Although Armorer may at first have moved in the circle of royalists like Langdale, who were hostile to the influence of the Chancellor and his allies in the royal counsels, and been on good terms with an agent like Davison, whom Hyde regarded with deep suspicion, he was understandably critical of the Gerard plot, which hampered his own activities, made more difficult his money collecting and certainly endangered his personal safety.38 There are disparaging references in his letters to ‘the small factors’ involved in ‘Lord Gerard’s last business’. Armorer advised that ‘the King will do well to have a care what small factors he employs’.39 But that was the problem. The ‘small factors’ were not employed by the king, but by Hyde’s factional enemies and rivals, like Langdale, Gerard and Percy, and neither Charles nor Hyde nor their instrument, the Sealed Knot, had the authority to prevent the tragic fiasco of the Gerard plot from taking place.40
Armorer’s intelligence reports, including his outspoken criticism of the mismanagement of the Gerard plot, reveal a perceptive, if perhaps too optimistic, appreciation of what was needed to encourage a royalist revival in England.41 Both the reports and his actions also show that he understood where the prospects of his own personal preferment were brightest: not at The Hague, as a protégé of Nicholas or as an obscure member of Mary of Orange’s household, and certainly not as a client of the bitter and frustrated anti-Hyde émigré grandees like Langdale, Percy and Gerard, but at the exiled court, where resided the most influential potential patrons, the Chancellor and his friend and ally Ormond. Armorer was ambitious, with plenty of self-confidence, distancing himself on his first mission to England from the ‘small factors’ who further muddied the already murky waters of the royalist underground; gradually, he was to abandon Nicholas as an intermediary between himself and the court and instead come to communicate directly with either Hyde or Ormond.
Thurloe’s spies on the Continent had informed him of Armorer’s presence in England, but he successfully avoided the sweeping arrests of royalist activists in the aftermath of the Gerard plot and was not apprehended. He eventually returned to the Continent in the summer of 1654, reporting not to his original patron, Nicholas, who still remained at The Hague, but directly to the king and his principal advisers at Aachen in the Rhineland, meeting certainly Hyde, and probably Charles for the first time.42 ‘One Mr Armorer, whom I formerly advised you was in England, is lately come from the north, where he says Charles Stuart hath many friends,’ reported Thurloe’s most industrious spy at the exiled court on 10 September. This was Henry Manning, ‘a proper young gentleman, bred a Catholic’, with an impeccable royalist family background, who had recently arrived at court and ingratiated himself with the more convivial courtiers, the hard-drinking ‘good fellows’ who made up the group around Henry Wilmot, now Earl of Rochester. Manning kept a close eye on the unsuspecting Armorer’s movements: ‘I see the marquis of Ormonde take him from court, to discourse privately with him.’ Nicholas, always sensitive to perceived slights, was annoyed that he was now apparently being by-passed by his protégé, but was consoled by his friend Thomas Ross: ‘I know that Armorer is in frequent commerce with Sir Edw. Hyde, but he said it was the King’s command, or he would not have relinquished you, to whom he is bound by great obligation and affection.’43
Nicholas Armorer appeared at the court in Aachen at a moment when the cause for which he had just spent almost a year in constant danger of losing his liberty, and possibly also his life, was in an even more than usual condition of confusion and complexity. The leading members of the Stuart dynasty were by this time widely dispersed. Foreseeing a possible humiliating expulsion under the terms of the imminent alliance between the Cromwellian Protectorate and the French crown, Charles and his court had left Paris at the beginning of July. They could not return to Holland, as the republican anti-Orange government now in power in the United Provinces was in the process of concluding a peace with England. So, after brief stays in Spa and Aachen, the little court was eventually established in Cologne. As a Daughter of France, Henrietta Maria was able to remain in Paris with her own household; its membership continued to include the faithful Jermyn and Percy, even though, to please the queen, the latter had been appointed Lord Chamberlain to Charles’s court.44 A number of other émigrés, for example Lord Hatton, who were not on the list of royalists to be expelled from France under the terms of the Anglo-French alliance also chose to remain in Paris.45 Prince Rupert, by this time not on good terms with his cousin, left Paris in June and headed for Heidelberg, the battered capital of the territorially shrunken and in every possible way ravaged and devastated Palatinate of the Rhine, to which his older brother Charles Louis had been restored by the terms of the Peace of Westphalia.46 Charles’s aunt, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and oldest sister, Mary of Orange, remained at The Hague, maintaining generally friendly if occasionally strained relations with the royal court at Cologne, which Sir Edward Nicholas at last joined, now that there was no longer a hostile queen on the premises to harass and insult him.
Agents were kept busy communicating between these dispersed Stuart households, sometimes employed simply as messengers, but also occasionally entrusted with more important responsibilities as envoys, borrowers and collectors of money, diplomats or, in the case of someone like Daniel O’Neill, universal ‘fixers’. One such episode was recounted by Clarendon in his Life, where he acknowledged the extent to which O’Neill ‘was very acceptable in the court of the princess royal, and to those persons who had the greatest influence upon her councils and affections’ – in other words, O’Neill’s friends Jan van den Kerckhove, Lord of Heenvliet, the superintendent of Mary’s household, and his wife, Catherine Stanhope. O’Neill was sent from Paris to The Hague to defend Hyde against the false charge of disrespect towards the princess and to ‘assure Lady Stanhope and Heenvliet of the King’s friendship for them’. His ‘good offices’ were so successful that Mary found a place for Hyde’s daughter Anne among her ladies in waiting and provided rent-free accommodation in Breda, an Orangist stronghold, for Lady Hyde and her other children.47
Agents like O’Neill and Seymour were not only needed as emissaries and couriers between the dispersed Stuart households. Nicholas Armorer’s appearance at the exiled court in Aachen in the summer of 1654 had not been an isolated event. The different plans to bring about the restoration of Charles II to his thrones were stimulating an impressive burst of activity by royalist agents, numbers of whom were passing back and forwards between the different Stuart courts and the scattered groups of plotters in England. But in the aftermath of the bitterness caused by the fiasco of the Gerard plot, the proposers of new designs were divided, disorganised and at cross-purposes with each other. Armorer may have given Ormond and Hyde encouraging reports on the large numbers of friends Charles possessed and on their willingness to act on his behalf, but lacking a Walsingham or a Thurloe to impose direction and authority on their activities, their efforts on the king’s behalf were muddled and uncoordinated. And although the court at Aachen did not yet know it, in Scotland the Highland rising had effectively just been crushed.
Middleton’s optimism during the early months of 1654, as the rebellion in the Highlands spread and the numbers of men in arms against the occupying English rapidly increased, had led him in May to write to the king inviting him to Scotland. By the time Middleton’s ‘express’ had made the long and dangerous journey from the Highlands to the court in the Rhineland, the grounds for this optimism had crumbled away. In April George Monck returned to Scotland, replacing as commander the relatively ineffectual Colonel Robert Lilburne. Well supplied with men and money, and drawing on his grim experience of campaigns in Ireland, Monck carried the war into the royalist heartland, ruthlessly harrying the Highlands with fire and sword. Middleton’s cavalry were trapped and defeated at Dalnaspidal in Lochaber in July, while their wounded general, with a reward of £200 on his head for anyone who killed or captured him, retreated northwards into the wilds of Caithness.48 Some courageous ro
yalist agents, notably Colonel Borthwick and Captains Smith and Mews, continued for a few more months to carry reports and instructions between the king and his two commanders, Glencairn and Middleton, but effectively the rising was over.49 Understandably pleased with the success of a campaign conducted in wild and mountainous terrain, Monck reported to Cromwell on 21 September that Middleton’s forces had been reduced to 200 foot and 40 horse, ‘and those are already much distressed for want of provisions and are like to be in a starving condition this winter’. Monck was able to assure the Protector that ‘this Country is now likely in a short time to be in a settled posture’.50
One of the agents intended to travel to the Highlands with letters for Middleton was the king’s groom of the bedchamber, Tom Blague, who of course was familiar with Scotland. Blague was in Amsterdam in October, by which time news of the defeats suffered by the Highlanders would have reached the port; understandably, he seems to have been reluctant to put to sea, waiting instead for further commands from the king. From the safety of Paris, Hatton wrote several letters to Nicholas, criticising Blague’s apparent dilatoriness: ‘We hear Sir George Hamilton is to go for Scotland to supply Coll. Blague’s defects, which some here give out to be a great disservice in Blague.’51 This particular sniping letter was written on 19 February 1655, by which time Glencairn’s rising had been well and truly suppressed. Glencairn and most of the clan chiefs involved in the rising had submitted and made terms with Monck which permitted them a peaceful withdrawal to their much-reduced estates. Having quarrelled with Glencairn, Balcarres had already gone into exile, arriving in Paris in the spring of 1654. Middleton evaded capture with difficulty, eventually escaping abroad and returning to the exiled court in March 1655. After many adventures while on the run in the Highlands and the Western Isles, Moray eventually followed Middleton into exile and back to the royal court in Cologne.52
The suppression of the rising in the Highlands forced Charles and his advisers to reassess their priorities, especially as the treaties signed during 1654 by the Protectorate with both the United Provinces and France meant that the Stuart cause could no longer expect significant support from those two states. From the German principalities, Charles could hope for hospitality and even some financial support, but in the aftermath of the losses and devastation caused by the Thirty Years War, little more.53 So royalist hopes were once again centred on England, and there they would remain. At least the reports of those agents like Armorer who had recently been in England gave the court some grounds for modest optimism.
Certainly, this optimism needed to be qualified. So far, the Sealed Knot had been fairly ineffectual, failing to prevent the fiasco of the Gerard plot, but not developing its own alternative and better-grounded plans for a general rising. Its natural caution was further aggravated by an internal quarrel between two of its members, Lord Belasyse and Sir Richard Willys. In these circumstances the king and Hyde were now prepared to consider favourably proposals from a new group of conspirators.54 The confused and fragmented condition of royalist conspiracy at this time is sharply demonstrated by the fact that in early July the same agent first carried into England the king’s letter and verbal instructions that urged the habitually cautious members of the Knot to continue their efforts to organise a general rising, and then returned to the court in August with proposals from a quite different group of conspirators, who requested Charles to authorise an insurrection to be launched as soon as possible.55
The agent who carried these various letters, instructions and proposals was John Stephens. As an effective and trusted royalist agent, he can be ranked close to O’Neill and Armorer for his energy, resourcefulness and the esteem in which he came to be held by his employers. The Protestant son of the collector of the customs at Waterford and Ross, Stephens had served under Ormond in the Civil War. After the surrender of Dublin to parliamentary forces he had joined Ormond in France and then returned to Ireland with him in 1649. In Ireland he began his career as a trusted messenger, communicating between Ormond and other royalist leaders, including Rupert and Inchiquin. Writing to Ormond from The Hague on 30 March 1649, Byron entrusted his letter to Stephens, ‘so welcome a messenger as I know Major Stephens will be to your Excellency’. With the collapse of royalist resistance to the Cromwellian invasion by the end of 1650, Stephens once again accompanied Ormond into exile in France, bringing his wife with him.56
Ormond clearly felt an obligation to try and assist this loyal follower. ‘None can be more obliged by kindness to him than myself,’ Ormond informed Digby in November 1651, ‘so long and so faithfully he hath followed my fortune’. But Digby’s attempt to secure for Stephens a commission in the French army was unsuccessful.57 Instead, following the example of so many other rootless Cavalier officers, he became one of the king’s agents in the relentless underground war to overthrow the Protectorate and restore the Stuart monarchy.
As a loyal and trusted client of Ormond’s, it is understandable that Stephens should be chosen to carry the king’s message and letter of encouragement to the Sealed Knot, but it is perhaps surprising that he should bring back the ‘Particular Account’, the proposal by a quite different and newly formed group of conspirators for a rising that was intended to draw in not only the traditional church and king Cavaliers, but also Presbyterians, and even disaffected Army officers. Having both been in England at the same time, it is also clear that Stephens had been in touch with Armorer. In his report on 11 August, Stephens referred to the imminent arrival at the court at Aachen of ‘our friend’ with ‘some fresh proposals’, which are noted by Hyde as the ‘Account by N. Armo.’, a verbal report which was delivered at the end of August.58
Stephens and Armorer were trying to ride two horses simultaneously: the Sealed Knot, a cautious and easily discouraged animal, and the new group of activists, whom Underdown called for convenience the ‘Action party’. The term is certainly convenient, although it implies an overly generous assessment of its degree of organisation and coherence. But Hyde’s reference to this new group of activists simply as ‘the new council’ is not a particularly satisfactory alternative either, as the exact membership, structure and authority of this ‘council’ remain fairly obscure.59 Whatever its name, this was a much more mettlesome mount than the Knot, and eager to show its paces. Hyde’s memorandum of Armorer’s report lists an impressively large number of targets for royalist attacks. It also names 18 committed supporters of a rising, a mixture of existing members of the Knot, like Loughborough and Villiers, the Presbyterian magnate Lord Willoughby of Parham, who was well known to Bampfield and Titus from earlier negotiations, agents like Stephens and James Halsall, and a collection of modest country gentlemen that included Armorer’s two contacts in Shropshire and the north, Richard Scriven and Colonel Edward Grey. It was from this last group, ‘impoverished country gentry with respectable civil war records’ as Underdown calls them, that the effective leaders of the new conspiracy were drawn. For the most part they were gentry who were prominent in their local areas but not nationally, had suffered for their loyalty financially through composition fines and other exactions, and in some cases had dabbled on the edges of conspiracy already. With a few exceptions, they conspicuously lacked the impressive aristocratic connections of the Sealed Knot’s members.60
While the Sealed Knot counselled caution, the ‘Action party’ carried ahead with plans for a rising early in 1655, employing their own network of agents that included Tom and Gregory Paulden, and two other northern Cavaliers who were to be particularly active in the coming months, Major Thomas Carnaby, responsible with Edward Grey for organising the seizure of Newcastle and Tynemouth, and Major Robert Walters, who planned the capture of York.61 At the beginning of that year both the Knot and the ‘Action party’ sent agents to Cologne to present their different views. The messenger sent by the ‘Action party’ was Thomas Ross, an unusual figure among royalist agents as he combined espionage with scholarship. When he was not employed on secret missions he was working
on a massive history of the Punic Wars.62 Charles received Ross favourably, and immediately sent him back to England to inform his employers that the Earl of Rochester would shortly be on his way to command the insurrection, while he himself would follow as soon as possible. While Ross waited in Antwerp for a passage across the Channel, the Knot’s agent arrived in the same port on his way to Cologne. This was Major James Halsall, brother to one of the murderers of the Commonwealth’s envoy, Anthony Ascham, in Madrid six years earlier. When Henry Manning encountered him four months later at Cologne, he described him in a report to Thurloe as ‘about 35 years of age, round face, in short hair or a periwig, and a round man’: a curious description for one of the most daring and active couriers in the royalist underground.63 Halsall carried a letter from Edward Villiers that condemned the plans for an imminent rising, and warned Charles that the Knot ‘look on the rising of your party but to the destroying of themselves’.64 He had what must have been a tense meeting with Ormond and O’Neill in Antwerp, and then returned immediately to England with the disturbing news for his employers that the king had approved an immediate rising, leaving the Knot’s letter and his own covering note to be taken on to Cologne by O’Neill.65
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