It takes a thief…

In the words of one of his contemporaries ‘a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes’, the 17th-century ne’er-do-well Thomas Blood sounds an unattractive proposition. His latest biographer, Robert Hutchinson, works hard to imbue him with the pantomime glamour of a lovable rogue.

Hutchinson roots Blood’s rackety life firmly within the context of the equally rackety Restoration underworld, with its network of spies and spymasters, venial courtiers and religious fanatics. Appropriately he makes vivid use of the sort of rhetoric more often associated with old-fashioned adventure stories. His Blood is a forerunner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, ‘a man of action who would risk all to liberate his friends even at the eleventh hour’; he indulges in ‘madcap’ and ‘harum-scarum’ ‘escapades’ and his chief weapons are ‘daredevil audacity’, ‘astonishing effrontery’ and ‘buckets of Irish charm’.

It’s a valiant effort and a rigorously researched account.