Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  From a speech by John Thurloe to the House of Commons, January 1657

  ‘I find here little hopes of the King’s business,’ wrote Joseph Jane gloomily to Secretary Nicholas from The Hague on 11 January 1656. ‘And those that should give it life, give it lost.’1 Broken and demoralised by the ignominious collapse of Penruddock’s rising, by the wide-ranging arrests of prominent royalists that continued for months, by the new decimation tax on all Delinquents (whether they had been involved in subversive activity or not) and by the various forms of harassment inflicted by the newly created military regime of the major-generals, the activist wing of the king’s party could offer few opportunities for employment to its agents.2 As Henry Manning had predicted to Thurloe, in the absence of any other projects, ‘the murdering of the Protector’ was considered for a time to be the only way to strike at the Cromwellian regime.

  From the winter of 1655–56 onwards a number of schemes to assassinate Cromwell were planned, some concocted by Levellers and others by royalists. The different schemes, which with the royalists rarely got much beyond the talk of frustrated exiles over their wine, were developed independently of each other, without any central direction from the court, the Sealed Knot or anyone else. They are another illustration of the collapse of morale, of the absence of significant projects and programmes, and of the royalist underground movement’s failure to create any effective centralised authority to direct it. Some quite prominent agents – in particular Armorer, Stephens, Halsall and Davison – were involved in the murder plots, but they acted without much direction from the leaders of the royalist party, who preferred to observe a discreet distance from dubious activities of this nature. For to authorise the assassination of the Protector posed a pragmatic as well as an ethical dilemma. If Cromwell were killed, this might lead either to the collapse of the regime or to savage reprisals being unleashed by a vengeful army on defenceless English royalists. Assassination plots therefore had more appeal to émigrés, who although they may not have enjoyed the experience of exile, were at least relatively safe, than they did to stay-at-home royalists, acutely and painfully familiar with the military might at the disposal of the Protector’s loyal major-generals.3

  Armorer’s involvement in the murder plots was sensibly exercised from a safe distance. He merely sent his servant Thomas Pearce to London to investigate the prospects. But Halsall, now the principal royalist financial agent as his predecessors in that unrewarding role, Harry Seymour and William Rumbold, the Sealed Knot’s secretary, were both in the Tower, rashly returned to England towards the end of 1655. He was accompanied by his servant William Masten, who promptly betrayed his master to Thurloe. Halsall was seized as he left his lodgings, and what must have been a capacious lining of his hat was ripped open, revealing all his papers and ciphers and two letters from the king. He immediately joined Seymour, Rumbold and many other royalists in the Tower. Although closely confined, interrogated and claiming to be half-starved and threatened with torture, Halsall managed to have some communication with his fellow prisoner Rumbold and to get a letter, written in pencil, out of the Tower. It was eventually received by Ormond.4 Most of the royalists arrested during the period of repression that followed Penruddock’s rising were released reasonably soon afterwards, but not Halsall, who remained a prisoner in the Tower until February 1659, so ending for over two years his career as one of the king’s most energetic agents.5

  The two servants of Halsall and Armorer, William Masten and Thomas Pearce, were clearly dubious and unprincipled characters, motivated by fear and greed, and existing precariously in the shadow of the Tower and Tyburn. Thurloe had quickly snapped up both of them when they arrived in England, and they saved their lives by telling all they knew of royalist plots and by agreeing to being ‘turned’. Masten’s treachery was known to the royalists almost immediately. He was sent off to Spain by Thurloe, and Secretary Nicholas’s son John hoped that he might travel by way of Dunkirk, where Ormond happened to be present, attended by the faithful Colonel Stephens. John Nicholas was hopeful that Stephens ‘may make sure work of him whereby he may never return’.6 Pearce’s double-dealing took a little longer to be exposed. Now acting as a spy for Thurloe, he returned across the Channel to Antwerp, where he reported to Armorer, who then took him off to meet Hyde and Rochester in Cologne. According to Pearce’s report to his new employer, the king’s two councillors ‘would not by any means have any attempt yet upon his highness’s person’, which suggests an unlikely display of scruples, especially by Rochester. But the wretched Pearce was soon regarded with equal suspicion by both his original royalist and his new Cromwellian employers. On his return to England early in 1656 he disappeared back into the Tower, and there he remained for nearly three years, which effectively ended his brief career as one of Thurloe’s spies.7

  The involvement of experienced agents like Armorer, Stephens, Davison and Halsall in mismanaged and dubious assassination plots was because there were no other projects available to make use of their particular talents. The plots’ exposure by government informers demonstrates not just Thurloe’s efficiency, but also the deplorable consequences of reliance by the king’s agents on treacherous hirelings like Masten and Pearce. Armorer, who two years earlier had understandably condemned the employment of unreliable ‘small factors’ in the Gerard plot, should have known better. Quite apart from the self-interested duplicity of insignificant creatures like Masten and Pearce, other evidence also suggests that at this time, treachery was becoming more widespread in the dangerous and shadowy world in which the agents moved. Driven to desperation by poverty and lack of employment opportunities, by the hardships of life in exile and by a loss of any hope – after so many defeats and failures – that the king would ever be restored, several royalist agents, with previously respectable records of service to the Stuart cause, were quietly offering their services to Secretary Thurloe. John Walters, for example, brother to the Yorkshire agent Robert Walters, when entrusted in April 1656 with a letter from the king to the northern royalist Sir Henry Slingsby, delivered it first to Thurloe, who made a copy and then returned it to Walters, ‘to be carried as he had direction’. Walters was playing his own small part in the devious process that would eventually bring the unfortunate Slingsby to the scaffold.8

  For the most part, men like John Walters were minor figures, and the intelligence they provided Thurloe was fairly trivial.9 One of the more significant, but by no means clear-cut, cases was that of Charles Davison. His arrest early in 1656 for involvement in one of the assassination schemes was probably the final spur that drove him to offer his services to Thurloe in order to avoid the gallows, especially as his already serious predicament was worsened by his participation in an unsuccessful escape attempt by three prisoners, in the course of which a guard was killed.10 But poverty was another factor that caused him to abandon the king’s cause. Hyde, who did not trust him, would not employ him, while Langdale proved to be an unreliable and inadequate alternative as a patron. In the event, Davison seems to have provided little information of value to his new paymaster, who proved reluctant to release him from prison. Finally, at his second attempt he did manage to escape, and resumed some kind of a career as a royalist agent, although the correspondence of Hyde and Nicholas shows that doubts gradually developed about his ‘fidelity and integrity’. As a dramatic illustration of the hazards of travel regularly encountered by agents on the king’s business, Davison was eventually drowned, washed overboard while on his way to Antwerp in the same great storm that accompanied the death of the Protector.11

  The poisonous mood of suspicion and mistrust that permeated the royalist underground movement at this time threatened the reputation even of experienced and previously trusted agents. The investigation into the extent of Henry Manning’s treachery resulted in some of the associates of Thurloe’s principal spy at the exiled court also falling under suspicion. Were there any more Henry Mannings who had not been uncovered? For example, both Robert Phelips and Hum
phrey Boswell were interrogated at some length. Not surprisingly, there were no incriminating discoveries but some kind of question mark possibly remained over Boswell.12 Maintaining his reputation for irritating elusiveness, during 1656 he quietly dropped out of the records of royalist espionage and conspiracy. It is unlikely that he would have been able to return safely to England, so he may have died in exile.

  None of Thurloe’s spies and informers on the Continent was ever to match Henry Manning for the detail, frequency and personal malice of his reports on the activities of royalist agents. Even Bampfield’s usefulness was now declining, although he continued to send his intelligence reports, which were supplemented by several brief visits to England and meetings with the Secretary. After one such trip in October 1656, he was promptly sent back to Paris carrying a private letter from Cromwell for Cardinal Mazarin.13 For most of the time, Bampfield remained in Paris, his presence tolerated and even welcomed by the Louvrian courtiers in the queen’s circle, but his value as a government spy was reduced by his exclusion from any contacts with Charles and his principal advisers in the exiled court. Remembering the fate of Manning, and knowing that the exiled court contained individuals who were notoriously prone to violence, it is understandable that Bampfield kept well clear of it. Ironically, another reason for Bampfield’s reduced value to Thurloe was the new alliance between Cromwellian England and France. An important consequence of the alliance was that Sir William Lockhart, an experienced officer and diplomat who was close to Cromwell, was appointed ambassador to France. As the frequent correspondence preserved in the Thurloe papers attests, the Secretary also developed a close relationship with Lockhart, who as an ambassador possessed resources and enjoyed an ease of access to important persons in the French court that were denied to Bampfield. Although Thurloe continued to maintain his secret little army of spies and informers on the Continent, he increasingly relied for intelligence on the reports of accredited ambassadors, notably Lockhart in Paris and that devious weather-cock who represented the Protectorate at The Hague, George Downing.14

  By far the most notorious case in England of a royalist who turned traitor was that of Sir Richard Willys, one of the original members of the Sealed Knot, and Thurloe’s ‘masterpiece of corruption’. From late 1656 onwards Willys was passing information on royalist designs to Thurloe, a continuing act of disloyalty that fatally undermined the Sealed Knot as it tried to re-establish its authority and to rebuild the organisation of royalist conspiracy after the disaster of Penruddock’s rising.15 Willys’s treachery also increased the already considerable dangers confronted by those of the king’s agents who were attempting to encourage this revival of royalist activity. Nor was Willys the only traitor loose in the royalist underground. From at least 1656 onwards, Francis Corker, Vicar of Bradford before the Civil War and a serving soldier under Langdale during it, acted as a spy and informer for Thurloe. His frequent and voluminous letters in the Thurloe papers are full of reports on the movements and activities of royalist agents. In his eagerness to betray men who trusted him, in his vindictiveness and malice, he outdoes Manning, and even possibly Bampfield as well. The reasons for his treachery seems to have been more than money or self-preservation – motives which sufficiently explain the acts of betrayal committed by some poor or captive Cavaliers – but to have been something deeper and more personal.16 Sir Richard Willys in some ways is a tragic figure, a genuinely loyal and committed royalist with an impressive war record who was gradually broken morally and physically by repeated disappointments, by periods of imprisonment and by poverty. By contrast, Francis Corker comes across as a very nasty piece of work indeed.

  The policy makers at the exiled court could not long remain satisfied with the dubious prospects for success of the assassination plots, nor did they have the patience to wait indefinitely while a new royalist underground network was rebuilt in England, whether it was by the ‘wary gentlemen’ of the Knot or by an emerging rival group of less cautious conspirators. Once again, as had happened on a number of occasions since the outbreak of the first Civil War, the failure of direct action by Cavaliers in England to achieve victory for the royal party led to a search for aid from a foreign prince. By the winter of 1655–1656 the prospects of powerful foreign support for the Stuart cause appeared promising. Cromwellian England had become an ally of France, which still remained at war with Spain. The English naval assault on Spain’s possessions in the West Indies in 1655 led step by step to the formal outbreak of hostilities between the two countries, at first at sea and eventually also in Europe. Confronting a common enemy, the representatives of Charles II and the Archduke Leopold-William, viceroy of the Spanish Netherlands, began negotiations for an alliance.17

  In the conduct of diplomacy the Spanish crown set a high standard on formality, decorum and punctilious observance of protocol. Easily the closest to a dignified grandee of impressive aristocratic lineage that the threadbare and raffish court of Charles II could produce was the Marquess of Ormond, who consequently was given a principal role in the negotiations with the Spanish ministers in Brussels. He was assisted by George Digby, now Earl of Bristol, whose fluency in French and Spanish and his natural command of the courtier’s arts of flattery and dissimulation for the time being compensated for his ability eventually and inevitably to bring disaster on whatever project engaged his attention.18 As winter gave way to spring, Ormond spent much of his time in the Spanish Netherlands, moving between Antwerp, Bruges, Dunkirk and Brussels. On these journeys he was frequently joined by Daniel O’Neill.

  In the months that followed his escape from England after the suppression of the March rising, O’Neill had not been idle. He quickly resumed his position in the inner circle of royal advisers, being specially valued for his close connections with Mary of Orange’s household at The Hague. In fact, the princess’s Scottish Chamberlain, Sir Alexander Hume, had previously expressed surprise to a doubtless irritated Secretary Nicholas that correspondence between the two courts was ‘wholly managed by Dan. O’Neill and Mr Chancellor’.19 The Secretary, now established in the court in Cologne, relied on his intelligencers at The Hague, principally Hume and Joseph Jane, to keep him informed of O’Neill’s movements, in which he showed an almost obsessive interest. Jane, who had been warned by Nicholas not to be taken in by the Irishman as ‘you will find he is like his name, subtle’, informed the Secretary that in January, O’Neill had been in the entourage that accompanied Mary when she left The Hague on a private, but in the delicate circumstances of strained Stuart relations with the French crown somewhat controversial, visit to Paris. But O’Neill did not cross the border into France with Mary, instead he joined Ormond in Flanders. ‘Mr O’Neill went hence with the Pr[incess] R[oyal],’ wrote Jane from The Hague, ‘but I believe he returns with Mr Heenvliet, his principal business being to meet with my Lord of Ormond.’ Nicholas was horrified at the news that O’Neill had joined Ormond when the marquess was in the middle of secret and delicate diplomatic negotiations with the Spanish authorities, but he acknowledged sadly that the Irishman was ‘more of the secret council than I am, being a great confidant of Hyde’s’. To a conservative traditionalist like Nicholas, it was ‘no wisdom to make those who are not sworn to be secret privy to the secrets of state’.20

  The negotiations reached a successful conclusion when the articles of the Treaty of Brussels were signed at the beginning of April. Spain accepted financial responsibility for the creation and maintenance of a royalist army in Flanders, a preliminary to a renewed attempt to overthrow the Protectorate by an invasion in which Charles would also be able to call on the assistance of 6,000 Spanish soldiers.21 The court would now need to move from Cologne to the Spanish Netherlands, travelling first to Bruges, and then a few months later to Brussels. These developments created plenty of opportunities for O’Neill to display his talents as a universal ‘fixer’. In the upheaval of the court’s move from Cologne to Bruges, the king and his ministers turned to O’Neill to solve an extraordinary range
of problems. Charles wanted advice on the best route for the transport of his goods, while Hyde, who was in dispute with his landlady, turned for help to O’Neill, ‘whose subtlety would be very useful in ordering her’. Whether it was to organise the supply of provisions for the court, especially wine, or find a suitable campaign tent for Ormond and furnishings for his lodgings, or even to try and persuade the king’s discarded mistress, Lucy Walter, to behave more discreetly, the demands on the Irishman’s legendary resourcefulness were varied and extensive.22

  In his dealings with Lucy Walter, O’Neill had only limited success. The unrewarding and distasteful task of forcing Lucy Walter to hand over her son was to be passed on to other royal servants in the following years, including the agent Thomas Ross. But although O’Neill failed to persuade her to surrender the custody of her neglected little son, the future Duke of Monmouth, he was able to use his friendship with Heenvliet to prevent the Dutch authorities from treating her as a common prostitute, to ‘be banished this town and country for an infamous person, and by sound of drum’, which, as O’Neill pointed out, would not have reflected well on the reputation of her ex-lover, Charles II.23 Apart from this sordid and essentially unsatisfactory episode, the evidence suggests that he enjoyed enormously the varied experiences of his career as a royalist agent: the constant travelling, the plots and intrigues, the wheeling and dealing, and even the occasional exposure to danger.

  The alliance between Charles II and Spain also revived the opportunities of royalist agents for employment. Somewhat surprisingly, and it is a reflection on the dismal condition of the royalist underground movement in England in the aftermath of Penruddock’s rising, Charles and his advisers at first turned back to the Scottish Highlands to spearhead the assault on the Cromwellian regime. According to a report in August from Thurloe’s spy in Louvain, ‘Charles Stuart professeth … he will owe his first rise to Scotland, because it being poor, they do rise willingly.’ By contrast, England was regarded as ‘not attackable’ until Charles’s forces had been greatly strengthened and Cromwell’s weakened by the need to send reinforcements to Monck in Scotland.24 Some of the same agents who had been active in Glencairn’s rising – Strachan, Drummond, Borthwick and Smith – were sent back to Scotland to sound out how the clan chieftains would respond to a landing in the north by an army of 5,000 men led by Middleton. Despite his efforts, Monck failed to capture the king’s emissaries, but he remained unperturbed by the warning dispatches he received from Thurloe. In his letters from Dalkeith in the winter of 1656–57, he reported that the Highlands had been pacified, apart from a few ‘broken men and thieves’, who, if necessary, could easily be rounded up and then presumably strung up. Thurloe was reassured by Monck’s dismissive account of how ‘Major Strachan, that was here, went up and down in a plaid and had written and sent to most of the heads of the clans, whether they would join with Charles Stuart … but they absolutely refuse.’ Not only did the clan chieftains refuse to stir, Middleton failed to raise enough men for a viable expedition, and was unable to find the money to pay the Scottish mercenaries he had recruited. The Scots project collapsed, leaving the court with no alternative but to encourage the revival of royalist conspiracy in England.25