Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies

by Geoffrey Smith

  The royal party’s journey to the Pyrenees was a leisurely and relaxed affair. The king had few attendants: the indispensable Ormond, who could hold his own with any Spanish grandee; the well-travelled Bristol, useful for his language skills; O’Neill, ‘to take care that they always fared well in their lodging’, Clarendon unable to avoid adding, ‘for which province no man was fitter’, and a couple of servants, including the reliable Maurice.33 O’Neill’s responsibilities were not confined to providing entertaining company and negotiating the provision of comfortable accommodation, adequate provisions and decent wine. His familiarity with courts and government ministers also once again proved useful. The cheerful little royal party did not arrive at Saragossa until early in October, ignorant of the state of the peace negotiations and unsure as to whether a suitably impressive reception would be provided by the French and Spanish ministers for the uninvited titular king of England, Scotland and Ireland. So O’Neill was sent ahead from Saragossa to Fuentarrabia, where he was reunited with Ormond, who had become separated from the royal party, and encountered Sir Henry Bennet, the king’s agent in Madrid. Their combined diplomatic skills ensured that when Charles arrived in Fuentarrabia he received an appropriately dignified reception from the Spanish minister, Don Luis de Haro.34

  Diplomatic courtesies and expressions of sympathy were all Charles did receive from the Spanish and French ministers.35 Of far more immediate consequence to his fortunes was the arrival of Armorer at Fuentarrabia on 27 October with the news of General Lambert’s expulsion of the Rump twelve days earlier. He also brought a letter from Mordaunt, who only a few weeks earlier had escaped to Calais as a proscribed fugitive, but who now wrote that he intended to return to England immediately: ‘N. Armorer will inform your Majesty of all particulars I have not time to write.’36 What O’Neill described in a letter to Hyde as Armorer’s ‘good news of the dissolution of those rogues that sit at Westminster’ was to bring the return of Charles and his followers from the Pyrenees.37 Being first with the news also meant, as O’Neill foresaw, ‘good fortune’ for Armorer. A few days later he was appointed an equerry of the hunting stable in the royal household. O’Neill wrote to Hyde on 4 November that ‘your friend Nic. Armorer … yesterday proceeded querry and this day as busy as a new broom that I doubt he has not the leisure to give you thanks for your favour in advancing him’. In fact, Armorer did write promptly letters of gratitude to his patrons, Hyde and Lord and Lady Mordaunt.38

  Charles returned to Brussels by way of Paris. The journey was not uneventful, as on the way Ormond’s servant Maurice contrived to kill the postmaster of Bordeaux in an obscure dispute. The killing was in self-defence according to Armorer, but Maurice had to be left behind in prison until Charles was able to arrange a pardon for him.39 After a pleasant stay in Paris, where to widespread relief Charles and his companions were welcomed in a friendly manner by his mother and her Louvrian courtiers, the little party continued on to Brussels.40 On the way O’Neill wrote to Hyde that on the king’s business he had now made many ‘long, dangerous and expensive journeys’ during the previous three years. But the long, dangerous and expensive journeys made by royalist agents on the king’s business, and for a much longer period than three years, were almost over.41

  While Charles and his little company were making their way from the Pyrenees via Paris back to Flanders, England appeared to be descending into chaos, for Lambert’s coup fatally broke apart the different interests that had held the Commonwealth together.42 There was ‘now no Government in the Nation, all in confusion’, wrote John Evelyn in his diary on 16 October. ‘No Magistrate either own’d or pretended, but the soldiers & they not agreed.’43 While Lambert struggled to assert his authority, the republicans agitated for the Rump’s reinstatement, his fellow generals agonised ineffectually over what course to follow, and royalists and Presbyterians planned a renewed assault on the Commonwealth. In Scotland the impenetrable and inscrutable General Monck denounced the expulsion of the Rump, purged his army of officers whose personal loyalty was unreliable, and then led it slowly towards the border. In response, Lambert led his army out of London and headed north, while behind him the discredited and increasingly ridiculed Rump Parliament resumed sitting in Westminster. Its expulsion by Lambert was the official reason why Monck was leading his army into England, but even though the Rump had been reinstated, Monck kept coming, his intentions a mystery.44

  Royalist plans to exploit the situation were made more difficult by the Council of State’s closure of the ports after Lambert’s coup. No mail was allowed to leave or enter England for three weeks, and the regular packet boat from Ostend was not permitted to land at Dover. ‘All that we know is from Dunkirk,’ Hyde wrote to Ormond on 30 October, ‘where they say that the confusions in England are extraordinarily great, and such as must involve the nation in a new and bloody war.’45 In this situation Hyde and his intelligencers, and the organisers of conspiracy like Mordaunt and Grenville, were forced to rely increasingly on couriers to carry their letters and information, as they struggled to keep each other up to date with a confused and constantly changing situation where, as Rumbold complained with pardonable exaggeration in a letter to Hyde on 9 December, every six hours brought some variation in the state of affairs.46

  Although royalist messengers and even prominent figures like Mordaunt and Massey seemed to have little difficulty in travelling between the court in Brussels and England, the Commonwealth’s security system had not yet collapsed completely.47 In January, Richard Allestree, at this time one of the most energetic of all the royalist couriers, and Sir John Stephens were both detained at Dover. Henry Booth, a royalist agent permanently established in Calais, reported the arrest to Nicholas, but assured the Secretary that ‘Mr Allestry’s letters, and c., were taken care of and safely delivered to a good hand there, and I have ordered them to be sent express to London, and have notice of their having reached Canterbury.’ Clearly, royalist agents were still active in the ranks of officials at Dover. Although the Council of State expressed its concern to the governor of Dover Castle that ‘dangerous persons [were] passing and re-passing between ‘England and Flanders’, the interception of notorious agents like Allestree and Stephens was rare. At about the same time that Allestree and Stephens were detained, Titus, Massey and Baron returned safely to England from Flanders.48

  Although Allestree was committed to the Tower, Stephens was held in Lambeth House. There he was better placed to observe the tumultuous events in the capital as Lambert’s unpaid and demoralised soldiers melted away before the advance of Monck’s disciplined troops, who entered London unopposed on 3 February.49 After a week of extreme tension, which drove royalists like Mordaunt almost frantic as they tried to discern the phlegmatic general’s intentions, on 11 February Monck and his officers presented to the Rump the army’s requirement that it dissolve itself and arrange for the election of a full and free parliament to succeed it.50 The citizens responded to Monck’s action with enthusiasm and relief, with ‘bonfires burning and flaming’ and church bells ringing, the sight and sound of which reached Stephens, confined in Lambeth House. At the time Stephens had a visitor, a Mr Bayly who had served with him under Ormond in Ireland, and who was immediately dispatched to Cheapside to investigate. There he witnessed the crowds of jubilant citizens, the bonfires and the open drinking of the king’s health, and also obtained a copy of Monck’s letter to the Rump. Bayly did not waste time. He rode post to Dover, hired a bark that brought him to Ostend, from where he rode straight on to Brussels, arriving in the lodging of Stephens’s patron Ormond in a state of exhaustion and near collapse. Although it was night, Ormond immediately took him to Hyde’s rooms, and the king was fetched from his bedchamber on the floor above to hear Bayly’s dramatic news, which aroused in them a ‘new dawning of hope’ and quite ‘turned their heads’.51

  A little over three months later Charles II and his brothers landed at Dover to be welcomed by General Monck, the mayor and a large and enthusiasti
c crowd. The previous few weeks had been busy for the king’s agents, involved in the negotiations and arrangements that secured an unconditional restoration, free of the ties on the royal authority proposed by some Presbyterians who looked back fondly to the 1648 articles of the Isle of Wight treaty.52 Some time in the second half of March, shortly after the Rump finally dissolved itself, Grenville had his famous secret night meeting with the general in St James’s Palace. Monck accepted letters from Charles, and in his turn promised that he was ‘now not only ready to obey the king’s commands, but to sacrifice … Life and Fortune in his Service’. Accompanied by Mordaunt, Grenville slipped quietly out of London on his way to Brussels with the news.53

  Grenville and Mordaunt were only the most important of a crowd of intelligencers and agents who at this time were either frequently writing dispatches that attempted to keep the king’s ministers up to date with rapidly changing developments or else were travelling constantly. On the Continent agents were needed to deliver letters to the Dutch authorities, when Charles made a hasty departure from Brussels at the end of March to turn up in the Orangist stronghold of Breda on the pretext of visiting his sister, and to Queen Henrietta Maria, who had to be appeased when the king rejected her request that he move to Paris so that he could return to England from a Catholic monarchy, and not from a Protestant republic.54 In England there were a large number of actual or potentially influential figures whose support was essential if an unconditional restoration were to be achieved peacefully and quickly: generals and grandees like General Monck and Admiral Montagu, as well as a varied collection of noblemen, clergymen, merchants, aldermen, politicians, army officers, country gentry, writers, printers, present office holders and hopeful would-be office holders. To keep Charles and his advisers informed of the progress of dealings with so many diverse and scattered personages required the involvement of many familiar figures: Grenville and Mordaunt obviously, but also kept particularly busy were Barwick, Brodrick, Cooper, Rumbold, Villiers, Halsall, Gregory Paulden, Armorer, Baron, Allestree, Stephens, Massey and Titus.55

  Among a crowd of newly sprung-up well-wishers, eager to demonstrate their newfound loyalty by offering their services to the king, some once-familiar names among royalist agents also reappeared. During the twelve months before March 1660, Secretary Nicholas received a series of intelligence reports from an agent in London who used the pseudonym ‘Miles’. It has been convincingly suggested that ‘Miles’ was John Berkenhead, who when editor of Mercurius Aulicus fifteen years earlier in Oxford had maintained close ties with Nicholas. ‘Miles’ was anxious that the Secretary brought his services to the king’s attention, and Nicholas obliged.56 Not relying on intermediaries or letters, but favouring the direct approach, Ned Progers, once a trusted courier and companion of the king, who as we have seen had quietly returned to England from exile in the dark days after Worcester, reappeared at the court in Breda, to be well received by his master and reinstated in his old position as a groom of the bedchamber.57 As Charles prepared to leave Dutch soil and to step aboard Montagu’s flagship (the Naseby, hastily renamed the Royal Charles) to sail for Dover, he was now surrounded by courtiers and agents, messengers and envoys, who were only too willing to offer their services on the king’s business.

  1 TSP, i, 718.

  2 Ibid., vii, 156, 183, 243–4; Firth, Last years of Protectorate, ii, 198; Firth, ‘Royalist and Cromwellian armies’, pp. 85–7.

  3 NP, iv, 50, 61; CClSP, iv, 69, 75; Firth, Last Years of Protectorate, ii, 198; Hutton, Charles II, p. 112. For Cotterell, see Smith, Cavaliers in Exile, pp. 70–71.

  4 Quoted in Underdown, p. 2, 331.

  5 Sir James Turner, Memoirs of his own Life and Times, ed. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1829), pp. 118–20, 122; Murdoch, Britain and Denmark-Norway, p. 171. For Turner and Montgomery, see David Stevenson, ‘Turner, Sir James (b. 1615, d. in or after 1689)’, ODNB, 2004, accessed 24 March 2010; T. F. Henderson, ‘Montgomery, Robert (d. 1684’, rev. Edward M. Furgol, ODNB, 2004, accessed 24 March 2010.

  6 CClSP, iv, 68, 72, 74; Stoye, Europe Unfolding, pp. 138–9.

  7 TSP, vi, 196–7; Bampfield’s Apology, p. 180.

  8 NA, SP Flanders, 77/31/fo. 504; BL Add. MS 1892 (Rupert correspondence), fo. 247; Bampfield’s Apology, pp. 182–4.

  9 TSP, vii, 364–5.

  10 HMC, Report 10, Braye MSS, Appendix, vi (London, 1887), 189.

  11 For Skelton, see Smith, Cavaliers in Exile, p. 187.

  12 HMC, Braye MSS, 7, 192, 193, 195, 197, 200; LBM, 5; ClSP, iii, 443–5.

  13 Barwick, Life, pp. 189, 420, 490; ODNB (Barwick).

  14 Barwick, Life, p. 420; CClSP, iv, 523, 531; CSPD, 1659–60, pp. 333, 334; ODNB (Richard Allestree).

  15 HMC, Braye MSS, pp. 189–90, 193; LBM, 304; Underdown, pp. 235–7. Hartgill Baron had served under Northampton in the Civil War; CClSP, iv, 34.

  16 Quoted in N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 7.

  17 Ibid., pp. 5–10.

  18 HMC, Bath MSS, pp. 189, 190, 192.

  19 ClSP, iii, 427–9.

  20 HMC, Bath MSS, ii, 122; CClSP, iv, 163, 164, 173, 178–9, 186, 201–2, 382; NP, iv, 128.

  21 CClSP, iv, 246, 296–7; HMC, Braye MSS, p. 211; Maurice Ashley, General Monck (London, 1977), pp. 160–63.

  22 For Whetstone, see M. L. Baumber, ‘The Protector’s nephew: An account of the career of Captain Thomas Whetstone in the Mediterranean, 1657–1659,’ Mariner’s Mirror, vol. 52 (1966), 233–46; Bernard Capp, ‘Whetstone, Sir Thomas (1630/1–1668?)’, ODNB, 2004, accessed 24 March 2010.

  23 HMC, Braye MSS, pp. 211, 215; CClSP, iv, 268–70, 284, 285, 286, 291, 297.

  24 By far the best account of Booth’s rising is in Underdown, pp. 254–85.

  25 HMC, Braye MSS, pp. 193, 210; LBM, 31; The term ‘wary gentlemen is Mordaunt’s, which he employed more than once; see HMC, Braye MSS, pp. 191, 210.

  26 ‘Scot’s Account’, pp. 122–3.

  27 CClSP, iv, 300, 365.

  28 For failure of plans to seize Gloucester, Bristol and Shrewsbury, see Underdown, pp. 258–66, 272–3.

  29 HMC, Braye MSS, p. 191.

  30 Bod.L. Clarendon MS 67, fos 75–6 (Cooper to Hyde, 28 November 1659).

  31 Bod.L. Clarendon MS 64, fos 104, 174, 215; Hutton, Charles II, p. 162.

  32 Clarendon, Rebellion, xvi, 56, 58; F. J. Routledge, England and the Treaty of the Pyrenees (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1953), pp. 60–65; Hutton, Charles II, pp. 116–17.

  33 Clarendon, Rebellion, xvi, 58.

  34 Bod.L. Clarendon MS 66, fos 5–6, 30; NP, iv, 183–4. Cregan, ‘Daniel O’Neill in Exile and Restoration’, pp. 61–2.

  35 Routledge, England and the Treaty of the Pyrenees, pp. 71–5, 117.

  36 LBM, 105; NP, iv, 188.

  37 Bod.L. Clarendon MS 66, fo. 95.

  38 BL Egerton MS 2542, fo. 331; Bod.L. Clarendon MS 66, fos 95, 134–5, 147; LBM, 105; Smith, Cavaliers in Exile, p. 164.

  39 CClSP, iv, 456, 459.

  40 CSPD, 1659–60, p. 129; CClSP, iv, 459.

  41 Bod.L. Clarendon MS 67, fos 132–3.

  42 For detailed studies of the fall of the Commonwealth and the Restoration, see Keeble, The Restoration; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II, 1658–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955; 1969).

  43 Quoted in Keeble, Restoration, p. 13.

  44 Ashley, General Monck, pp. 162–5; Keeble, Restoration, pp. 18–19.

  45 Carte, Letters and Papers, ii, 258; CClSP, iv, 421, 424.

  46 Ibid., 477.

  47 Massey was captured outside Gloucester on 31 July, but almost immediately escaped; Clarendon, Rebellion, xvi, 37.

  48 CSPD, 1659–60, pp. 277, 305, 311, 316, 324, 332–3, 334. Stephens was knighted in 1658 on his return to the Continent after his mission to London with Ormond and O’Neill; ibid.,
p. 338.

  49 Ibid., pp. 342, 569; Clarendon, Rebellion, xvi, 139.

  50 ‘Yet Monck is so dark a man, no perspective can look through him’ (Mordaunt to Queen Henrietta Maria, 23 January 1660); LBM, 173; Keeble, Restoration, pp. 17–22.

  51 Clarendon, Rebellion, xvi, 137–41; CClSP, iv, 568.

  52 LBM, 169, 178; Keeble, Restoration, pp. 23–6; Hutton, Restoration, pp. 105, 117–18.

  53 Underdown, p. 313; Hutton, Restoration, pp. 107, 322; Davies, Restoration of Charles II, pp. 311–13.

  54 CClSP, iv, 617, 619, 636, 654, 673; Clarendon, Rebellion, xvi, 230–34.

  55 For some examples among many, see CClSP, iv, 569, 627, 629, 633, 638, 641, 657, 658, 659, 672. See also LBM, 109, 114, 115, 169; Hutton, Charles II, p. 130.

  56 Thomas, Berkenhead, pp. 264–6. ‘Miles’s’ intelligence reports are printed in NP, iv, pp. 102–77, passim, and in CSPD, 1659–60, pp. 304–5, 393–4.

  57 Ibid., pp. 654, 673.

  Chapter 10

  Restless and Invincible Spirits

  It was nothing else, but the restless and invincible spirit of the Royal Party, that by keeping the Usurpers in a perpetual distraction and Alarm, hinder’d them from proceeding to a final Establishment of their Power.

  Edward Phillips, in his Continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s

  Chronicle of the Kings of England (1679 edn)

  The ships in the fleet that conveyed Charles II from Holland to Dover in the last week of May were crammed with courtiers and other returning exiles, in many cases accompanied by their families. It is reasonable to assume that O’Neill, a groom of the bedchamber to the king, and the newly appointed equerry Nicholas Armorer were among them. A spectacular and enthusiastic reception awaited the royal fleet when it reached port, ‘the acclamations and numbers of people’ so great, according to Ann Fanshawe, ‘that it reached like one street from Dover to White Hall’.1 This reception was in sharp contrast to O’Neill and Armorer’s previous furtive landings at the port and hasty and hopefully unobtrusive departures up the London road. On this occasion there was no need for them to adopt false names and identities, and no danger of their ending up in a cell in Dover Castle.