The story here told has been related elsewhere though not in such detail nor, so far as I am aware, from precisely this point of view. Apart from the accounts in encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries, of which by far the best for its day is the Biographia Brittanica, the most accessible source of information is the article on Blood in the Dictionary of National Biography and the fullest details are to be found in W. Hepworth Dixon's Her Majesty's Tower, VOL. IV, pp. 119, and in a note (No. 35) to Scott's Peveril of the Peak, in which novel the Colonel plays enough part to have a pen-portrait drawn of him by Scott in a speech by Buckingham.

These, of course, touch but lightly on the broader aspects of the matter. The sources for nearly all the statements made in the foregoing narrative are to be found in the Calendars of State Papers, Domestic and Ireland, 1660-1675, in the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, especially in the Ormond Papers and in Carte's Life of Ormond. In 1680 was published a pamphlet entitled Remarks on the Life and Death of the Famed Mr. Blood, etc., signed R. H., which includes, besides a general running account of several of the outlaw's chief adventures, a curious and obscure story of the Buckingham incident from which it is practically impossible to get any satisfaction. To this is added a Postscript written some time after the body of the work and describing Blood's illness, death and burial. This tract appears to have been written by some one who knew Blood, and in places seems to represent his own story. It would perhaps be too much to assume from the similarity of the initials that it was composed by that Richard Halliwell, Hallowell or Halloway, the tobacco cutter of Frying-Pan Alley, Petticoat Lane, whose name, or alias, appears among those often connected with Blood in his enterprises. Sir Gilbert Talbot's narrative of Blood's adventures, especially valuable for its full account of the attempt on the crown, is to be found in Strype's Continuation of Stowe's Survey of London. Some details as to Blood's London haunts may be found in Wheatley and Cunningham's London, Past and Present.

There are several portraits of Blood extant of which the one in the National Portrait Gallery, painted by Gerard Soest, is the best. This is reproduced in Cust's National Portrait Gallery, VOL. I, p. 163. Another which appeared in the Literary Magazine, for the year 1791, is evidently a copy of the one prefixed to this study. This is reproduced from a contemporary mezzotint, which is described in Smith's British Mezzotinto Portraits, (Henry Sotheran & Co., Lond., 1884), as follows:

The family of Blood among the earlier settlers of New England has sometimes been said to be closely connected with that of the Colonel, but there is no substantial evidence either way. (Mass. Hist. Coll.) On the other hand a tablet to the memory of Blood's cousin, Neptune, is to be found in Kilfernora Cathedral (Proc. Roy. Soc. Antiq. Irel. 1900, p. 396). A note says that he was the son and namesake of his predecessor in the Deanery and grandson of Edmond Blood of Macknay in Derbyshire who settled in Ireland about 1595 and was M.P. for Ennis in 1613. A fuller account of the plots is to be found in articles by the author of this sketch in the American Historical Review for April and July, 1909, under title of English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660-1674.