The King's Revenge (34 page)

Sidney took up residence in Rome, a city he knew and whose culture he admired, though he distrusted the papal Church. While
Charles’s spies were tracking other republicans around northern Europe, Sidney must have thought Rome a most unlikely place
from which to be suspected of launching plots or rebellions. He was received warmly by Roman society and the pope’s nephew,
Prince Pamphili, lent him a house. As so often, money was the worry. He was still owed money from his diplomatic work and
was broke. He lived on a small allowance of five shillings a day from his father, the 2nd Earl of Leicester. With little money,
Sidney threw himself into study and began to enjoy life in the city. His studious idyll did not last long. Even in Rome, assassins
planned his death. The details are unknown but he was saved, he recorded, ‘only by the charity of strangers’.
¹¹

Sidney left Rome to go to Brussels and Holland. En route, he stopped off to see the exiles in Vevey. In particular, he wished
to see Ludlow. In the last days of the Commonwealth, Ludlow had suggested to Cromwell that Sidney should be made second-in-command
of the army in Ireland. The appointment was never carried out; the support of the House of Stuart by some of Sidney’s aristocratic
relations put paid to that. Sidney and Say were also acquainted: they had
been colleagues on the Commonwealth’s foreign affairs committee prior to the imposition of the Protectorate.

We only know in the most general way what Sidney and the Vevey group talked about, but there is no doubting that it revolved
around the possibility of unseating Charles Stuart – as Sidney might have put it in another of his oft-quoted sayings, ‘God
helps those who help themselves.’ In his memoirs,
A Voyce from the Watchtower
, Ludlow described how the still-fragile state of the court of Charles II provided a background to Sidney’s visit:

From this we know that conversation included discussion about how to restore the Commonwealth, for both men were ardent republicans.
The persecution of Puritans roused Sidney to anger.
¹³
Due to several new Acts known, after the Earl of Clarendon, as the Clarendon Code, those who did not take the sacraments
in a parish church (i.e. all Puritans, Baptists and other nonconformists) could not hold public office and all public worship
by nonconformists was illegal. The effect upon Sidney and Ludlow of news of the religious clampdown in England cannot be overestimated;
as Blair Worden’s discoveries of manuscripts written by both men has shown us, religious enthusiasm coloured the glass through
which they viewed the world.
¹⁴
To top it all, there came new rumours that the king was a Roman Catholic.

Sidney’s stay in Vevey lasted three weeks. He left Ludlow with a present of a pair of pistols made by the most famous of Italian
gunsmiths, Lazarino Cominazzo of Brescia. For the impecunious Sidney to bestow such an expensive present was deeply significant:
he was hoping to entice Ludlow into leading an uprising to unseat Charles.
Leaving the cautious Ludlow to ponder his future, and that of the republican ideals both men believed in, Sidney headed on
in search of his elusive victorious army. In the visitors’ book of the Calvinist Academy in Geneva, he wrote in memory of
Harry Vane, ‘Let there be revenge for the blood of the just.’

In October 1663, an armed uprising took place in the north of England. It was largely inspired by the king’s new policies,
which forbade any cleric from preaching that had not been ordained by a bishop of the Church of England. The rebellion, which
was small in scale, was led by a Congregationalist minister named Edward Richardson. Men gathered to join the rising in Yorkshire,
Westmorland and Durham, but the numbers were low and the rebellion easily crushed. Richardson fled to the Netherlands. Ludlow’s
name was again raised in royalist propaganda as being behind it all. There was an uprising in Ireland, too. An attempt to
seize Dublin Castle was led by Captain Thomas Blood, the Irish parliamentarian soldier who would later attempt to steal the
crown jewels. The Dublin plot was betrayed and most of its participants executed. Captain Blood escaped.

In Vevey, there was cause for rejoicing: Ludlow and Cawley’s wives arrived to join them. Cawley was by now quite sick with
an illness from which he would never recover. He described this as a ‘wide and incurable rupture in the intestines with a
spice of the stone’.
¹⁵
The women’s departure from England and arrival in Vevey was noted in London. For some time, the regicides’ wives had been
under scrutiny by Joseph Williamson’s security apparatus. Their mail was read for clues about the actions and whereabouts
of their husbands. Their support was also the fugitives’ Achilles’ heel.

Ludlow and some of the others decided to visit Bern to assure the authorities of their gratitude and so solidify their position.
The syndic assured them that they remained honoured guests. No sooner had the Englishmen returned to Vevey than they received
intelligence that a certain ‘Riordo’ was now in Turin and was on a mission to kill them.

‘Riordo’, also known as Major Germaine (or sometimes John) Riordane, was an Irish officer who had once served in the Duke
of York’s Regiment. Having left his commission and fallen on hard times, Riordane now sought, like many Irish soldiers, to
find work where he could. For Riordane, this included the desperate world of espionage and murder. According to Ludlow, Riordane’s
real name was MacCarty and he had become a hired assassin for the English crown. Apart from information about MacCarty, the
exiles also heard that Charles II had written to the authorities in Bern asking them to give up the English rebels. Although
they hardly knew it yet, Ludlow and the rest of the group now had their backs to the wall.

From the fact that Riordane corresponded directly with Lord Arlington, secretary of state, spymaster and chief procurer of
the king’s mistresses, it was clear he was under the direction of Charles’s government at the highest level. It is true that
there is no paper evidence that Riordane was instructed by the authorities in London to do any more than seek out the regicides,
but Arlington and his head of intelligence, Williamson, were far too wise to commit any base instruction to paper. However,
as Ludlow discovered, Riordane was also in the employ of (or was at least paid by) the king’s sister, Henrietta, the Duchess
of Orléans, whom he often used to pass information to members of the French court, including Louis XIV himself.

The little group of exiles received intelligence of other death threats. As Ludlow recorded:

Such frantic warnings placed the Ludlows and their companions in an awkward situation. They had promises of protection where
they were, but if they moved, they might not be able to obtain the same level of protection. Ludlow received information that
Riordane had been seen in the Pais de Vaux and Savoy. Alarmed by such reports, the Vevey group considered their options. Despite
the dangers of remaining where they were, they decided they didn’t want to play cat-and-mouse across Europe with men like
Riordane. They concluded that with the protection in Vevey ‘so frankly, publicly, and generously extended’, the best option
was to stay put. Meanwhile, Charles II’s agents were closing in. Riordane reported to London that many of the king’s murderers,
including Ludlow, Lisle, Whalley and Goffe, were now in Vevey. While his intelligence was right on the first two, it was completely
wrong on the others, for Whalley and Goffe were in a different continent. Riordane even suggested that one of Oliver Cromwell’s
sons was in Switzerland; he doesn’t say which one, though it most likely would have been Richard.
¹⁷

No sooner had they decided to remain in Vevey than a group of ‘villains that had been employed to destroy us’ arrived in the
town.
¹⁸
On Saturday 14 November, Riordane, together with two other Irish soldiers and a group of locally hired thugs, crossed the
lake from Savoy. They arrived in Vevey an hour after sunset. In total, there were ten in the group, plus two servants.
¹⁹
Riordane then split his group in two to lodge at different inns. They told anyone who asked that they were pilgrims on their
way to a Catholic shrine further along the lake. The following morning, Ludlow’s landlord, M. Dubois, went to church. At the
quayside he saw a boat with four watermen sitting at their oars, ready to put off.
The ropes securing the town’s boats had been cut to prevent pursuit. Nearby stood two men Dubois had never seen before, with
their cloaks thrown over their shoulders and held closely around them. Dubois spotted the barrels of carbines sticking out
from under the cloaks. Two more men were sitting under a tree with their cloaks held around them as if hiding something. Another
two strangers were sitting a little way off.

Dubois reached the obvious conclusion – kidnappers or assassins had come for his guests. Abandoning his devotions, he retraced
his steps. On the way back he met one of his neighbours, a Monsieur Binet, who informed him he had earlier seen two men loitering
near his house and had spotted four more in the marketplace. These six had then moved down towards the lakeside. This information
confirmed Dubois’s suspicions and he hurried home to alert the Englishmen.

Ludlow reacted calmly. Knowing that the strangers no longer occupied the route to the church, he decided he would go to a
later service, while taking the precaution of going armed and with other members of the group.

Riordane’s men waited while the townsfolk left church to see if Ludlow would appear. When he failed to do so, the would-be
assassins also left the church and were heard to say that their target had not shown up.’
²⁰
The townsfolk then saw that the ropes of their boats had been cut. The only people whose boat had not been interfered with
were the Savoyard boatmen hired by Riordane. A row broke out and the would-be assassins realised the game was up. They returned
to the quayside and rowed off across the lake towards Savoy.

The exact intent of Riordane and his gang is not known. It has been speculated that their intent was to kidnap Ludlow rather
than murder him. In the English state papers it is noted that following the foiled raid in Vevey, Riordane submitted a report
setting out the case for a new raid in which all the regicides might be ‘reclaimed’.
²¹
He envisaged a complex undertaking in which the king would write to
Bern, demanding that the exiles should be given up as ‘parricides’. At the same time, the roads out of Vevey would be guarded
(presumably by English agents). If the authorities in Bern refused to comply, the regicides would be taken by force to Savoy.

Riordane did not discuss the difficulties of transporting a group of political prisoners across Europe. The abduction gang
would have had to convey their prisoners through France, where the government of Louis XIV would hardly have been pleased
to have English political hostages on their soil. All things considered, it seems evident that murder was the sole motive
the first time round, and the subsequent plan for a mass kidnapping was simply too difficult, both politically and logistically,
to be implemented. Assassination remained the most effective weapon.

The thwarted attack sapped the exiles’ morale. Here was indubitable evidence that their enemies knew where they were and had
the ability to strike. Reports, accurate or otherwise, arrived from England that Riordane had been ordered to renew his efforts
to murder them. In a bizarre twist, a relative of one of the French members of Riordane’s gang told Ludlow he would try to
warn him should his relation attempt anything more.

As 1663 drew to a close, the exiles felt cornered, but alternative places to run to were limited. The authorities in Vevey
and Bern considered their options, weighing up whether it might be better for the English group to move to Lausanne or go
north to Yverden on the shores of Lake Neuchatel. On the plus side, the choice of Vevey had been vindicated – the size of
the town had made the presence of strangers more noticeable. In a larger city, assassins might not be spotted until it was
too late.

When all was considered, the people of Vevey decided the fugitives could, if they wished, stay put. Extra precautions were
taken. Ludlow’s house stood by the town walls next to one of the gates. A rope was rigged up from a window to the bell above
the gateway so that he could ring the bell in an emergency and summon the town militia.

In London, Arlington and Williamson did not give up. The interception of the fugitives’ mail was proving to be difficult.
London had a real need to find out whether plots were being hatched between the runaways and their friends at home. The method
of discovery would be by the use of double-agents: ‘by inducing some persons of those now in the islands by promise of reward
to feign escape and fly to them’.
²²
In January 1664 came news of the treatment of some of the regicides who had not been executed and who were incarcerated in
the Tower. They were to be dispersed around the country for extra security; some were even to be transported overseas. The
worst treatment was reserved for Sir Henry Mildmay, George Fleetwood and Augustine Garland (who was said, though he denied
it, to have spat in the king’s face as he was led from the court). All three were ordered to be transported to Tangiers. Mildmay
was saved the horror of foreign slavery by dying en route at Antwerp. One report has Fleetwood’s wife Hester successfully
interceding for him, another has him dying in Tangiers. In the case of Garland, who was in his seventies, the sentence must
be seen as a particularly cruel action by Charles.