s life would never be peaceful or normal again.9 It was the Bishops’ Wars that began the process of adding another dimension to the careers of men like Goring and Suckling, Elliot and Bampfield. Having been courtiers, professional soldiers or country gentry, they were soon also to become agents, conspirators and spies.

  During the spring of 1639 the king’s elaborate strategy to assault the Covenanters simultaneously from different directions disintegrated. Confronted by the Scots’ efficient military preparations, both the will and the capacity of Charles’s widely dispersed forces to carry out the tasks allotted to them withered away. After some inconclusive skirmishing and manoeuvring along the border, it was clear that each side was reluctant to launch a full-scale assault on the other. A truce was declared, culminating in a peace treaty of sorts, the Pacification of Berwick, signed on 18 June. The king disbanded his forces and returned to London.

  At Trinity College, Cambridge, the young Abraham Cowley, with a shameless disregard for the reality of the situation, praised Charles for his successful resolution of the crisis:

  Others by war their conquests gain,

  You, like a God, your ends obtain,

  Who, when rude chaos for His help did call

  Spake but the word and sweetly ordered all.10

  Within a few years the Cambridge scholar and poet would be in exile, employed as a courier on missions between the scattered leaders of the royalist party on the Continent and carrying secret messages in cipher from members of the household of Henrietta Maria in Paris to the king’s supporters in England and Scotland.

  The first Bishops’ War had possessed one unusual but positive feature for a war: hardly anyone was killed. But it also had another more negative feature, which in wars is much more common: it had solved nothing. Behind insincere professions of amity, both sides prepared for a renewal of hostilities. The king dismissed the two unenterprising generals who had commanded his forces, the elderly connoisseur of the arts the Earl of Arundel, and the queen’s favourite, the Earl of Holland. In their places he appointed the formidable but deeply unpopular Thomas, Viscount Wentworth, recalled from his office of Lord Deputy of Ireland and created Earl of Strafford. As his subordinate commanders, Strafford had two prominent court noblemen, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Conway, who in their turn had as their deputies several tough and experienced veterans of the wars in the Low Countries, notably Sir Jacob Astley and Sir John Conyers.

  In 1639 Sir John Conyers, an experienced soldier who had served under both the Prince of Orange and the King of Denmark, was living comfortably and contentedly in Breda, where he commanded an English company of horse in the Dutch service. With considerable reluctance, he eventually accepted the pressing invitation of Conway and the Secretary of State Sir Francis Windebank to serve against the Scots as Lieutenant General of horse and governor of the garrison of Berwick upon Tweed. As part of the urgent search for experienced officers to train and lead the raw troops being mustered for the new campaign, Conyers promised to ‘persuade as many as I find fit for his Majesty’s service to transport themselves into England’. In particular he recommended two officers, Henry Wilmot and Daniel O’Neill, who had distinguished themselves over two years earlier in the bloody but successful siege and assault that had recaptured Breda, the Dutch frontier fortress lost to the Spaniards in 1624. Wilmot was already in England, while Conyers requested that O’Neill be appointed major in his own regiment, expressing his confidence to Conway that ‘he would give you and the Earl [of Northumberland] contentment in that place’.11 In March 1640 O’Neill returned to England to serve in the English army being hastily raised to march once more against the Scots Covenanters.

  Both Wilmot and O’Neill were soldiers and courtiers by choice, but as with Goring and Suckling, Elliot and Bampfield, circumstances were soon to turn them into agents and conspirators as well. Wilmot, who had been seriously wounded during the assault on Breda, was almost a stereotype of the traditional image of the Cavalier: dashing, reckless and a heavy drinker. He much enjoyed his ‘hours of good fellowship’, which, according to the somewhat jaundiced view of Clarendon, ‘was a great part of t
he day and night’.12 The expression ‘a cavalier attitude’, with its traditional connotations, could have been invented for Harry Wilmot. Daniel O’Neill on the other hand was a much more complex figure. He did not conform in all respects to the traditional image of the Cavalier, although he certainly did in some. Like Wilmot, he was also notorious for his enjoyment of ‘good fellowship’, but unlike Wilmot, when the wine was circulating freely O’Neill knew when to decline a refill. Clarendon, who came to know O’Neill extremely well and was not by natural inclination disposed to a favourable view of Irishmen, claimed that ‘in subtlety and understanding’ O’Neill was ‘much superior to the whole nation of the old Irish’. In a vivid character sketch in his History of the Rebellion, Clarendon described how O’Neill:

  was very well known in the court, having spent many years between that and the Low Countries, the winter seasons in the one, and the summer season always in the army in the other; which was as good an education as that age knew any.

  Clarendon approved of O’Neill’s appointment to a command for the campaign against the Scots as ‘he had good experience in the most active armies of that time, and a courage very notorious’.13

  It was in his family background that O’Neill differed most strikingly from the other courtier soldiers like Goring, Wilmot and Suckling who were rallying to the king’s cause in the early months of 1640. Goring was the son of a baron who was shortly to be made an earl, Wilmot the son of a viscount, and Suckling the son of a secretary of state. They all had strong family court connections. By comparison, Daniel O’Neill’s ancestry was dubious in the extreme. For O’Neill was Gaelic Irish, a descendant of the Great O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, who during the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I had been the leader of one of the most serious and extensive of all Irish rebellions against the English crown. As a consequence both of his involvement in Tyrone’s rebellion and of his own personal negligence and fecklessness, O’Neill’s father had lost almost all of what had once been extensive estates in Ulster. Young Daniel was brought up as a ward of the crown in England, raised as a Protestant and deprived of his patrimony, an object of sympathy in some quarters but of suspicion in others. Particularly unsympathetic to his plight was Wentworth, the all-powerful Lord Deputy, who systematically blocked a series of attempts during the late 1630s to restore to O’Neill some of his lost inheritance. Wentworth possessed a deep distrust and dislike of the young Irishman, whom in a letter to Secretary Windebank in March 1639 he denounced as ‘in his Heart and Affections a Traitor, bred no other, Egg and Bird as they say’.14

  Wentworth’s distrust of O’Neill is largely explained by the Irishman’s highly suspect family background. For not only was O’Neill descended from the great rebel, Tyrone, but his uncle, Owen Roe O’Neill, had a senior command among the ‘Wild Geese’, the Irish exiles who made up some of the most highly regarded regiments in the Spanish forces in the Low Countries. To add further fuel to the fire of Wentworth’s distrust, Daniel’s younger brother Con, who of course, like his uncle, was a Catholic, was one of Owen Roe’s most trusted officers. As if that were not enough, O’Neill was also connected by marriage to, and on good terms with, the Catholic Gaelic Irish nobleman whom Wentworth probably detested above all others, that highly controversial figure Randal MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim.15 To restore in the Isles and the western Highlands the power and prestige of Clan Donald, of which he regarded himself as chief, was Antrim’s great and lasting ambition. To further this ambition Antrim planned an invasion to be launched from Ulster, but a private war against the hated Campbells was a project which had no place in Wentworth’s grand strategy for dealing with the Scots Covenanters. A major reason for his hostility to the project was that the officers Antrim had hoped to employ, one of whom was Daniel O’Neill, were deeply suspect to the Lord Deputy: ‘native Irish, and the Sons of Rebels, [who] acknowledge no other King but the King of Spain’.16 Daniel O’Neill’s complex pattern of relationships with men like his uncle, Owen Roe O’Neill, and the mercurial Antrim, while deeply suspect to Wentworth in 1639, was to be viewed quite differently a few years later when the fortunes of war were turning against the king’s forces. But in the short term Wentworth’s dislike of O’Neill, which was clearly reciprocated, was to have more immediate consequences.

  During the spring of 1640 courtiers like Suckling, young men looking for adventure like Bampfield, and professional soldiers from the Low Countries like O’Neill joined an army that was untrained and undisciplined, the soldiers largely unpaid, poorly armed and inadequately equipped. Confronting them on the other side of the border was a Scots army of 25,000 men under the competent command of Alexander Leslie, a veteran of the German wars, while the English forces were widely dispersed and their leadership seriously disorganised. Consequently, the campaign that followed was short, and from the English viewpoint, humiliating and inglorious. The Scots army crossed the Tweed on 20 August and advanced without opposition though Northumberland to the ford of Newburn on the Tyne, a few miles west of Newcastle, where the hastily assembled English army prepared to oppose its crossing of the river.

  Present at Newburn on both sides were a number of men who were in future to be active in the world of royalist intelligence and conspiracy, but in the English army only two seem to have distinguished themselves. As the English infantry broke and retreated before the fire of the artillery established on the higher ground of the north bank, the Scots splashed forward through the ford. In a letter on 10 September one of the English officers, Captain Thomas Dymoke, succinctly described the outcome to Secretary Windebank: ‘the fight was sharp and short, the flight general, and the foot being overrun by the horse in a narrow lane, fled’. Only a few troops of horse stood their ground and made a desperate charge into the front ranks of the advancing Scots in an attempt to cover the retreat of the English army. ‘Six of our troops made a stand,’ Dymoke reported to Windebank, ‘and the enemy’s horse coming up fought with them the second time, but the issue was bad, Commissary Wilmot, Sir John Digby, and Captain O’Neill were taken prisoners.’17 The bravery of these few officers and their men could not halt the Scots’ advance nor deny them a total victory. On the next day Conway and Astley hastily abandoned Newcastle and fell back towards York. After occupying Newcastle without resistance, the Scots continued their unopposed advance southwards as far as Durham.

  At first there was some confusion over whether the three officers ‘who alone did their duty’ had survived the battle. A London newsletter reported that Wilmot ‘was seen to kill three men with his own hands after he had received a pistol shot in his face’, which seems a little unlikely, while ‘Sir John Digby and Serjeant-Major O’Neill were seen to charge the enemy and were likewise lost; it is uncertain whether these are taken or slain.’18 O’Neill’s superior officer, Sir John Conyers, still holding out with his garrison in isolated Berwick, was among those who thought O’Neill had been killed. That unsentimental soldier was able to get a letter through to Conway, expressing his regret at ‘Mr Wilmot’s mischance’, presumably his capture, and at ‘O’Neale’s death’. As O’Neill ‘owed me thirty-three pounds, for which I have his [note of] hand’, Conyers requested that Conway, who as the commander of a defeated and scattered army presumably at this time had rather more weighty and urgent matters to deal with, ‘would help me to a good horse of his’ as a way to cover the debt. In fact, the three officers were safe in the Scottish camp, where they were treated with ‘great civility’ by their captors. Over a few bottles of wine, Wilmot and O’Neill could exchange campaign stories with the Scots officers, having served alongside several of them at the siege of Breda three years previously.19

  What Clarendon called ‘the infamous rout at Newburn’ was not much of a battle as battles go. Brief and straightforward, the tactics unimaginative, the result probably inevitable and the casualties low, it is not normally included in any of the traditional accounts of famous British battles. But, as Conrad Russell has argued, its influence can be seen to hav
e been enormous: on the new shape of the relationship between England and Scotland; on the movement towards rebellion in Ireland; on the power and prestige of Charles I; on the emergence of open opposition to royal policies, and on the fate of the king’s principal ministers and advisers, the scapegoats held responsible for the defeat. In assessing the influence of the battle on ‘the internal history of Britain, perhaps only Bannockburn, the Boyne and Culloden have settled as much’.20

  Released as part of a general exchange of prisoners, on the night of 30 September Wilmot, O’Neill and Digby rode into the English army’s camp at York. The freed officers were confronted by a rapidly changing political scene. Under the terms of the Treaty of Ripon there was now an uneasy truce between the two armies stationed in northern England, with the Scots occupying the counties of Northumberland and Durham, while the king’s army remained based on York. As Charles could not afford to maintain one army, much less two, or even three if you include the Irish army raised by Strafford as part of his grand strategy for the assault on the rebellious Scots, the king had no alternative but to summon Parliament. What was to become known as the Long Parliament assembled in Westminster in November. Among the first actions of the new assembly was the impeachment of the king’s principal and most hated ministers, Strafford and Archbishop Laud. In the early months of 1641 the impeachment and trial of Strafford was the dominant issue in London, although this long-drawn-out drama did not distract Parliament from the systematic demolition, where it had not already collapsed, of the structure of the Personal Rule. Understandably anxious to avoid following Strafford and Laud into the Tower, and unnerved by attacks both from the pulpits of popular preachers and by the MPs mobilised by John Pym and his lieutenants, royal ministers and prominent courtiers scurried for cover. In some cases their scurrying took them as far as across the Channel into France or Holland. The royalist emigration had begun.