As a peaceful and orderly achievement of a negotiated settlement acceptable to the king, the Parliament, the army and the Scots became increasingly unlikely, so the demands on royalist agents increased. The missions undertaken to maintain links between the king in Newcastle, the queen and her advisers in Paris, and notables of varying backgrounds and views in London were only part of the picture. Increasingly important was the position of Prince Charles, among whose following was the formidable but by this time purely titular Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Edward Hyde. Trusted agents were needed to connect the prince’s household with the other Stuart courts, with Ormond, barely clinging on in Ireland, and with the geographically dispersed royalist leaders. Secretary Nicholas, for example, resisted all appeals to exchange the Protestant and relatively congenial surroundings of The Hague for the Catholic and frostily hostile atmosphere of Henrietta Maria’s household in Paris.19 By contrast, at the end of June, obeying the commands of his parents, Charles left Jersey for Paris, to join his mother at St. Germain, where he was to be based for almost two years. The prince’s followers who had accompanied him from Scilly to Jersey were scattered, some, like Hyde, remaining on the island, some accompanying him to Paris, and others drifting to other refuges on the Continent or even quietly back to England.
Among the attendants who accompanied Charles was Henry Seymour, one of his grooms of the bedchamber. Seymour’s career illustrates a new development in the activities of royalist agents; their increasing dependence on the future Charles II and his advisers as their most important patrons, employers and protectors. Other agents who had been active in the Stuart cause for years also now began to look to the prince for instructions rather than to his powerless father. The indefatigable Cochrane continued to importune Denmark for aid during 1646, although informed by the Danish crown prince that the recent war with Sweden had left the kingdom so militarily and financially ruined that all that could be sent to Charles I were prayers.20 Not discouraged, and reluctant to abandon the long-held royalist hope of Danish intervention, Prince Charles sent John Poley from Paris to add his pleas to Cochrane’s.21 Both Poley’s mission to Denmark in mid-1646 and his future activities as a royal courier illustrate the shift taking place in responses by royalist activists to the fragmented leadership of their party. While some agents, like Ashburnham and Davenant, continued to serve predominantly Charles I and Henrietta Maria, others – obviously and understandably Seymour, but also experienced emissaries like Cochrane and Poley – increasingly took their orders from the Prince of Wales and his advisers.
This variety in the missions and activities undertaken by agents was the consequence of the divisions within the royalist leadership over what policies should be followed in the bleak aftermath of the defeat of the king’s armies in England and Scotland. Montrose went into exile in Norway in September 1646, and in the spring of the following year, in a ruthless campaign marked by the butchering of ordinary prisoners while the more important were reserved for more formal executions, royalist resistance in the western Highlands and the Isles was crushed by David Leslie’s army.22 For the time being the Scottish royalists were totally subdued. Nor was there any help to be expected from Ireland, with most of the country in the hands of mutually suspicious Confederate armies whose different commanders, Owen Roe O’Neill in Ulster, Thomas Preston in Leinster and the Earl of Castlehaven in Munster, were incapable of co-operating with each other, much less with the royalist forces who recognised Ormond’s authority, even although they were all seriously threatened by the common enemy of an aggressive parliamentarian army under Inchiquin in Munster and by the Scots Covenanter troops still entrenched in Ulster.23
During the approximately two years he spent in Ireland between his arrival in August 1645 and his departure into exile in France in September 1647 Daniel O’Neill was prominent in the drawn-out and frustrating series of attempts to unite the different Irish factions and forces. Although they had in common their opposition to the authority of the English Parliament, they differed on just about every other issue.24 A complex network of negotiations and intrigues swirled around the different factions on the Supreme Council in Kilkenny. Threading his way among the mutually suspicious commanders of the Confederate armies, the papal nuncio Rinuccini, the ambitious and devious Antrim, the well-meaning but incompetent Glamorgan and even the irrepressible Digby, who arrived in Dublin in January 1646 via the Isle of Man, having escaped the wreckage of his little army at Sherbern in Elmet the previous October, O’Neill remained committed to the policies of his patron, the loyal but ultimately ineffectual Ormond.25 Briefly, O’Neill was drawn into a typically rash and audacious scheme of Digby’s, to take two frigates from Waterford to Scilly to collect Prince Charles and bring him to Ireland. The prince had already left for Jersey when the frigates arrived to a hostile reception from the Scilly islanders, who ‘put themselves in arms and loudly cried that no Irish rebels should land there’. Typically, Digby followed the prince to Jersey in one frigate while O’Neill returned to Ireland, where Ormond had work for him if that elusive prospect, Peace in Ireland, were ever to be realised.26
As he was believed to have influence over his evasive and uncommunicative uncle, who was now at the height of his prestige after his convincing victory over the Ulster Scots at Benburb in County Tyrone on 5 June 1646, O’Neill was employed as an emissary between Ormond and Owen Roe. He was instructed to inform his uncle that Ormond was pleased to confirm him in his commands, but in return he wished him to employ his army to decisive effect ‘in the King’s service’.27 The attempts to detach Owen Roe from his allegiance to the hard-line clerical party at Kilkenny led by the papal nuncio Rinuccini, and instead to win his support for the so-called ‘Ormond peace’, involved O’Neill in frequent journeys and frustrating negotiations. Although Owen Roe expressed his friendship for his ‘affectionate nephew’ and his respect for the lord lieutenant, his professed ‘zeal for the house of God’ and his desire to achieve ‘the freedom of my country’ within the protective bosom of the Catholic church meant that Ormond, a Protestant who was committed to preserving the authority of the English crown over Ireland, had no chance of winning Owen Roe to his side. O’Neill’s diplomatic skills and family ties both failed to move what he later called ‘that superstitious old uncle of mine’.28
By the early months of 1647 the Stuart cause in Ireland appeared to be lost. Ormond was bottled up in Dublin, anticipating an assault from the Ulster army of Owen Roe, now firmly allied to the nuncio, and even temporarily and insincerely reconciled with the rival Confederate general, Preston. Last-minute attempts to reach an accommodation between Ormond and the Confederate leadership failed, even though the queen sent another agent, her chaplain, George Leyburn, who travelled under the pseudonym of Winter Grant, to Ireland to attempt to act as mediator between the two sides.29 O’Neill’s frequent journeys between the key figures proved fruitless. His unfaltering royalism and his total loyalty to the lord lieutenant, clearly stronger influences on him than his blood relationship with ‘that silent man’ Owen Roe, even led to his being briefly imprisoned on the orders of the Confederate Supreme Council.30 The final breakdown in negotiations occurred when the English Parliament, at this time dominated by the Presbyterian party and still hopeful of reaching a negotiated settlement with the king, indicated that it was prepared to grant Ormond generous terms if he surrendered Dublin. Having declared that he preferred ‘to give up those places under his command to the English rebels rather than the Irish rebels’, Ormond handed over control of Dublin to the commissioners of Parliament and their supporting English troops on 28 July 1647 and withdrew to England, from where, having settled his affairs, he went into exile in Caen in Normandy.31 Daniel O’Neill remained in Ireland for a couple more months, but in the absence of his patron, and having earned the enmity of Rinuccini both as an Ormondist and as a Protestant, he no longer had a significant role to play. In September O’Neill, for the third but by no means the last time in his career, went into ex
ile, and after a dangerous sea voyage joined Ormond at Caen.32 For the time being Ireland seemed to have no significant role to play in any revival of the Stuart cause. The royalist leaders, and the agents they employed, had no alternative but to turn to moderate parliamentarians and Presbyterians if the king were to be rescued from captivity and restored to his throne.
The attempts by royalist agents to keep Charles I informed of developments and in a position to communicate his own views were made increasingly more difficult by the transfers of the king from one place of honourable confinement to another, by changes in the personnel both of his captors and of his personal household, and by the variations in the restrictions and controls placed on him. Having been handed over by the Scots to Parliament in January 1647, Charles was taken from Newcastle to Holmby House in Northamptonshire, from where he was seized by Cornet Joyce on 3 June and transferred to the control of the army generals, who then installed the king at Hampton Court. In November the drawn-out and meandering negotiations with Generals Cromwell, Ireton and Fairfax were brought to a sudden conclusion when Charles escaped from Hampton Court in the company of the two courtiers, Ashburnham and Sir John Berkeley, and the experienced old soldier Will Legge. In a mismanaged and still in some aspects puzzling affair, Charles eventually found himself not at liberty, but confined in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.33
Despite the difficulties and dangers inherent in this series of changes in the king’s circumstances, several agents still managed to maintain fragile lines of communication between Charles and the scattered royalist leadership, although it is possible to see a change gradually taking place in their principal concerns. To begin with, the main subject of their missions was the debate over the terms of a negotiated settlement between Charles and either the Scots, a Presbyterian majority in Parliament or the army generals, the so-called grandees. As any kind of negotiated settlement gradually became increasingly unlikely, the emphasis changed to a reliance on military action to defeat the New Model Army and its supporters. Alongside this change in emphasis, a new objective emerged: to rescue the king from enemies who it was coming to be feared threatened not just his restoration to the throne, but his life.
The arrest of Major Humphrey Boswell in the proximity of Holmby House in June 1647 illustrates the changes taking place in both the role and even the personnel of royalist agents at this time. Boswell is an irritatingly obscure figure on several counts, including his name, as he is also often referred to as Bosvil(l)e, which suggests a connection with the prominent Kentish gentry family of that name. Allegedly, he was a major of horse in the brigade commanded by the Earl of Cleveland, but his Civil War record remains obscure.34 Unlike so many of the other agents employed on the king’s business, he did not have court connections or prominent and influential patrons. Boswell tends to appear suddenly as an enterprising and highly regarded agent and conspirator, and then just as suddenly disappear from the record. But he came to be regarded by the parliamentary authorities as ‘a very dangerous person’, and achieved a reputation for prison escapes that ranked with Daniel O’Neill’s, while his activities eventually placed him on the agenda of a meeting of Lord Protector Cromwell and the Council of State.35
During his residence at Holmby House the king was well treated, with occasional opportunities for recreation. On the morning of 6 April, while riding from Holmby to play bowls at nearby Boughton, Charles alighted at a narrow bridge by a mill on the way, where, according to the report from the parliamentary commissioners attending the king, ‘stood one Humphrey Boswell, in the Disguise of a Country-man’s Habit, with an Angle (fishing rod) in his Hand, as if he had been Fishing, and privately conveyed into the King’s hand letters from the Queen and the Prince’. The commissioners did not quite have the nerve to demand that the king hand over the letters, but they were able to capture Boswell, whose suspicious behaviour was observed and reported by the miller whose mill overlooked the bridge. Under interrogation, Boswell admitted bringing a packet of letters ‘out of France from the Queen, with some inclosed from the Prince’, having earlier carried letters from Charles at Newcastle across the Channel to France. On this most recent mission he had been in England for a fortnight and had ‘lodged two nights in a furze bush and three nights at a countryman’s house’ while waiting for an opportunity to deliver the letters, but he refused to identify the ‘countryman’ who supplied him with accommodation and clothes. Boswell was sent under escort to London to be further examined by Parliament’s Serjeant at Arms and to be committed to Newgate, but this was not the end of his career as a royalist agent.36
Both this episode and others like it illustrate a new development in the activities of royalist agents. Men like Davenant, Murray and Cochrane did not disguise themselves as agricultural labourers equipped with fishing rods while on the king’s business; primarily, they saw themselves as emissaries moving in a world of courts and princes, of nobles and generals. But as the condition both of the captive Charles I and of his cause became more desperate, so the king’s agents moved increasingly into a darker world of disguises and pseudonyms, letters in cipher concealed in hiding places, arrests, imprisonments and daring escapes. The various plans to rescue Charles from a confinement he found increasingly onerous are replete with the traditional cloak-and-dagger properties of cipher keys, fishing boats moored off lonely coves, letters hidden in chinks in walls, mysterious horsemen emerging out of the night, and so on.37
Along with experienced agents like Bampfield and Boswell, several royal servants were also drawn into acting as couriers and planning the king’s escape. Members of Charles’s personal household, whether he was at Newcastle, Holmby House, Hampton Court or Carisbrooke, were regularly vetted, with consequent frequent changes in the personnel, but among those who retained their positions were several royalist sympathisers who were prepared to assist in maintaining the king’s links with his family and supporters, and even in planning his escape. Two members of his household, his steward Francis Cresset and treasurer Henry Firebrace, were clients respectively of two moderate and essentially conservative parliamentarian commissioners entrusted with the supervision of king, the earls of Pembroke and Denbigh. Cresset, who had been part of Barwick’s London intelligence network during the Civil War, was a royalist agent of some standing who managed to arrange for Charles to receive Barwick, who ‘willingly embraced this Opportunity of making frequent journeys to and fro[m]’ Hampton Court, carrying the king’s instructions.38 Firebrace had served as secretary to Denbigh’s council of war when the earl was Parliament’s principal military commander in the Midlands. He was still in Denbigh’s entourage when the earl was appointed one of the parliamentarian commissioners to take over responsibility for the king from the Scots at Newcastle.39 According to Firebrace’s own account, the king ordered him to ‘make my application to some of the Commissioners that I might be admitted to attend his Majesty as one of the pages of his Bedchamber, in which I prevailed’, presumably as a result of the exercise of Denbigh’s influence.40
Somehow Firebrace retained the trust of the king’s different guardians during the various transfers of the royal captive from Newcastle to his eventual arrival at Carisbrooke Castle, while at the same time being actively involved in organising the transit of messages to and from Charles and in planning his escape. According to his own account, the resourceful Firebrace:
had settled a very good way of correspondence with his Majestie’s friends at London, having two men, very faithful and unsuspected, constantly going and coming; by which means his Majestie never wanted good intelligence from the Queen, the Prince and many of his friends.
Firebrace claimed that he gave Charles ‘several despatches every week, and conveyed his safely away’.41 Firebrace and Cresset were not the only royal servants who managed to retain their positions in the circle around the king during this period, while at the same attempting to outwit or suborn the guards, to deliver and collect messages, generally to further the progress of the plans that w
ere to culminate in the outbreak of the second Civil War and to plan the king’s escape. Among the most active was the ex-parliamentarian officer Captain Silius (or Silas) Titus. Considered by Colonel Robin Hammond, the Governor of Carisbrooke, to be a gentleman of ‘approved integrity’, Titus was one of four officers instructed ‘constantly to attend the person of the king’. This was the beginning for Titus of a long and colourful career in espionage and conspiracy that would last for over thirty years, with several changes of allegiance on the way, eventually entangling him in the machinations of Titus Oates and the Popish Plot in 1678, and even in Monmouth’s ill-fated rebellion seven years later.42
Another royal servant who was to have a chequered and controversial career as a spy was Nicholas Oudart, who was born in Brabant, but while still a boy emigrated to England as a page in the household of the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton. Oudart spent most of the Civil War in Oxford, acting as a secretary to Sir Edward Nicholas. By the middle of 1647 he was performing the same function for Charles, first at Hampton Court and then later at Carisbrooke.43 His official employment, but not his unofficial role as a royalist agent, came to a sudden end in February 1648 when the delivery to the king of a packet of letters, brought from London by the irrepressible Humphrey Boswell, who clearly had not wasted a great deal of time in escaping from Newgate, was intercepted by a suspicious guard. ‘If Oudart and Bosvile [sic] were not escaped beyond seas (the one into Holland [and] the other France) they would hardly have escaped hanging here’, reported an anonymous correspondent, probably Cresset, to the Earl of Lanark, Hamilton’s younger brother, on 23 February: ‘Oudart having delivered letters to the D. of York, persuading him to attempt an escape, and Bosvile having received his answer, which was intercepted at Carisbrooke Castle with several other letters from the Queen and others.’ Governor Hammond reported to Parliament the interception of the packet, ‘brought by Major Boswell, under the name of John Fox’, which contained letters from the queen and from the little Princess Elizabeth, along with ‘divers other Letters and Characters’.44
Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies Page 15
