Rebels and Traitors (103 page)

‘Well, that will be helpful,’ answered Gideon, a little primly, as his hopes of ducking the task were overturned. ‘I may be able to find where he drinks —’

‘The Cross Keys,’ Nedham instructed firmly.

Now Sir Marmaduke Langdale had Orlando Lovell as his tool, and John Thurloe had Gideon Jukes. Nobody was aware of the ironies.

Thurloe did have Lovell on a list of Royalist activists. The spymaster used Royalist double agents on the Continent, one of whom had noticed Lovell. At this period Thurloe was cultivating a secret correspondent in France called Henry Manning, who was close to Charles II’s court. He most usefully sent details of the Sealed Knot, so the supposedly secure group was corrupted from within pretty well as soon as it was formed. Thurloe knew of six founder members, Belasys, Loughborough, Compton, Villiers, Willys and Russell. Others were implicated, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. A name that occasionally came up as an associate was ‘Colonel Lovell’, though the Duke of York’s tutor was called Lovell, which at first confused the issue. Thurloe’s agents had not fully latched on to Colonel
Orlando
Lovell, in cahoots with Sir Marmaduke Langdale. Nor were any of them yet aware of his awkward connection with their own informant, Gideon Jukes.

We are here in great quiet under our new protector’,
wrote a Royalist from England, in a letter that was intercepted by Thurloe in January 1654. It was somewhat inaccurate.

Over winter and spring many upheavals occurred, though government espionage had success against them. Thurloe’s organisation broke a curious plot directed by Cardinal Mazarin of France involving English Anabaptists. The codewords ‘Mr Cross intends to visit Sweden’ gave away the Earl of Glencairn’s intended rebellion in Scotland which would have brought Charles II there. Imprisoned conspirators supplied long lists of names and haunts, such as the Windmill in Lothbury where one man had met fellow-plotters under cover of his weekly trip to play billiards. The Gerard Plot was foiled and the two brothers who led it were executed.

Orlando Lovell took no part in these proliferating schemes; he derided all of them. However, in September 1654, when Charles II formally commissioned the Earl of Rochester to lead a new wave of risings in England, this seemed to be old-style action and Lovell deigned to assist. Over the next six months he was involved in the procurement and distribution of arms. The weapons were to furnish a countrywide rebellion, which would be led by long-time cavaliers and new recruits. Lord Rochester landed in Kent in mid-February 1655.

Lovell followed. After his involvement in the 1648 rebellion there, it was familiar territory. And Kent was a convenient base from which he could now seriously attempt to find his wife.

On the 6th of September 1654, Richard Overton penned a letter to Secretary Thurloe. Marchamont Nedham brought a copy to show Gideon, now deemed to be an expert on Overton:

Gideon was fascinated. ‘It is a wary piece of prose. I imagine that Secretary Thurloe enjoyed its deconstruction. The slithering clauses and two-faced humility are painful!’

’And most unlike the plain-speaking of the usual informants,’ said Nedham. ‘
“Ruth Wiskin testifies that one Christopher Emerson called the Lord Protector a rogue and a rascal, and a bloodsucker, and said that he should have his throat cut ere long”…
’

Gideon considered Overton’s note. ‘Master Nedham, this phrase, “the government, as it now is”, hints that he has lingering discomfort with the Protectorate. Is the man genuinely seeking public peace — or just strapped for cash?’

‘He is an old pamphleteer, with no regular employment. The intelligence office has a large expenses fund, as Overton already knows.’

‘This could be bluff — trying to find out what Thurloe knows. Will Thurloe meet him, as he asks?’

‘Perhaps not, but there could be money. Last year Thurloe paid him twenty pounds for snitching on Sexby whose behaviour was no secret anyway’

‘Sexby?’

‘You know him too?’ asked Nedham, pointedly noting it.

‘I have met him,’ responded Gideon, playing down their association.

‘Would you care to go into the West Country to observe him?’

‘Is that where Sexby is? My new wife would not welcome my leaving her, Master Nedham!’

Gideon was trying to back away from all this intrigue, but he was being pressed hard to help. When the first Protectorate Parliament assembled in the autumn of 1654, unrest assailed on all sides. The Fifth Monarchists’ leader, Major-General Thomas Harrison, was a constant thorn in Cromwell’s side. Three army colonels — Alured, Saunders and Gideon’s old colonel, Okey — petitioned with claims that Cromwell had adopted greater powers than had been wielded by Charles I. John Wildman was accused of stirring an army plot in Scotland, put in the Tower and left to stew. The Scotland plot had thrown up a new participant. One of the Levellers that General Monck dismissed from the army, Miles Sindercombe, fled to Flanders. There he made dangerous contacts, one being Edward Sexby.

Notes which Thurloe prepared for the Council of State about these plots indicated the wide range of his espionage. Long witness statements gave names, places where meetings had been held, lists of regiments which might mutiny. Actual conversations were reported:
‘Overton and Wildman spoke together of their dislike of things, but no design was laid…’
Thurloe knew far more than the various plotters ever seemed to realise. But he did not know enough.

Edward Sexby was openly intent on destroying Cromwell. Arresting Sexby became a priority. In February a correspondent in the West Country reported that Sexby had been in Somerset, ‘talking about a rising. Two days later came a report from Exeter, addressed to the Protector, on efforts to preserve the peace:
‘I also acquainted Your Highness that I had not been careless in making the most curious search after Sexby, having had parties out after him both in Devonshire and Dorsetshire …’

The searches failed. Soon Sexby showed just how cunning and influential he was: in March he was thought to be staying with a Captain Arthur in Weymouth,
‘a man esteemed of no good principle’.
Weymouth was close to Portland, where Sexby had been governor, and where he had used his charm to make firm friends throughout the community. He had acquired a mistress, Mrs Elizabeth Ford, a woman of quick wits and spirit. She became suspicious when a soldier came to the house, disguised as a yokel and pretending to have letters for Sexby. Mrs Ford raised the alarm; the mayor and the castle governor took into custody the very soldiers sent to arrest Sexby. Their spurious grounds were that the militiamen were attempting to deprive a freeborn Englishman of his liberty whilst they had no written warrant…

Sexby fled. He was next heard of in Antwerp.

Ports were watched. Customs officers carried out surveillance. They needed their wits. As Sexby escaped, other suspicious parties tried to enter England. Passengers in a ship bringing an ambassador from the King of Poland were a particular nightmare. One man not in the ambassador’s accredited party loudly reviled the officers, saying they had no authority to question or seize him. As this troublemaker was secured, four shifty young Dutchmen queued to be interrogated.

‘Gerrit Pauw, aged twenty-two; I am related to important Dutchmen and have come to England to see the country and learn English.’

A quiet man, waiting patiently, caught the customs officer’s eye sympathetically. The officials were harassed by the diplomatic courtesies required for the Polish ambassador, bemused by the dozy Dutch boys, and desperate to keep pegs on a known Royalist — one Matthew Hutchin, also arrived in the same ship, who said he was carrying letters to Lord Newport at his house — a house to which Royalists in exile regularly sent correspondence — which Thurloe’s agents routinely intercepted.

‘Dirck Simonse, aged twenty. I am a gentleman living in the Hague. I have come to see fashions and learn English …’

The person still waiting was about thirty-six years, with a beard, quietly dressed. He tipped his black beaver hat with a nod, as if the busy officers knew him — an honest Englishman, the kind of diffident insider who can always pass through customs without paying duty.

‘Cornelius Van Dyke, aged twenty, a chandler’s son. I have come to see fashions, learn English — and to spend my money’

The quiet man picked up his bag, as if gently moving forward in the queue. He and the officer exchanged weary smiles over these youthful travellers, who wanted fun without parental supervision, probably hoping English girls were easy …

‘Jerit Johhes, a Frieslander, aged thirty-four …’ Jerit wanted to see fashions and learn English, but he had complicated matters by bringing over two trunks of linen and apparel. The linen he intended to sell, he claimed, if he could get a market for it; otherwise he would carry it back again, or make use of it himself… This was an extreme nuisance because the trunks had to be tediously searched.

By the time that was over, the officers saw the quiet Englishman had slipped past them and made his way ashore without being questioned.

Once he left Gravesend, Orlando Lovell — for it was he — burrowed into anonymity in Kent. He was now increasingly trusted by Langdale and had been asked to assess the situation for the Earl of Rochester, who had entered the country to lead a revolt which they feared was compromised. Lovell found it all too true.

As a Hants man, Lovell placed much of the blame on Kent. Although some of its secret byways reminded him of Hampshire, he deplored this large, insular county where every man was more concerned with his own property first and, if pushed, Kent second, with no love for the kingdom in general at all. There were no great lords to provide leadership and the people did not even like each other. As well as the famous disputes between Men of Kent and Kentishmen, the High Weald hated the Low Weald, the marsh folk were thought peculiar by everybody, and the Isle of Thanet was so lawless some had proposed splitting it off as a tiny county by itself. Intermarried families in their agricultural manors had knuckled down under Parliament for much of the first civil war, only rising en masse in 1648 as a reaction to harsh penalties and interference. Lovell had been there then.

What Lovell remembered of those depressing weeks were desertions, separations, fouled-up actions in stinking old castles and endless angry conversations with mediocre men who could neither take nor give orders, all countrymen who were just longing to sneak away to check on their cows and their field boundaries.

Now he was back in Kent, and when he set about investigating the intended arms network, Lovell had a shock. He was amazed how extensively the Protector’s agents had uncovered the arrangements. They had already seized weapons and apprehended collaborators. Lovell had to watch his step. Soon he discovered just how the expensively funded exercise had come to grief. He raged at the carelessness.

This time the Action Party had intended to arm troops all around the country, hoping that concerted risings in many places might stretch the Parliamentary army. Naturally they wanted surprise. And tossed it away!’ growled Lovell, in despair. The idea had been ambitious — too ambitious for the fools into whose care it was placed.

Buying and distribution had been unsophisticated. Some weapons were to be imported, but correspondence revealed the ships and their landing places. Royalists had innocently written letters via the ordinary post service. They used ridiculous pseudonyms and labelled papers,
‘Leave this at the post-house until called for’ -
just begging for some under-occupied postmaster to start wondering.

Gunsmiths in London had been asked to supply large numbers of weapons, on flimsy excuses:
‘Lord Willoughby has a plantation to the south-west of Barbados called Savannah, with six hundred men in it; and they are sending a ship with arms and other commodities’.
Lovell fumed; Willoughby of Parham, an old cavalier, must be just waiting for arrest after that fiasco. Other stories fed to gunsmiths were equally ludicrous: crackpot talk, for example, of buying commodities for a scheme to supply mulberry trees for silk-growing in Virginia … Worse, having established their cover, the Royalist agents had not even stuck to it, but confessed to the gunsmiths that they wanted false bills of lading in order to baffle government enquiries — and that all this was a tarradiddle because in reality there was a design to bring Charles II into England …