Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  So a withdrawal into private life was one response by royalists to the regicide and the establishment of the Commonwealth, while a flight into exile was another. But neither of these courses of action was necessarily simple or straightforward. The three attendants on the king who had organised the flight from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight displayed strikingly different responses to the situation confronting them in 1649. All three – Ashburnham, Berkeley and Legge – had been forbidden access to the king when he was confined in Carisbrooke Castle, but only Berkeley had taken this prohibition seriously, almost immediately going into exile. Operating at a somewhat higher social level than Oudart, he also was soon deeply involved in the intrigues and disputes over policy that divided the exiles, with his particular interest being to confirm good personal relations with Henrietta Maria and then to establish his influence over the young Duke of York.11 Ashburnham and Legge had remained on the mainland close to the island, and Ashburnham was deeply implicated in the various schemes for the king’s escape. But in 1649, with his heart ‘full of sorrow and mourning for the death of our dear master of holy and glorious memory’, Ashburnham withdrew from the field of royalist resistance, to pay his composition fines, retire to his now heavily encumbered estate and to wait for better days.12 Will Legge, a more typical example of the fighting Cavalier, was not so easily discouraged. Having been frustrated by the quick suppression of the risings in Kent in 1648, and forced to join the flight of royalist fugitives to Holland, Legge continued to look for action. Not surprisingly, he turned to Ireland, where royalist armies were still in the field and his old friend and companion in arms Prince Rupert was establishing a naval base at Kinsale. Carrying letters from émigré leaders to Ormond, in the early summer Legge sailed for Ireland, only for his frigate to be pounced on and seized when it tried to slip through the parliamentarian Admiral Blake’s blockade of Kinsale harbour. Brought back a prisoner to Plymouth, Legge was charged with high treason and imprisoned in Exeter gaol, remaining in confinement for three years.13 Ashburnham’s payment of composition fines and withdrawal into private life; Berkeley’s emigration and involvement in the politics of the exiled court; Legge’s continued military resistance and consequent imprisonment: as the examples of these three attendants on Charles I demonstrate, the responses of royalist agents to the fall of the Stuart monarchy covered a wide range.

  Some agents neither withdrew into private life nor fled into exile, but instead went to ground in London, where, in the months following Charles’s execution, an extraordinary outpouring of royalist propaganda from the underground presses demonstrated the continued presence in the capital of a significant body of sympathisers to the Stuart cause. Several seditious weekly newsbooks, notably Mercurius Pragmaticus, Mercurius Melancholicus and Mercurius Elencticus, for a time were remarkably successful in evading government attempts to suppress them, but the most remarkable and most outrageous was clearly John Crouch’s The Man in the Moon.14 The survival of this colourful and scurrilous newsbook is evidence of the existence of an entrenched popular urban royalism, the presence of which was to provide a haven that would be exploited by the king’s agents for the next ten years. The Man in the Moon attempted to rally the shattered morale of the king’s supporters with savage and often obscene ridicule of the Commonwealth’s leaders, extravagantly unrealistic predictions of an imminent dramatic reversal in royalist fortunes, and grim predictions of the fate of the martyred king’s judges:

  Now Tom and Noll to Tyburn straight

  With president John must pace,

  And the rest of the traitorous junto there

  To end their wicked days.15

  The hopeful sentiments expressed in the royalist newsbooks like The Man in the Moon and Mercurius Melancholicus showed little if any insight into the reality of the contemporary political situation:

  Yet cheer up England, wipe away those tears,

  The night is passed and now the day appears.16

  For royalists, this looked-for day was going to be a long time breaking, yet despite plenty of legitimate causes for tears, the mood of the newsbooks usually combined optimism with anger, not with despair.

  Rising about the level of the indecent sexual libel and dreadful doggerel verse favoured by John Crouch were the productions of other royalist agents who were also lying low in London in 1649. John Berkenhead, one-time editor of Mercurius Aulicus, lamented the death of Charles I in his poem Loyalties Tears Flowing after the Blood of the Royal Sufferer Charles the I, which, like the royalist newsbooks and a number of other elegies on the royal martyr, successfully evaded the vigilance of the government censors and was printed in 1649. Whether we consider the scurrilous doggerel of the verses in The Man in the Moon or the more refined productions of the editor of Mercurius Aulicus, there is an insistent cry for revenge underlying the flowing tears, those conventional expressions of grief and horror:

  But hark, what fatal Noise is that which flies

  On terror’s wings, and thunders at the Sky;

  Poor Bradshaw now his leave in vain denies,

  For though Charles might not speak, his Blood will cry.

  It Cries, and fears not Guns, nor trumpets throats,

  Nor the more barbarous Roar of Rebels Votes.17

  Prominent among the royalist agents who neither retired into conformist obscurity nor fled into exile but remained committed to supporting the king’s cause from within London was John Barwick. Through his associate Francis Cresset, Barwick seems to have maintained some links with Charles I during his imprisonment, while he was also in touch in 1649 with the new king’s ministers in exile, employing his brother Edward as messenger.18 But these were dangerous times for royalist agents. The Treason Acts of 14 May and 17 July 1649 made it a capital offence to ‘publish by Writing, Printing, or openly Declaring, that the government is Tyrannical, Usurped or Unlawful’, and the authorities were vigilant to identify and crush opposition to the regime.19 A series of seizures of unauthorised printing presses and arrests of journalists, printers and ‘intelligencers’ netted, among others, Barwick and his brother Edward in April, and by the end of the year, the elusive Crouch. Although released from the Gatehouse prison after a few weeks, Edward Barwick died soon afterwards, but his brother was committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason, although never brought to trial.20 The government’s policy seems to have been not to create martyrs of royalist journalists and agents by hanging them, but to apply various pressures, including imprisonment, to induce them to abandon their support for the Stuart cause and to come to terms, and even to collaborate, with the new regime. With some this policy was remarkably successful, as is illustrated by the career of that notorious side-changing journalist Marchamont Nedham, and even eventually by the switch in allegiance of Crouch himself.21 The appeal of this policy was also aided by the seemingly unending series of victories by the Commonwealth’s armies over an apparently foundering royalist cause. For the time being Barwick remained in London, but in the Tower, with no opportunity to demonstrate that his loyalism, at least, was unfaltering. The loyalism of some of his associates, like Cresset and the bookseller Richard Royston, seems also to have survived the grim and bleak – in all senses of the word – early months of what Earl Miner has called the ‘Cavalier winter’, but it was certainly not at this time being expressed in any discernible activity.22

  The effectiveness of the repressive measures of the new regime meant that a withdrawal into exile was the best course to follow for those agents who wished to continue an active support for the Stuart cause. But during 1649 the traffic of royalists across the Channel was two-way. The flight to Holland of plotters like the Newburghs, Boswell, Titus and Oudart was swamped numerically by the return of royalists who had previously gone abroad but were now hastening back to compound, fearing that under new regulations they would otherwise forfeit their entire estates. Sir Hugh Cholmley, the defender of Scarborough Castle in the Civil War, was living in exile in Paris when: ‘having notice that the Parl
iament had admitted the King’s party to a composition (but some few excepted persons), I thought fit to return to England’. Cholmley returned from exile in June 1649, merely one of a flood of royalists hastening to pay their composition fines and preserve as much as possible of their estates. Indeed, the number of cases presented to Parliament’s Committee for Compounding in 1649 and 1650 exceeded those of any other year with the exception of 1646.23

  Among the royalists who returned to England from the Continent in 1649 was Joseph Bampfield. As is usual with Bampfield, the reasons for this risky action remain unclear, but are probably at least partly dubious. He may have felt that for the time being he had burned his boats with the émigré leaders of the royalist party, although he still possessed some influential sympathisers among them, notably Jermyn and Will Murray. He was also involved in a relationship with Anne Murray, the adventurous young woman who had assisted him with the escape of the Duke of York. The successful development of this affair was dependent on Bampfield keeping Anne Murray in ignorance of the fact that he already had a wife tucked away in the West Country. Whatever the reasons for his return, it was a dangerous action at this time. Bampfield’s well-advertised role in the duke’s escape and his connections with leading Presbyterians were quite enough for the authorities to take an interest in his reappearance in England. After going into hiding in London for a few months, he was finally tracked down, arrested in December and imprisoned in the Gatehouse, where the keeper was ordered ‘to receive Joseph Bampfield for holding correspondence with the enemy’.24 Bampfield was considered to be a prisoner of sufficient importance to be examined before the Council of State, but the authorities failed to hold him for long. According to Anne Murray, still in the toils of her romantic attachment to this apparently dashing and heroic Cavalier while remaining in ignorance of the depths of his duplicity, Bampfield cut the iron bars of his cell window with aqua fortis, then escaped with the aid of ropes taken from the bed, successfully making his way back to Holland.25

  During the months following the regicide, while some royalist agents fled across the Channel to Holland and others either retired into conformist obscurity or attempted to avoid discovery by disappearing into the seething and anonymous alleyways of the capital, a number still hoped to continue the struggle. By 1649 several of the most trusted and experienced agents had not been in England for years, but they had no intention of following the example of Cholmley and dozens of other royalists and quietly trickling home to apply to compound for their delinquency. Daniel O’Neill, for example, was in Ireland, still employed by his patron Ormond in the drawn-out and frustrating attempts to bring his uncle Owen Roe and his Ulster army into alliance with the heterogeneous mixture of royalist forces that in theory recognised the authority of the lord lieutenant and his ally Inchiquin. In the early months of 1649 royalist expectations – once again – were fixed on Ireland, where it was hoped that Ormond would soon be joined by the young Charles II, whose presence would help to revitalise and unite the various mutually suspicious but nominally royalist groups and factions.26 Two events suddenly transformed the political and military situation, threatening once again to dash the hopes of the king’s party. On 2 August Michael Jones, the aggressive and vigorous parliamentary commander in Dublin, decisively defeated Ormond’s army at Rathmines as it moved slowly and awkwardly to establish a blockade of the capital. What Cromwell called the ‘astonishing mercy’ of the victory at Rathmines shattered the main royalist field army and forced Ormond’s scattered and divided forces onto the defensive.27 Two weeks later Oliver Cromwell, at the head of a formidable, vengeful and well-equipped army, made an unopposed landing in Dublin.

  This transformation of the situation in the late summer of 1649 gave Daniel O’Neill’s missions to his uncle a new urgency. Ormond expressed to O’Neill his fear that ‘delay of his assistance is as ruinous to our business as almost his continued enmity can be’. At the end of August, as Cromwell prepared to march north from Dublin to besiege Drogheda, O’Neill was once more sent back to Ulster. After passing through what he described as a ‘distracted country’ from which, as far as maintaining garrisons was concerned, ‘little is to be expected’, on 4 September O’Neill arrived at Owen Roe’s army headquarters at Ballykelly, twelve miles east of Derry.28 Finally, an alliance between the royalist viceroy and the commander of the Irish Ulster army was agreed upon, for which Daniel O’Neill, one of the signatories of the treaty that was formally concluded on 20 October, deserves some credit.29 But it was all too late. The day before O’Neill reached his uncle’s headquarters, Cromwell appeared before the walls of Drogheda, soon followed by his heavy siege guns, transported by sea up the coast from Dublin. There was no longer a possibility of Owen Roe leading the Ulster army to the rescue of the doomed town. Further delayed by the decision to wait until a temporary truce with the local parliamentary commander had expired and by his own ill-health, Owen Roe and his army did not finally set out until 20 September. By this time the ablest of the Irish commanders was so unwell, according to his nephew, that he was ‘carried in a litter, which he endures but ill’. Nine days earlier Drogheda had been stormed and sacked by Cromwell’s army and most of its defenders killed.30

  Daniel O’Neill returned slowly to Kilkenny with the vanguard of the Ulster army, most of its troops dispersing on the way as they tried to live off the ‘distracted country’ and with its commander’s health collapsing. Owen Roe O’Neill never reached Kilkenny, but died at Cloughoughter Castle in County Cavan on 6 November; much of the military effectiveness of the Ulster army, which his nephew had spent so much time and energy trying to unite with the Stuart cause, died with him.31 On hearing the news some months later in Madrid, Hyde observed somewhat waspishly to the courtier and fellow exile Toby Mathew that ‘Owen O’Neill hath dealt somewhat frowardly with the King, to die after he had done him all the mischief he could, and before he did him any good.’32

  Hyde’s comment to Toby Mathew illustrates how the émigrés’ intense emotions of grief and anger at the original news of the regicide and the establishment of the Commonwealth were fuelled by the grim reports of a succession of military defeats and frightful massacres that kept arriving from Ireland. Bitter arguments over a number of issues – whether the exiled prince whom royalists now recognised as King Charles II should go to Ireland or to Scotland, remain in Holland or return to France, favour the representations of Irish Catholics or of Scottish Presbyterians, receive graciously the envoys of Argyll or of Montrose – divided the royal advisers and their various followers into hostile factions. A whole new range of issues and challenges now confronted the king’s councillors: the need to gain diplomatic recognition and practical aid for Charles II from European governments while having them denied to the envoys despatched by the Commonwealth; the urgent necessity of extracting financial support from British expatriate merchant communities while preventing them making any contributions to parliamentary coffers; the establishment of lines of communication and intelligence gathering networks that would link the scattered communities of exiles not only with each other, but with the new king’s intimidated but not necessarily totally crushed supporters in what had once been his father’s three loyal kingdoms. In 1649 there were ample employment opportunities for the geographically widely scattered royalist agents.

  A striking example of the variety of roles able to be played by royalist agents is provided by the activities of Sir John Cochrane, whose behaviour ranged from respectable diplomacy to downright thuggery. For much of the 1640s Cochrane had been either in the Netherlands or travelling up and down the Baltic, visiting Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Hamburg, Riga, Danzig and Mittau in Courland, negotiating diplomatic recognition for Charles II and attempting to raise loans, recruit soldiers and obtain ships and arms to support the royalist cause in Scotland, while at the same time intimidating those expatriate merchants who opposed his activities.33 Cochrane displayed enormous energy, travelling extensively as he attempted to mobilise support from the nort
hern princes and cities for the Stuart cause in general, and that of his patron and friend Montrose in particular. In November 1648 he was in Copenhagen, in correspondence with Duke James of Courland, an enterprising prince who was sympathetic to the Stuart cause and eager for his modest duchy, a vaguely defined dependency of Poland, to play a more important part on the European stage.34

  Cochrane could move easily from diplomatic exchanges with kings and princes to bullying of and threats against those who did not support the royalist cause. A couple of months later he was in Hamburg, exploiting the population’s horror at the news of the regicide and terrifying Henry Parker, the secretary to the Merchant Adventurers of Hamburg, and other expatriate sympathisers with ‘the rebels in England’, including the local minister, who was obviously a Puritan. According to Parker, ‘the servants of Col. Cochrane laid wait for the English minister, when he was going to the English house to preach, and would have pistolled him’. The pistols misfired, but undeterred, ‘the fellows being mad with anger drew their poyniards to stab the minister, who crying out murther, was rescued by the citizens’.35 As well as the alleged attempted murder of a minister, Cochrane also created a furore by his attempt to kidnap and hold to ransom several English merchants who were regarded as supporters of the new Commonwealth.36 In strongly worded protests to the Senate of Hamburg, the new Commonwealth’s Council of State complained at how peaceful English merchants had been ‘affronted and endangered’ by Cochrane’s thugs and demanded that this ‘pest to human society’ be expelled from the city.37

  The tumults that surrounded Cochrane’s residence in Hamburg did not interrupt his more diplomatically conducted campaign to obtain aid from the rulers of the different states around the Baltic, a campaign which got under way shortly after Montrose himself had made a very public progress through the courts of the kings and princes of the region. Having moved eastwards through the Baltic to Riga and Mittau by the end of the year, Cochrane claimed to have received impressive promises of aid from numerous sympathetic princes and merchants. The Duke of Courland, for example, promised to loan Charles II six fully armed and equipped warships, three to be delivered instantly to Amsterdam, while three were still being built.38 In Sweden the Scottish merchant John Maclean, who was based in Gothenburg and whose eldest son was married to Cochrane’s daughter Catherine, displayed strong royalist sympathies and was energetic in providing ships and arms and recruiting soldiers to assist Montrose’s expedition to Scotland.39