The King's Revenge (35 page)

As the winter of 1663–4 began to bite in Vevey, the English group could only trust to extra vigilance and bad weather for
protection. At least one of them, John Lisle, was far from sure this was the best tactic. Lisle was a man with a facility
to find difficulty where others saw strength. He found no solace in Ludlow’s reasoning that they had survived attack and would
do so again. Lisle felt their current base was compromised. He further reasoned that since the royalists’ number one target
was Ludlow, the biggest threat to the longevity of the others was their proximity to
him
. Lisle resolved to move to Lausanne. The decision would be the death of him.

With tension between Britain and the Dutch once more increasing, London was again concerned about possible alliances between
the exiled republicans and the Dutch to plan and carry out an invasion. Shortly after Lisle left, Ludlow heard from his French
source that a new plot had been hatched. This time, the assassins would not
approach across the lake but would come less ostentatiously on foot, with horses held nearby on which to make a speedy getaway.
Ludlow sent word to Lisle and the small group of other English exiles in Lausanne. Eight days after his intelligence, several
well-armed men were encountered by one of Vevey’s townsmen, a Monsieur du Moulin, near the lake between Vevey and Lausanne.
However, once the group was discovered, nothing further transpired. On 21 July 1664, several Savoyards were spotted in Lausanne,
standing by the door of the church attended by Lisle. When neither he nor any other English exiles came to the church, they
were heard to curse and ride away.
²³

By now Lisle no longer thought he was better protected in Lausanne than he had been in Vevey. Royalist agents seemed to be
everywhere. A few days after the agents were seen at the church, two suspicious characters lodged at a Vevey inn. The men
made off once their presence was noted. As had been arranged under the town’s new security measures, Ludlow was informed of
their presence.

On the afternoon of 11 August, Ludlow received dreadful news from Lausanne: Lisle had been murdered. He had been shot on his
way to church. From descriptions given by passers-by and those arriving for the service, the assassins were similar to those
who had recently been seen at Vevey. They had taken up residence at a Lausanne inn after moving from Vevey about a week before.
Their presence had become so noticeable that English émigrés in the town had been warned. In response, Lisle had sent his
servants to try to ascertain who the men were but they returned with no firm information. While the strangers remained in
town, Lisle was urged to stay at home. Saying his life was in the hands of God, he disregarded the warnings.

Lisle had been so sure of the security of his new billet that he had sent for his wife, Alice, to join him. Neither of them
realised that Williamson had opened their mail and now knew exactly where his quarry lived. Of course, Lisle knew that having
acted as a legal
advisor and judge at the king’s trial could make him a target. He took precautions and used the alias Mr Field – an action
negated by his unfortunate habit of wearing his Lord Chancellor’s cloak while walking around the town.
²⁴
The ambition and vanity which had taken Lisle to the top had now helped pitch him into the abyss.

That morning, he had left his lodgings and walked to the church near the town gate to hear the morning sermon. It is thought
that, due to his friends’ urging, he may have been accompanied by bodyguards. Near the churchyard, several assassins were
waiting. When Lisle appeared and walked towards the churchyard, one of them walked up to him and bid him good day, addressing
him by name. Whether Lisle responded to the trick or not is unknown. He walked on into the churchyard. His assailant rushed
up behind him, reached under his frock coat, pulled out a gun and shot him in the back at point-blank range and in full view
of the congregation gathering to enter the church. The weapon the assassin used was a large-bore musketoon, or blunderbuss,
designed to fire multiple shots like a shotgun. It was favoured for use at sea, particularly by pirates. Three pistol balls
tore into Lisle’s back. As he crumpled to the ground, the killer ran out of the churchyard to the town gate, where his accomplices
waited with horses.

According to some sources, the killer’s accomplices drew swords and briefly fought with Lisle’s bodyguards, the engagement
ending once it became clear Lisle had been fatally wounded. The assailants galloped off through the town gate, shouting, ‘
Vive le
Roi!’
²⁵
Official royalist versions claim that Lisle was first called on to surrender, and was shot only when his bodyguards drew
their pistols. It is hard to reconcile this with the fact that Lisle was shot in the back. A musketoon was not a weapon to
stick in a man’s ribs, like a pistol, to persuade him to come quietly; it was a weapon with which to eviscerate him.

So died Sir John Lisle, aged fifty-four. Before his exile, he had been a senior barrister and an MP, had assisted in organising
the trial of Charles I and had sat as a judge, though he did not sign the king’s
death warrant. He went on to be a Commissioner of the Great Seal, a member of the Council of State and a Commissioner of the
Admiralty. His widow, Alice, already a pariah and known as ‘the regicide’s wife’, lived on in the family home at Moyles Court
in Hampshire on the edge of the New Forest. In old age she would face a scandalous trial for treason and be sentenced to death.

Ludlow wrote to his friends in England with the sad news of Lisle’s death. His immediate version of events was understandably
at variance with that which emerged later. For example, according to Ludlow, there were two assailants, not three. In London,
there was great joy at the court when the news of Lisle’s death arrived.

As with the attempt on the life of Ludlow, there is a tendency to claim that Lisle’s murder was a kidnap attempt gone wrong.
Again, it is hard to take this seriously. Even if he had been captured, quite how he would have been put on a horse against
his will in a busy street and taken away in broad daylight is hard to comprehend.
²⁶

So who were the men who killed Lisle? There is little doubt they were Irish soldiers in the employ of the English crown: Germaine
Riordane, or MacCarty, of whom we have already heard; Miles Crowley, or O’Croli, who also went by the name Thomas MacDonnell;
and James Fitz Edmund Cotter, or Semus mac Emoin Mhic Choitir. It seems Crowley fired the shot that killed Lisle. Some accounts
have it that Cotter, not Riordane, was in charge.

All three assassins were rewarded for their exploits, rather dispelling any view that Charles was against such thuggery (he
had, after all, made that arch-promoter of political murder, Silius Titus, commander of the Cinque Ports). O’Croli was given
a commission in the English army. Riordane already had a commission, although he was reported to have lost it in 1667 for
being a Roman Catholic. In 1670, he surfaced to write to friends of Ludlow, saying he had changed his ways and now wished
to serve the Good Old Cause. Ludlow was not impressed. Cotter received a commission in the English army, but ended up in prison
on the West Indian island of St Christopher after a misjudged raid went wrong. Upon his release, he
returned to England and was sent to spy once more on Ludlow in Vevey in the 1670s. For his pains he was paid a pension of
£200, made Marshal of the Leeward Islands and retired to Ireland with a knighthood.

It has been suggested that the assailants were in the employ of the Duchess of Orléans, or that she at least paid for their
hire. Although it is known that O’Riordane certainly received money from her, this does not mean the gang were directly controlled
by the duchess, or that they received their orders solely from her. She is far more likely to have been the conduit for a
policy conducted from London. The fact that Williamson knew via intercepted mail where Lisle and others were living, and that
the assassins were afterwards rewarded with appointments and gifts by Charles’s government, strongly indicates that while
the action was perhaps controlled via Paris, the instigating orders came from London at the behest of the king. Such an arrangement
would have had the added bonus of ‘plausible deniability’, the technique of disguised responsibility so beloved by the CIA
and other security agencies in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Charles’s childhood governor, the Earl of
Newcastle, had instructed:
Plus ça change
.

At the time of Lisle’s death, the search for Edward Whalley and William Goffe was revived on the other side of the Atlantic.
Following previous frustrations and failures, the hunt had been largely abandoned since 1661. The fugitives continued to live
in their cellar in Milford. Thomas Temple’s promise to ‘hazard his life’ in pursuit of them had helped him become governor
of Nova Scotia but it left the fugitives untroubled. Their old cave on Providence Hill lay abandoned to the bears and snakes.

That all changed in the summer of 1664. The king gave the order for an expeditionary force to be sent to New England. Its
prime target was the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam on Long Island, which Charles wished to take over in order to create an
unbroken wedge of British rule on the north-east seaboard. The force was led
by four commissioners and commanded by Colonel Richard Nicholas. They had further orders ‘to apprehend all persons who stand
attainted of high treason, and to discover those who have entertained them since the restoration’. It was unnecessary to identify
the traitors by name.

Four men-o’-war arrived, carrying four hundred troops and enough firearms and ammunition to equip several hundred more. Whalley
and Goffe retired once more to their cave but remained there only for a week or two. One night, a panther screamed outside
the entrance. More worryingly, a group of Native Americans chanced upon their hiding place and discovered their bedding, though
they did not spot either of the men. Word spread around Milford about their presence. Their benefactors decided to move them
to one of the most remote settlements in Massachusetts, an outpost called Hadley, some eighty miles to the north-west on the
boundary of Indian territory and ninety miles from the coast. Goffe’s sojourn here would become a legend, and inspire great
storytellers on either side of the Atlantic.

Hadley in 1664 was a stockaded village of some fifty Puritan families. The settlers who built it in 1659 chose a site in the
tranquil valley of the Connecticut river. It must have seemed to them that they had found the Promised Land. Their little
satellite settlement was on an oxbow bend under the shadow of a richly forested mountain. They would discover that they were
surrounded by the most fertile soils in New England. The great nineteenth-century landscape artist Thomas Cole would call
it ‘Arcadia’ and immortalise the landscape in
The Oxbow
, an 1833 painting that became as famous in America as Constable’s
Haywain
in England. After Niagara Falls, Hadley would develop into the most visited holiday site in America.

By pre-arrangement, the fugitives were received by the town’s Puritan minister, John Russell. The Reverend Russell concealed
them in an upstairs room. Since the Russells lived right in the middle of the settlement, this seemed an unnecessary risk;
however, their luck held. Many decades later, a historian picked up folk
memories of searchers from Boston and Redcoats from England arriving in Hadley around 1664, but there is no record that the
Russell house ever came under suspicion.

Colonel Nicholas and his troops succeeded in their primary task of ejecting the Dutch, but they found it impossible to persuade
the colonists of New England to aid the search for the regicides. Nicholas reported later that when he tried to set up a hearing
of complaints in Boston and issued a summons for witnesses, a small mob-cum-delegation appeared and stopped him: ‘The Government
sent a herald and trumpeter and 100 people accompanying them to proclaim that the Commissioners should not act in that government
nor any persons give obedience,’ he reported, adding that ‘the meeting was dissolved and nothing farther done.’
²⁷

The commission had secret instructions from Charles to tread gently with the Massachusetts Puritans. The colonial government
had been slow to recognise Charles as king and the British strategy – unusually subtle – was to woo the colony gently back
to full allegiance, prior to imposing a new charter. This might explain the failure to take tough action against people suspected
of harbouring Whalley and Goffe.

Much of what we know about the fugitives’ lives at this point comes from the researches nearly a century later of Thomas Harrison,
then governor of Massachusetts. He acquired Goffe’s papers – letters and a diary – while compiling a history of the colony
published in 1764. The material revealed that the two were sometimes living ‘in terror’. In letters between Goffe and his
wife Frances the two tell each other to be careful of betrayal. Given that Frances’ friend Lady Wariston was being betrayed
by Robert Johnston, the warnings were timely.

Goffe’s diary revealed that in February 1665, with Colonel Nicholas’s men still in the area, they were joined by a third regicide.
This was another military man, John Dixwell, formerly the governor of Dover Castle. Here was a man who took chances. In 1660
he was named as a regicide, but in order to sell as much of his property as
possible before it was seized, he had hung on in England almost as long as Edmund Ludlow before fleeing abroad.

Dixwell went to Hanau in Germany and was one of the fugitives George Downing had in his sights in 1661. It is more than likely
that he decided to quit Europe and make for America because of the callous betrayal of John Okey and his other friends, whose
kidnapping was to have such a profound effect on some of the refugees. Dixwell remained in hiding in the Russell household
with his two friends for perhaps two years before deciding to move on.