Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain

"I read this as much out of duty as pleasure because this is my period, the mid-seventeenth century, the Civil Wars, the Protectorate. I probably would say this, but this is one of the most important periods in English and indeed British history and it’s not very well known by the wider public. I’ve wondered why that’s the case because it has such extraordinary characters. A theory I’ve always had is that one of the reasons why the mid-seventeenth century is not popular among readers is the absence of women in major roles. In Tudor times , with Henry VIII, you have Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, Mary and Elizabeth . There are prominent female figures, whereas during the seventeenth century, with Charles and Cromwell, men dominate. There’s an absence of strong women, at least to the layperson. What Nadine Akkerman does is concentrate on these invisible women. That’s why it’s such a good title—because women are so invisible in this period in the public sphere. Men literally couldn’t imagine that women were capable of being spies or intelligencers. There are some great stories in the book. There’s one about Alexandrine, Countess of Taxis. She has a house in Brussels, and a Stuart agent who’s there is having his letters intercepted. He talks to her and says something like, ‘Who is doing this? It couldn’t be you, because of your honesty, your dignity and your sex. You just wouldn’t be capable of doing it.’ But Alexandrine has this commercial network and she’ll sell this stuff to the highest bidder. She’ll sell to Catholics; she’ll sell to Protestants. She has no real loyalty to anyone. It’s very amusing. It’s a classic lesson in what so many historians have overlooked—which is not just what historians have overlooked, it’s what people at the time overlooked as well. This world is a little bit like the world of Thomas Cromwell. It’s quite fragmented. It’s a place where you can step through the cracks. There are some great details in the book about spying in general. We’ve tended to concentrate in the popular imagination on spies in the Elizabethan world, but in the period of the Civil Wars, there’s some great stuff. The book talks about Oxford, which is Charles’s capital at the time. The parliamentarians would put little pieces of paper in holes and they’d be picked up by ‘gardeners’, brought back and left in a ditch just outside the city where they’d be picked up. The book is very good on tiny, fascinating details, and also at conveying the high stakes. Being a spy was incredibly dangerous. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s one particularly gruelling episode recounted by Akkerman which begins with a man called Anthony Hinton. Hinton is a member of the Sealed Knot, a clandestine organization—largely incompetent, it should be said—that tries to build a network of resistance to Cromwellian rule and the Protectorate. It’s not very good at this: many of its people are louche, drunken or just not very able figures. Anthony Hinton is arrested for carrying correspondence from Susan Hyde, who is quite highly placed within the circle. Eventually, at the Restoration, her brother, Sir Edward Hyde, becomes the chief minister of Charles II. She’s investigated and although it’s claimed that there’s no torture during the Cromwellian period—which I think is right—it’s nevertheless a very brutal episode. She is stripped; she’s interrogated; she has an almost complete mental breakdown. She’s left catatonic. It’s an appalling experience, and she dies a week later. Yes, it’s safer than it is for the men. The example with Susan Hyde is atypical in terms of brutality towards a female spy. Coming back to the title, ‘invisible agents,’ it simply wasn’t thought that women were capable of doing this, though they were at it all the time. It’s quite a scholarly work. Perhaps more could have been done to give it a narrative thrust, but it’s so revelatory in terms of scholarship that it’s worth persisting. Maybe now this groundbreaking work has been done, others will carry on. There’s a small book by Blair Worden called The English Civil Wars which is quite good. But if you just concentrate on the Civil Wars, you don’t see how we got there and you don’t see what the consequences are. So the best book if you really want to understand this period, I would say, is probably by Austin Woolrych. It’s called Britain in Revolution . It’s a well-written, really brilliant overview of the whole period. It explains how it began. It’s a very good chronological narrative of the war. You also get the idea of the Cromwellian Settlement and the problems there were and why the Restoration happened. It’s also quite good on the idea of ‘revolution’ because it has two meanings, really. We tend to think of it in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration. It is literally the revolution of a wheel. “We tend to think of ‘revolution’ in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration.” So is it a revolution that happens when Cromwell comes to power? It’s very difficult to argue that it’s a revolution in the modern sense—like the French Revolution—because it’s so imbued with religion. Or is it a revolution when Charles II comes back? I suppose you do have a turning of the wheel, but it’s never quite the same again. The king never has the power that Charles I was trying to find in his personal rule. The other thing that is misunderstood about the Civil Wars is that we tend to view Charles as the reactionary and Parliament as the radical, progressive force. Actually, I think it’s the other way round. It’s Charles who’s trying to build something new, because he’s seen European absolutism and wants to build that kind of absolute monarchy in England. That was a modern thing. It’s the Parliamentarians who want to return to what they constantly call ‘the ancient constitution’; the Levellers want to get rid of ‘the Norman yoke.’ It’s much more ambiguous than we tend to think, from our twenty-first-century perspective."