Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  Closely watched by an increasingly stressed governor during the final weeks of his governorship, the king remained at the centre of a shadowy but extremely active group of royalist agents. It is not surprising that Colonel Hammond’s peace of mind was sorely tested by the diverse collection of plotters and couriers who came and went about the king, with their personal relationships and their plans and schemes not always in harmony with each other.

  First, there were the members of Charles’s personal household, their numbers and personnel constantly changing as a result of regular purges, but with a resilient core of devoted royal servants who contrived the elaborate procedures by which letters were conveyed to and from the king. Some of these royal servants were also involved in the increasingly desperate schemes for the king’s escape. The most prominent were Henry Firebrace, Francis Cresset until he was dismissed, Silius Titus, Nicholas Oudart and Sir William Hopkins, who was probably a member of the minor local gentry, although traditionally identified as the local schoolmaster. Charles stayed in Hopkins’s house during the Treaty of Newport negotiations.75 But the network of agents extended beyond the royal household to include a number of civilians and soldiers who also had contact with the king. There was, for example, his laundress, Mrs Wheeler, one of the links in the fragile chain that connected the king with the resourceful Major Boswell, and through him to royalists in London. Early in 1648, after Hammond received information from Parliament’s Derby House Committee ‘that the king hath constant intelligence given him of all things, which he received by the hands of a woman, who bringeth it to him, when she bringeth his clean linen’, Mrs Wheeler was dismissed from her employment in the castle, only to reappear in his enlarged household in the town at the time of the Treaty of Newport negotiations.76 One of the remarkable features of the activities of royalist agents at this time is that despite expulsions, arrests, restraints of one kind or another, they keep reappearing on the scene. Wheeler, Oudart, Boswell, Cresset, Ashburnham: despite repeated efforts Hammond could never get rid of them for long.77 He must have found it extremely frustrating. One of the last letters the king wrote was to Oudart in London from Hurst Castle on 5 December, when he was being taken from Carisbrooke to Windsor on the journey that would end with his trial and execution: ‘The chief errand of this despatch is to know you how to send to me,’ for which information Oudart was referred to the letter’s bearer, the redoubtable laundress Mrs Wheeler.78

  Another resourceful woman who needs also to be included among the king’s active supporters within Carisbrooke Castle was Jane Whorwood. Like so many royalist agents, Jane Whorwood had court connections through both her father and especially her step-father, the Scot James Maxwell, one of the king’s grooms of the bedchamber.79 She had apparently tried to make contact with the king when he was confined at Holmby, but had been unsuccessful. Oudart reported to Nicholas that although possessed of ‘all her father’s boldness and art, [she had] dared adventure no further than Northampton’.80 Undeterred by this failure, she became involved in the plans for Charles’s escape from Carisbrooke. In a letter to Colonel Hammond in May the governor was warned of the intention of Jane Whorwood, ‘a tall, well-fashioned, and well-languaged gentlewoman, with a round visage and pockholes on her face’, to provide a ship for the king’s escape. Yet Hammond was unable to prevent secret visits by Whorwood to the king in his apartments in the castle or to suppress her subversive activities. Actively involved for a considerable period in the different plans for the king’s escape and in the secret transmission of letters and money from loyalists in London, her courage and energy earned her not only the admiration of her fellow plotters Cresset and Firebrace, but also first the favour and then the friendship of the prisoner she called ‘Our Master’. Anthony à Wood, who also knew her, made a point of her red hair when he described her as ‘the most loyal person to King Charles in his miseries as any woman in England’.81 Charles may have valued Jane Whorwood for more than her loyalty and zeal. It has been forcefully argued, after a close analysis of the affectionate and familiar tone of the two surviving cipher letters from the king to Whorwood, the frequency of his references to her in his letters to Firebrace and Hopkins and the fact that a couple of private meetings between Charles and his ‘Sweete Jane’ were contrived with considerable difficulty, that a fleeting sexual relationship existed. The king’s hopes that Jane Whorwood would be able to arrange his escape were not met, but there may have been other compensations in his dealings with her.82

  There was yet another group of active royalists, for the most part with more aristocratic and consistently royalist backgrounds than the members of the household in the castle, who also plotted to rescue the king. The three Cavalier courtiers, Ashburnham, Berkeley and Legge, who had brought the king from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight in the first place, had very soon been banished back to the mainland by Hammond.83 Berkeley, whose role in the whole muddled affair was sharply criticised by Ashburnham, soon went into exile in Holland, joining the Duke of York’s entourage at about the same time as Bampfield was being expelled from it.84 But Ashburnham and Legge hung around on the mainland, staying usually at Hertford’s seat at Netley Abbey or the Earl of Southampton’s at Titchfield. From these convenient bases they were able to make occasional furtive visits to the island and to develop their plans for the king’s escape.85 They were in contact not only with Firebrace and his associates, but also with other royalist sympathisers, including two aristocratic ladies well versed in plots and intrigues. As the ardently royalist young widow of Lord d’Aubigny, Catherine Howard, as we have seen, had been drawn into the plots to secure London for the king in 1643, an escapade that earned her several months in the Tower. By late 1648 she had a new husband, the Anglicised Scottish courtier James Livingston, Viscount Newburgh, like her first husband a devoted royalist, but also a formidable duellist.86 She also enjoyed the friendship of Prince Charles’s adviser Sir Edward Hyde, who in his History of the Rebellion recorded that Lady Newburgh ‘was a woman of very great wit, and most trusted and conversant in those intrigues which at that time could be best managed and carried on by ladies, who with less jealousy could be seen in all companies’.87

  A more controversial figure in royalist circles was that notorious intriguer Lucy, Countess of Carlisle. Lady Carlisle’s contacts were with those Presbyterians who were anxious to reach a settlement with the king. This was the world in which agents like Bampfield and Titus operated, connecting Charles with such shadowy figures as Lawrence Lowe, the London surgeon who had assisted in the escape of the Duke of York from St James’s.88 The ease with which Parliament’s Derby House committee was kept informed of the king’s escape plans was partly attributed by suspicious Cavaliers to Charles’s indiscreet letters to Lady Carlisle and associates like Lowe. ‘She has been through the whole story of his Majesty’s misfortunes a very pernicious instrument,’ wrote Secretary Nicholas bitterly to Hyde in 1654, ‘and she will assuredly discover all things to her gang of Presbyterians who have ever betrayed all to the ruling rebels’.89 Although Charles was warned by Whorwood to keep his plans secret, so that he even wrote to Firebrace on 17 April advising him ‘in points of secresie, give no great trust to E (Lady Carlisle’s code number)’, the king continued to receive letters from the countess and to send replies back through Titus.90

  It is therefore not surprising that the various complicated schemes to effect the king’s escape proved futile. Security was never a strong point of royalist plotters. Ignoring the risk of unreliable or even treacherous couriers and the real danger that even the trustworthy ones might be intercepted by government officers, an anonymous correspondent, probably Cresset, wrote to Lanark on 11 April to inform him that four royal servants were making plans for the king’s escape:

  There is an engine made to pull out the bar of his chamber window, and so to get over the wall, having two gentleman Islanders of his only to carry him away to his ship; the design is reasonable and I hope it will be successful.91

  It
wasn’t. Firebrace described in his Narrative, composed after the Restoration, how when the crucial moment came for Charles to climb through the window to where faithful servants were waiting in the courtyard in the dark to escort him to a ‘lusty boat’, he became jammed in the window, ‘sticking fast between his Breast and shoulders, and not able to get forwards or backwards’.92 Further schemes, devised in the difficult conditions created by the increasing vigilance of the island authorities, who were kept well informed with intelligence from the Derby House committee, proved equally futile. The letters of Ashburnham, Firebrace, Titus, the Newburghs, Whorwood, Hopkins and the rest, written in cipher or in invisible ink based on lemon-juice, are full of elaborate schemes involving files and aqua fortis to cut through or dissolve bars, horses and disguises concealed by faithful servants, boats moored in lonely coves to take the king to safety across the Channel.93 The combined impact of government security measures, the diverse and fragmented nature of the plans of royalist agents and perhaps the king’s own lack of resolution doomed all these rescue plans to failure.

  The drawn-out negotiations for the Treaty of Newport, conducted in an increasing air of unreality, ended on 28 November, when the commissioners took their formal leave of the king to take his views to Westminster. Two days later Colonel Hammond was summarily dismissed from his command, to be replaced immediately by the much more radical and undeferential Colonel Ewer, whose force of 200 foot and 40 cavalry seized control first of Newport and then of Carisbrooke during a night of drenching rain. Time had run out for the agents planning the king’s escape. Firebrace recorded in his Narrative how their:

  hopes were all blasted; when the Army, thirsting for his blood, sent a party into the Island to secure him: which was so suddenly, and privately done, that there was no notice, or appearance of them, until that night they began their horrid Tragedy.94

  Any real hope that Bampfield’s exploit in rescuing the king’s second son would be repeated with the father was now over. Separated from his faithful attendants like Firebrace and from the royalist nobles who had been permitted to attend him during the Newport negotiations, like Richmond and Hertford, and with no chance of any further contact with ‘Sweet Jane’ Whorwood, Charles was removed the next day to Hurst Castle, a small and grim fortress on the point of a narrow spit running out into the Solent. Ten days later Colonel Harrison arrived at the castle to escort Charles on his final journey to Windsor, and from there on to his trial in London, where Pride’s Purge of Parliament had just taken place and the New Model Army was in full control of the capital.95 Thanks to Mrs Wheeler the laundress, a few letters in cipher were still smuggled out, but there is no record that they reached anyone except some of his faithful attendants still on the Isle of Wight and Nicholas Oudart in London.96

  The last remotely serious plan for the king’s escape was made by Lord and Lady Newburgh when he dined with them at their house at Bagshot on the way to Windsor. The plan’s success depended on Charles being able to exchange his allegedly lamed horse for an exceptionally fast mount provided by Newburgh, on which, at the right moment, he was to make a sudden break for freedom. Harrison was far too vigilant to be taken in by this ruse, and Charles never had the opportunity suddenly to put spurs to his horse and gallop off into the night, leaving Harrison’s troopers floundering behind. What was meant to happen next, according to this desperate scheme, remains unclear, but in fact nothing did happen. The account of the plot contained in the Perfect Occurrences concluded with the report that ‘the King came very quietly to Windsor that night’.97

  During the almost four weeks that Charles passed in isolation at Windsor, while the preparations for his trial lurched forwards unevenly but relentlessly in London, there were last-minute attempts by royalists if not to stage a dramatic rescue, then at least to open up secret lines of communication.98 A servant of Thomas Herbert, appointed by Parliament to attend on the king in place of the notoriously unreliable and untrustworthy attendants left behind on the Isle of Wight, was bribed by none another than the incorrigible Major Boswell to smuggle in two letters from the queen and hide them in Charles’s close-stool. The letters were discovered in a routine search, and both the servant and the intermediary in the transaction, one Isaac Wheeler, were arrested – but, not surprisingly, not Boswell. By the time the New Model Army’s bloodhounds had identified his hiding place as the Three Squirrels inn in Lambeth, he was gone, eventually to turn up at The Hague.99

  The trial of Charles I began in Westminster Hall on the afternoon of 20 January, and ten days later, on the afternoon of 30 January, he was executed on the scaffold erected outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall. During these dramatic and tumultuous days there was a final desperate flurry of messages, both threatening and pleading, from European courts, from prominent exiled royalists, from the other kingdoms which acknowledged Charles as their monarch.100 But the high court of justice held to its purpose to bring ‘the man of blood’ to the scaffold. At the urgent request of the Prince of Wales, two envoys of the Dutch republic presented a formal protest to Parliament while a personal messenger from the prince was permitted to see the king on 28 January. Henry Seymour, the last Cavalier to pay his respects to his monarch, delivered the prince’s final letter to his father.101 Thomas Herbert described in his Memoirs how ‘Mr Seymour, at his entrance, fell into a passion, having formerly seen his Majesty in a glorious state, and now in a dolorous; and having kissed the king’s hand, clasped about his legs, lamentably mourning.’102 Seymour returned to the Continent with the king’s last message to his son and his letter of farewell to the queen, but news of the execution had reached Charles well before his agent arrived back at The Hague, delayed by the government’s closing of the English ports.

  Shattering though the news of the king’s execution was to royalists, a passive acceptance of God’s will was the response only of some. A quietist withdrawal into ‘the chamber of devotion’, as recommended by the Reverend Harwood at St Mary’s in Oxford in the aftermath of the disastrous defeat at Naseby, had no appeal to men like Boswell, O’Neill and Seymour. On the contrary, to continue the struggle, to take revenge on the murderers of the king, was an intense and widespread reaction among royalist activists. This feeling was apparent in London, where the anti-government underground presses were active, in Ireland, where Ormond still, at least on paper, commanded impressive forces strengthened by an influx of English Cavaliers, and among the communities of exiles scattered throughout the towns of western Europe. As a grim – in all senses of the word for royalists, –winter closed in, there was still plenty of employment available for agents in the service of the young man they now recognised as King Charles II.

  1 CSPD, 1645–47, p. 456. Cited in Smith, Cavaliers in Exile, p. 18.

  2 C. E. Long (ed.), with supplementary introduction by Ian Roy, Richard Symond’s Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 172, 249, 256; ODNB (Nicholas Armorer).

  3 William Huddesford (ed.), The Life of Anthony à Wood from the Year 1632 to 1672 (Oxford, 1772), pp. 26–8; H. Cary, Memorials of the Great Civil War in England, 1646–52 (London, 1842), i, 27–8, 133; Roy, ‘The Royalist Armies in the English Civil War, 1642–1646’, in A. Hamish Ion and Keith Neilson (eds), Elite Military Formations in War and Peace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), p. 86; Newman, Royalist Officers, p. 31.

  4 Bruce, Charles I in 1646, pp. 58–9.

  5 Cited in Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, p. 239.

  6 Ibid., pp. 239, 248.

  7 Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 187, 282.

  8 Ashburnham, Narrative, p. 85.

  9 Smith, Cavaliers in Exile, pp. 17–20.

  10 For examples, see HMC, 4th Report, iii, 162–8; Baillie, Letters and Journals, ii, 35, 48, 66, 125, 277, 395–6, 401, 407, 476; Bruce, Charles I in 1646, pp. 6, 12–13, 63–7, 71–2, 75.

  11 Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time, i
, 447. See ODNB.

  12 CClSP, i, 302, 309.

  13 Bruce, Charles I in 1646, pp. 6, 12, .63, 65, 66–7; Baillie, Letters and Journals, ii, 394–5, 401. ‘I leave the managing of all this to your dexterity’ (Charles to Murray, 15 October 1646), ClSP, ii, 275.

  14 Clarendon, Rebellion, x, 57; Bruce, Charles I in 1646, p. 67; ClSP, ii, 273, 297.

  15 Bampfield’s Apology, pp. 47–8, 111–14. See also Valerie Pearl, ‘London’s Counter-Revolution’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum, pp. 37–8.

  16 Charles I in 1646, p. 68.

  17 Pearl, ‘London’s Counter-Revolution’, pp. 38–43.

  18 LJ, vii, 520; Barwick, Life, pp. 70–3; Bruce, Charles I in 1646, p. 75; Firebrace, Honest Harry, pp. 31, 36.

  19 BL Egerton MS 2534, fos 117, 119, 127; NP, i, 285.

  20 Murdoch, Britain and Denmark-Norway, pp. 130–31.

  21 Ibid., p. 131.

  22 Cowan, Montrose, pp. 251, 254–5; Stevenson, Highland Warrior, pp. 231–41.

  23 Scott Wheeler, ‘Four Armies in Ireland’, in Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland: From Independence to Occupation 1641–1660, pp. 51–6.

  24 O’Neill left Hereford at the end of June, sailed from Cornwall to The Passage and Waterford, and arrived at Ormond’s headquarters on 8 August. Digby’s Cabinet, pp. 48–9; Gilbert, Contemporary History, i, 655–6; CClSP, i, 269. For illuminating accounts of this exceedingly complex period, see Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration, pp. 160–200; Wheeler, ‘Four Armies in Ireland’, pp. 53–6.; Cregan, ‘Daniel O’Neill in the Civil Wars’, pp. 120–26.