Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  To encourage such a revival, reliable and trusted agents were needed, while the royalist army being formed in Flanders also required a corps of experienced officers. From early 1657 onwards, in diplomatic, conspiratorial and military affairs, there is a marked increase in the level of activity of agents employed on the king’s business – a process which would continue until the Restoration. On 10 February, in recognition that the Scottish project had been abandoned and the royalists’ focus was back on England, Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell that ‘the common enemy is certainly stirring, and that very vigorously. They threaten an invasion some time in March, and have directed their party here to prepare for it.’26 Although Thurloe was exaggerating both the level of military preparedness of Charles’s forces on the Continent and the state of readiness of the king’s party to support an invasion, clearly the royalist leaders no longer regarded England as ‘not attackable’.

  The army that Thurloe feared was about to attempt an invasion was being painfully constructed in Flanders from a motley collection of professional soldiers, most of them Irish, drawn from different foreign services, as well as from a crowd of adventurers and refugees attracted for a variety of motives to the king’s service. Writing from Antwerp in May 1656, one of Thurloe’s spies reported the approach of Charles II, whose presence attracted ‘many English [who] do flock to him from all parts’.27 At its peak the royalist army numbered 2,000–3,000 men, organised into six foot regiments – four Irish, one Scottish and one English – with a small cavalry lifeguard. Among the regimental commanders were Ormond, with Stephens on his staff, Taaffe, Middleton, Newburgh and Rochester. In October 1657 Rochester, who commanded the English Guards regiment, fell ill of a fever, and in the following month his command was transferred to Blague.28 Rochester’s turbulent career of plots and intrigues, campaigns and battles, arrests and escapes, which had begun when he fought alongside Daniel O’Neill at the siege of Breda twenty years earlier, was also to end in the Netherlands. He died at Sluys in February 1658, and was buried beside his fellow royalist, General Lord Hopton, who had died in Bruges six years earlier.29

  Among the adventurers who flocked to join the little army were some whose clandestine activities on the king’s business had made it advisable to leave England quickly. For example, the northern Cavalier Thomas Carnaby, who had been deeply involved in the designs to seize York and Tynemouth in March 1655, had sensibly maintained a low profile since. But now that what Thurloe regarded as the common enemy was stirring, Carnaby was once more drawn into conspiracy, in this case into the network of Sir Marmaduke Langdale, his old patron and commanding officer. Although Langdale’s activities had been regarded with suspicion by Hyde in the past, attitudes had clearly changed. This time it was with Hyde’s encouragement that Langdale attempted to recreate the royalist underground organisation in the northern counties. He naturally looked for support to prominent northern royalists like Belasyse, Slingsby, Grey and Carnaby, and a number of couriers, experienced agents like the indefatigable Paulden brothers, Robert Walters, and John Cooper, as well as more obscure figures like Robert Dungan and one Barton, were employed as messengers to maintain links between the plotters in England and their patrons in exile. Unfortunately, Langdale ignored Hyde’s advice to only employ ‘some who are discreet’, and included in his revived network another old soldier who had served under him, Francis Corker. The treacherous ex-priest and ex-royalist soldier passed on to Thurloe information on the design that he was able to acquire from his too trusting former commander, whom he claimed to have visited on the Continent. Inevitably, a wave of arrests broke up the network almost before it was formed, Gregory Paulden being one of those seized.30

  Tom Carnaby escaped Thurloe’s round-up and fled into exile, turning up in Flanders and joining the royalist army being raised there. Clearly an extremely restless individual, he then drifted to Paris, where for a time he existed in abject poverty, in ‘danger to perish for want of bread and clothing’, according to Percy Church, a kind-hearted member of Henrietta Maria’s household and one of Hyde’s regular intelligencers. Hyde arranged for money to be sent to Carnaby, who seems to have managed to rejoin the army in Flanders, receiving eventually a colonelcy and apparently even a knighthood as a reward for his services.31 This roughly simultaneous revival of conspiracy in England and creation of an army in Flanders meant that men like Blague, Stephens and Carnaby could move backwards and forwards between these two principal areas of active royalism.

  The attempt by Langdale to recreate an organisation to manage conspiracy in the north had its counterparts also in southern England. By the end of April 1656 the Sealed Knot had re-established links with Hyde, employing as their courier a Kentish Cavalier, Major Philip Honywood, who had served under Willys in the Newark garrison in the Civil War.32 Although as part of its revival the Knot widened its membership, it retained its habitual caution; its capacity for decisive action and effective direction remained paralysed, both by the treachery of Willys and by the frequent spells in prison suffered by its leaders, especially by Compton and Russell. The way was left open for the emergence of several essentially uncoordinated groups of plotters in different parts of the Midlands, the West Country, some of the southern counties and London.

  The leadership of these emerging groups of hopeful plotters reflects their variety. Leaders ranged from the influential Sir John Grenville, undisputed leader of the Cornish royalist gentry, through the self-important surgeon Richard Pile, with his ambitious plans for major risings in Somerset and Gloucestershire, to Dr John Hewett, a distinguished Anglican minister, and John Stapley, a disaffected Cromwellian with a regicide father, who were both at the centre of several plots that were being concocted in London and the Home Counties.33 By far the most notable new figure to emerge as a leading royalist conspirator was John Mordaunt, the energetic and forceful younger brother of the second Earl of Peterborough. Mordaunt’s principal sphere of operations was in Surrey, but his interests were anything but narrowly local. His ambition and energy, his aristocratic connections and his links through his mother with prominent Presbyterians gave the organisation of royalist conspiracy a broader base and a dynamism it had previously lacked.34

  The leaders of these largely uncoordinated centres of conspiracy spawned their own networks of agents and messengers. Some old hands in royalist plotting, who had been lying reasonably low since the suppression of Penruddock’s rising – like Pile, John Seymour and Trelawney – now reappeared on the scene. But one of the most experienced of all royalist agents, John Seymour’s older brother Henry, although he was finally released from the Tower ‘upon hard terms’ in the middle of 1657, after two years imprisonment, did not resume his activities on the king’s business. Although Hyde wrote to one of his London intelligencers in July that he longed to hear from ‘honest Harry Seymour’, both the health and the fortune of one of the ablest and most courageous of royalist agents had suffered from his confinement, and he remained in England, living quietly and unobtrusively.35

  There were plenty of new royalist agents eager to fill any gaps left by Seymour’s withdrawal from the field. One of the most active was a former parliamentarian, Richard Hopton, a younger son of Sir Richard Hopton of Canon Frome, Herefordshire. Armorer liked to regard Hopton as his own protégé, writing to Ormond from The Hague in May 1656 that he was sending him to the West Country to make contact with Pile and his circle of plotters. But Hopton was both wide-ranging and energetic in his activities, and certainly no deferential client of Armorer’s. His largely independent travels in England between different groups of plotters in London and the West Country and his journeys back and forwards across the Channel to hold meetings with the king and Nicholas, while deliberately avoiding any contact with Hyde, illustrate both the lack of any overall direction of conspiracy and the continued baleful influence of factional and personal rivalries among the king’s agents and their patrons.36

  Despite its lack of organisation and discipline, the revival of conspir
acy in a number of different areas, the recruiting of new adherents like Stapley to the Stuart cause, and the busy bustling to and fro of an increasing number of agents all demonstrate a renewed vitality in a cause that had once appeared to be foundering. In January 1657 Thurloe, in a parliamentary speech, expressed his irritation that ‘the old Delinquent Party’ was once again ‘hatching new disturbances to trouble the peace of the State’.37 This vitality is also reflected in the increased volume of intelligence reports and letters of other kinds being dispatched from England to the exiled royalist leaders. Hyde, for example, had a number of regular intelligencers in London. His papers are full of letters from the Knot’s two secretaries, William Rumbold and Alan Brodrick, from the faithful Dr Barwick, who resumed his role as intelligencer on his release from the Tower, and from a number of other correspondents. There were also more couriers now available to carry them. On their missions back and forwards across the Channel, agents like Armorer, Stephens and Hopton regularly carried bundles of letters, commissions, instructions, requests for money or expressions of thanks at having received some.

  Where possible, the organisers of conspiracy preferred to rely on experienced couriers like Armorer and Stephens rather than the regular post, exposed as it was to the scrutiny of Thurloe’s agents. But there are indications that fear of the Secretary’s capacity to intercept letters between England and the Continent was declining. In April 1656 William Rumbold had written to Ormond that he ‘durst not send letters by the ordinary [way] as that way is dangerous’. He enclosed a cipher key for Ormond’s use, but warned him that his ‘letters must not be adventured by the post, as they are searched weekly’. Nine months later, Alan Brodrick, Rumbold’s successor as Secretary of the Knot, advised Hyde that it was now reasonably safe to send letters by the common packet, even ‘although Thurloe be postmaster’. Letters should be directed to be left at the George Inn, at Brownrigg’s, or at the shop of the bookseller Mr Twyford at the Inner Temple Gate, and addressed to Mr Jonathan Perkins. On the other hand, Lysson the barber’s was no longer a secure address, and was not to be used.38

  A key figure in managing the security of this increased volume of correspondence was a somewhat surprising figure, the abbess of a convent. Mary Knatchbull, from a Kentish gentry family, in 1650 succeeded her aunt as the Benedictine abbess of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Ghent. She then gradually made her convent a regular clearing house for royalist correspondence. Royalists in England wrote not to the king or members of the exiled court, but direct to the abbess, who forwarded their letters on to Hyde. She clearly read them first and only bothered to send on those she considered important. ‘Nothing has come by the post worth sending,’ she informed Hyde on 14 October 1658, ‘merely good wishes and hasty desires for the king’s service.’ She was also quite prepared to pass on her own views on information contained in the letters she read. On 29 July 1658 Hyde warned Charles that he had just received ‘a very discreet and sad letter from the Abbess, enclosing a letter from London with such mention of the King’s pursuits … which is little for his advantage’.39 Abbess Knatchbull was clearly kept busy as a kind of secret royal postmistress, exercising the traditional right of holders of that office to open the mail that passed through her hands. In her correspondence with Hyde, Ormond and Nicholas there are frequent, at times almost weekly, references to large packets of letters received from and dispatched to England, including letters to and from active conspirators. That the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Ghent was able to continue to act as a clearing house for royalist correspondence until the Restoration is further evidence of a deterioration of the English government’s security measures during the last years of the Interregnum.

  Whether brought by an increasing number of messengers or entrusted to the post, the exiled court was receiving a range of mixed messages on the prospects for a successful rising. While the Knot remained faithful to its habitual caution, younger men were appearing on the scene who had not experienced personally the disappointment and bitterness of lost battles and failed designs. Described by a loyal Cromwellian as ‘new sprung up Cavaliers, such as young gentlemen lately come to their lands and estates’, they rejected the Knot’s cautious attitude, and were eager to bring on an insurrection as soon as possible.40

  To try and resolve these divisions within the king’s party, which were largely over policy, but, as always, exacerbated by personal differences, it was decided to send Ormond into England. Ormond, it was believed, had the authority and prestige to impose a sensible course of action on the divided and mutually distrustful groups of plotters. After it was publicly announced that he had been sent to the court at Dusseldorf of Charles’s friend Duke Philip-William of Pfalz-Neuburg to raise troops for the royal army, the marquess instead headed secretly for the Dutch coast, from where he hired a small vessel that landed him in Essex at the end of January 1658. From there, disguised as a simple backwoods country squire with his portmanteau strapped behind him on his horse, he rode into London.41 He was only accompanied by one servant, Maurice, an attendant whom he regarded extremely highly, claiming to Hyde that he did not know ‘an honester or more useful creature’ – and by the ubiquitous Daniel O’Neill.42 In fact, according to Clarendon, O’Neill ‘had inflamed him [Ormond] very much to that undertaking’, of which the Chancellor himself strongly disapproved.43

  Arriving in London, Ormond was joined by two more agents who had travelled to England separately – his old officer from the Irish wars, John Stephens, and Nicholas Armorer.44 The atmosphere in London when Ormond and his fellow royalist agents came together was tense. Discontent was widespread in the City, where both trade and commercial confidence were suffering from the war with Spain. The knowledge that a Spanish fleet was being concentrated in Flemish ports in preparation for a sudden descent on England also contributed significantly to the atmosphere of doubt and apprehension. Then the sudden and unexpected dissolution of Parliament in January took Londoners by surprise, delighting royalists, who saw it as a sign that support for the Protectorate was crumbling. The rumours of some new imminent design by irreconcilable Cavaliers, the clandestine but inadequately concealed gatherings and comings and goings of notorious Delinquents, the sudden raids and searches of inns and houses by the Protector’s soldiers all added to the tense and unsettled mood, to the expectation that great events were about to take place.45

  For eight days Ormond remained in the capital, constantly moving from one house to another, while holding a series of hurried conferences with representatives of the different groups of conspirators. Thurloe’s agents were always close, but never quite succeeded in catching him, the Secretary admitting to Henry Cromwell on 16 February that he had ‘got knowledge of his [Ormond’s] business, but could not come at his person’. It has been suggested that Willys was playing a complex and dangerous double game, setting the Protectorate hounds on the trail, but at the same time giving sufficient warning to the royalist hares to keep moving. It is also by no means certain that Ormond’s head on a spike on London Bridge would have been to the advantage of the Cromwellian regime. To make it impossible for Ormond to remain in London, to force him to make a hasty withdrawal back into exile, may have been better policy than to capture, try and execute him.46

  During his few days in London, Ormond was able to send two intelligence reports to Hyde, one ‘under the Lady Abbess’s cover’ and one entrusted to the faithful Maurice. He then made his escape via Sussex and the south coast in the middle of February, arriving in France ‘after a dangerous and troublesome passage’, and leaving O’Neill, with his lieutenants Stephens and Armorer, to attempt to co-ordinate and reconcile the plans of the different groups of plotters.47 O’Neill was in his element, as usual extraordinarily optimistic about the prospects for a successful rising and obviously swayed by the confident assertions of plotters like Alan Brodrick that in London alone, ‘20,000 men are listed for the King’. In a report to Hyde on 17 February he pronounced that ‘the game never was fai
rer, if they will venture; the enemy never had fewer friends, a less, worse paid, and more mutinous army, more empty coffers, nor the country worse disposed to supply him’. Having been left largely without specific instructions, O’Neill flung himself into a whirl of negotiations: with the members of the Knot, with prominent Presbyterians and ex-parliamentarians like Sir George Booth, Sir William Waller, Major General Richard Browne and even the Earl of Manchester, and with the leaders of the different plots in London and the provinces, like Mordaunt and Dr Hewett. Stephens was principally employed as a courier, being despatched to Hyde at the beginning of March to communicate the state of affairs, while Armorer acted as O’Neill’s liaison officer, entrusted with approaches to ‘the northern lords’, presumably Belasyse and Willoughby.48