The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood
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Authors: Robert Hutchinson
To Gavin and Caroline, Rob and Matthew;
Jo and John, Bertie and Charlie
Contents
12    Colonel Blood's daggers. English or Scottish, 1620. (© Royal Armouries)
So high was Blood's fame for sagacity and intrepidity
. . . [he was believed]
capable of undertaking anything his passion or interest dictated
[no matter]
how desperate or difficult.
Biographia Britannia
, 1747â66.
1
Colonel Thomas Blood is one of those mysterious and charismatic characters in British history whose breathtaking exploits underline the wisdom of the old maxim that truth can be stranger than fiction.
An attempted coup d'état in Ireland and his involvement in countless plots to assassinate Charles II and to overthrow the lawful government of England, Scotland and Ireland in the late seventeenth century won him widespread notoriety in the three kingdoms. Little wonder, then, that Charles II's ministers publicly branded him the âFather of all Treasons'.
2
With a substantial price on his head, dead or alive, Blood became a hunted man throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles.
But this extraordinary fugitive from justice was far from cowed by any hue and cry pursuing him in the dark, filthy alleyways and back lanes of London or Dublin. Paradoxically, the tighter the net was drawn around him, the more audacious this ânotorious traitor and incendiary'
3
became.
Blood's attempt to steal the Crown Jewels from within the protective high walls of the Tower of London in May 1671 propels him to the top of a very select group of bold outlaws who have preyed upon the riches of the English royal court down the years.
In the mid-fourteenth century, âAdam the Leper' cheekily snatched property belonging to Edward III's buxom and matronly queen, Philippa of Hainault.
4
A few decades before, in 1303, Richard of Pudlicott raided Edward I's treasury in the Chapel of the Pyx inside Westminster Abbey, assisted by its sub-prior and sacristan. Today we would recognise the crime as a medieval âinside job'.
5
Richard was hanged and reportedly his skin was flayed off his corpse. Tradition maintains (wrongly) that this was nailed upon a wooden door of that sacred edifice, near the Chapter House, as a terrible warning to lesser mortals who covet the wealth of their sovereign lieges.
6
Almost four centuries on, Blood was no mere thief, no matter how brazen his crime. He was an incorrigible adventurer who, not for the first time, eventually turned his coat to live a perilous existence as a government spy, or double agent, for Charles II's secret service in their battle to counter both internal and external threats to the uncertain Stuart crown.
His skill at avoiding retribution was so adroit that when he finally went to meet his Maker, there was a prevalent belief that he had managed to cheat even the Grim Reaper himself. The alehouses of Westminster and Whitehall buzzed with stories that the old soldier had not died but was only up to his usual tricks. Was his demise just another of Blood's clever stratagems to fool his many powerful enemies at the royal court? Was death his ultimate cunning disguise?
Such was the full tide of rumour running across London that the government was forced to exhume Blood's body from his grave in Tothill Fields chapel to demonstrate publicly the mouldering truth. The colonel's swollen and rotting cadaver was only identified at a grim inquest in Westminster by a witness recalling the inordinately large size of one of his thumbs.
His was a complex character, full of contradiction and inconsistency. He possessed strong nonconformist religious beliefs, pledging himself daily to be âin serious consideration . . . of Christ and what he has done' and not to be âslothful in the works of ye lord'. He claimed to shun wine, strong drink and any kind of âexcess in recreations or pomp or in apparel . . . quibbling or joking . . . all obscene and scurrilous talk'.
7
Sometimes he erred from this straight-and-narrow godly path. Blood was also an arrogant, eccentric fantasist with a very persuasive manner, reinforced by buckets of Irish charm and armed with a neat turn of phrase that proved useful in a tight spot. That lyrical word âblarney' might have been created especially for him. And, in truth, his escapades, conducted under a multitude of aliases and assisted by a wardrobe packed full of disguises, left no swash unbuckled, no outrage untested, no crime too great to attempt. Many a daring man of action would resemble more a meek, pious Vatican altar boy by comparison.
Thomas Blood came from a family whose origins, appropriately, lay in a thirst for adventure. The Irish branch traces its origins to Edmund Blood, a minor member of the Tudor gentry, from the tiny hamlet of Makeney, near Duffield in Derbyshire,
8
who sailed off to Ireland in 1595 as an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old cavalry captain seeking fame and fortune â or, more bluntly, the simple plunder of war or the joyful sequestration of an enemy's land and property.
He joined Queen Elizabeth I's army to fight in what became a bitter nine-year war against the Irish magnate Hugh O'Neill and his allies, who sought, like so many others before and after, to finally end the alien English rule of the Emerald Isle.
9
During a stormy sea passage over to Dublin, Blood's first wife, Margaret, inconveniently gave birth to a son, which at the gracious request of a fellow passenger and comrade-in-arms, the Earl of Inchiquin,
10
was appropriately christened âNeptune'.
Edmund quickly discovered that the discomforts of soldiering were not to his taste. He resigned his commission and acquired 200 acres (81 hectares) of land near Corofin in Co. Clare, along with nearby Kilnaboy Castle
11
and later Bohersallagh House,
12
possibly through the influence of Inchiquin, his old travelling companion and later commanding officer, who already owned property in the area.
Extra income was opportunely earned by stopping ships sailing north along the Clare coast to Galway or south to Limerick and politely inviting their captains to hand over sizeable quantities of cash in return for the promise of a safe passage onwards. The presence of armed men in cutters, probably based at Lahinch in Liscannor Bay, was a persuasive reason to accept gracefully such imperative suggestions. Some may regard this traditional pastime as a protection racket, others as pure piracy â but no one dared suggest there was any conflict with the sober Presbyterian religious beliefs that the Blood family had practised after arrival in Ireland.