The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (18 page)

The evidence was passed on to Arlington. Halliwell's letter rebuked his fellow ‘fanatics' for their coldness and for obeying the ‘filthy proclamation forbidding the churches to meet together'. It was a long, rambling and angry diatribe, which culminated in Halliwell's threat to quit the ranks of the Fifth Monarchists altogether until they fully ‘repent of their sins'.
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The two undated letters from Blood – signed ‘T.A.' for Thomas Allen – appeared arcane. The first complained about not hearing anything about an unspecified coat and hose and expressed the desire to arrange a meeting. The second sought the loan of a coat, pistols and a sword. It concluded with the writer's fond hope that Halliwell ‘may see a happy return' of them.
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While safely in hiding, Halliwell rather cheekily wrote to one of the constables who had searched his house during that early morning raid. He was a friend and near neighbour called Howell, a weaver who lived in Half Moon Alley, on the other side of Bishopsgate Street. Only too well aware that Williamson's Post Office might
intercept it and read the contents, Halliwell entrusted the letter to be delivered by hand by William Mosely and his daughter Honour, of Blue Anchor Alley, off Bunhill Row.
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He enclosed a letter which he begged Howell to deliver to Sir Richard Ford, the lord mayor. There was nothing ‘unbecoming' in its contents, he assured the constable, and its purpose was only to vindicate his character.
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This letter was a strange compound of abject pleading and righteous indignation. Halliwell wanted to ‘undeceive' Ford about him being ‘an actor in the prodigious attempt against . . . Ormond'. His only involvement with Thomas Hunt was related to their business interests and the letter about a case of pistols found in his coat pocket was very old – he had not worn the garment since the previous spring. Furthermore, these weapons were required ‘for an adventure at sea'. The wet cloak belonged to a young boy and been left accidentally at Halliwell's home. Several witnesses could provide him with a cast-iron alibi for the time of the attack – as he was innocently at home all that day. He then complained about the imprisonment of his wife and child ‘without legal process and [who were] terrified with hard usage and want of food'. He added:

It was to avoid such severity that I absented myself, being under prejudice in respect of my religious principles and of my formerly being in arms, notwithstanding the Act of Indemnity.
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I will readily surrender if I am granted a trial but not otherwise.

I beseech your lordship to prevent my inevitable ruin.
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Mrs Halliwell was to be held by the lord mayor for six weeks and was regularly questioned about ‘the horrid attempt [on Ormond] whereof I praise God I am altogether innocent and hope that my husband is also, though he absents himself, for what reason I am utterly ignorant'. Then she was released into the custody of a king's messenger. Her protestations began to appear less than ingenuous when the authorities discovered she had sent a cloak to Halliwell, by a Mrs Perryn, whose address she refused to divulge.
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Warrants were issued on 11 December for the arrests of a Dr Ayliff, his son ‘Thomas Hunt' and Richard Halliwell.

The first breakthrough in the investigation proved something of a mirage. The fourth man named as wanted in connection with the attack on Ormond was ‘John Hurst', who had been seen at Halliwell's home on 9 December. Arlington was soon hard on his tracks.

His inquiries threw up one man called Hurst, the son of a Cambridge parson who had served Sir Francis Leake in Nottinghamshire for six or seven years. This Hurst had stayed at William Done's tavern, the [Golden] Fleece, in Tothill Street, Westminster, for two nights, 19 and 20 December, and had also been lodging at John Jones's White Swan in Queen Street, off Drury Lane.
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Jones had seen Hurst on horseback at his door the previous October when he said he was a brother of a servant of Lord Howard at Arundel House named Owen,
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‘a desperate fellow and of ill life', whom he had visited the day after the assault. Hurst had also been seen drinking at the St John's Head (or ‘Heaven') tavern in the precincts of the Palace of Westminster
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on 20 and 21 December and had sold his brother's horse to Done, saying that he was soon to depart to Jamaica with a commission to receive slaves. He was later imprisoned in the Marshalsea for a paltry debt and was brought from there to be identified by witnesses. Arlington discovered to his chagrin that this was the wrong Hurst.
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On 12 December Arlington interviewed several witnesses about another Hurst, a Yorkshire lawyer who had gone to Ireland in September 1669, leaving his wife Elizabeth behind in London. He had gone on to Scotland but had lately returned and was going to (?bigamously) marry a widow at Deptford, a shipyard area on the south bank of the Thames. This Hurst was described as aged about forty, ‘pretty tall' with yellow hair and, according to Thomas Trishaire, was a ‘great cheat'. No surprise, then, that he had had one ear cut off, or ‘cropped', and had stood in the pillory – the normal punishment for writing seditious texts. Superficially, this Hurst's antecedents seemed very suspicious, fitting the profile of someone quite likely to be one of Blood's desperadoes. Indeed, a man called Taylor claimed to have seen him in company with Halliwell at the Royal Exchange more than a week after the attack.
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However, no evidence could be uncovered to justify linking him with the Ormond conspiracy.

The investigation turned up a third man called John Hurst, a sailor born in Sussex who had returned four months before from the island of Nevis in the West Indies where he had been based for eight years. He was interrogated on 17 December but was able to prove that he was at ‘Capt. Lawrence's' house on the night of the assault. Moreover, Hurst could offer up ‘Lady Lawrence of Chelsea' and other witnesses who would vouch for his unimpeachable respectability.
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Despite all this effort, it looked likely that the line of inquiry about Hurst was an annoying dead end. Quietly, his name was eliminated from the investigation.

This was not the only red herring. On Christmas Day, a letter arrived on Arlington's desk that seemed to clear Blood of any involvement in the outrage. Sadly, all that is left us is the postscript – the remainder of the letter is torn away.

I am told that Allen or Ayliff mentioned in the [London]
Gazette
as one of the persons suspected in the attempt on the duke of Ormond was at sea in the
Portland
frigate
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and that Jennings or Jennins, who was formerly surgeon to that ship is a great crony of his and a likely man to give an account of him.

Jennings lives over against the Coach and Horses in St Martin's Lane and his wife works at the [Royal] Exchange. It will not be amiss to call upon him when you go that way.
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The note is endorsed: ‘John Rogers received this letter from William Rogers of Lincoln's Inn on 24 December and that John Rogers believed it came out of Worcestershire. He does not know from whom, but will write about it to William Rogers who has gone to Gloucestershire.' ‘Rogers' was an alias used by Captain John Lockyer, one of Blood's accomplices in the rescue of John Mason and his companion in his European mission to lure Edmund Ludlow to Paris. It is unlikely that this helpful correspondent was Lockyer, but it is by no means implausible that this was a clever attempt to
create a false alibi for Blood and divert Arlington's questing bloodhounds from his trail. The surgeon Jennings may well have been lined up to receive a visit from Arlington or his agents and to tell of Blood's convenient adventures at sea. If he did, his account was not believed.

Meanwhile, Samuel Holmes, the apothecary who had tried unsuccessfully to train Blood junior in the mysteries of pharmacy, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the attack on Ormond. On 9 December he was questioned by the lord mayor and Mr Justice Hooker and by Arlington three days later. He acknowledged that Thomas Hunt had been apprenticed to him and that he knew ‘Dr Aylett' or ‘Elyot', but he had not seen either man for six months. Both, he thought, were Presbyterians. He knew nothing of Hunt's father and had never heard of Thomas Blood.
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He was remanded to the Gatehouse
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as a close prisoner on suspicion of being ‘an accessory to the late attempt on the Duke of Ormond'.
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John Buxton, a tailor of Bell Alley, off Coleman Street, told the secretary of state that he suspected Holmes was ‘in the business', as he corresponded with the three suspects and was ‘a surgeon in the [parliamentary] army'. These three men, he said, ‘were Fifth Monarchists and desperate'. Holmes's sister, Mrs Elizabeth Price, who had lived with Buxton, had dined with Thomas Hunt four or five months before.
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As he seemed to know them so well, Arlington handed Buxton a warrant empowering him to apprehend all three men on sight.
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However, after Holmes testified against Hunt, Arlington discharged him from prison on 23 January 1671 when he came up with cash as a security to appear when required.
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A week before Christmas, Arlington questioned Francis Johnson, a one-time fellow of All Souls Oxford, ‘a pretended [Congregationalist] minister' and a former chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, who lived in Gray's Inn Lane. His lodger for three years had been Lieutenant Colonel Moore, who had remained out throughout the night of 7 December. The notes of the interrogation have the endorsement that ‘Moore had once the pistol' used by Hunt and left behind at the crime scene.
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Despite all this sound and fury, Arlington was getting nowhere.
Every strand of the tangled investigation ended in a blind alley. Three merchants on their way to France, two butchers from Gloucestershire, an Irish counterfeiter turned burglar
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and a London cook were all detained and intensively questioned. Even one of Catherine of Braganza's royal guards was suspected of involvement.
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All proved wholly innocent of any connection with the attempted kidnap.
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Sir William Morton, a judge of the King's Bench, told Ormond on 31 December that he was still searching actively for Blood and Lieutenant Colonel Moore as he had heard ‘they are in or about London'.
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On 14 January, sixty-nine temporal and spiritual members of the House of Lords
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were appointed as a committee to ‘examine the matter of fact committed in the late barbarous assaulting, wounding and robbing the person of the lord steward of his majesty's household and to make a report thereof to this House'. Their lordships, or any five of them, were to meet that afternoon in the prince's lodgings and have power to adjourn from time to time and ‘to send for such persons as they shall think fit'.
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The Lords investigation turned up little new, aside from the distraction of a handful of reprobates who were unwise enough to utter unflattering opinions in public about the Duke of Ormond.

Thomas Woodhouse, a king's messenger, was instructed to detain Thomas Sunderland for having ‘in some discourse justified the attempt to assassinate . . . Ormond, or at least declared that the persons that encouraged the assassins were as good men as the duke' himself. Sunderland happily only spent two days in custody before he was freed.
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The charmingly named John Washwhite, a former parliamentary soldier turned cook, who had lived at Lazy Hill, near Dublin, for seventeen years had been thrown into the Gatehouse for having spoken against Ormond. He appeared before their lordships on 23 January and denied the charge levelled against him of using threatening language against the duke and openly wishing that ‘he had lost his leg as well as his boot' at the Battle of Rathmines, outside Dublin, on 2 August 1649. More threateningly, he had predicted that Ormond ‘would not die in his bed'. Washwhite denied all this
and claimed his accusers were friends of someone he had caused to appear before Judge Morton and were trying to keep him imprisoned ‘to hinder his serving' the king. The Lords believed him and his chains were ordered to be removed.
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Thomas Dixey, a butcher from the seedy area of Bankside in Southwark, was also accused of using abusive language about Ormond. When he was brought up in front of Judge Morton on 3 February he was accused of involvement in the assault. Defiantly, he replied: ‘What's that to you?' Morton, not a man for levity, commented: ‘I do suspect this fellow the more because he is a bold impudent fellow . . . and lives in Southwark whither those who did assault the duke did retire.'

The butcher was hauled up before the Lords committee on 8 and 10 February, when the constable who arrested him swore that he had said: ‘All they can say is that I said the Duke of Ormond is a knave and I will justify it. I think I shall be hanged but I care not.' He confidently expected to be rescued by his brother John, known as ‘Cherrybounce',
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and Captain Careless – a mischievous reference to William Careless, Charles II's companion when he hid in an oak tree in the woods of Boscobel after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651.

Dixey was dispatched to the Gatehouse from where he wrote to Arlington, in a rather more moderate tone, sorrowfully seeking a release on bail, as ‘his goods are seized and his wife and children are turned out of doors'.
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Probably suspecting that the butcher's bark was worse than his bite, the Lords released Dixey on his providing a financial surety for his future good behaviour.
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