The clandestine comings and goings of couriers, the complicated and secret despatch and receipt of letters in cipher, took place within the broader context of plans for an invasion of England by a Scottish army commanded by Hamilton. The invasion was timed to coincide with a series of risings by English royalists supported by ex-parliamentarians disenchanted by the rise of the New Model Army and the increasing influence of its allies among the Independents and sectaries. With the genuine Scottish royalists apparently crushed, and with Montrose in exile, the triumphant Covenanters split into mutually suspicious factions or parties. By the end of 1647 the devious Hamilton, with his policy of a moderate Presbyterian settlement negotiated directly with the king, had acquired in the Scottish Parliament a fragile ascendancy over the supporters of the at least equally devious Argyll. On 26 December three Scottish nobles, Hamilton’s brother Lanark and the earls of Loudon and Lauderdale, signed the Engagement with Charles at Carisbrooke, the treaty by which he was to receive Scottish military aid in return for concessions far less onerous than those presented to him at Newcastle over a year earlier. The fate of Charles I was to be determined by events beyond the walls of the castle.
Against a background of popular discontent, economic depression, terrible weather, mutinous mutterings in the army and the rise of the radical Leveller movement, the royalists prepared for a renewal of civil war. On a number of fronts that ranged from an increase in bitter attacks on the parliamentary government by the London underground presses to the return of Ormond to Ireland to once again attempt to create a royalist–Confederate alliance, the forces of counterrevolution were active.45 The royalist plan was for a multi-pronged assault on the government in London, launched by a series of risings by resurgent English Cavaliers with the support of disillusioned ex-parliamentarians and mutinous sailors, timed to coincide with an invasion by an army of moderate Scots Covenanters commanded by Hamilton. At the same time, the conclusion of an alliance between Protestant Irish royalists and Catholic Confederates under the leadership of Ormond, returned from exile, would make available another army to invade England in the king’s name. This was a complex strategy, made even more complex by being directed and organised from more than one source: Henrietta Maria and her advisers in Paris, the Prince of Wales and his advisers at Breda, and Hamilton’s insecure Engagers’ regime in Edinburgh.46 If it were to have any chance of defeating the New Model and its allies this royalist military revival needed a secret army of agents, couriers and emissaries to co-ordinate and direct the multifarious and ill-assorted forces of counter-revolution. During the first half of 1648, while Charles intrigued and fretted impotently at Carisbrooke and England drifted towards the outbreak of the second Civil War, a host of royalist agents – spies, journalists, intelligencers, conspirators and messengers – were active throughout the three Stuart kingdoms and on the Continent. To illustrate the activities of the many, I have concentrated on a few of the most prominent: Bampfield, Fleming, Murray, O’Neill, Seymour, Boswell, Ashburnham and some of the royal servants in Charles I’s household.
A constant, nagging desire of the king was that his second son, the Duke of York, should escape and join his older brother in Holland. As events in his three kingdoms moved towards a crisis it was essential that such a potentially important figure should be removed from Parliament’s control. Plans for the young duke’s escape went back as far as the king’s meeting with Bampfield in Newcastle in September 1646, and since that time there had been several abortive designs that all came to nothing. By early 1648 the need to rescue James had become urgent, as one of the possible solutions to the deadlock in negotiations that was being seriously considered by the army leaders was to depose Charles and put James in his place as a puppet king.47 Bampfield had remained in contact with the king since their meeting in Newcastle, sometimes carrying letters and instructions between Charles and what his friend Anne Murray called ‘persons of honour and loyalty’, but this was his opportunity to perform a really significant service to the Stuart cause, and he seized it enthusiastically.48
At this stage of his extraordinary career Bampfield was still totally committed to the royalist cause and enjoyed the king’s trust, while at the same time he was busily establishing connections with leading Presbyterians. He organised the young duke’s escape from the guardianship of the Earl of Northumberland at St James’s Palace with impressive efficiency. George Howard, a younger brother of the Earl of Suffolk, whom Parliament had appointed to the duke’s household, regularly conveyed Bampfield’s instructions and arrangements to James while Bampfield’s besotted admirer, the 25-year-old Anne Murray, an ardent royalist with court connections through her parents, had female clothes made to fit him. On the night of 20 April James successfully made his escape from the palace into St James’s Park, where he was met by Bampfield and taken by boat to a house near London Bridge belonging to a surgeon, Lawrence Lowe, a Presbyterian activist.49 There was waiting the adventurous but by this time extremely apprehensive Anne Murray, who ‘quickly putting off his clothes … dressed him in the women’s habit that was prepared, which fitted his Highness very well and [he] was very pretty in it’.50 A barge then took Bampfield and the duke further down river, dimming its lights when it passed the Gravesend blockhouse, although the bargemaster’s suspicions had already been aroused when James hitched up his stockings in a very unladylike manner to allow Bampfield to adjust the too hastily tied garters. Once past Gravesend, the fugitives boarded a waiting Dutch ship which took them across the Channel to Flushing. After spending a night at an inn in Middleburgh where James, still in female dress, ‘gave much wonder to the hostess, that a young gentlewoman would not let the maids help her to the bed’, preferring the services of her ‘pretended brother’, they continued to The Hague and an enthusiastic welcome from the duke’s sister, Mary of Orange.51
The royalists’ fear that Parliament and the army leaders would interfere with the legitimate royal line of succession was relieved by the escape of the Duke of York, the news of which was received by Charles at Carisbrooke from Firebrace within two days of James’s flight.52 Their hope in the spring and summer of 1648 was that Hamilton’s army would be large enough and strong enough to overwhelm the New Model Army, while its presence in England would encourage Cavaliers and English Presbyterians to take up arms. The two Scottish courtiers Sir William Fleming and Will Murray were the royalist agents with closest links to the most prominent Engager leaders, the Hamilton brothers, and the three earls of Callendar, Lauderdale and Loudon. Fleming, following his secret contacts with officers in Leslie’s army outside Hereford early in 1646, seems not to have gone into exile until late in 1647, when he joined Henrietta Maria in Paris. Early in 1648 he was dispatched to Scotland via the Netherlands, where he met with Prince Charles and arranged for the sale of the few remaining pieces of jewellery the queen still possessed.53 Fleming spent about a month in Scotland before returning to France in May with a shopping list of arms, ammunition and ships and an invitation to the prince to go to Scotland. Clearly possessing considerable energy – displaying ‘all possible diligence’ according to a correspondent of Lanark’s – Fleming then returned to Scotland in July, carrying expressions by Charles of his desire to be with his loyal Scottish generals, but only as long as certain conditions were guaranteed: the freedom to attend Anglican services and not be pressured to accept the Covenant, to choose his advisers and the members of his household, and to travel wherever he chose. Considerably more welcome to the Engagers than this list of conditions were the arms and ammunition Fleming brought with him, the proceeds of the sale of the queen’s jewellery in Holland. As Hamilton had already crossed the border on 8 July on his leisurely advance into England, the arms and ammunition were sent after his large, slow-moving and unwieldy army.54
Accompanying Fleming on this return journey to Scotland was Will Murray. Whereas Fleming’s royalism was never questioned, doubts and suspicions constantly surrounded Murray, who was seen in some émigré circles as b
eing too close to Argyll while at the same time professing loyalty to Hamilton and the Engagers.55 In any event, and probably fortunately for them, the two agents arrived too late to join Hamilton’s army as it stumbled through the rain to its crushing defeat by Cromwell and the New Model Army at Preston on 17 August. By the end of September the Engager regime had collapsed; those of its leaders who were not prisoners, like Hamilton, were fleeing into exile, like Lanark and Callendar, while Argyll, with the powerful support of Cromwell and the English army, had reasserted his authority in Edinburgh. Among the scores of Engagers and ‘persecuted Cavaliers’ who departed hastily from Scotland and northern England for the Netherlands in the final months of 1648 were Fleming and Murray.56 Ironically, as this exodus was taking place, a Danish ship laden with arms for Hamilton’s army arrived in Leith, to be seized immediately by Argyll’s supporters. The fruit of Cochrane’s indefatigable efforts in the Baltic to send aid the Stuart cause was plucked by Covenanters.57
The total defeat of Hamilton’s army at Preston, the suppression of a scattering of risings in different parts of England and Wales, and the eventual unconditional surrender of those towns and fortresses seized by the insurgents soon ended the second Civil War. But royalist hopes were not yet totally crushed. In September Ormond had returned to Ireland, where a royalist revival had been taking place, assisted by Inchiquin’s declaration for the king and his signing of a truce with the Confederate government at Kilkenny. At about the same time a mutiny in the parliamentarian fleet in the Downs at the end of May saw eventually the defection of 11 warships to the royalists, including the flagship, the Constant Reformation. After some indecisive activity along the Kentish coast in support of royalist insurgents, the ships sailed for Holland, so providing the Prince of Wales with a small navy.58
The acrimonious debate in the royalist leadership over who was to command and how to employ this fleet involved two of the most active of the king’s agents, Bampfield and Seymour. Bampfield, drastically overestimating his influence and prestige in the aftermath of his personal triumph in rescuing the Duke of York, urged his protégé, who was, after all, titular Lord High Admiral, to assume command of the fleet, to put to sea immediately and to appoint as his Vice-Admiral Lord Willoughby of Parham, one of the Presbyterian ex-parliamentarian ‘persons of honour and loyalty’, as Anne Murray described them without apparent irony, with whom the colonel had been intriguing for nearly two years.59 Bampfield’s presumptuous behaviour aroused enormous resentment among some of the most prominent exiled royalists. According to one contemporary, Abraham de Wicquefort, who knew Bampfield and who in the late 1660s wrote an account of the rescue of the Duke of York, the colonel’s enemies believed that his intention, at a time when he ‘governed the young prince’, was ‘to conduct the prince to Scotland and to have him recognised as king, to the prejudice of the rights of the Prince of Wales, his older brother’.60 Although Bampfield certainly acted rashly in attempting to organise a naval expedition without waiting for authority from or even the arrival of Prince Charles at the harbour of Helvoetsluys, the more serious charge is extremely unlikely. In the event, when Charles did arrive he assumed personal command of the fleet and there was a sudden end to Bampfield’s enjoyment of Stuart favour. From this time onwards Charles and some of his principal advisers, most notably Hyde, regarded Bampfield with unrelenting hostility.61 Yet, as we shall see, his career as an intelligence agent was by no means over and he still retained some prominent supporters among the exiled royalists.
When the royalist fleet finally put to sea, nominally commanded by the Prince of Wales and with James and Bampfield left on shore, there was considerable division among the prince’s advisers and senior officers about how it should be employed.62 The decision finally reached was to attack the parliamentarian fleet commanded by the Earl of Warwick that guarded the approaches to London. There were serious royalist hopes that Warwick, whose brother, the chameleon Earl of Holland, was in arms for the king in Surrey, would decide to bring his ships over to join the prince’s fleet. Henry Seymour was chosen to carry a message from Charles’s flagship to Warwick’s, inviting him ‘to return to his allegiance’, only to return with the earl’s disappointingly unsatisfactory reply, which ‘humbly besought his highness to put himself into the hands of the Parliament’.63 Warwick remained loyal to Parliament, and eventually the royalist fleet was forced to return to port, only to be blockaded in Helvoetsluys by parliamentarian ships, while the disastrous news trickled in of the crushing defeat of Hamilton’s army, the suppression of the royalist risings in England and Wales and the collapse of the Engager regime in Scotland.64 While Bampfield returned unobtrusively to England, other agents, like Seymour, could look forward only to an indefinite continuation of their exile. There remained only two significant spheres for their activities: Ireland, where royalist hopes remained high, and the Isle of Wight, where the need to rescue the king was now urgent.
In the words of Patrick Crelly, one of Antrim’s agents, in the absence of competition Ireland had once again resumed its uncomfortable role, ‘as the great and principal instrument to reduce Scotland and England’.65 The ambitious project, which had its origin with Henrietta Maria and her circle of advisers in Paris, notably Jermyn and Digby, required Ormond to return to Ireland, to unite the various mutually suspicious – when they were not actively hostile – Confederate, royalist and Ulster Presbyterian factions and armies, to win over Owen Roe O’Neill and then to launch a combined assault on Dublin as a preliminary to an invasion of England.66 The enterprise was to be financially supported by France in return for the handing over of several Irish ports and fortresses, even though at this time the civil wars of the Fronde were placing increasing demands on the energies and resources of the young Louis XIV’s government.67
The project hatched in the peaceful security of the queen’s apartments in the Louvre and St. Germain confronted enormous obstacles if it were to be realised in the ravaged fields and stricken towns of Ireland. The defeat of Hamilton at Preston and the suppression of the royalist risings in England and Wales greatly increased the importance of Ormond’s expedition while at the same time reducing its chances of success. Yet when Ormond sailed from Le Havre with a small following that included Daniel O’Neill, he already knew that Inchiquin and his Protestant army in Munster had declared for the king and had negotiated a truce with the Confederate government in Kilkenny. Two of Ormond’s most trusted agents, Colonels John Barry and John Stephens, had been in touch with Inchiquin, who had agreed to abandon his loyalty to Parliament on condition that Ormond returned to Ireland as the king’s viceroy.68
Despite various attempts to undermine the expedition from a range of enemies – agents of Rinuccini’s clerical party, Antrim grumpily hostile on the sidelines, Spanish authorities opposed to French influence in Ireland, to name just a few – Ormond landed at Cork on 30 September, bringing with him arms for 4,000 foot and 1,000 horse provided by the French.69 After joining forces with Inchiquin, the Lord Lieutenant opened negotiations with the Confederate general assembly at Kilkenny to settle the terms for a general peace agreement. Absent from the negotiations was Owen Roe O’Neill, whose loyalty was still to Rinuccini’s clerical party, which, actively encouraged by Antrim, still hoped to derail this new ‘Ormond peace’, by force if necessary. Yet Owen Roe’s Ulster army was probably the most effective Irish fighting force still in existence, and it was Daniel O’Neill’s task to try and persuade his intractable uncle to include himself in the peace settlement. Arriving in the general’s Ulster headquarters in November, Daniel O’Neill would not have been pleased to encounter his old patron Antrim, whose intentions were exactly the opposite to his, and who successfully encouraged the officers of the Ulster army to reject the terms of the new ‘Ormond peace’. According to Rinuccini, the ‘Ormondists’ were ‘greatly in fear of O’Neill and the marquis of Antrim, and therefore make them large offers’. But the offers of an independent command and the viceroy’s good will that were conveyed
to Owen Roe failed to sway him.70 Although Daniel O’Neill always maintained friendly personal relations with his ‘superstitious old uncle’, he was unable to obtain Owen Roe’s accession to the general peace agreement signed in Kilkenny on 17 January. Ireland remained divided among three main parties: the forces loyal to the English Parliament who still controlled some towns and fortresses, of which Dublin was by far the most important, the fragile and uneasy alliance of moderate Confederates and Irish royalists which recognised the leadership of Ormond and Inchiquin, and Owen Roe O’Neill’s Ulster army, upholding the dwindling authority of Rinuccini’s clerical faction and encouraged in its intransigence by Antrim from the sidelines.71
Ormond’s return to Ireland, his apparently successful conclusion of an alliance between royalists and Confederates, and his obvious intention of continuing the civil wars seriously threatened the already precarious personal security of Charles I. Throughout the second Civil War the king continued to negotiate at Newport the terms of a new treaty with the parliamentary commissioners sent from Westminster, while at the same time secretly encouraging plans for his rescue and maintaining fragile lines of communication with Ormond and with royalist leaders in exile. Charles informed Ormond that his letters were sent ‘by way of France’, which meant first by courier to London, then smuggled across the Channel to the queen in Paris, there to be redirected for the dangerous sea voyage, running the gauntlet of Parliament’s patrolling warships, to reach Ireland.72 To the dismay of the New Model Army’s officers, their military victories in England failed to bring about an end to the fighting as the king refused to disavow either Ormond’s warlike preparations in Ireland or the seizure of parliamentary ships by the Prince of Wales’s fleet in the Channel.73 Their patience exhausted, the officers believed they had ample grounds for the Remonstrance they presented to the Commons on 20 November, which denounced the Treaty of Newport and demanded that justice be done against ‘the capital and grand author of our troubles, the person of the King’.74
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