THE THIEF
The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.
—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, 15321
A century before the American Revolution, Blood Farm was set on land owned by the British Crown. The Crown, however, had no actual hold on the American Bloods. To the Bloods, the Crown was a symbol to be challenged. And for one of them, it also was an object to be stolen.
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TODAY, 23,578 GEMSTONES are housed under glass, under armed guard, at the Jewel House in the Tower of London. At the center of the collection of gems is the Imperial State Crown, which, for a thousand years, has been worn by British monarchs as they exit Westminster Abbey after their coronation. If there is a single symbol of monarchical rule, a symbol that stood against the fledgling colonies of America, this is it. Used in celebrations throughout the year, it is a sort of everyday crown, the crown of state business. Due to its regular use, the crown has been modified, repaired, and replaced numerous times. Now it features 2,916 jewels, including Cullinan II, or the Second Star of Africa, a cushion-cut diamond with sixty-six facets, weighing 317.4 carats. But Cullinan II, a relatively recent addition to the royal regalia, is not the focal point of the crown. Seated just above this brilliant clear cushion, squarely on the forehead of nobility, rests the oldest, most mysterious gem in the Tower: the Black Prince’s Ruby.
In 1919, when George Younghusband studied the Crown Jewels, he remarked that this ruby “has belonged to the royal house since 1367. Its history before that date is unknown and may be of great antiquity, for it is pierced at one end, so as to be worn as a pendant, as often are gems of Oriental origin, and the Orient is exceedingly old.”2 We now know that before 1367, the ruby was owned by the king of Moorish Granada, and coveted by Don Pedro, the king of Castile, who took the most expeditious path to seizing it by stabbing his adversary to death. Pedro, often known as Peter the Cruel, went on to vie for the Spanish throne, allying himself with England. In April 1367, at the bloody Battle of Nájera—with the help of mercenaries funded by the British monarchy—Pedro came to power. The new king of Spain occasionally paid his debts, and, in this case, passed the ruby to the Black Prince, the son of Edward III of England. The stone, now a symbol of violence and theft, became the central decoration of the royal family. When England and France crossed swords at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, in one of the greatest English victories in the Hundred Years’ War, the ruby was there, affixed to the battle helmet of Henry V. According to legend, Henry received a glancing head blow that removed part of the helmet, but the king’s head and the Black Prince’s Ruby remained attached, and the rock became a symbol of unlikely victory. In the centuries following the victory at Agincourt, the gem was placed squarely on the front cross pattée of the Imperial State Crown, and the crown, along with the royal scepter and orb, was placed with great care into a designated room, first at Westminster Abbey and then at the Tower of London—where it remained almost secure.3 Almost.
It was stolen exactly once.
Thomas Blood came by his thieving ways as honestly as any man could.
He was cousin to the earliest American Bloods. Their family originally hailed from Northumberland, the northernmost region of England abutting the Scottish border. The Blood family was founded, not unlike America itself, in the promise and peril of a nameless border region—a site of trespassing and looting. The New World was envisioned centuries before it was discovered, in a pointed sense of lack, in an abiding discontent with one’s origins and home. The insecurity experienced by the earliest American colonists, four hundred years later, was presaged by the medieval mindset of the inhabitants of the wild moors.
The British Crown Jewels
Today, Northumberland is a thinly populated territory, a desolate highland more amenable to roe deer than humans. In the thirteenth century, the land of the Bloods was even more barren, and wolves roamed freely, attacking its few inhabitants and digging up its slowly expanding graveyards. The heath had been the site of military conflict for more than a millennium, hard, unforgiving ground better for galloping across and dying on than putting down roots in.4 The Bloods lived but miles from Hadrian’s Wall, erected in AD 123 to defend Roman civilization from the Picts. The wall did nothing to repel the seafaring Vikings who ransacked the region in the eighth century. This was a haunted land, long in flux, where territories simultaneously meet and part ways, a seat of contention and unrest. Loyalties at the border are fluid, or just as often, nonexistent. In such a place, the only constant is the specter of homelessness. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Bloods had temporarily pledged themselves to the British Crown, and fought on its behalf against the Irish magnate Hugh O’Neill, who aimed to sever Ireland from British rule. The Bloods, however, were never Royalists in any formal and lasting sense, only opportunists who understood conflict as a way of carving out a home, even on an island as unforgiving as this one.
Thomas Blood was born at Sarney in County Meath, twenty miles north of Dublin, in 1618. Very little is known about his childhood save for the fact that he grew up in a world that had come undone. What was once the British kingdom was now torn into three, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the British Civil Wars, were underway, collectively known as the English Civil War. As a boy, Thomas learned quickly that his family lived in singularly chaotic times—times in which thievery did not preclude respectability and social status. His grandfather Edmund lived at Kilnaboy Castle overlooking the North Atlantic and controlled a stretch of water—most likely Liscannor Bay—between Limerick and Galway. A merchant on his way to either town had to pass through Blood’s waters, which was, it turned out, an unusually expensive trip: Edmund Blood, supported by a fleet of cutter ships and crews of armed men, suggested that the captain of each vessel surrender part of their load, or comparable moneys, in return for safe passage. This is to say that Thomas Blood was the youngest grandson of a wealthy pirate, a boy who learned early on that criminality was one of the few paths to prosperity.
Thomas came of age in the political landscape of seventeenth-century Britain, demarcated along strict, but circuitous, religious lines. Catholics would fight Protestants, but Protestantism itself would schism and members of various factions would take up arms against their fellow Reformists. Religion was a matter of devotion and piety, but it also determined whom one was licensed to murder and torture.
The crisis might have been avoided, or at least mitigated, had the religious groups been separated geographically. But they weren’t. So neighbor was pitted against neighbor across the kingdom in what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—who lived through the Civil War—lamented was “a warre of everyone against everyone.” “Warre,” for Hobbes, connoted a state of anarchy in which bloody conflict, if not faced at every moment, remained a constant and inescapable threat, a state of thoroughgoing apprehension punctuated by merciless violence.5 This described the Ireland of Thomas Blood’s day rather nicely, which explains a lot about the darkly authoritarian vision of Hobbes’s Leviathan. It is telling, and foreboding, that Thomas, at the tender age of twenty-two, in 1640, was made a justice of the peace. What peace meant, however, was anybody’s guess.
Thomas spent his early twenties killing in the name of Charles I: the prospect of getting rich somehow had a way of solidifying commitments that might otherwise have been unstable. And he did get rich, plundering the farms of his enemies and stealing their land. When the Scottish rebellion inspired Irish Catholics to revolt at Ulster in October 1641—and later establish the Catholic Confederation, which became the country’s de facto government—Blood was among the Royalists who fought successfully to restore English rule. In the next year, Thomas raised the banner against the Parliamentary forces of Oliver Cromwell, and this “Captain Bludd,” now a quartermaster, emerged in the roll call of Royalist troops in Sir Lewis Dyve’s regiment of infantry forces. The king’s forces, however, were beginning to take heavy losses, and at some point in the mid-1640s, Thomas Blood reevaluated his commitment to Charles I and joined the Parliamentary army. This would be the wisest choice of Thomas’s notorious life.
On January 30, 1649, on a bitingly cold afternoon, Charles I was led under armed guard from St. James’s Palace, where he had been placed under house arrest, to the Palace of Whitehall. A scaffold had been erected outside the Banqueting House. In the weeks before, he had been tried and convicted of treason. Charles had argued that liberty and freedom could only be secured by a good and stable monarch, a political order that only he, the rightful king, could secure, but then he followed up with an assertion that Cromwell and his soldiers could not abide: such freedom did not involve subjects being part of this government, that “a subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”6 Different indeed. To the very end, Charles Stuart—for that is what the Parliamentarians called him—maintained that he was king and “the king could do no wrong.” Sovereign immunity, however, had lost its power. Wrong or right, Charles was going to die. In the king’s last words, “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the World.”7 At two o’clock in the afternoon, a masked executioner mounted the scaffold, cut off Charles’s head, and ushered him to the only place where there is absolutely no disturbance. A quiet groan supposedly swept through the once-frenzied crowd around Whitehall, like a sigh of relief so total that it escapes as a moan, or a lament that grows into a stifled cry. In the days that followed the execution, Oliver Cromwell visited Charles’s reassembled body (his head having been reattached for burial), and it is said that he uttered two Machiavellian words: “Cruel necessity.”8 Woe to the man who tries to deny the danger of unrealistic ambitions. For Royalists, the beheading of Charles I meant something very different; it was tantamount to the death of God, and, as Dostoyevsky would later write, “when God is dead everything is permitted.”
Thomas Blood hadn’t waited for Charles I to be beheaded before turning on his king. By the early 1650s, he was firmly ensconced in the Parliamentary army as a lieutenant, and when Cromwell was named the lord protector of the Commonwealth in 1653, Blood was among his supporters who would share in the bounty of victory. Blood returned to Ireland, a territory that was being repartitioned by Parliament; lands once owned by Royalists and Catholics were given to Cromwell’s allies. By 1652, Blood owned approximately 2,500 very profitable acres in the counties surrounding Dublin and Sarney. He also had a son, Thomas, born to a very respectable wife, Maria Holcrofte, daughter of Thomas Holcrofte, the mayor of Liverpool. During these years of good fortune, Blood was in direct service to Cromwell, who considered him “a person fit for employment and promotion.”9 What Blood’s exact employment consisted of is largely a matter of speculation but he undoubtedly supported his lord protector in initiating the largest campaign of ethnic cleansing of the British Isles since the Norman conquest, which displaced or killed more than fifty thousand Irish Catholics. Good fortune came at a wolfish price.
For most of the 1650s, Thomas Blood’s family lived on in the good graces of their new leader. “Cruel necessity,” however, does not pick sides, and in 1658, Cromwell, who was by that time regarded as “Prince Oliver,” died. Any pretenses to strict Protestantism—like the Puritanism that had been suppressed under the Royalists—died with him. John Evelyn reported in his diary of November 22, 1658, that he witnessed “the superb funeral of the Protector … but it was the joyfullest funeral that [he] ever saw, for there were none that cried, but dogs, which the souldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise; drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went.”10 In the absence of a fear-inducing, often self-righteous ruler, civil society again risked tipping into chaos, and the Protectorate of England was fully dissolved in May 1659.
The English Crown—which had remained in exile in France for many years—would return to London victorious just two years after the death of Cromwell. Actually, the crowns and the rest of the royal jewels had to be replaced or recovered since most of them had been melted down and sold off after the execution of Charles I. His successor spared no expense in this project and many of his subjects hoped that the monarchy could once again be secured.
Thomas Blood, however, was not enthused.
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660, with the coronation of Charles II, ushered in a series of events that made his life nearly unbearable. The Irish Parliament passed the Act of Settlement, which forced Cromwellian soldiers like Blood to forfeit much of the acreage they had been granted in the land grab in Ireland. Blood lost more than three-quarters of his estate. It was this turn of events that transformed him into both a criminal and a legend that followed the American Bloods to a New World.
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DUBLIN, 1661. The cattle of a butcher named Dolan vanished. Wolves still roamed the Irish countryside, but, in this instance, they weren’t responsible. On June 30, Dolan visited James Butler, the first Duke of Ormond, to file a legal grievance in order to retrieve his “outlandish bull and cow.” The thief was none other than “a lieutenant in the late army,” Thomas Blood. The cattle were returned, and the Bloods presumably went hungry. This minor offense reflects the direness of Blood’s financial situation, of a man who could hardly live hand to mouth, but also sets the stage for his growing hatred for the Duke of Ormond, and more generally, for the Crown.
To call Ormond a Royalist would be a gross understatement. When Charles II fled England during Cromwell’s reign, Ormond accompanied his king to France. When Charles II reclaimed the throne in 1660, Ormond was rewarded, being named lord high steward, the first of the Great Offices of State, the right hand of the king. In November 1661, he assumed the lord lieutenancy of Ireland, took up residency at Dublin Castle, and crossed paths and swords with Thomas Blood.11 Blood, at that moment, was after more than cattle—he wanted nothing less than a castle, Dublin Castle—and he began to conspire with other former Parliamentarians to recapture it. He was on the fringes of a small, unsuccessful plot to overturn the government, but he quickly moved into a principal role in a much wider, more deadly conspiracy against Ormond.
In the winter of 1662, Blood journeyed north into the heart of the Gaelic world—the northern province of Ulster, a historically wild realm that Irish and Scots had co-occupied for centuries. Here Blood found allies: Presbyterian Scots who had recently settled in the region, who promised to support his plan to seize the castle and usurp the Irish government headed by Ormond. According to Royalist spymasters, Blood’s insurrection was part of a wider plan to overthrow Charles II, coordinated with radical Protestant uprisings in England and Ireland. The rumblings of revolution—or civil war—began to sound once again. The duke wrote to Charles II that “the general discontent will not, I hope cause any disturbance but if it should, the army is in a very ill state to repress it … 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 will end.”12
On the evening of May 20, 1663, Blood and a few desperate men—seven to be precise—met at the White Hart in Dublin, a thatched, whitewashed pub in the shadow of the early Gothic St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The coup was to be as simple as it was dangerous: in the morning, three of the men were to dress as petitioners, like the butcher Dolan, and seek Ormond’s assistance in legal grievances. When the trio was granted access to the Great Gate, a fourth man, disguised as a baker, would create a diversion and the guards would be subdued or killed. This is where Blood would come in: leading a hundred soldiers, he’d storm the castle and capture Ormond. They would raise the flag of the insurgency and Protestant troops would march under the banner, freeing Ireland from popery and royal control.13
Unfortunately for Blood, none of that happened. Among the desperate men at the White Hart was Phillip Alden, who double-crossed Blood. Just hours after the conspirators left the pub, Alden contacted his handler, the spymaster Ned Vernon. Before dawn, Ormond was roused and given news of the plot, and quarters of Dublin woke, almost immediately, to the sound of his soldiers battering in doors and seizing the conspirators.
Part of Blood’s band entered Dublin Castle—but not as they had intended. A handful entered in manacles, under armed guard. Blood was not among the captured. Three days later, Ormond offered one hundred pounds for the arrest of thirteen organizers of this “traitorous plot.” The first name on the list of escapees was Thomas Blood. Had he been captured, he certainly would have faced a gruesome end of torture and death, but Blood fled to the mountainous region north of Dublin, then to Scotland, and finally to the Dutch Low Countries. Several of the schemers were not nearly as lucky—they were hung at Ormond’s orders. Explaining his handling of the coup, Ormond wrote to Charles II: “We [must] show that we are prepared to foil such attempt” but also show “they mean absolute ruin to the contrivers.”14 Blood, however, lived on. The seizure of Dublin Castle had failed, but it succeeded in one important respect: it gave Thomas Blood the opportunity to express the high-minded motivation for his dissent, an intention that would be carried forth on American soil by the Bloods who crossed the Atlantic. Taking up arms was the proper response to one’s personhood or estate being unjustly taken. Before attacking Ormond’s stronghold, Blood had written out the public objectives of the rebellion:
Having long expected the securing of our lives, liberties and estates as a reasonable recompense for that industry and diligence exercised by the Protestants of this kingdom … instead we find ourselves, our wives and children, without mercy, delivered as a prey unto these barbarous and bloody murderers, whose inhumane cruelty is … in the blood of 150,000 poor Protestants … And to this end … no well-minded Protestants in the three kingdoms may be afraid to stand by us in this our just quarrel, we will stand for liberty of conscience proper to everyone as a Christian for establishing the Protestant religion in purity, according to the Solemn League and Covenant.15
This religiously inflected declaration carried with it a practical demand for “restoring each person to his lands as they held them in the year 1659,” the year that Blood was dispossessed of his estate. Blood’s statement, however, was justification not only for his particular form of rebellion but also for a broader revolution based on a political philosophy that was beginning to show itself in the 1660s. Written in 1663, Blood’s protection of the “lives, liberties and estates” of the people drew directly on the language used in the Declaration of Breda, the 1660 writ of Charles II that ensured that no harm would come to Parliamentarians for their actions against the king during the Civil War or the Interregnum. At Breda, Charles II had stated that “no crime committed either against him or his royal father shall (as far as lies in his Majesty’s power) endamage the least either in lives, liberties, estates, or reputation; it being his Majesty’s desire that all sorts of discord should be laid aside among all his subjects.”16 Blood, a commoner, was now using the king’s words against him. Life, liberty, land, and riches could not be stripped from a person without consequences. A hundred years later, this thought would take hold in the New World as inalienable rights, an ideal that supported the American Bloods in their own bloody revolt against the Crown.
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AFTER THE FAILED PLOT against Ormond, Thomas Blood went into hiding. He was described as a “stout fellow,” a stocky man in his late forties, with a pockmarked face, deep-set eyes, meaty jowls, and a fleshy, imposing nose. He was considered an unattractive man, suited for unattractive jobs. He was reputedly the champion—or henchman—of the Earl of Buckingham and would often face Buckingham’s opponents when things got dirty. The clearest portrait of him was produced by Gilbert (or Gerard) Soest, who also painted Shakespeare and Samuel Butler.17 The title of the portrait, however, is peculiar: Unknown Man, Formerly Known as Thomas Blood.18 During these years Blood was known as Dr. Ayliffe or Dr. Allen in Romford Market, east of London, pretending to practice as a physician and apothecary.
This was not a happy time for Blood, and he laid most of the blame for his sorrows at the feet of his longtime nemesis, the Duke of Ormond. By 1670, Ormond had returned to London and taken up residence at Clarendon House, which was, in the words of John Evelyn, “the best contriv’d, the most useful, graceful and magnificent house in England.”19 When Ormond traveled, he would usually leave his quarters by coach and head north on St. James’s Street, accompanied by only a small handful of footmen. Thomas Blood was silently taking note. On the night of December 6, 1670, Blood and three armed accomplices attacked Ormond’s coach, dragged the duke into the street, bound him, affixed a notice of offenses to his chest, and spurred him on to the northeast corner of Hyde Park. They were on their way to Tyburn, or more specifically the Tyburn Tree: London’s most famous gallows. The triangular structure could accommodate twenty-four men, or corpses, at a time and public hangings occurred twelve times a year. The poet John Taylor wrote of Tyburn: “I have heard sundry men oft times dispute/ Of trees, that in one year will twice bear fruit./ But if a man note Tyburn, ‘will appear,/ That that’s a tree that bears twelve times a year.’”20 Ormond was to have the tree all to himself. Capital punishment was meted out at other places, too—the Tower of London was for traitors, West Smithfield for witches—but Tyburn was specifically for felons. And this is what Ormond was in Blood’s eyes: the basest of thieves. By horse, at night, the trip from Piccadilly to Tyburn could be made in a matter of minutes, but Ormond freed himself en route and escaped back into the narrow, winding streets of Mayfair, which have the uncanny ability to make things and people suddenly vanish.
Gilbert Soest, Unknown Man, Formerly Known as Thomas Blood
In the seventeenth century, there were two kinds of thieves: the type, like Ormond, who expanded their already generous holdings by stealing from the common people, and the type, like the famous highwaymen of the day, who got rich by stealing from nobility. A highwayman’s luck eventually ran out and he would be run to Tyburn, but rogues like Ormond rarely met this fate, instead hiding in their ill-gotten mansions, on the estates that had once belonged to men like Blood. For the time being, Blood would continue to suffer this inequity without compensation.
Copyright © 2024 by John Kaag
