The staffing of the missions dispatched across the Continent reflected the arguments and divisions over policy within the exiled court as much as the need to impress European rulers with the justice of Charles II’s requests for aid. As well as the king’s permanent ambassadors, like Sir Richard Browne in Paris and Sir William Boswell at The Hague, some new residents were appointed. The courtier and playwright Thomas Killigrew was accredited to Venice with responsibility also for other northern Italian states. Special missions were also dispatched to a number of courts. Most were led by prominent members of the exiled court, the embassy of Lord Cottington and the reluctant Hyde to Madrid being the most famous example, with its travel expenses partly paid by a loan from the Duke of Lorraine.60 But less well-known figures were also dispatched around the Continent. Cochrane’s missions to different north German and Baltic states have already been discussed. One consequence of Cochrane’s dealings with the Duke of Courland was the gift to Charles from the duke of a number of fine horses. Sent to Courland in May 1650, both to replace Cochrane and to collect the horses, was William Armorer, an equerry and a royal household officer of long standing who was occasionally employed as a courier. Armorer possessed a fiery temper and was notorious for his dislike of Scotsmen, openly expressed in the royal court, where, according to a later intelligence report from one of Thurloe’s spies, ‘the equerry daily breeds quarrels with those of that nation’. Although presumably he knew a lot about horses, he was certainly no diplomat.61 Sent to Portugal at about the same time was Tom Elliot, who, as we have seen, had been employed as a courier between Henrietta Maria in Paris and royalist Oxford during the Civil War. Elliot was instructed to request King John IV to renew the traditional articles and treaties of friendship between the two crowns and to reject any approaches from the ‘traitors and rebels in power in England’, but, just like Armorer, the ‘loud and bold’ Tom Elliot was no urbane and courtly diplomat. He belonged to that loosely defined faction generally known as ‘the Swordsmen’ who looked for leadership to Prince Rupert. Also, again like Armorer, Elliot had no love of Scotsmen, having sworn as early as the outbreak of the Bishops’ Wars that ‘the Covenanters were all traitors’.62 From Hyde and Cottington down to Armorer and Elliot, the dispatch of royal envoys across Europe meant that in the early months of 1650 the court was being culled of those royal advisers and household officers who were known to oppose an alliance with the government of the Kirk party in Edinburgh.
While waiting for the return of Seymour to Jersey from his mission to Ireland, one of Charles’s attendants had written to Hyde’s secretary, William Edgeman, in Madrid that ‘the certain assurance of the condition of that kingdom will, I believe, remove us, one way or other’.63 The removal of the court back to Holland demonstrated that Ireland had failed, once again, to meet the often unrealistically optimistic royalist expectations. During the early months of 1650 the fragile alliance of different groups, factions and forces that nominally recognised Ormond’s authority was crumbling before the remorseless advance of the Commonwealth’s armies. This collapse is clearly illustrated by the tragic fate of Owen Roe’s once-formidable Ulster army. There was no obvious or universally accepted successor to Owen Roe, and a bitter dispute over the appointment divided a provincial assembly of Ulster clergy, gentry and army officers. For a brief period Daniel O’Neill, being Owen Roe’s nephew and Ormond’s friend, and by now a major-general, was a serious candidate for the command, but his Protestantism made him unacceptable to the clerical faction, while his closeness to the lord lieutenant was no longer the asset it may once have been. O’Neill also claimed to be in poor health, although there is little evidence for this in the impressive range of his activities during the following eighteen months. He may have been reluctant to accept the command in any case, discouraged by the generally desperate military situation and by the bitter factional feuding, deploring in a letter to Ormond the destructive influence of ‘such animosities of counties and families against one another’.64 Eventually, the assembly elected Heber MacMahon, Bishop of Clogher, a supple and skilful politician, but an unlikely army commander; according to a contemporary observer he ‘was no more a soldier fit to be a general than one of Rome’s cardinals’.65 Daniel O’Neill was fortunate that he was no longer with the Ulster army when Bishop MacMahon led it to its destruction at Scarrifhollis in Donegal on 21 June – a disastrous defeat in which many of the Ulster army’s officers who were not killed in the battle were captured and executed soon afterwards, among them Owen Roe’s son Henry and the unfortunate but militarily incompetent bishop.66
Daniel O’Neill was no longer even in Ireland when Scarrifhollis was fought and lost, having left the country a month earlier, never to return to his native land. Five months after his departure, in a letter to the Marchioness of Ormond from The Hague, he expressed how ‘to my extreme grief I was by the persecution of the bishops forced to leave my Lord Lieutenant, when he had most need of friends’.67 But for all his loyalty to Ormond, O’Neill also never lost sight of what Clarendon called ‘his particular interest’, a concern for which ‘he was never without’.68 Before leaving the kingdom, O’Neill seems to have had a meeting with General Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law and his successor to the command of the Commonwealth’s forces in Ireland, and to have received permission to levy 5,000 men for service in either the Spanish or Dutch armies.69 Despairing of the royalist cause in Ireland, O’Neill briefly seems to have envisaged a career for himself that was modelled on his uncle’s: commander of a mercenary Irish force serving the king of Spain. This career was never to eventuate, for there was another more immediate and inviting prospect facing O’Neill when he arrived at The Hague in May. He was just in time to join Charles II’s expedition to Scotland, which was on the point of sailing.
A couple of weeks, possibly only a few days, before O’Neill arrived at The Hague, Sir William Fleming left Breda on a hopeless mission to save the life of Montrose, the victim both of the relentless hatred of the leaders of the Kirk party and of the confusions and contradictions of royal policies. By the time O’Neill arrived at The Hague, Charles had reluctantly come to agree to an alliance with the Covenanter regime. During several months of often bitter and acrimonious negotiations with the Scots commissioners at Breda, Charles found himself increasingly dependent on advice from those counsellors who favoured reaching an agreement with the Kirk party’s commissioners. Those advisers and courtiers who opposed any deal with the Kirk party had either been expelled from court, dispatched out of the way on various missions or had withdrawn themselves voluntarily in disgust.70 It was against this discouraging background of the king’s negotiations with his enemies that Montrose launched his invasion of Scotland. As early as September 1649 a small advance party under James Hay, Earl of Kinnoul, had been sent to occupy the Orkney Islands as a forward base from which to invade the mainland. Montrose himself arrived with about 1,200 men, mainly Danish mercenaries, in March 1650, while Cochrane’s friend James King, Lord Eythin, was appointed to lead a second wave of soldiers being mustered in the Baltic ports. Eythin’s reinforcements never sailed, for Montrose’s last campaign ended in disaster. Early in April he crossed to the mainland and advanced southwards with his small and unimpressive force, attracting few adherents. On 27 April, at Carbisdale on the border of Ross and Sutherland, in an engagement that ‘was less a battle than a rout’, Montrose’s little army was destroyed. After surviving for a week as a fugitive on the run, Montrose was captured and brought back to Edinburgh to face with calm dignity and courage an ignominious and inevitable death.71
Sir William Fleming was at the centre of the last act in Montrose’s extraordinary, but in its final stages tragic, life. Fleming, an old friend of Montrose to whom he was related, had, as we have seen already, plenty of experience as an envoy and messenger in the complex and violent world of Scottish politics. In the first two weeks of May he received from the king a series of letters and instructions either to deliver to or withhold from, depending
on the situation he encountered, Montrose or the Scottish Parliament. The instructions reveal Charles’s uncertainties and irresolution. Having at first been ordered ‘to go on vigorously and not disband’, Montrose might instead now need to be informed that Charles had reached an agreement with the Scottish government that required him to disband his forces and withdraw from the kingdom, although he was to be privately assured of the king’s continued favour. The different letters and instructions, dated 3, 5, 8 and 12 May, but all intended to be carried by Fleming on one journey, illustrate the confusion and uncertainty in royalist policy, made unavoidably but significantly worse by ignorance of what was happening in Scotland. For when these overlapping letters and instructions were given to Fleming at Breda to take to Scotland, Montrose was already a prisoner – one contingency they had not allowed for. Fleming was still at Breda on 12 May, although Will Murray, acting as the courier between Argyll and the Scots commissioners, had already set out for Scotland carrying letters from the commissioners that, in conjunction with the king’s letter of 12 May, eventually delivered by Fleming, enabled Argyll to present to Parliament the official Kirk party line that Montrose’s expedition had not been authorised by the king. For by the time Fleming arrived in Edinburgh, Montrose was dead.72
For the time being Fleming and Murray remained in Scotland, where Charles was now preparing to join them. There is unfortunately no record of Fleming’s reaction to the death of Montrose, shortly followed by the executions of some of his officers captured at Carbisdale, or to Charles’s alliance with Argyll and the Kirk party. Fleming was not a ‘Montrosian’ in the narrow sense, like for example Cochrane, whose long career as a royalist agent seems to have come to an abrupt end at this time.73 Fleming’s royalism was broader, encompassing, as his earlier missions showed, friendly relations with moderate Covenanters and Engagers like the Hamilton brothers, Lauderdale and Callendar. There is no evidence that he expressed any disillusionment with the treatment of Montrose by Charles, whom he was to accompany on the invasion of England a year later and fight for at Worcester.
Before Charles sailed for Scotland with an entourage that included several experienced agents, a number of other messengers and conspirators were dispatched to England to hasten the planning of royalist risings intended to coincide with – once again – a Scottish army crossing the border, but this time one that would be commanded by the king. Not surprisingly, it was in the West Country that an organised conspiracy network was most developed: the Western Association, under the leadership of Hertford’s eldest son Henry, Lord Beauchamp. The extensive Seymour interest was the foundation on which the Western Association was built. Prominent among the agents who made the dangerous journeys between ‘the Gentlemen of the West’ and the exiled court at this time were the Dorset Cavalier Colonel Alexander Keynes, Harry Seymour’s younger brother John, and his brother-in-law Colonel Jonathan Trelawney, who was later to claim that the Commonwealth authorities had come to regard him as the ‘most obnoxious’ royalist in the West Country.74
Outside the West Country, with the partial exception of Lancashire, where agents of the ultra-royalist Earl of Derby, who was still holding out on the Isle of Man, were active, there is little evidence of any effective or widespread organisation of royalist opposition to the Commonwealth.75 The key figures in London and the south-east were Thomas Coke, son of Charles I’s secretary of state, and Colonel Thomas Blague, one-time die-hard defender of Wallingford, but now in exile as a rather unlikely groom of the royal bedchamber. Accompanied by another Cavalier ex-officer, Sir Richard Page, Coke and Blague travelled from Holland to England in June. Blague came originally from Suffolk, and it was his responsibility to organise royalist activity in East Anglia, which he seems to have already visited a few months earlier, while Coke had two principal tasks: to reestablish links with the London Presbyterians broken by Silius Titus’s flight into exile a year earlier, and to supervise and co-ordinate the plots beginning to take shape in the Home Counties.76
The prospects of a revival of Stuart fortunes were therefore not particularly promising when at the beginning of June Charles boarded a Dutch ship provided by his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, for the voyage to Scotland. The fragile royalist and Irish alliance that had been cobbled together under Ormond’s leadership in Ireland was unravelling before the formidable assaults of the Commonwealth’s armies. Portions of Montrose’s dismembered body were on display in Edinburgh, Stirling, Glasgow, Perth and Aberdeen – an appallingly gruesome demonstration that Scotland was under the undisputed control of an intransigent and rigid Kirk party.77 The English Cavaliers were not yet in any position, even if they wished to do so, to challenge the authority of the Commonwealth, while many of them, including some of the king’s most demonstrably loyal and prominent supporters, disapproved of the alliance with Scotland. Finally, no foreign state seemed willing to provide any significant aid to what appeared to be an increasingly desperate and forlorn Stuart cause.
Accompanying Charles on the voyage to Scotland was a not particularly sympathetic entourage of Scots nobles and clerics, although it did include the reasonably congenial Hamilton and Lauderdale. There were also on board a number of English courtiers and royal companions who favoured the alliance, notably the Duke of Buckingham and Henry Wilmot, and inevitably several of the king’s grooms of the bedchamber and other household officers, including Henry Seymour, Nicholas Oudart, Ned Progers and John Poley.78 Somewhat surprisingly, Daniel O’Neill, whose dubious Irish ancestry, spectacularly Malignant career and unshakeable Ormondist loyalties would all have made him anathema to any good Covenanter, also managed to find a place on board. O’Neill was taking a risk in travelling to Scotland in that company, but with the royalist cause in Ireland collapsing, it was in his ‘particular interest’ to establish a close relationship with the king.79 Silius Titus, with his Presbyterian background, was a much more acceptable royal attendant in Scottish eyes. Unable to resist the opportunities for advancement suggested by a royalist alliance with the Covenanters, Bampfield was also on his way to Scotland. Blague and Boswell were to follow him.80 As Fleming and Murray were already in Scotland, there was a remarkable concentration of royalist agents in the northern kingdom at this critical point in the fortunes of the Stuart cause. Some of them were about to be extremely busy.
1 Clarendon, Rebellion, xi, 238, 244.
2 Paul Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), pp. 63–5; Royle, British Civil War, pp. 438–9, 454–5, 507, 516–17; Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, p. 289.
3 Clarendon, Rebellion, xii, 150.
4 Quoted in Jason Peacey, ‘Order and Disorder in Europe: Parliamentary Agents and Royalist Thugs 1649–1650’, Historical Journal, vol. 40, no. 4 (1997), p. 953.
5 Firebrace, Honest Harry, pp. 193–7; ODNB.
6 Poynting, ‘Deciphering the King’, pp. 128–9; Firebrace, Honest Harry, pp. 190–2; ODNB (Firebrace). Unlike other royal servants of Charles I in his captivity, like Firebrace and Titus, there seems to be no record of Wheeler and Whorwood being rewarded at the Restoration for their services.
7 NP, i, 73–4; CSPD, 1648–49, p. 38; ODNB. Oudart’s future career lay principally in Holland, in the service of the house of Orange.
8 Desiderata Curiosa, ii, Book IX, p. 52; ODNB (Titus).
9 CSPD, 1648–49, p. 320; CSPD, 1650, p. 265.
10 Clarendon, Rebellion, xii, 10; Brown, ‘Courtiers and Cavaliers’, pp. 173, 189; ODNB (James Livingston of Kinnaird and Katherine Stuart).
11 Ashburnham, Narrative, pp. 122, 127; Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, Clarendon’s Four Portraits, ed. Richard Ollard (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), pp. 117–19; Miller, James II, pp. 9–10.
12 Ashburnham, Narrative, pp. 11, 129, 133–4; Calendar of the Committee for Compounding, p. 1,863; NP, i, 111; Sean Kelsey, ‘Ashburnham, John (1602/3–1671)’, ODNB, September 2004, online edn, January 2008, accessed 21 March 2010.
13 A Modest Narrative of Intel
ligence for the Republique of England and Ireland, no. 16 (14–21 July 1649), pp. 123–5; Carte, Letters and Papers, i, 240; CSPD, 1649–50, p. 235; Newman, Royalist Officers, pp. 227–8; Ian Roy, ‘Legge, William (1607/8–1670)’, ODNB, 2004, accessed 20 March 2010; Charles Spencer, Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), p. 208.
14 Jason McElligott, ‘The Politics of Sexual Libel: Royalist Propaganda in the 1640s’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1 (2004), pp. 75–8; Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, pp. 274–5, 289, 328.
15 The Man in the Moon, no. 4 (10 April–7 May 1649), p. 25. The references are to Fairfax, Cromwell and John Bradshaw, president of the court that tried the king. Fairfax, of course, took no part in the trial. For Crouch’s career, see Jason McElligott, ‘John Crouch: A royalist journalist in Cromwellian England’, Media History, vol. 10, no. 3 (2004), pp. 139–55.
16 Mercurius Melancholicus, no. 1 (21–28 July 1648), p. 7.
17 Sir John Berkenhead, Loyalties Tears Flowing after the Blood of the Royal Sufferer Charles the I (London, 1649), p. 6. For elegies on Charles I, see Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, pp. 296–8.
18 Barwick, Life, p. 86; ODNB (Barwick).
19 Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. C. H. Firth and C. S. Rait, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1911), ii, 120–21, 193–4. See also McElligott, ‘John Crouch’, p. 142.
20 Barwick, Life, pp. 89, 94–5, 120–21.
21 McElligott, ‘John Crouch’, pp. 142–5.
22 When Barwick was released from the Tower in August 1652 after lodging bail of £400, half of the amount was provided by Royston; ODNB (Barwick). For the expression ‘Cavalier winter’, see Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton, pp. 187, 282–8.
Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies Page 21
