Espionage in the Divided Stuart Dynasty, 1685–1715

Introduction

Treason never prospers What’s the reason?

Why if treason prospers None dare ever call it treason.

Families can be complicated. Royal families can be more complicated than most. Such was the case of the Stuart royal family in the second half of the seventeenth century. Charles II fathered at least twelve children, most of which were brought up with royal privileges but none could succeed him as they were all illegitimate. On Charles’s death the crown passed to his Catholic brother James II, who fathered several bastards but also had two legitimate daughters, Mary and Anne. When James’s first wife died he married Mary of Modena, an Italian Catholic. Mary was only slightly older than her husband’s two daughters, and they did not take to her. Mary, the eldest of these daughters, was obliged for political reasons to move to Holland and marry her first cousin William of Orange, a dour Dutchman whom she heartily disliked. Mary and Anne’s hostility towards their stepmother was such that when she gave birth to a boy they convinced themselves that the child was not hers. These were quite enough complications for any family but there was one overriding issue that was to fracture both the family and the nation: religion.

James was a Catholic, as was his queen, and it was therefore inevitable that the baby Prince of Wales would be brought up as a Catholic, so perpetuating a Catholic monarchy. Both Anne and Mary were devout Anglicans, as were the majority of the country. The prospect of enforced Catholicism led the leading Protestant aristocrats to invite Mary’s Lutheran husband William to invade England to preserve the Protestant religion. This he did, and received so much support that James fled, never to return to England. William and Mary were jointly crowned and became rulers of the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. For the next hundred years James, then his son and grandson, would try to regain the thrones. In this they were supported by British Jacobites, who regarded them as the legitimate monarchs, and by French aid. The Jacobites and their French backers were to be the main threat to the security of the three kingdoms during the reigns of William and Mary, and then Anne.

This book is about government intelligence in this complex period where some regarded King William as a saviour, others as a usurper. Likewise, King James and his heirs were looked on by some as true sovereigns and others as pretenders. Although espionage and conspiracy are the book’s subject matter, its theme is loyalty. James’s Catholicism was an excuse for his disloyal nephew Monmouth to lead a rebellion against him. Loyalty to the Crown resulted in that rebellion being savagely put down, but James’s continued Catholicisation caused his overthrow by those whose prime loyalty was to the Protestant religion. Foremost of these was William of Orange, his nephew and son-in-law, but it also included his own daughters. In the case of Mary, it meant having to decide between loyalty to her father and to her husband. In religion there was not much room for compromise. With the king’s two Protestant daughters turned against him, it became a tragedy of King Lear proportions. Indeed the similarity was so strong that performances of Shakespeare’s play were banned.

For Catholics, those of the Protestant faith were heretics, and for Protestants, the Catholics were idolaters whose Pope was the Antichrist. To be a member of the opposing faith was to consign your immortal soul to an eternity of damnation in the afterlife. James’s loyalty to the Catholic Church not only lost him his crown, but also prevented him negotiating for his son to inherit the throne on condition he was brought up a Protestant. When James died, his son likewise refused the offer of the crown in exchange for converting to Protestantism out of devotion to the Catholic Church. Many Jacobites risked losing their wealth, freedom and even lives out of loyalty to James and his heirs.

The times saw numerous instances of selfless loyalty to monarch or religion, but it also saw another type of loyalty. Adherence to monarch or religion could be trumped by an individual’s overriding concern for themselves and their families; in other words, self-interest. John Churchill’s sister was a mistress of James, and Churchill owed his rise in fortune entirely to King James. This did not prevent him deserting James to join William, and although remaining apparently loyal to the new regime he kept his options open by sending messages of support to the exiled Jacobite court. There were many like him who did not want to burn their boats and this included Anne’s principal minister and secretary of state responsible for intelligence, who plotted to transfer the throne to the Old Pretender on her death. It is no surprise that in dangerous and uncertain times, self-interest was often a greater motivating factor than faithfulness to monarch or religion. As we shall see, this was particularly so in the murky activities of espionage and intrigue, where agents and informants were happy to transfer their allegiance to whoever was likely to pay them most.

The period between 1685 and 1715 spanned just thirty years, but was to lead to the creation of the country as we know it today. As well as ensuring that England remained primarily Protestant in religion and culture, it had other important results. The period saw the foundation of parliamentary democracy with the Bill of Rights, the expansion of trade and commerce with naval supremacy, new overseas territories and with the formation of the Bank of England. Finally, and most importantly, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain by the Act of Union. This work describes how government intelligence played its part in influencing the great events of this fascinating period where conflicting loyalties led to the fracturing of a royal family and the British nation.

God save the King

I mean the Faith’s Defender.

God save, no harm in saving,

The Pretender

But who Pretender is and who the King,

God save us all that quite another thing!

Chapter 1

A New King 1685

‘The King begins his reign with great expectations, and hopes of much reformation as to the late vices and profaneness of both Court and Country.’

Diary of John Evelyn, entry for 23 April 1685

It was another bitterly cold winter and the Thames in London had frozen over. In the city, there was a general spirit of gloom and uncertainty. Many citizens could be seen weeping as they walked the streets. A feeling had taking hold that something both tragic and momentous was about to take place.

The two brothers had shared the highs and lows of tempestuous times. Their father executed, their birthright removed, then unexpectedly restored, only to be later challenged but finally again restored. Their brother and three sisters had died and they were now the only surviving children of Charles I. It was 4 February 1685 and it had become clear that the two men who had lived through so much together would soon be parted for ever. Charles II lay dying in his bedchamber at the Palace of Whitehall with his brother James, Duke of York, at his side.

During the previous five days the royal physicians had tried the best known medical practices including copious bleeding and placing pigeons at Charles’s feet, which seemed to have helped cure the queen when she had been ill a few years earlier, but appeared to have no effect on a male patient. Many other remedies were employed such as shaving the king’s head and then applying blistering agents to his skull, and some fifty-eight different drug concoctions were administered, usually with horrific results. These included ingredients such as the spirits of human skull and a bezoar stone from the stomach of a Middle Eastern goat. Red-hot irons were applied to Charles’s head and bare feet, but neither this nor the continued bleeding managed to cure what is now believed to have been chronic granular kidney disease.¹

James was beside himself with grief and wept openly. It is true that he and Charles had not always seen eye to eye, but there was a deep brotherly bond despite being so different in personality. While Charles was light-hearted, amusing and approachable, James was serious, rather dull and haughty. For all his indolence and pursuit of pleasure, Charles could be shrewd, flexible and politically adept, whereas James was unimaginative, inflexible and unopen to political compromise. There were two things the brothers had in common besides their shared experiences, and that was bravery in military action and exceptionally high levels of promiscuity. But even in the latter there was a difference. Charles’s many mistresses were renowned for their beauty and lively personalities, whereas James’s were rather plain, dull creatures. This had prompted Charles to jokingly remark that he believed that James had been given his mistresses as a penance by his confessor.

James was of course a Roman Catholic by now. James and Charles’s mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, had been a Catholic, and James’s first wife, Anne Hyde, had converted to Catholicism in 1660. She had some influence over his secret conversion to Catholicism nine years later. Such was the anti-Catholic feeling in the country, that despite his conversion, he had continued to attend Anglican services for another seven years. Charles may have had Catholic sympathies himself, but was well aware that as king he was head of the Church of England and insisted that James’s children were brought up as Anglicans. Anne died of breast cancer in 1671 and their only son, Edgar, died three months later, leaving James with just two surviving children, Mary and Anne, aged 9 and 6 respectively. Charles II had sired numerous bastards such as James, Duke of Monmouth, but never produced a child with his queen, Catharine of Braganza. That meant his brother James was next in line to the throne and after him, James’s eldest daughter Mary.

Parliament’s concern about growing Catholic influence led to the Test Act of 1673 in which all civil and military office holders were obliged to take an oath denouncing Catholic beliefs. James refused to take the oath and resigned as Lord High Admiral, thus making it clear to all that he had converted to Catholicism. In the same year James decided to remarry in the hopes of producing a male heir. The lady eventually chosen was Princess Mary Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Modena in northwest Italy, whom he married by proxy in Modena in a Catholic ceremony.

Mary Beatrice was tall and slim with Mediterranean good looks, was fluent in French as well as her native Italian, and had a good command of Latin. However, at 15 years of age she was twenty-five years younger than James. She had charmed Louis XIV when she visited Versailles on her way to England and he had given her a £6,000 brooch. James was equally charmed by his wife when he first saw her on their wedding day in London. The ceremony was an Anglican one and after it James introduced his daughters to his young wife as ‘a new playmate’ for them. Mary Beatrice was less than happy when she first met her pockmarked, stuttering, 40-year-old husband and began a somewhat disconcerting habit of bursting into tears whenever she saw him. Fortunately this passed with time and she and James were to become quite devoted to each other.

Charming as she was, Mary Beatrice was a devout Catholic and was not welcomed in Protestant England, where Catholics accounted for only one per cent of the population. Before long many were referring to her as the ‘Pope’s daughter’. This was no more than standard Protestant prejudice, but parliament was expressing deep concern about James’s Catholicism. In an attempt to counter this, Charles decided that James’s eldest daughter Mary should marry her Protestant cousin, Prince William of Orange, the Stadtholder (leader) of Holland. William was the son of Charles and James’s sister, and had become Europe’s principal Protestant leader against Catholicism in general, and Louis XIV in particular. Despite this display of support for the Protestant faith, antiCatholicism not only persisted, but far greater anti Catholic feeling was to take hold of the country the next year.

1678 saw what became known as the Popish Plot. This was as series of fictitious Catholic plots to kill the king which were fabricated by Titus Oates and other Protestant extremists. The purpose of the supposed plots was to replace Charles with his Catholic brother in order to turn England into a Catholic country. Allegations of complicity in the plot began to be levelled at senior Catholics, including Queen Catharine, Mary Beatrice and various Catholic peers. The country became gripped by an antipapist hysteria which rampaged for three years with many innocent Catholics being imprisoned and fifteen executed. This then led to the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ in which the Whigs in parliament, headed by the Earl of Shaftesbury, wanted to exclude James from inheriting the throne for being a Catholic. With so much opposition to James, Charles instructed him and Mary Beatrice to leave England and live first in Brussels and then later in Edinburgh.

In 1680 Charles summoned parliament to royalist Oxford and then dismissed it, thus removing it as a mouthpiece for the Exclusionists. Charles never held another parliament and managed to obtain sufficient funding from subsidies given by his cousin, Louis XIV of France. Deprived of his ability to wield power through parliament, Shaftesbury began considering open rebellion to support the Protestant Duke of Monmouth as the rightful heir to Charles. When Charles had managed to get Tory sheriffs elected in London who could select juries to convict Shaftesbury of high treason, Shaftesbury fled the country and died in Rotterdam in 1682. Meanwhile, the Lord Chief Justice was hearing cases brought against Catholics by Oates, and it became obvious that the evidence of Oates and his fellow accusers was a pack of lies. Oates was imprisoned, there was a public backlash against him and the anti-Popish frenzy died down sufficiently for James and Mary Beatrice to return to London. James then had a great stroke of luck.

In 1683 the Rye House Plot was uncovered to assassinate both Charles and James as they passed a building called Rye House when returning to London after attending Newmarket races. The aim of the plot was to enable a Protestant succession, possibly by putting Monmouth on the throne, but it was not very well developed and much of it was just talk among extremist Whigs. The king was held in great affection by the common people, whose shock at the revelation of the proposed assassination resulted in an upsurge of support for him and even James. Charles played this for all it was worth and in subsequent trials nearly all those implicated in the plot were executed, imprisoned, or escaped abroad. Charles had managed to rid himself of most of the opposition Whig leadership which had tried to prevent James from inheriting the throne.

One prominent person who was probably implicated in the plot was Charles’s much loved bastard son, Monmouth. Charles tried hard to get Monmouth to provide evidence against the plotters and return to royal favour, but to the king’s sadness he refused and was banished. Monmouth moved to The Hague where he was generously received by his cousin, James’s daughter Mary, and her husband William of Orange. With Monmouth gone, Whig leaders vanquished and no parliament to question the king’s actions, Charles had a relaxed and enjoyable final year. He quietly enjoyed the company of his mistresses, dogs, and numerous illegitimate children, with his brother James returning to the Privy Council and taking up responsibilities appropriate to the heir presumptive. This happy state was brought to a sudden end when Charles had a seizure on 2 February which took him to his death bed and the excruciating tortures of his well-meaning physicians.

As Charles lay in pain, falling in and out of consciousness, James took command of the situation. He dispatched messages to lord lieutenants, instructing them to get into a state of readiness in case of any disturbances that might follow the king’s death. He had also ordered all ports to be closed so that no messages of Charles’s imminent demise could get to Monmouth and be exploited by him. There was one action that had been uppermost in James’s mind but was fraught with danger. He needed to save his brother’s soul by arranging for him to convert to Catholicism before his life ended. Soon after Charles’s first seizure, Queen Catharine had asked Mary Beatrice to request James to arrange for Charles’s conversion. James knew how difficult this was, not least because the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops, including Durham, London, Ely and Bath and Wells, were constantly in the king’s bedchamber trying to provide Charles with Anglican prayer and comfort. James decided he could take no action. The situation was very delicate, Charles had spent his pubic life as an Anglican and would be furious if he recovered and discovered he had joined the Church of Rome.

As Charles became weaker, his principal mistress, the Catholic Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth, got the French Ambassador, Paul Barrillon, to visit James and beg him to arrange a conversion. James realised that time was running out and told Barrillon that ‘I would rather risk everything than not do my duty on this occasion.’² The decision was made but the problem was how to implement it. Firstly it was necessary to get Charles’s consent to conversion and secondly to find a priest. James was the only person who could approach the royal bed on his own authority; he did so as discretely as possible and whispered about conversion in his brother’s ear. Charles answered very quietly: ‘Yes with all my heart.’

The next step was to find an English speaking Catholic priest, but they were not easy to come by, as being a Popish priest was illegal and risked the death penalty. The queen and Mary Beatrice as foreign royalty had dispensation to have their Catholic chaplains, but they all spoke either Portuguese or Italian. Fortunately, an English priest was found in the queen’s household and this was Father John Huddleston. He had been given a position in the queen’s household by way of thanks for his part in helping Charles escape after the Battle of Worcester. Huddleston was disguised in a wig and cassock and led from the queen’s apartments to a back-stairs closet just off the king’s bedchamber which had a concealed communicating door. James told the clerics and courtiers assembled around Charles that the king wished everyone to retire except for the earls of Bath and Feversham who were, respectively, the Groom of the Stole and the Queen’s Chamberlain, both Protestants but completely loyal to the crown.

When the bedchamber had been cleared Huddleston was led in and Charles rallied at the sight of him. Huddleston took the king’s confession, accepted him into the Catholic Church then administered the Vaticum and Extreme Unction. The king was conscious and accepted the rites wholeheartedly. Huddleston’s work completed, he silently left as he had arrived through the secret door. The only people who had seen the king’s conversion were James, Barrillon, Bath and Feversham. James had wanted Bath and Feversham to be in the room so they could be Protestant witnesses to the event, if James ever decided to make the conversion public. Having completed his religious duty to his brother, James then recalled all those who had been sent to wait in the antechamber and Charles’s prolonged death agonies continued as if nothing had happened.

Charles clung onto life for another two days, prompting the king to apologise to those around his bed for being ‘such an unconscionable time a-dying’. Charles then began a series of farewells, firstly to Queen Catharine, then James with Mary Beatrice by his side, and lastly all his illegitimate children, except of course Monmouth. At ten in the morning of 6 February, Charles fell into a coma in which he remained until his death at noon.

News of the king’s death resulted in an outpouring of public grief. Queen Catharine received the formal condolences of ambassadors with dignity, and the royal body was placed in the Whitehall’s Painted Chamber to lie in state. The funeral took place on 14 February and Charles was interred in the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey. Much to James’s distress, the funeral service had to be an Anglican one, as there was no question that Charles’s conversion to Catholicism could be acknowledged. James had done his best to save the soul of his brother, but there was only so far he could go in Protestant dominated England

With Charles dead, James’s principal task was to ensure the security of his throne. After all, it had only been a matter of a couple of years previously that the country had been in the grips of anti-papist hysteria and powerful opposition leaders were demanding that he be excluded from inheriting the crown. It was a top priority for James to alleviate fears about him being a papist king of a Protestant country. The day after his brother’s death James called his Council and made it clear to them that the country had nothing to fear from him being a Catholic. He included in his speech: ‘And I shall make it my endeavours to preserve this government both in Church and state as it is now by law established.’ The Council requested that the speech could be published, and following James’s agreement copies of it were distributed about the country. James took the further step of reassuring the clergy by summoning Archbishop Sancrof and giving a similar undertaking to protect the Anglican church, adding that he: ‘would never give such countenance to Dissenters, knowing it must needs be faction not religion if men could not be content to meet five beside their own family which the law dispense with.’³

James’s next step was the popular move of summoning parliament, which Charles had been ruling without for the last five years. Following these reassurances to Tories and Anglicans, James received loyal addresses from all parts of his three kingdoms. The City which had been so stridently anti-Catholic during the Popish Plot had even sent a message from the Lord Mayor and Aldermen expressing their duty to James while Charles was still in the process of dying. In fact, so firm was the position of the crown in the last years of Charles’s reign, that there appeared to be no opposition to the accession of a Catholic king who had given his word to protect the government and church.

It might be thought that a new sovereign would make widespread changes, but James further demonstrated quiet continuity by making very few. He made some minor appointments in the royal household such as making Colonel John Churchill a gentleman of the Bedchamber. Churchill had shown talent as a soldier and diplomat and had been in James’s service for twenty years starting as his page, and James had stood firmly by him during the Exclusion Crisis. It was no surprise that James should want to promote a gifted and personable man who had shown him absolute loyalty. Of more importance were the positions in the Council and these James kept virtually unchanged with the main exception being Laurence Hyde, the Earl of Rochester, who he moved from being Lord President of the Council back to being Lord Treasurer. Rochester had been Lord Treasurer previously but had been removed by Charles when his great rival Lord Halifax accused him of losing £40,000 through mismanagement. Rochester was the brother of James’s first wife, Anne Hyde, so was semi-family. On the same basis Rochester’s elder brother, Henry Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, was made first Lord Privy Seal, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

It was entirely understandable that James should give promotion to those who were close to him, but it was a surprise and a relief that he was magnanimous to those ministers who had supported his exclusion. Chief among those was Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, who had voted for the Exclusion Bill, an act Charles described as ‘a Kiss of Judas’, and immediately dismissed him as Secretary of State for the Northern Department. However, after lobbying from the king’s principal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, Charles brought him back into government as Secretary of State for the Southern Department. It should be explained that the inner Council had ministers with particular portfolios such as the Lord Treasurer for finance and the Lord Chancellor for the judiciary, but foreign affairs and general domestic matters were split between two Secretaries of State. The most senior was the one for the Southern Department who covered foreign affairs concerning France and southern Europe. The Secretary of State for the Northern Department covered the United Provinces of the Dutch Republic and Scandinavia. Spencer was nothing if not ambitious, and realised that if he was to keep hold of this important post he would have to exert himself to display exceptional loyalty to the new king. To fail to do so would deprive him of the income he badly needed to pay his gambling debts.

James had, therefore, succeeded to the throne without causing any great alarm about his Catholicism, and demonstrated continuity with the previous reign. The one way in which he was not demonstrating continuity could be regarded as a positive one. That was his own standard of conduct and what he expected of his courtiers. Whereas Charles had been lazy and easily bored by the detailed matters of state, James was hardworking, and unlike his brother, kept a close eye on revenue, scrutinising the accounts of the Exchequer on a weekly basis. As expected, Charles’s extravagance had resulted in huge debts and James set about paying them off, devoting over £1 million of revenue to this over the next three years. As part of his reforms he made it clear he would not tolerate corruption or the sale of offices. Naturally such practices were ingrained and did continue, but at least less blatantly than before.

Charles II’s court may have been merry and dominated by outrageous but amusing men and grasping but beautiful mistresses, but it was undeniably dissolute. Prior to his conversion, James had joined in with the general amiable decadence, even if he had not possessed his brother’s sharp mind to take part in the witty repartee. After his conversion to Catholicism James had become steadily more moral and strait-laced. Now he was king he made it clear that blasphemy, drunkenness and gambling for high stakes were no longer acceptable at court. James drank in moderation and became very abstemious in his tastes. He once told Pepys that he used only one sauce to be served with fish, flesh or fowl, and that was ‘made up of some parsley and dry toast beat in a mortar, together with vinegar, salt and a little pepper’.⁴ James even decided to set an example by sending away his chief mistress Catherine Smedley. It goes without saying that for someone with James’s strong libido this would not last. Before long, ladies of a lesser degree were being smuggled into the king’s bedchamber through the same secret door from the back stairs