The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (4 page)

the twelfth day of February in the night time, Thomas Holcroft of Holcroft esquire; Hamlet Holcroft the younger of Culcheth, gent[leman], Joseph Key, Robert Drinkwater, husbandmen and Richard Dean Milner, all of Holcroft, forcibly and riotously w[i] th swords . . . and other weapons did enter into . . . [the] house of this infor[mant] . . .

The document is badly torn
¹⁶
and, frustratingly, the
lacuna
rules out any chance of explaining why Margaret's eldest son and another member of her late husband's family, together with three henchmen, should break into her home at dead of night, armed to the teeth. In the light of events that we shall explore later, it seems likely this was somehow connected with the division of Holcroft's estates.

A flurry of court actions now assailed Blood's embattled in-laws over their extensive property holdings throughout north-west England. In 1660, Robert King brought a civil case against ‘Mary Holcroft, relict of John Holcroft' and John Benbow, over an earlier conveyance made by Christopher Trentham of his estate in Cheshire to Holcroft.
¹⁷
To complicate matters still further, during the Easter and Trinity legal terms of 1661, depositions were taken in a fresh action brought by John Calveley against the son, Thomas Holcroft, his mother and others over the ownership of the manors of Holcroft, Cadeshead, Barton-upon-Irwell and Pursfurlong and lands in Culcheth, Risley, Atherton and Wigshaw, all in Lancashire.
¹⁸
As we will see, the intransigence of the issue was to deepen as the years passed and, as usual in such cases, only the lawyers profited.

Therefore, as far as Thomas Blood was concerned, on top of the problems of a growing family in Ireland and an unexpected dramatic downturn in his fortunes, immediate fulfilment of his wife's expected inheritance rights seemed less than certain. His future looked decidedly bleak, if not hopeless.

There were others in Ireland in the same sorry plight and feelings amongst the English and Scots Protestant population began to run high. Anger and resentment became widespread and there were furious demands for action to redress perceived injustices.

A further factor in the growing agitation amongst the nonconformists was the Act of Uniformity of 1662
¹⁹
which made use of the new
Book of Common Prayer
compulsory during church services and decreed that officiating ministers had to be ordained by bishops. Any clergyman who refused to take an oath swearing allegiance to the terms of the Act faced ejection from his living. This legislation
imposed the established Anglican Church and its rites and form of prayers on the population and further alienated Presbyterians and other dissenting ministers and their congregations.

Fear of violence and unrest multiplied like an unseen contagion throughout Ireland. In October 1662, the Dublin government was forced to order that unauthorised stockpiles of gunpowder should be surrendered by 10 December under amnesty. A second proclamation in November banned anyone other than MPs and enlisted soldiers from openly carrying weapons.

Another disturbing straw in the wind was the continuing losses, apparently from pilfering, of weapons from the army's arsenals in Ireland. An inventory drawn up in June 1663 showed major losses of arms since the last stock-taking nine months before: 112 modern firelock muskets were missing; 848 older matchlock muskets, 837 bandolier belts with powder cartridges; 80 cavalry carbines; 93 pikes; 80 pistols and 3,499 swords. While in the normal course of events some may have been discarded because of age and others sent for repair, there were inevitable suspicions that some of these weapons had found their way into the hands of nonconformist dissidents – more than enough to equip a well-armed regiment of rebels.

More perturbing, perhaps, was the absence of twenty-three ‘great guns of all sorts'. Again, this may have been because these cannon were no longer regarded as fit for use; of the remaining artillery, only forty guns were ‘sufficiently mounted' for service in combat.
²⁰

In early 1663, an intercepted letter written by Irish nonconformists was palpably designed to be both inflammatory and seditious. It purported to be penned by a Catholic and aimed to trigger antipopish hysteria with its talk of ‘crushing the fanatic [Protestant] officers [in the army] by peeling their rind and imprisoning some of the leading men' as part of a plot to make the army in Ireland wholly Catholic.
²¹

Protestant settlers believed it was high time to sweep aside the niceties of political protocol and make a stand in the defence of their interests. On 13 February 1663, Sir Audley Mervyn, speaker of the Irish House of Commons, delivered an eloquent and powerful
address to Ormond in the presence chamber of Dublin Castle.

It must have been uncomfortable listening for Ormond as Mervyn rambled on, employing colourful, sometimes almost apocryphal prose, in a thirty-page speech designed to demonstrate the great anger felt by his MPs and their constituents. He began with dire warnings that popery still posed a grave danger to the Anglican religion in Ireland:

Believe it sir, whatever delusive tenets have been broached of late, the contrary has been written in blood, not in his majesty's kingdom, but wheresoever the Papal power has been exalted.

Persons preferring the reformed religion are but tenants for their lives and fortunes till a time of slaughter is appointed.

Mervyn then moved on to the unrest and disquiet over the restitution of lands under the 1662 Act of Settlement: ‘We have been asked to speak for the people, who had we not spoken for them would certainly have spoken for themselves . . . The alarm that Hannibal is at the gates is hot throughout the Protestant plantations'. They were being treated unjustly: ‘The law says “All hail Protestants of Ireland” but if the execution is dissonant we are crucified under a glorious inscription of mockery.'
²²

Just over two weeks later, the Irish Commons reinforced their message to Ormond's government by approving a motion pledging that they would apply ‘the utmost remedies to prevent and stop the great and manifold prejudices and inconveniences which daily did and were like to happen to the Protestants of Ireland by the proceedings of the Commissioners'.
²³
The vote did nothing to dampen the dangerous powder trail of discontent and protest.

The lives and well-being of the commissioners were now being threatened and in London Charles II was quick to lend them his royal support in what was becoming an impossible task:

We have heard there have been several threats and disrespects used to you by some turbulent and unquiet persons to discourage or at least [harass] you in the execution of the trust committed to you.

We shall loyally support you against all such affronts and are pleased with your impartiality.
²⁴

No wonder the acrid, sharp smell of insurrection began to creep through the streets of Dublin. That month, the lord lieutenant warned Charles II that the army in Ireland was so ill-prepared that it was impossible to predict how far a rising might succeed:

This general discontent will not, I hope, cause any disturbance but if it should, the army is in a very ill state to repress [it], for there is nothing in the Treasury to draw or keep it together . . .

If we cannot keep the army together it will always be in the power of a few desperate men to start a commotion with regard to which no one can say where it would end.
²⁵

Ormond waited until 9 March before he made his official response to the Irish MPs' resolution. He did not mince his words, reproaching them for having caused so much ‘general uneasiness' that many English-born Protestants ‘had been frightened into selling their lots and adventures at vile and under rates or compounding with the old proprietors on very ill terms'.
²⁶

In making his admonishment, Ormond was aware that a conspiracy to stage a coup d'état in Dublin was under way. On 4 March, he had received a letter from Philip Alden, a shady lawyer, a dealer in forfeited estates and a known agent of the former parliamentary general and regicide Edmund Ludlow, who after the restoration had escaped to Switzerland to save his head.
²⁷
Alden had been recruited by an army officer, Colonel Edward Vernon, as a double agent at the
beginning of 1662 to monitor the activities of nonconformist ‘fanatics' in Ireland. Now he was proving his mettle.

His encrypted note to the lord lieutenant – sent direct as his ‘handler' Vernon was away in London – provided sketchy details of a political conspiracy against his administration involving some Irish MPs.
²⁸
Ormond replied immediately, demanding to know ‘who are at the head of the design for taking [Dublin] castle'.
²⁹

According to the spy, the plot had been under way since the beginning of 1662 with a ‘close committee, being most of the members of [the Irish] Parliament' sitting daily in Dublin with the objective of overthrowing Ormond's government and engaging ‘England, Scotland and Ireland in a new civil war'.
³⁰
Confirmation came the same day from a soldier named Jenkin Hopkins, who had been reportedly sounded out about joining the insurrection by a Lieutenant Turet. Further credence to the reports was provided by later news of the discovery of a parallel plot in Durham, but there the principal conspirator, Paul Hobson, had escaped.
³¹

The attempt on Dublin Castle was originally planned for 9 or 10 March, but the conspirators brought forward the date to Thursday, 5 March – just twenty-four hours after Alden revealed it to Ormond – because Sir John Stevens, constable of the castle, was due to mount the guard that day. He was blissfully unaware there were traitors within his garrison. A sergeant and fifty privates had joined the plot and, having obtained arms and powder ‘out of the store by the folly of the storekeeper's boy, resolved to make their attempt on the outer gate'.
³²
Ormond organised a hasty plan to thwart the coup attempt with loyal troops, but the plotters got wind of it and fled the city.

Two days later Ormond wrote to Chancellor Hyde describing how the plot to ‘surprise this castle' had been discovered. He admitted ruefully that he could not ‘boast much of being master of the temper necessary for the government of as ill a sort of people as inhabit any part of the earth. I am destitute of the power which should make them good [and] to keep them from doing hurt'.
³³
The same day, he wrote to Henry Bennet (the previous year appointed one of Charles II's secretaries of state), announcing he was deeply engaged ‘in the examination of a conspiracy for taking this Castle and me in it'.

He had discovered ‘no one better in it than [Captain] William Hewlett who has been accused of bragging that it was he that had murdered the last king'.
³⁴
Ormond added: ‘These fellows evidently take courage from the [Irish] House of Commons and if they change not and become more temperate, I shall presently make use of the power I have to separate them either by prorogation or
for good and all. They will [create] less harm apart than together.'
³⁵
At least the chastened Irish Commons pulled back from confrontation. On 11 March they responded to Ormond's biting words with a short, somewhat cringing response:

Our address was certainly misinterpreted if it was taken to mean anything disloyal to the king.

Our only wish was to lay before you and the Commissioners of Settlement certain considerations in order that you might take resolutions upon them.

The House believes that you have done much to establish the Protestant religion and English interest. We never intended by the orders we made to trench upon your grace's prerogative and hope that those who made the late plot against the castle will receive condign and speedy punishment.

They concluded with the promise of steadfast assistance ‘against all opponents of the king's authority'.
³⁶

A week later, Ormond sent for Alden ‘for fear of discovery of our correspondence'. A face-to-face meeting was required to elicit more information to help find ‘the bottom of the plot . . . in some way that it may not spoil the use of future intelligence'.
³⁷

Two days later in London that inveterate gossip Samuel Pepys heard of the conspiracy in a coffee house near St Paul's churchyard:

I heard how there had been a surprisal of Dublin by some discontented Protestants . . . and it seems the Commissioners have carried themselves so high for the Papists that the others will not endure it.

Hewlett and some others are taken and clapped up and they say the king has sent over to dissolve Parliament there who went very high against the Commissioners.

May God send all well!
³⁸

The Irish government was meanwhile frustrated by its lack of evidence against the handful of minor players swept up after the
aborted coup – mostly former parliamentary officers now working as ‘discontented tradesmen' in Dublin. Ormond was exasperated at the failure to discover and then prosecute the ringleaders: ‘The design to surprise the Castle sticks at Hewlett', he complained to Secretary Bennet. ‘We can trace no further – not even to get enough evidence to incriminate him legally.'
³⁹
He admitted to the king that ‘we find a difficulty in inculpating people in connection with the recent plot against the Council and Parliament . . . Since yesterday I have heard that some go about persuading the English that the Irish had a plot to destroy them'.
⁴⁰

His irritation was exacerbated by widespread rumours that Edmund Ludlow had been involved in the plot and, if so, had cannily escaped his net. John King, First Baron Kingston, reported that the regicide was said to have been in Ireland

until the last week and I think he came here when the last design [plot] in England failed him . . .