The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (16 page)

Crime never pays and it was not long before ‘Thomas Hunt' fell into the clutches of the law. He appeared before Chief Justice Keeling and Judge Morton at the Surrey county assizes at Guildford on 4 July 1670, accused of assaulting, with intent to rob, John Constable near Croydon the previous May. He was fined 100 marks, or £67, and thrown into the Marshalsea prison in Southwark.
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His father moved to Southwark to be close to his son and lodged with Barnaby Bloxton, tailor, at Winchester House, using the pseudonym ‘Dr Alec'. Blood asked his landlord to stand surety for his son, but Bloxton refused. Instead he helpfully introduced him to the brewer William Mumford.
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Mumford agreed, as did William Gant of Wapping in Essex, and both men put up the requisite money. ‘Thomas Hunt' was freed after a month on their bond guaranteeing his good behaviour for seven years.
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On 17 October, the
failed highwayman recovered his sword, belt and pistol from the Lambeth constable Thomas Drayton, signing a receipt, witnessed by his brother Edmund.
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Blood senior returned to Romford with other things on his mind.

The origin of the well-known phrase ‘revenge is a dish best served cold' is highly debatable.
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Certainly it describes very aptly Thomas Blood's beliefs or personal creed. Specifically, he had waited patiently for more than seven years to inflict a terrible revenge on one particular enemy.

Now he saw his chance for vengeance.

5

An Incident in St James's

The execrable design to assassinate the duke of Ormond has alarmed all the country . . . It has opened all men's mouths and thoughts to speak their liking for him as well as their detestation of the attempt.

Robert Benson to Williamson 24 December 1670.
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In the late seventeenth century, built-up London petered out at the western end of Piccadilly.
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Clean air and the bucolic fields and lanes of the flat Middlesex countryside began at Tyburn Lane, which led north to the city's traditional place of execution for felons, very near today's Marble Arch.
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In 1660 a windmill stood at the other end of Piccadilly, at the start of the highway to Reading in Berkshire and onwards to Bristol, known as the ‘Great West Road'. Along the north side of this unpaved street stood half a dozen grand mansions, including the newly completed Clarendon House, the short-lived residence of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, which cost him between £40,000 and £50,000 to build.
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After Clarendon's fall from power in August 1667, the house was rented by the Duke of Ormond for a few months in 1670.
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It was an impressive London home for the former lord lieutenant of Ireland
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– a huge three-storeyed E-shaped building, with two wings and a central cupola behind a courtyard, set back from the street at the T-junction of Piccadilly with St James's Street. There were two imposing wrought-iron gates barring its entrance, flanked by porters' lodges, each one embellished with blind columns on the street façade. The grounds extended to thirty acres (12.14 hectares) of
former agricultural land, including the twenty-four once owned by ‘the widow Austin of the “Eagle and Child” [tavern] in the [nearby] Strand'.
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Ormond had served as lord steward of the royal household since the Restoration and was appointed lord high steward of England in March 1661; the mansion was a convenient base for his ceremonial duties at court.

St James's Street, which began to be built up at the beginning of the century, ran south from Piccadilly, down a gentle slope to Henry VIII's red-brick palace of St James, erected in 1531–6 on the site of a medieval hospital for leprous women.
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The impressive tall twin-towered gatehouse fronting Pall Mall still bears the old ogre's royal cipher. This wide street, earlier described as a ‘quagmire' by the diarist John Evelyn, was paved over in 1661 and was later celebrated across London for the fashionable coffee and chocolate houses scattered among the twenty-four dwellings that lined the road.
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It was at the top end of this street, after seven o'clock on the evening of Tuesday, 6 December, 1670 that Blood staged another outrage that rocked the royal court, triggered a feverish House of Lords investigation and became a sensation throughout all of Charles II's realms. Blood, together with four or five desperadoes, including his eldest son Thomas, dragged Ormond from his coach in a violent attempt either to kidnap or assassinate the former Irish viceroy.

His crime bore all the hallmarks of a carefully planned operation. Reliable intelligence must have been obtained from a well-wisher (or someone within Ormond's household who was corruptible) indicating that the lord high steward would attend a state function in the City of London that day. Blood was also provided with the precise time of the duke's return and his route homewards.

Ostensibly, it was an act of pure revenge. Blood and his fellow assailant, Lieutenant Colonel William Moore, who now lived in Gray's Inn Lane, London, had irretrievably lost their Irish estates when they were attainted as traitors in the aftermath of the bungled Dublin Castle plot of seven years before. Both held Ormond personally responsible for their continuing impoverishment, as did the
younger Blood, who similarly had lost any hope of his inheritance. Their hatred of the duke burned still bright despite the passing of the years.

If our adventurer – by dint of yet another self-promotion now enjoying the exalted rank of colonel – relished a certain vicarious notoriety before, his exploits now became infamous. After such an audacious crime, committed on the very doorstep of a royal palace, Charles II's government left no stone unturned to find and arrest Blood and his outlaw accomplices.

Yet the blue-blooded aristocrat quite possibly at the heart of the conspiracy was left unquestioned and untouched by the forces of law and order as he strutted vaingloriously within an arm's breadth of the monarch himself.

It was a propitious time for such an attack, as London was distracted and enthralled by the pomp and splendour of a grand state visit. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had ended three years earlier after de Ruyter's flotilla broke the chain booms defending the River Medway in Kent, burned some English warships moored at Chatham and jubilantly towed away the
Unity
and the flagship
Royal Charles
as prizes. After this national disgrace, the treaty signed on 31 July 1667 at Breda Castle restored peaceful relations between the two rival naval powers.
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William, Prince of Orange arrived in England on a five-month visit, primarily to collect an embarrassingly large debt of 2,797,859 guilders (about £280,000) owed to the Dutch House of Orange by the Stuarts. Of course, the perpetually cash-strapped Charles II could not repay the loan and William eventually agreed magnanimously to reduce it by £100,000. No wonder he was royally entertained, even though the king's continuing indebtedness, coupled with the lingering shame of the successful Dutch naval attack on the Medway, must have made Charles, for all his gamecock bravura, an uncomfortable and uneasy host.

But the English monarch had other, more sanguine, reasons to lavish his hospitality on the twenty-year-old princely guest in his household. His Portuguese wife, the Catholic Catherine of Braganza, whom he had married in May 1662, had failed in the first
duty of any royal consort down the ages: to produce the all-important healthy heir to the throne. She had endured four tedious pregnancies but, sadly, all resulted in miscarriages and stillbirths, the last in June 1669.
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James, Duke of York, Charles's younger brother and the heir presumptive to the throne, was also a Catholic and this posed almost insurmountable problems, in many eyes, to his peaceful succession. To dampen down or divert parliamentary and popular disquiet, Charles conceived the idea of marrying off Mary, James's eldest surviving daughter, to the staunchly Protestant William, even though she was eleven years his junior and still played with her dolls in the royal nursery.
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On Saturday, 3 December, Charles, his queen and the Prince of Orange (who was fresh from an agreeable visit to the academic splendours of the University of Cambridge) appeared incognito ‘at the merriments usual at this time of year at The Temple [in London] where they were entertained with dances of all kinds to their very great satisfaction'.
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The following Tuesday, the prince was feasted in the Guildhall's fifteenth-century great hall by the lord mayor, Sir Richard Ford, and the affluent Corporation of the City of London. After the banquet, William was graciously pleased to review the city's trained bands of citizen soldiers marshalled outside in the courtyard facing Gresham Street.

Ormond, now an infirm sixty-year-old, had been invited to the function and left the Guildhall sometime after five o'clock by coach to return westwards across the City of London to Clarendon House. Unusually, his vehicle did not have straps fitted at its back for his liveried retainers to hang on to; indeed, the duke had somewhat heartlessly fixed a large number of projecting iron spikes on the carriage to prevent them from enjoying the ride. Instead, they had to pant along behind or beside the coach on each side of the street. He normally was attended by six tall footmen carrying torches or
flambeaux
to light the way – some running ahead, shouting this proud warning to bystanders: ‘Make way for the Duke of Ormond!'
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The weather was stormy, as it had been for the last fortnight.
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As Ormond's coach wended its slow way through the crowded and filthy streets, Michael Beresford, a parson from Hopton in Suffolk,
was strolling in the Piazza in Covent Garden, a large colonnaded open space situated between St Martin's and Drury lanes which had been completed by the classical architect Inigo Jones in 1637.
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There, he told Arlington later, he recognised a man called Thomas Allen, dressed smartly and wearing a fine brown periwig on his head. Beresford had formerly known him as a footman to Sir Michael Livesey, another Puritan signatory to Charles I's death warrant who had fled for his life to the Netherlands in 1660.
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This was indeed Thomas Blood, as usual hiding behind one of his favourite aliases.

‘Allen' walked past the parson several times before he stopped, turned back and politely inquired his name. Beresford, in turn, asked him to confirm his identity and he replied: ‘Allen – and that Sir Michael Livesey was living'. Where was Allen lodging in London? He would not say but added that he ‘had been in Ireland and [was] lately come over' and had relations on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Allen's reticence and evasiveness troubled Beresford so much that he continued his questioning.

What was Allen doing here? ‘Nothing at all.'

Would Allen like to drink a pint of wine with him (probably in the nearby Shakespeare tavern)? Allen unfortunately had to refuse the kind invitation.

‘What was Sir Michael Livesey [doing] in town?' Ignoring the question, Allen – ‘looking ghastly' – blurted out: ‘There are bad designs at foot.'

‘What!' exclaimed an astonished Beresford, then added: ‘We have had too many already.' Allen responded with the cryptic comment: ‘We are all desperate.'

As the pair walked northwards towards Long Acre in the gathering dusk, a messenger boy came up and told Allen enigmatically: ‘The horses have gone before' and he immediately strode off without even saying a word of farewell, leaving behind a perplexed and discomforted parson standing alone in the street.
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This surreal meeting must have ended sometime after six-thirty. The planned rendezvous for Blood's accomplices was a large hostelry called the Bull Head tavern
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in Old Spring Gardens at Charing Cross, about fifteen minutes' walk away from Long Acre.
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Matthew Pretty, who drew pints of ale from the tavern's barrels, and its young potboy, William Wilson, testified afterwards that five men in cloaks, armed with swords, had earlier arrived there on horseback and had ordered drinks.

They having drunk about six pints of wine – canary,
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sherry and white wine – two pints of each and one of them [told] the drawer to draw good wine for they were graziers.
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Then the drawer asked if they knew Mr West, a grazier, who is dead and if they knew Mr Poultney, a grazier of Blackwall. They said, yes, they knew them.

The drawer recalled that one of their horses was ‘a reddish dark colour with a bald face' and its rider was a ‘tall, lean, pale-faced man with short-black hair' who said he would not take £10 for his old bald horse yet. The potboy believed this man to ‘be a Portuguese' and remembered him only too well as he had sometime before taken a message to his lodgings and he had not only beaten him but refused to hand over a tip. Pretty said two of the others were young; ‘about twenty-six years' old, he estimated with curious precision.

Both witnesses said that ‘near the hour of seven o'clock' a man wearing a cloak walked into the tavern – this must have been Blood – just as one of the duke's linkmen ran past, shouting: ‘Make way here for the Duke of Ormond!' At the same time everyone saw the duke's coach trundle by outside in the darkened street, followed by his breathless retainers.

The ‘graziers' and the new arrival paid for and drank another two pints of white wine. After fifteen minutes, they called for three white clay pipes of tobacco and left hastily, taking the tobacco with them. The horsemen rode off at ‘a great pace' west towards the Haymarket or Pall Mall, leaving their change and some of their wine undrunk. This was consumed appreciatively by the potboy
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and Pretty probably pocketed the coins.