A Gallant Attempt for the Crown
BLOOD was defiant before the King, but let him know his value. His cause was religious liberty, he thundered; never would he rat on his friends. There were three hundred of them, and only he could stop them — as he did when, with his rifle trained on Charles during the King’s ablutions in the river at Battersea, he had aborted the mission because “his heart was checked with an Awe of Majesty”.
The Duke of Ormond’s suspicions were confirmed. Charles not only asked Foreign Secretary Lord Arlington to discharge Blood along with his confederates, but recommended an annual pension of £500 in Irish lands. “How he came to be pardoned,” complained Sir John Evelyn, after meeting Blood over dinner with Sir Thomas Osborne, Treasurer to the Navy, “and even received into favour, I could never come to understand.”* Perhaps a private note sent to the King six days after the crown affair, in which Thomas named three conspirators at the Navy Pay Office, had something to do with it. Arlington sheepishly broke the news to the Duke of Ormond, who cut him short. “Since it is his Majesty’s pleasure, that is reason sufficient for me. Your Lordship may therefore spare the rest.”
* In fact Sir John made a pretty shrewd guess as to the reason. “Some believed” he confided to his memoirs after this unsettling dinner-engagement “he became a spy of several parties, being well with the Sectaries and Enthusiasts, and did his Majesty services that way, which none alive could do so well as he. [...] The man had not only a daring, but a villanous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken and dangerously insinuating.”