The optimistic expectation of Charles I, expressed in a letter to Ormond, that ‘Antrim and Daniel O’Neill’s negotiation with the Irish’ would lead to their doing him ‘very eminent good service’, would not have been satisfied by the news of the despatch of 2,000 wild Irish warriors into the remote Western Isles and inaccessible fastnesses of the Highlands.37 For the other objective of the Antrim mission – a substantial Irish army to land in England, bringing with it muskets and powder for Prince Rupert – was not achieved. In a letter to Digby in the early summer, which the Secretary never received as it was intercepted and ended in the possession of Sir William Brereton, Parliament’s commander in Cheshire, O’Neill advised of the need to secure ports in Lancashire to facilitate the landing of 10,000 Confederate troops who were soon to arrive.38 It is difficult to reconcile the misguided optimism expressed in this letter with O’Neill’s knowledge both of the hostility of influential Confederate leaders to the plan to send a substantial Irish army to England and of Ormond’s own reservations about the scheme, not to mention the refusal of his own uncle, Owen Roe O’Neill, to co-operate.39 For all his natural shrewdness and good sense, displays of unjustified optimism about the prospects for success of enterprises in which he was he was involved were to be a feature of O’Neill’s long career as a royalist agent.
Although in their different ways Digby, Antrim and Ormond all relied heavily on O’Neill’s ‘diligence and judgement’, his abilities as a negotiator and ‘fixer’, he was never the only agent employed in the complex and ultimately frustrating series of attempts to bring substantial Irish aid to the king’s forces in England.40 Ormond had his own network of agents and intelligencers, among whom O’Neill was prominent, but not dominant. For example, until he was killed, Colonel John Barry, a Confederate officer who was totally loyal to the Lord Lieutenant, was also frequently employed by Ormond as an agent and courier.41 Barry, whom Ormond regarded much more highly than he ever did Antrim, even turned up in Oxford in December 1643, with a proposition to Digby ‘concerning the raising of three regiments to be brought thence [from Ireland] for his Majesty’s service’, a proposal approved of by both Digby and the king, but from which nothing eventuated and which seems to have existed quite independently of Antrim’s more ambitious schemes.42 Another of Ormond’s officers, Colonel John Stephens, who was sometimes employed as a courier, was to become one of the most enterprising and resourceful of all the royalist agents involved in espionage and to be associated with O’Neill on a number of dangerous missions.43
By the end of June, O’Neill was back in England. Marston Moor was fought and lost while O’Neill was still travelling through Wales to Eversham, where he joined the king and his troops, disparagingly described in his report to Ormond as ‘rather in perpetual motion than marching as an army’ as they followed the parliamentary army under Essex as it lurched into the heart of the royalist West Country.44 By this time O’Neill’s reputation at court had been somewhat dented by the modest results of the mission and by his being regarded as a client of Antrim and Digby, both of whom had their severe critics among the leaders of the royalist party, most notably Rupert and his faction, ‘the Cumberlanders’, who were becoming increasingly assertive in the intrigues that swirled through the tension-ridden court.45 For during the approximately five months O’Neill had been absent from Oxford, the situation confronting the king’s supporters in England had both deteriorated and become more complex – developments that had further heated the already hot-house atmosphere of the wartime court. The royalist war effort was increasingly fragmented. The defeat of Hopton’s western army at Alresford in Hampshire in January and threatening troop movements by Waller and Essex had persuaded Charles to send his, once again pregnant, queen back to France from an Oxford whose security could no longer be guaranteed. After a melancholy – and as events turned out, final – separation from her husband in April, by leisurely stages Henrietta Maria returned to France via Exeter, where she gave birth to Princess Henrietta Anne. Among the modest entourage who accompanied her was Jermyn, one-time army plotter and still very much a favourite of the queen. Once established in Paris, the queen, despite ill-health, was full of energetic determination to serve her husband’s cause. With Jermyn’s active involvement she soon created her own network of agents and couriers. The queen’s agents were given the responsibility both of establishing a secure line of communication with the king and leading royalists in England, and of securing aid for the royal cause from sympathisers on the Continent.
The queen’s network of agents included both familiar figures and some new recruits. The faithful and indefatigable Cochrane was once again sent back to Denmark to apply pressure on Christian IV, with instructions to continue to dangle before the Danish king the bait of the Orkney and Shetland Islands.46 Then in February 1645 the queen despatched her Chancellor, Sir Kenelm Digby, to Rome to seek financial aid from Pope Innocent X. Digby, the Catholic son of an executed Gunpowder Plot conspirator, was a colourful figure, ‘held to be the most accomplished Cavalier of his time’, according to John Aubrey.47 Cultivated and cosmopolitan, Digby had travelled widely and was a well-known figure in the courts and learned societies of western Europe. Initially, he made a favourable impression at the papal court, obtaining the promise of a loan of 20,000 crowns and inspiring Jermyn to report to Secretary Digby in April that ‘Sir Kenelm Digby writes hopefully of money from Rome.’ With his habitual optimism now beginning to be tinged with desperation, the Secretary stressed to Jermyn the increasing reliance of the faltering royal cause on ‘Denmark for men, Rome for money’.48 The net cast by the queen’s agents was stretched beyond Rome and Copenhagen to embrace also the Netherlands, the sphere of activities of Dr Stephen Goffe, the clerical brother of the Cromwellian general and future regicide William Goffe. With a background almost as exotic as Kenelm Digby’s, Goffe was a significant recruit to the queen’s network. A protégé of Archbishop Laud, he had originally served as a chaplain to English soldiers in the Dutch service. Like so many royalist agents, Goffe travelled extensively, in his case principally between England, France and the Low Countries, and seems to have been equally at home in Paris, Brussels and The Hague. Highly regarded by both the queen and Jermyn, he was involved in negotiations in Brussels with agents of the princely warlord Charles, Duke of Lorraine, who, owing to the vicissitudes in his fortunes during the Thirty Years War, possessed a formidable army, but no longer a duchy in which to deploy it. Royalists were to remain interested in the duke as a potential saviour for some years, as he was believed to be looking for a suitable employment for his army, but the situation was complicated both by legitimate concerns about his ‘reckless and unscrupulous’ character and by the implications of his ambition to find a replacement for his lost principality.49 When not in Brussels in consultation with Lorraine’s agents, Goffe was at The Hague, conducting negotiations with Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, father-in-law to King Charles’s daughter Mary.50
The embassies of Cochrane, Digby and Goffe during 1644 and 1645 demonstrate the continuation of the already well-established Stuart policy of soliciting foreign aid. Their embassies continued the pattern of the earlier missions of Cochrane himself, of Poley and Henderson, not to mention the constant endeavours of the queen, as Jermyn expressed it in a letter to Will Murray from Paris, ‘to engage the King of France to the succours of the King our Master’.51 But the principal and ongoing responsibility of the queen’s agents was not missions to Rome, Brussels, The Hague or Copenhagen, but to maintain lines of communication with the king and the royalist leadership. From March 1645, when the Prince of Wales left Oxford to set up his own command and council in the West Country, this leadership was further fragmented.
The surviving correspondence between the king and the queen and between Digby and Jermyn is surprisingly extensive. This is largely because in the aftermath of two royalist defeats during 1645, at Naseby on 14 June and at Sherburn in Elmet on 14 October, the coaches of the king and Digby, containing their
papers and correspondence, were captured by the parliamentarians and published as major propaganda coups.52 The captured correspondence revealed not only the secret dealings of the queen’s agents on the Continent, but also the frequency and regularity with which the Stuart courts at Oxford and St. Germain outside Paris remained able to communicate with each other. This frequency is impressive, as the correspondence contains numerous references to the obstacles in the way of maintaining the lines of royalist communication. The king and Digby were frequently out of Oxford on campaign, and it was becoming steadily harder to track them down. The likelihood of couriers being intercepted was high, as the territory controlled by the royalists gradually shrank while parliamentary naval control of the approaches to England made the Channel crossing an increasingly dangerous operation.
One reasonably safe alternative to reliance on a courier was the diplomatic bag, and one source that both the king and queen depended on for the transmission of their correspondence was Antonio de Souza, the diplomatic representative in London of the king of Portugal. De Souza, who seems to have travelled quite regularly between London and Paris, was apparently happy to carry the royal letters; Charles even on one occasion referred to him as ‘my Portugal ambassador’, desiring the queen to send him back from Paris to Oxford ‘with all speed’. Although providing a reasonably secure means of communication, a lack of speed was sometimes the major disadvantage of dependence on de Souza’s diplomatic immunity. Writing to Digby from Paris on 25 April 1645, Jermyn acknowledged the receipt that week of letters from him and Charles ‘by way of the Portugal Ambassador’, but complained that ‘all your letters that way are very long [in coming]’.53 Couriers ran considerably greater risks than the Portuguese ambassador, but they were likely to be able to deliver letters more swiftly, and even more important, they could be entrusted with other responsibilities as well.
It is not possible to identify all the agents who maintained communication between Henrietta Maria and the royalist leadership in England, Ormond in Ireland and Montrose in Scotland. Inevitably, some remain obscure or anonymous. For example, on 9 June Jermyn wrote to Digby to inform him of the arrival in Paris that day of an unidentified agent whom ‘the Queen sent four months ago into Scotland to Marquess Montrose’.54 The details are lost to us of what must have been a hazardous and arduous journey, first to find Montrose and MacColla campaigning in the Highlands and then return through territory held by the Covenanters, with their tendency to hang or drown captured royalists, and finally back to France across seas patrolled by Parliament’s ships. Also, some couriers were clearly not part of any organised network. Cavaliers travelling for some reason between England and France were sometimes entrusted with letters to deliver, a task they would normally have performed only once. The royalist credentials and general reliability of Colonel Sir Nicholas Byron, for example, were so impressive that it was thought unnecessary to put wholly in cipher a letter to Digby in July 1645 entrusted to ‘so secure a Bearer’. But Byron was essentially a soldier, not an agent, and seems only to have been employed as a courier on the one occasion.55
Yet among the couriers a number of the same names occur regularly, those of the long-term agents who survived their hazardous employment for years. The army plotter Sir William Davenant, ‘infinitely faithful to the King’s cause’ according to Jermyn; the groom of the bedchamber and confidant of Charles I, Will Murray; the adventurous John Poley, returned from his missions to Denmark: during these critical years for royalist fortunes these three agents were fairly constantly travelling between the queen and her husband.56 They were joined in their dangerous journeys by several other agents, at least two of whom were also to have long careers in this secret underworld of royalist politics: Thomas Elliot and Sir Frederick Cornwallis. Although also a groom of the bedchamber, in his case to Prince Charles, Elliot seems to have lacked the manners and the courtesy traditionally associated with the behaviour of courtiers. His dislike of Scots Covenanters has already been mentioned. In his History of the Rebellion Clarendon described Elliot as ‘a loud and bold talker’ who was ‘no polite man’, accusing him of showing insufficient reverence to the king and queen.57 According to Clarendon, Elliot was sent to Paris to join the queen instead of accompanying Prince Charles to the West Country as the king disapproved of Elliot’s influence on the prince.58 In contrast, Sir Frederick Cornwallis was a much more traditional court figure, free of the controversy that surrounded Elliot. Like Poley, he belonged to a prominent Suffolk landed family, in his case one that had extensive court connections going back for generations. Like so many royalist agents, he had travelled widely before the Civil War; as a young man he had been in the entourage of the Earl of Arundel on his diplomatic mission to Vienna in 1636. MP for Eye in the Long Parliament, Cornwallis was a ‘Straffordian’ who consistently supported the court interest, and although principally a courtier rather than a soldier, had fought at Cropredy Bridge in June 1644.59
These five royalists – Davenant, Murray, Poley, Elliot and Cornwallis – were all in the literal sense ‘the king’s servants’, place-holders in one or other of the royal households.60 They were therefore in a different category to the obscure and anonymous women in Berkenhead and Royston’s network, who smuggled letters and copies of Mercurius Aulicus between Oxford and London. Their status as courtiers and office-holders, their prominent family and other personal, factional and social connections, meant that they could be entrusted with roles more complex than simply the carriage and delivery of correspondence. This gave them a considerable advantage over the safer but more limited alternative of reliance on the goodwill of the Portuguese ambassador.
These qualities meant that the services of agents like Poley, Murray, Cornwallis, Murray and Elliot were frequently required.61 Consideration of just one mission, that of Tom Elliot from Paris to Oxford at the end of March 1645, illustrates some aspects of the range of what may be called the ‘professional’ courier’s responsibilities. On this journey Elliot carried letters from Henrietta Maria and Jermyn to Digby, but as the queen expressed it, he was also ‘charged … to impart unto you [Digby] what I have told him, therefore I shall not write any more’. Elliot’s mission occurred at a time when factional divisions in the royal court were becoming intense, with the rivalry between Rupert and Digby for influence over the king and the control of royalist policy coming to a peak.62 Elliot, who had corresponded with Rupert from Paris, was correctly regarded as one of his ‘creatures’ or clients and so he ‘was enjoined by the Queen to do all good offices’ to try and heal the breach between the prince and Digby. This is merely one example of how agents like O’Neill, Murray and Elliot, who were embedded in the complex clientage networks of royalist politics, could be employed to do much more than merely carry letters. Also, the news that Elliot was heading for England was clearly not kept a secret in the little court at St. Germain. Hearing that Elliot was ‘ready to put foot in stirrup’, the queen’s Treasurer, Sir Henry Wood, entrusted him with a private letter to a friend at the court in Oxford. Elliot was an early performer of a role that the king’s agents would play for another fifteen years: maintaining the links between royalists in exile on the Continent and their friends and families in England.63
While Cochrane, Goffe and Kenelm Digby were endeavouring to extract arms, men or money from European princes in order to sustain the faltering royalist war effort, and others like Elliot, Davenant and Cornwallis sought to maintain increasingly precarious lines of communication between the dispersed leadership of the king’s party, there were still other important areas of employment for royalist agents. Despite frustrations and disappointments, Charles, with a stubbornness that arouses a reluctant admiration were it not so misguided, refused to abandon his belief that Irish intervention would preserve his English crown. During these months his letters to Ormond became increasingly desperate as he ordered the Lord Lieutenant to ‘conclude a peace with the Irish, whatever it cost’ – an injunction that reveals the fatal inadequacy of the king’s
understanding of the morass of competing interests in that unfortunate kingdom, a morass in which Ormond struggled to remain a footing, much less dominate. Yet in his letters from Oxford Charles continued to make serene reassurances to the queen, informing her on 20 March 1645 that he was ‘confidently assured of a considerable and sudden supply of men from Ireland’.64 To convert this expectation into an actual army required more than letters to Ormond. Men who would achieve results needed to be sent to Ireland. Being Charles, he sent several, while as far as possible keeping each one ignorant of the activities and responsibilities of the others. At the – in theory – secret diplomatic level, the newly and controversially created Earl of Glamorgan, Edward, Lord Herbert, son of the devoted royalist the Marquess of Worcester, who had expended a vast fortune in the royal cause, was authorised by Charles to negotiate a treaty with the Confederates on terms which included so many concessions to the Catholics that it would not have been acceptable to Ormond. While keeping Ormond in the dark about the true nature of Glamorgan’s mission, Charles acknowledged to his long-suffering Lord Lieutenant that, while valuing the new earl’s honesty and loyalty, he would ‘not answer for his judgement’.65 Historians, who have variously dismissed Glamorgan as the king’s ‘most ambitious and most incompetent servant’, an ‘amiable poltroon’ who had already raised and then lost an army in south Wales, and whose ‘lack of common sense’ and ‘hair-brained and quixotic character’ inevitably doomed his mission, have been less charitable than the king in their judgement.66
Yet the English royalists’ increasingly desperate condition, and possible doubts about Glamorgan’s ability to produce the promised army of 10,000 men to lead into England to reinforce what remained of the king’s depleted and scattered forces, led Charles to despatch other agents to Ireland who had a more realistic understanding of the complexities of Irish politics. One was Colonel Oliver Fitzwilliam; another, inevitably, was Daniel O’Neill. Fitzwilliam was one of Ormond’s officers, a Catholic Irish professional soldier whom Jermyn described to Digby as ‘a brave man who hath served in the wars of this Country with great reputation’. In meetings with the queen in Paris in May 1645 he convinced her that he would be able to raise an army of 10,000 or 12,000 men to bring into England, but on the great stumbling block condition: ‘if the Peace be made in Ireland’. So Fitzwilliam also was sent to Ireland, only for his initial optimism gradually to evaporate during the next few months as he encountered the irreconcilable demands of the different Irish factions.67 Fitzwilliam’s army of 10,000 men landing on the coast of Lancashire was doomed to join the formidable but mythical forces already conjured up by Antrim and O’Neill, by Colonel Barry and by Glamorgan to tantalise and distract Charles I.
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