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COLONEL
THOMAS BLOOD
CROWN-STEALER
1618-1680
BY
WILBUR CORTEZ ABBOTT
Professor of History, Sheffield Scientific School
Yale University
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK
1910
Copyright, 1910, by
Edward Wheelock
GENESEE PRESS
ROCHESTER, N.Y.
Colonel Thomas Blood
The story which follows is, without doubt, one of the most curious andextraordinary in English history. It is, in fact, so remarkable thatit seems necessary to begin by assuring the cautious reader that it istrue. Much as it may resemble at times that species of literatureknown in England as the shilling shocker and in America as the dimenovel, its material is drawn, not from the perfervid imagination ofthe author, but from sources whose very nature would seem to repudiateromance. The dullest and most sedate of official publications,Parliamentary reports, memoranda of ministers, warrants to and fromofficers and gaolers, newsletters full of gossip which for two hundredyears and more has ceased to be news, these would seem to offer littlepromise of human interest.
Yet even these cannot well disguise the fascination of a life likethat of Thomas Blood. The tale of adventure has always divided honourswith the love story. And such a career as his, full of mystery, ofpersonal daring, and the successful defiance of law by one on whom itsprovisions seem to have borne too hardly, cannot be obscured even bythe digest of official documents. Moreover it has historicalsignificance. This most famous and successful of English lawbreakerswas no common criminal. In a sense he was the representative of animportant class during a critical period of history. Not merely to theOld Englander, but to those interested in the rise of the New Englandbeyond seas, the fate of the irreconcilable Puritans, no less thanthat of their more submissive brethren, must seem of importance. Thisis the more true in that no small number of the men whose names appearin this narrative played parts on both sides of the Atlantic. Theyounger Vane, who had been the governor of Massachusetts, in 1636, andwhose execution marked the early years of Restoration vengeance, isthe most striking of these figures. Next to him come the fugitiveregicides, Goffe, Whalley and Dixwell, who lived out their days in NewHaven, Hartford and Hadley. It is not so well known, however, thatVenner, whose insurrection in the early days of the Restoration wasone of the most dramatic and important events of that time, was at onetime a resident of Salem. Still less is it likely to be known thatPaul Hobson, one of the contrivers and the involuntary betrayer of thegreat plot of 1663, was later allowed to remove to Carolina. Therelationship of Lawrence Washington, whose activities in the earlyyears of Charles II's reign gave the government such anxiety, to theWashingtons who settled in Virginia ha