The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood

Why was the colonel not immediately executed for treason? The plain truth is that this brash adventurer was more useful to Charles alive than hanging from the Tyburn gallows. Smooth-talking and brimming with Irish charm and wit, he assured the king that he fully deserved a reprieve, adding: 'If my life is spared, [I will be] your dutiful subject whose name is Blood, which I hope is not what your majesty seeks after’. He was generously pardoned for ‘all treasons, murders, felonies, assaults and batteries' committed by him.

But the monarch’s munificence did not stop with wiping his sheet clean of every crime. The king also granted him property in Ireland providing an income of 500 pounds a year for life. The colonel had now become a spy for the king eavesdropping on the gossip within the feverish atmosphere of court and , as a double-agent, regularly informing on those conspiring to overthrow Charles and restore Catholicism to England or return it to the austere, God-fearing republic it was only a few years before under Oliver Cromwell. Blood was also employed by politicians to bring down their rivals. From his base at White's coffee house, near London's Royal Exchange, he proundly proclaimed" 'It's no matter if one lets me fall, another takes me up. I'm the best tool they have'.