These developments had serious consequences for the principal royalist agents still in Scotland, in particular for Dysart, Bampfield and Titus. The first two in particular were compromised by their relationship with Argyll, who was largely held responsible by the king’s principal advisers at the exiled court for the ‘barbarous treatment’ Charles had suffered in Scotland. ‘All men complained of the marquis of Argyle,’ according to Clarendon, as he ‘prosecuted all the King’s friends with the utmost malice’. As he had become too closely identified with Argyll’s policies and alleged treachery, Dysart’s long career as a trusted royal confidant was effectively over. Learning that Dysart had arrived in Holland, Hyde wrote to Nicholas from St. Germain in August 1652 that he would not be welcome at court. A similar opinion was expressed by Ormond a few months later, when he informed Langdale that the king did not trust Will Murray, who was seen as a creature of Argyll’s.74 What further damaged Dysart’s reputation in the eyes of Old Royalists like Hyde and Ormond, who never had much time for Presbyterians anyway, was his friendship with Bampfield. ‘The Earl of Dysart has sent the King a letter, writ by Lord Balcarres, containing nothing but commendations of Bampfield,’ wrote Hyde scornfully to Middleton on 28 March 1653. Hyde replied to Balcarres with a warning not to trust Dysart or Bampfield: ‘The former will never fulfil his promise of supplying a ship with arms; and of the latter he knows more ill than anybody can know good.’75
While Dysart was effectively stranded in the Low Countries, Bampfield lingered in Scotland. To the English authorities he was still a wanted royalist spy, and on 4 August 1652 the Council of State issued a warrant for his arrest.76 While remaining in hiding in Edinburgh he continued to meet secretly with Balcarres and his associates, who were beginning to plan a royalist rising in the Highlands. According to Anne Murray, still deluded in her belief that Bampfield’s intentions and behaviour were both honourable, ‘every night in the close of the evening’ he came secretly to Lord Tweeddale’s house, ‘where those persons met with him who were contriving some means to assert their loyalty and free their country from continuing enslaved’. Murray identified ‘those persons’ as Balcarres, Dunfermline, Sir James Halkett, a widower whom she eventually married, and Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat.77
Although Bampfield moved in the circle of Balcarres and his associates, who clearly continued to trust him, it was firmly believed at the exiled court that he was also still an agent of Argyll. So Bampfield’s participation in any planned royalist rising in the Highlands was unacceptable to men like Hyde, Ormond and Nicholas, who were now beginning to assert their dominance, even though it was precarious and frequently challenged, in the royal counsels. Writing to Hyde on 13 March 1653, Nicholas claimed that Bampfield ‘gives intelligence to Argyll of all the Highlanders’ motions, strength and designs’. This accusation had some factual basis. From February 1653 Argyll was supplying Monck’s successor, Colonel Robert Lilburne, with intelligence about plans for a royalist rising in the Highlands.78 Eight years later, as a prisoner in the Tower, the regicide Thomas Scot attempted vainly to save his life by writing a full ‘Account of His Actions as Intelligencer during the Commonwealth’. In his account Scot acknowledged that he had received ‘some things of a general nature out of the Highlands and [about] the Royal Presbyterians (Balcarres and his associates) from Col. Bampfield’.79
Despite the disapproval of Bampfield voiced so strongly by both Charles and his advisers, including even a royal order to ‘the principal officers who are at present in arms for us in the Highlands of Scotland’ to arrest him, Bampfield continued for some months to move freely among the ‘Royal Presbyterians’ like Balcarres, and even the Highland leaders, with no apparent attempt made to enforce the royal command. As Clarendon reluctantly acknowledged, Bampfield was clearly ‘a man of wit and parts’, qualities exercised to good effect not only on the enterprising but also susceptible Anne Murray, but also on the royalist Scottish nobles and clan chieftains, whose obvious need to co-operate with each other was constantly vitiated and undermined by a host of personal, family, religious and political differences.80
Silius Titus, despite his parliamentary and Presbyterian background, his employment by Argyll, and his friendship with Dysart and Bampfield, does not seem to have lost the trust of the king and his advisers, although he was no longer as close to the heart of royalist affairs as he had been. In the lists of members of the royal household compiled at different times during the 1650s he is no longer included as one of the grooms of the bedchamber, only reinstated in this position after the Restoration.81 Titus slipped unobtrusively back into exile in the Netherlands, eventually to resume his career as a royalist agent, but not for some time to become a frequenter of the court. He was later to claim to Hyde that he had been ‘amazed’ to learn of the treachery of his old companion Bampfield.82
The first faint stirrings of a royalist revival in Scotland did not occur until the end of 1652, over a year after Huntly and Balcarres had surrendered to the victorious forces of George Monck. Just as a royalist revival was beginning in Scotland, the last embers of royalism were being stamped out in Ireland. As royalist and Irish resistance to the Cromwellian conquest crumbled, the Confederates in their desperation looked for aid from a foreign power.83 From the obvious potential deliverers of the Catholic Irish from Cromwell’s ferocious heretics there were few prospects of serious assistance; neither France nor Spain was prepared to allow the other to intervene decisively in Ireland. In any case, by 1652 the French monarchy was entangled in the civil wars of the Fronde, while Philip IV of Spain, the first European monarch to recognise the Commonwealth, had no desire to antagonise the new English republic.
Once again hopes were centred on Charles IV of Lorraine, who had failed to recover his duchy in the peace settlement in Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War, and who consequently remained based in the Spanish Netherlands. The duke remained a wealthy, militarily significant but landless princely warlord in search of profitable employment.84 The negotiations with Lorraine were primarily in the hands of agents appointed by prominent Confederates acting independently of Ormond, or when the Lord Lieutenant went into exile in December 1650, his hapless successor Ulick Bourke, Marquess of Clanricarde. With the significant exceptions of Lord Taaffe, and even Henrietta Maria further in the background, the king’s principal advisers remained unenthusiastic, if not actively hostile, towards the negotiations, dubious about their benefits and suspicious both of the duke’s intentions and the real objectives of those who hoped for his assistance. As early as October 1648 Nicholas had reported to Ormond that ‘there are here discourses of some pretty treaty with the duke of Lorraine, but little credit given to it, or to their counsels or negotiations of [those] who are employed in it’.85
As the situation in Ireland steadily deteriorated, the approaches to Lorraine became more urgent, while the duke’s ambitions increased correspondingly. After lengthy negotiations the Confederate delegates agreed to designate Lorraine ‘royal Protector’ of Ireland and to give him control of most of the territory still in Irish hands, in return for substantial military and financial aid, a proposal that Clanricarde considered ‘totally inconsistent with the king’s authority’.86 In these negotiations Taaffe, in his enthusiasm, overreached himself. Writing to the Archbishop of Dublin on 3 January 1651, Taaffe asserted that ‘no other Prince in Christendom is more willing or better able to defend you than this Duke’. Stating that Lorraine was ‘a wise prince and very rich’, Taaffe maintained that ‘if you encourage him you will have fifty sail before the end of March’.87
As an Irish Catholic, Taaffe had of course disapproved of Charles’s alliance with the Scots Covenanters. With alternative saviours of the Stuart cause becoming increasingly thin on the ground, the Duke of Lorraine, almost by default, had become for him the best option. But Taaffe exceeded his authority when he supported the proposal for a marriage between Lorraine’s daughter and the Duke of York. Charles responded diplomatically to the proposal of a
‘Marriage between our most dear brother the Duke of York and our good cousin of Lorraine’, but only on the decisive, and in the circumstances unrealisable, condition that Lorraine be able ‘to contribute in such manner to our reestablishment that we may be able to make the condition of our Brother as happy we desire’: no re-establishment of Charles on the throne by the duke; no marriage of Charles’s brother to the duke’s daughter. Taaffe confessed to Ormond that Charles had not been consulted about the proposal, and understandably, the king felt his sovereignty in Ireland was being undermined by the whole scheme.88 The approaches to Lorraine petered out, and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland continued.
It is significant that Daniel O’Neill, who was a friend of Taaffe and accompanied him from The Hague to Paris at the end of October 1651 when these negotiations were still continuing, is never mentioned in the context of the approaches to Lorraine. He must have known of them. In the same letter to Ormond from The Hague in which Taaffe admitted that he had ‘presumed to write to his Majesty but gave him no account of my proceedings with the d. of Lorraine’, he also mentioned that ‘Daniel O’Neill goes along with me to Paris.’89 O’Neill would also have known that his friend and patron Ormond disapproved of the whole scheme, so he wisely had nothing to do with it. His interests, as he rode south with Taaffe to join the court in exile, were no longer focused on the country of his birth, where he had spent long and bitterly frustrating periods during the previous ten years, and certainly no more on Scotland, but on England.
The court that O’Neill and Taaffe joined was understandably not a particularly cheerful institution. Riven by factions, demoralised by an apparently unending series of defeats and disappointments and ground down by poverty, it was humiliatingly dependent for its very existence on the living quarters and pension provided by the French crown. Deploring the ‘general corruption and licence of the court’, Hyde complained in his letters to Nicholas that ‘the weakness, credulity and vanity of our friends trouble us little less than the vices of our enemies’.90 He was referring to the behaviour of the court factions. Although those advisers, whether English or Scottish, who had advocated the alliance with the Kirk party had for the most part lost their influence, the return to favour of Hyde, Ormond and the Old Royalists was not unchallenged. As Charles and his more important followers had no alternative but to reside either in the Louvre or at the palace of St. Germain, members of the queen’s circle, the Louvrians like Jermyn and Percy, remained prominent figures at court. To become a beneficiary of the limited but apparently idiosyncratic distribution of royal preferment and favour, of pensions and places, consumed the energies of the courtiers. There was also a constantly changing crowd of hangers-on, of widely ranging degrees of respectability, who were attracted to Paris by the king’s presence; the more important or respectable were sometimes tacked on at the end of lists of the household, as ‘the lords and the gentlemen that follow the court’.91
Among the manifold problems confronting the court when Taaffe and O’Neill joined it, a shortage of money was the most acute. Armed royalist resistance to the Commonwealth had almost totally collapsed. Of the organisation of conspiracy and the collection of intelligence at this time there is little evidence. But the need for money was pressing. The pension from the French crown was inadequate and paid irregularly, so other sources of income were needed.92 To find them, in the summer of 1652 ‘honest Harry Seymour’, as Hyde called him, was sent to England on a money collecting mission. Seymour’s family connections, his experience and the many proofs of his reliability and courage made him the obvious choice for this dangerous mission.93
Seymour’s difficulties began at once. First he had to take a circuitous route out of Paris in order to avoid the skirmishing in the suburbs between soldiers of the Fronde leader, the Prince of Condé, and loyalist forces. Then when he reached England he soon learned that the authorities were expecting him, according to Nicholas: ‘there having been not long since an information given to the council of state that he is employed there by the King’.94 Allegedly, the informer was the queen’s comptroller of the household, Sir Henry Wood.95 Seymour was soon tracked down and arrested, but he did not join for long the large bag of royalists taken after the battle of Worcester and imprisoned in the Tower. With the significant exception of the Earl of Derby and two of his officers who were executed, there was no series of show trials of the royalists taken at or after the battle, as had originally been projected. Presumably, it was realised by the Council of State that to send a clutch of Scots lords and other notables to the block would not assist in reconciling the Scottish people to English domination, and so a more generous and conciliatory policy replaced the original proposal to make the prisoners severe examples of Commonwealth justice. Seymour was to benefit from this policy of a generally lenient treatment of captured royalist activists.
Although some important figures captured after Worcester, like Leslie and Lauderdale, remained confined, most of the others were gradually released, sometimes on condition that they ‘go beyond sea’ into exile.96 Some also contrived to escape, like the two generals Massey and Middleton, the first with the assistance of a convenient and presumably adequately capacious chimney, and the second in his wife’s clothes. Both got away to the Continent, from where they eventually resumed their involvement in royalist conspiracy.97 The Tower also failed to hold Humphrey Boswell. In March 1653 a special committee was established ‘to consider the miscarriage of the officers of the Tower in the late escape of Major Boswell’. It is not clear whether Blague also managed to escape or was one of those royalists freed on condition that he left the country. In any case, during 1653 Blague joined Boswell back in exile on the Continent.98
Sir William Fleming’s fortunes were more complex. Clearly, Fleming was regarded as someone extremely well informed on the sometimes lethal complexities of Scottish politics. So, on 27 August 1652, he was granted bail on condition that he travel to Scotland to be interrogated by General Monck, promising not ‘to do anything to the prejudice of the Commonwealth’ while he was free.99 It was while Fleming was making this journey that Seymour arrived in England, with not much opportunity for money collecting from the king’s adherents before he was arrested. Seymour was soon released on parole, but as Nicholas complained to Hatton, ‘the misfortune fallen so unluckily upon Mr H. Seymour hath so retarded his business for the K. that he shall not be able to get any money for the K. till Christmas, and much less than he expected’.100 By March, Fleming was back in London, and some time during the first half of 1653 both he and Seymour crossed the Channel to join the court in Paris.101
During the final months of 1652 and the first half of 1653, as royalist agents and conspirators like Massey, Middleton, Blague, Boswell, Fleming and Seymour, whether formally banished or as fugitives on the run, made their way across the Channel and back into exile, one of their number was going the other way. Some time during the winter of 1652–53 Daniel O’Neill returned secretly to London.
The evidence for O’Neill’s return to England, approximately a year after he had fled the country as a fugitive from Worcester, is confined to one document preserved in the Clarendon MSS in the Bodleian Library: ‘A brief Relation of the Affairs of England as they stand at present’. This intelligence report is endorsed by Hyde: ‘State of the Rebels in England, received from Mr O’Neale, 12 March n.s. 1653’.102 The report, delivered to Hyde six weeks before Cromwell’s expulsion of the Rump, analyses the political situation in London, concentrating on the condition of the army and the rivalry between the two factions of Cromwell and Harrison. O’Neill identifies causes of the increasing tension in London, for example the difficulties the Rump Parliament was having in financing the unpopular war against the Dutch, and claimed to have had private access both to ‘some who are of Harrison’s party’ and to some of ‘Cromwell’s party’. He believed that if there were a struggle for power between the two generals, Harrison would prevail. The implication is that if Harrison and Cromwell combined their
forces, the Rump was doomed.
For the Stuart cause, there was little encouragement in O’Neill’s ‘brief Relation’. ‘There is no talk of Presbyterian nor royalist at present,’ he reported, ‘but all the discourse is of these two factions in the Army.’103 With the hopes raised by the different campaigns of Ormond, Montrose and the king all dashed, with resistance to the Commonwealth stamped out by the English army in all three Stuart kingdoms, with even the royalist islands and colonies, from Virginia to Jersey, forced to acknowledge the authority of the English republic, it is not surprising that O’Neill, slipping back unobtrusively across the Channel to resume the impoverished existence of an émigré, could report to Hyde in Paris that there was no talk of royalists at present. But in fact he was not quite right. Charles’s crown had not quite faded into nothingness. In the early months of 1653, the flickering light of an apparently dying royalism was once again being stirred into life, not in England, but in the Scottish Highlands.
Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies Page 25
