Intelligence and espionage in the English Republic c. 1600–60

By Alan Marshall

This ambitious and important book is a richly detailed account of the ideas and activities in the early-modern ‘secret state’ and its agencies, spies, informers and intelligencers, under the English Republic and the Cromwellian protectorate.

The book investigates the meanings this early-modern Republican state acquired to express itself, by exploring its espionage actions, the moral conundrums, and the philosophical background of secret government in the era. It considers in detail the culture and language of plots, conspiracies, and intrigues and it also exposes how the intelligence activities of the Three Kingdoms began to be situated within early-modern government from the Civil Wars to the rule of Oliver Cromwell. It introduces the reader to some of the personalities who were caught up in this world of espionage, from intelligencers like Thomas Scot and John Thurloe to the men and women who became its secret agents and spies. The book includes stories of activities not just in England, but also in Ireland and Scotland, and it especially investigates intelligence and espionage during the critical periods of the British Civil Wars and the important developments which took place under the English Republic and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.

The book will appeal to historians, students, teachers, and readers who are fascinated by the secret affairs of intelligence and espionage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526118912

Book preview

Introduction

In 1653 the Dutch ambassador in London wrote home in panic that

I dare not write much news. All our actions are spied. We have spies set to watch us in our houses. We cannot be certain of anything that we do, that it shall not either be known or miscarry.¹

Clement Walker was also to protest later about the ‘hundreds of Spies and Intelligencers … swarming over all England as Lice and Frogs did in Egipt’ in the era.² So clearly the image of the state spy, the common informer, and their intelligencer masters was already a familiar one to most contemporaries in this period. Indeed, the sheer notoriety of the Cromwellian Protectorate’s ‘secret state’ would soon draw many barbed comments. The Venetian ambassador of the day thought the secrecy of this Cromwellian state was so tight that the regime was always highly successful in keeping ‘their secrets … [and that so] closely that no effort can discover the true substance of their deliberations’. He also asserted that Cromwell’s regime ‘maintained spies everywhere’ and that the Protector’s Council of State held its meetings ‘in a room approached though others without number and countless doors are shut’. He remarked, with some exasperation and possibly not a little admiration, that the Cromwellian government continued to ‘act through money and bribes’. It also captured various ‘insignificant persons’ for covert tasks, who ‘being less under observation [could] penetrate everywhere’.³ It was even claimed that ‘Every foreigner who lands in places here has the papers and letters he has with him minutely examined, and transmitted to London, nor are they restored before being submitted to the rigorous examination’, and that firm restrictions were placed upon foreigners leaving London without the government’s permission. The government had spies left in ‘convenient places’ and any reports and rumours of any popular discontent were immediately investigated. In times of increased political stress indeed troops continually patrolled London’s streets, and the ports were closely watched for suspects.⁴

The image we see here is of a Cromwellian state that was especially marked by secrecy, and that was at least singularly security-minded. A regime indeed that was able to act, at least partially perhaps, as an early modern ‘secret state’.

Even writing some twenty-five years later George Bate would paint a bleak picture of this wholly mistrustful Cromwellian secret state’s reputation. It was a country, he said, simply poisoned by ‘whole swarms of informers [who] wandered about in all places’; where churches, taverns and alehouses were watched; where noblemen and gentlemen’s servants were corrupted, where the prisons were full of ‘accusers’ and where there was apparently ‘no village free from snarlings nor snares’. The very cities themselves, he complained, ‘were filled with solitude, silence, trembling and fear’.⁵ It seems to be the very model of what we would expect an early modern secret state to look like. Yet, this vision needs testing for its accuracy, and testing it is one of the main purposes of this book.

In point of fact, many of the actual references to this Cromwellian ‘secret state’ come from a key era in its life. They are taken from a period of reaction after various failed Royalist conspiracies and assassination plots that ultimately also brought about the social and political experiment of the Major Generals. What followed were many arrests, disarmament and the implementation of financially punitive measures, in the form of bonds for security, with numerous names of suspects even centrally placed in a register office in Fleet Street, while the press was also heavily curbed.⁶

Even so, the Cromwellian regime’s reasoning behind this severe ‘securing the peace’ was, as it usually was, a contingent one: the numerous issues it had currently with the irreconcilable elements amongst the Royalists who it said, although they knew that God had spoken against them, remained ‘restlesse in their Designs’. Such dangerous actions did indeed give it some excuse, justification and even perhaps a clear mandate to act; and so, act it did, without any need to be ‘tyed up to the ordinary rules’, for this, as it said, ‘would be wanting in such a state the means of common safety’. Nor could conspiracies and ‘the Walks of Conspirators’ be thwarted if mere legality kept getting in the way.⁷ Bending the law therefore could be done through ‘necessity’.

Still, following the fall of the Major Generals, many of the more intense security measures that had been used by the regime were dismantled or simply lapsed, but by then, of course, Secretary John Thurloe had already manufactured, or, as we shall argue here, had simply revived, what later commentators came to see as one of the most formidable espionage systems ever created by the state. This intelligence network certainly guaranteed Thurloe some contemporary fame and a real notoriety, which he retains in the more general histories of intelligence and espionage to this day – especially, perhaps, in the more popular versions of ‘spy history’. But were all of these covert actions, all of these resorts to espionage and Thurloe’s covert work really something akin to a Cromwellian ‘police state’ or were they merely an aberration in the Lord Protector’s rule? Where indeed did such ideas about the use of espionage in government and society come from in the first place? What was their history? Did they have deep and earlier roots that had somehow allowed this particular Republican regime to seize upon these covert ideas and then move themselves ever closer towards the creation of an effective English ‘secret state’? Was there in fact any real continuity between this era and those other, more well-known eras of skilled intelligence and espionage: the world of Elizabethan England, with that doyen of all espionage actors, Francis Walsingham, for instance? Or was it rather the Jacobean era of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, with his sinister moves and wheels within wheels against the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605? For that matter how did the Britain of King Charles I and the Civil Wars fit into this image of a secret history? How indeed were such secret actions actually managed on the ground level in the era, especially all of their supposed spies and informers, and what effect did they really have on the political world and its policies? And one last question: how do these secret actions of the government in the 1650s link with our own modern ideas of what we think a secret state is? This book aims to find out some of the answers to these questions and, most significantly, it seeks to place the intelligence and espionage activities of the Republican regimes of the Rump Parliament (1649–53) and the Cromwellian Republic (1653–58) in their own context in order to do so.

Clearly even a superficial view of the literature of the early modern period proves that by the mid-seventeenth century spies and secrecy were a common enough feature in the early modern political world. They are also to be extensively seen in its culture and literature. In this book we will explore some of the trends, the roots and the realities that lie behind the images and shapes of secret intelligence gathering and espionage actions, especially in the 1640s and 1650s.

It will be argued here, for example, that the 1650s was in fact a key period for intelligence and espionage history in general. It did have its own especial novelties in its administrative development, whose roots lay in the Civil Wars. The Republican regimes themselves were also inclined to more state management of intelligence matters than their predecessors had been. They moved from a ‘working tradition’ to a more state-structured response to these secret matters. And there was also a distinctive Republican identity and sensibility in such matters, especially in the idea of collective work. Furthermore, there was also some continuity between the Republican era of the 1650s and what was to come in the Restoration period, a government that got to pick over the bones of its predecessors.

So here, rather than retread all of the somewhat over-familiar and, it might be said, often exaggerated tales of Walsingham and co., I will seek to introduce readers to some less familiar tales, some intriguing personalities and some of the covert ideas and methods of the 1650s that went with them. They are, of course, no less interesting and structurally perhaps even more significant than most of what had gone on before in this area of early modern government. This book will especially focus upon the themes, actions and attitudes of two of the main ‘British’ polities of the era: the English Republic of 1649–53 and the Protectoral regime of Oliver Cromwell from 1653–58, and it will also seek to trace the roots and contexts of this Republican secret world.

What is more, this work will explore the role and images that espionage had in the era as it circulated within contemporary ideas about the concept of the arcana imperii, or ‘secrets of state’, in government, and how the so-called ‘edg’d tools’ of espionage themselves became ever more state-centred.⁸ We will examine the idea of the spy in the era and also explore the careers and personalities of some of the men and women who became entangled (deliberately or involuntarily) in this trade, the techniques they used and the varied contemporary opinions about them. This book will also examine the particular nature of the role of personality in the world of early modern espionage. To do this, it will study two of the most important intelligencers of the era, Thomas Scot and John Thurloe, one famous, one less so, in some detail. Lastly, the work will outline the important changes in intelligence and espionage that took place in the 1650s, so as to explore the impact of these changes on what was to follow in the Restoration period and even beyond.

To do this, we need to explore the actual shape and visions of the mid-seventeenth-century covert business of the ‘secret state’. While this had many of its roots in the early seventeenth century, or even further back in the sixteenth century, the turning point of the Civil Wars of the 1640s can be seen as crucial to understanding the subsequent methods and ideas in this area of government. As such, this work will seek to examine both the meanings and the usage of the terms and languages that these secret actions acquired. In itself, the so-called ‘thread of intelligence’ has always been something of a halting and stuttering process in the context of British history.⁹ Such early modern secret state agencies indeed were frequently diverse, and to modern eyes they might even be seen as somewhat ramshackle. Yet this was a world in which the individuals who came to manage such affairs were invariably its most noteworthy players in the espionage game, and their ideas were made to count. So espionage history in this era is frequently as much biographical as institutional.

As has been noted above, the English Republican version of the early modern ‘secret state’ in the 1650s lies at the centre of this volume. Its view of its espionage techniques, however, requires from us a generally more fluid interpretation as to who its spies were, what they did and what their overseers actually thought they were doing. Certainly, it will be argued here that early modern espionage in the era was never just about gathering secret information merely for its own sake but was instead embedded into a series of contemporary moral and social discourses, and into choices of policy within government. These early modern espionage discourses operated in a distinctive personal, historical and cultural environment and language. The intelligence systems and the espionage actions that did emerge in this period had important social traits, especially to the great fluid of politics in the era: the client–patron system. Accordingly, the decisions made in this world tended to be made by individuals who were habitually grasping towards rather different forms of goal from those of their modern counterparts.¹⁰ What is more, while such matters may have been secret, often for no other reason than a simple love of mere secrecy for itself, they did begin to conflict with the developing public exchange mechanisms in information that were occurring within the broader framework of the contemporary public world. This was what Peter Burke has called the early modern ‘commodification of information’, or the world of the ‘public sphere’: the press, newsletters, rumour, public conversations and political debates.¹¹

Our own contemporary interest in the secretive aspects of government is fairly obvious.¹² Within the growing historiography of intelligence matters and, especially, in the realm of popular history and in the historical novel, copious ink has been spilt in tracing the adventures of mysterious spies and their controllers. Much of the actual results of this, it has to be said, especially in its most popular forms, are all too often shaped by a generally Whiggish approach to the past. It engineers something of a false continuum between ‘them’ and ‘us’, often borrowing heavily from the languages of John le Carré or Ian Fleming to do so and then simply regurgitating the many myths and adventures of espionage without any real context. The world of spies, espionage and secrecy clearly has a popular appeal. This in fact continues a tradition that was previously established in the seventeenth century itself, where such spy stories always carried with them the frisson of entertaining historical secrets being exposed to light. All of this, of course, might well be seen as a ‘juvenile’ form of literature, but it is still a very popular one and, as we shall hopefully see, there is more to this story than merely spies and secret agents.

Historically, we can in fact break the contexts of intelligence and espionage within British polity into three main periods: the early modern period (c.1500–c.1720); the pre-modern period (c.1720–c.1909); and the modern period (from c.1909 to the present day). The first period is firmly within the core subject matter of this book and was what could be called a developmental stage for this area of government. Continuity was often difficult to achieve in such matters, as we shall see, and the major personalities loomed large. Such activities became increasingly valued, however, and they tended to be measured by the protection they gave, the promotion of personal authority and by the political structures of their day. It was an era that, as Samuel Morland once put it, was especially ‘governed by politick maxims’, so the resulting ‘edg’d tools’ of government were to prove useful to have to hand and to exploit. Again, as we shall see, connections between early modern intelligence gathering and the general contemporary developments in administration in the early modern state are also important in the era. Indeed, the use of new forms of physical handling of official correspondence, as well as the creation of textual constructions and the use and storage of official documents in archives within the early modern administrative world, were significant innovations that allow us to fully understand the real role of intelligence and espionage in government.

In Chapter 1 we will begin by exploring some of the major historical themes, roots, ideas and issues that underpinned the development of secret government activities in the 1650s. In Chapter 2 we will consider the important development of the office of the secretary of state up until the outbreak of the Civil Wars; for it was to be this office above all that would play an important role in such affairs, and in which we can find the first signs of the development of the state management of secret intelligence gathering and espionage. This was also bound up with the parallel history of administrative changes in government. In Chapter 3 we will examine the immediate roots of the intelligence activities of the 1650s that are to be found in the chaos of the British Civil Wars of the 1640s, while in Chapter 4 we will follow this thread of intelligence into a direct analysis of the actions of the espionage system of the English Republic and we will especially focus on the important role played by the relatively forgotten figure of the regicide politician Thomas Scot, who was the ‘intelligencer’ for that regime. Lastly, in Chapter 5 we will directly examine the Cromwellian Protectorate’s intelligence and espionage system of 1653–58 and will seek to reassess the secret work of Secretary John Thurloe and his master Oliver Cromwell. Finally, in the Afterword to this work we will link these earlier periods of intelligence and espionage to the coming secret intelligence world of the Restoration state and beyond.¹³ We should begin our quest, however, by clarifying some of the context for the 1650s: the ideas of secrecy and espionage history, and the roots of the English Republic’s ‘secret state’.

Notes

1TSP , I, pp. 335–47; ironically this information comes from an intercepted letter.

2Clement Walker, The Compleat History of Independencie upon the Parliament begun in 1640 (London, 1661), part III, p. 34.

3CSP Venetian, 1655–56 , pp. 142–3.

4East Sussex Record Office, RYE/47/149/6, 21 May 1654; also RYE/47/149/7 24 May 1654; RYE/47/149/8 21 May 1654; RYE/47/151/10, 13 March 1655; RYE/47/151/11, 13 March 1655.

5George Bate, Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia, or a short historical account of the rise and progress of the later troubles in England (London, 1685), pt. II, pp. 80–1; 184–5.

6BL, Additional MS 34014, ‘Lists of suspected persons in London and Westminster, 1655–56’; BL, Additional MS 34015, ‘Appearances of Persons coming from Forraigne Parts, 1655’, fos. 1–82. The entries give names, where from, where landed, date, how arrived, where they were to lodge in London and their business there. Occasionally it also lists who they came with (wife’s name, servants, etc.) and when they were leaving; see also BL, Additional MS 19516: a book of letters to Major Generals and BL, Additional MS 34016, which covers the residents in Westminster; David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 166–7; Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 130.

7A Declaration of His Highnes[s] by the Advice of His Council; Shewing the Reasons of their Proceedings for Securing the Peace of the Commonwealth & c (London, 1655), pp. 3, 4, 7, 17, 19.

8It was James VI and I who noted that these ‘edg’d tools’ were ‘like that weapon that is said to cut with one edge and cure with the other’. Onslow, Life of Dr George Abbot , p. 14. Francis Osborne, Traditional Memoyres of the Reigne of King James (London, 1658), p. 37. The ‘edg’d tools’ were: the Post Office, domestic correspondents, diplomats abroad, as well as spies and secret agents. All were used in order to gain information that proved invaluable in politics and protected the Protestant state.

9HMC, Portland MSS , IV, p. 65; this phrase was used by Sidney Godolphin in 1703.

10 For some parallels see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, P&P , 129 (1990), 30–2.

11 Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1.

12 For a good general academic introduction to this area see Daniel Szechi, ‘Introduction: The Dangerous Trade in Early Modern Europe’ in Daniel Szechi (ed.), The Dangerous Trade: Spies, Spymasters and the Making of Europe (Dundee: Dundee University Press, 2010), pp. 1–21; also more generally Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Béatrice Perez (ed.), Ambassadeurs, apprentis espions et maîtres comploteurs, Les systèmes de renseignement en Espagne à l’époque moderne (Paris: Sorbonne, 2010).

13 See also Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage , p. 1 et passim .

Part I

The background

Bosola: It seems you would create me

One of your familiars.

Ferdinand: Familiar! What’s that?

Bosola: Why a very quaint invisible devil in the flesh, –

An intelligencer.

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Act I, Scene i

1

Themes and issues

We do know that there was a long history behind the methods of espionage that were to be eventually used by the governments of the 1650s, for espionage methods and ideas themselves had already become part of actions that were normally undertaken, to varying degrees and with varying success, in order to protect individuals and the realm from the actions of foreign powers or from domestic violence or from internal disruption. Additionally, they had also played a significant part in the uncovering of, or in some cases immediately prompted, the successive political and religious plots that were to be regularly found in the era. ‘Secrets of state’, as they were often termed, had indeed come to be seen as essential for routine stability. Secrets and secrecy were also reflected in early modern culture and literature, where they were frequently seen as key elements in understanding how politics and society really worked. The revelation of secrets, personal or political, would become something of a deus ex machina on the London stage as well as in the early novels of the day. More practically, secrets were used to benefit the state’s foreign policy and, just as importantly perhaps, to strengthen the power and reputation of certain individual leaders.¹

King James VI and I once labelled the actual secret devices of state the ‘edg’d tools’ of government.² These secret state tools involved covert matters like clandestine intelligence gathering, the use of spies and common informers, access to the developing theories of political dissimulation and sometimes even violent actions such as the kidnapping or assassination of opponents – although the last of these events was actually a very rare occurrence indeed.³ Some contemporaries came to believe that a judicious and politic use of such secret state tools was simply necessary to rule effectively, although they were also seen as morally dubious and at times even quite shameful methods of government.⁴ But it was frequently suggested by some commentators that those princes who did resort to such secret techniques could gain access to still more arcane knowledge, in itself otherwise unobtainable, which could even reveal the very mechanisms and roots of power itself.⁵

Whatever the moral uncertainties over such actions, and they were many, the idea of secrecy in government was generally seen as invaluable to early modern rulers. They had, of course, ancient masters to teach them this basic fact of life. Greek and Roman texts taught their value, while there were many religious examples in the Bible.⁶ Such affairs became part of what the Roman historian Tacitus had once called the arcana imperii of the ruler.⁷ As a historian, indeed, Tacitus’ unique clarity over such secret matters of state was both praised and critiqued in early modern humanist culture. His very pragmatic approaches to political life and his real understanding of ‘how to do’ politics, whether for either good or evil, appealed to the sensibilities of many early modern political theorists and their powerful aristocratic pupils so that, by the later sixteenth century, there was something of a minor industry in revealing these Tacitean skills of the arcana imperii for princely and even popular audiences, and such ideas trickled into the vitals of popular literature where they could be especially seen upon the stage. These literary works, of course, mainly sought to illuminate how the great men and women of the past had not only maintained but had sought secret power.⁸ Anyway, as Ben Jonson was to wryly note, all the ‘ripe statesmen’ of his day naturally took to carrying ‘in their pockets Tacitus’ as a guide for their actions.⁹ More practically, perhaps, Sir Walter Raleigh pointed out that any sensible ruler would naturally enough always

have their beagles or listeners in every corner, and all parts of the realm, especially in places that are most suspected; to learn what every man saith or thinketh; that they may prevent all attempts, and take away such as mislike their state.¹⁰

Yet in order to really understand this subject in the 1650s, there is another important root connection to be made. This was the link between espionage actions of the period and the development of the administrative world of the early modern state. For within this growing administrative world, we can find the arrival of new forms of physical handling of official correspondence and new textual constructions of official documents, and the changes made here were also to have a profound impact upon the inner workings of contemporary secret intelligence and espionage.

Whilst the methods of gathering secret information via the popular adventures of spies are perhaps a familiar enough territory for many readers, much of the more mundane office-bound techniques of the age’s espionage analysis and assessment, which was equally, if not more important, is not so familiar. Yet, government secret intelligence and espionage activities in the seventeenth century did, as we shall see below, become a distinctive part of the new administrative world of paper, of files and of bundles of documents. In fact, it was here, if anywhere, that this gathered secret information could be most closely scrutinised and it was also here that its important interpretations could be privately constructed. So it is arguably just as significant for us to get to know how this was achieved as it is to reveal how secret intelligence was obtained on the ground by spies and informers. Put simply, it is within this era’s growing ‘paper empires’ that the contemporary state secret intelligence systems that began to emerge can actually be successfully measured by their impact upon the policy choices of government.

Clearly, then, we need some understanding of how this early modern administrative world developed and how it played its part in the history of the secret state of the era. As G. R. Elton once noted, we need to know

The analysis and description of past administrative processes, the discovery of principles implicit or explicit in the conduct of government, and an understanding of the manner in which the theoretical mechanism operated in practice.¹¹

These matters of administration were mainly to be found within distinct contemporary philosophies about the theories of knowledge and its production, as well as in practices that could be established and laid down by contemporary administrators. Additionally, they were embedded within fashionable moral notions of authority and trust in government, as well as in philosophies of the morality of the everyday. There were in fact still many serious questions about when it was really legitimate to use such secret skills as political deception and dissimulation and especially when to use the even more sinister ‘edg’d tools’ of government. This being so, philosophical ideas were often brought into the discussion in order to underpin the notions of the arcana imperii, or ‘secrets of state’.¹²

There was also a general cultural awareness of the idea of state secrecy in government. This was mainly due to the fact that the actual protection of state secrets was experiencing considerable pressure from a growing and literate public’s greed for the revelation of political secrets. Versions of secret state business would continue to bleed into the developing ‘public sphere’ throughout the period covered by this book.¹³ The consequences of this, of course, were seen as highly dangerous by many loyal commentators and especially by the prominent statesmen of the day. So dangerous in fact that Clement Walker was to remark that it had now become far too common in his view to

cast all the Mystery and secrets of Government, both by Kings and Parliaments before the vulgar (like Pearl before Swine) and … [this had] taught … the people to look so far into them, as to ravel back all Governments to the first Principles of Nature.

One major consequence of this move, he was to complain, was that the opening out of secret actions of the state would shake ‘the Fundamentals … [of government and could even, or so he thought,] take down the Fabrick’ of society itself.¹⁴

Certainly, the development of the very popular genre of ‘secret’ histories became part of this phenomenon. Deliberately written to cash in on new public audiences, who now clearly thought they had the right to know why things happened and, moreover, who was to blame for them when they did, such ‘revelatory’ texts now allowed versions of the formerly sacred arcana imperii to be freely bandied about by the ‘vulgar’, so as to answer what was thought by some at the top of society to be rather impertinent questions.¹⁵ Some continued to argue that this move would not only lead inevitably to a loss of respect for rulers but could even shatter the very magic of rule itself.¹⁶ Printed explanations about the dark arts of state would completely dissolve the boundaries between rulers and ruled. On this matter, King Charles I, amongst others, heartily agreed. Charles (who had various secrets of his own to hide) anxiously observed that the ruled, if they were fully equipped with such sensitive state information, might well discover that government was not in the end really undertaken for them at all, and indeed they might even (dreadful fate) seek to ‘set up for themselves’. This vulgar peeking behind the curtains of government would, or so the King argued, only result in the ‘Destroy[ing] all rights and properties, all distinctions of families and Merits; And by it … this splendid and excellently distinguished form of government’. Where would it all end? Well, in a ‘dark … chaos of confusion, and in the long line of our many noble Ancestors [ending] in a Jack Cade, or Wat Tyler’.¹⁷ As it turned out, of course, the actual unlocking of the Caroline arcana imperii during the course of the Civil Wars did indeed enable something of a transformation to take place, as the formerly secretive Caroline ‘mysteries of state’ and the relevant documentary evidence that proved it had gone wrong were converted into a genuine ‘public knowledge’ about the King’s somewhat dubious secret dealings, his supposedly sinister actions and his rather suspect motivations.

It is still necessary, however, for us to begin to define what exactly we mean when we write or talk about pre-modern espionage and intelligence, for despite the many popular claims to the contrary there really is no simple continuity between what happened then and what happens now, either in construction or in language. In point of fact, various visions of such matters did exist in the period covered by this book and it may be as well to try to contextualise some of them here.

There were in fact many different types of networks of information gathering emerging in the era, alongside the more covert state intelligence networks and state espionage actions which are our subject here. These general early modern intelligence networks were part and parcel of the many social, public and private networks of communication that were coming to the fore, all with their own ideas of both gaining social capital through information and accessing basic news, whether for business or pleasure. They radiated out from a number of sources. One of the most important of these was what we might call social patronage. Here monarchs, aristocrats, merchants, diplomats, military men, ‘scientists’ (natural philosophers), court brokers, news vendors, social mediators and central and local government officers were all becoming involved in acquiring information in some form.¹⁸ Some even began to dabble in forms of what we would now call espionage although, as we shall see, this was often limited in both range and scope. At times the masters of such networks demanded certain forms of secret information, mainly due to their holding office, to protect their elite social positions at court or even for economic or ‘scientific’ reasons.¹⁹

Such agencies now became regularly embedded in the normal Europe-wide client–patron structures that were in operation.²⁰ This was a part of the social glue that lay at the very heart of all political, cultural and social life in the era and it can be found in the many cultural, economic, local, national and international transactions of the day. One result of these relations, however, was also to bind into the personal, social and moral interests of individuals, and even in some cases into family structures, as well as into the economic and commercial world some forms of limited espionage action. These networks and the individuals in them therefore soon took to gathering all sorts of private information that could give them a personal edge or a social or political advantage, or that could simply build up their own interest in the form of social or political capital.

Social relations were naturally important for the development of the early modern secret state intelligence gathering networks and espionage activities. The practices of such secret networks, as we shall see, began to rely directly upon the very familiar client–patron discourses and languages of the day and upon the current social concepts of brokerage and mediation, as well as upon the creation of social links and networks between individuals and groups. Clients in this world sought to act as mediators for all sorts of information so as to increase their own and their patron’s power.²¹ The inhabitants of such relations, at first, still tended to be somewhat functional in their desires and somewhat opportunistic in their actions, while they possessed a distinctly limited view of such matters, rather than immediately thinking of themselves as solely ‘professional’ or state agents.²² Consequently, Linda L. Peck’s familiar definition of the early modern client–patron relationship, as something that was a ‘cultural construct, dependent on the matrix of values, social and economic structures, ideology, and ritual in any society’, is indeed one good key to understanding what happened in state intelligence gathering and espionage systems in the 1650s where, as we shall see, similar patron–client relations were in existence.²³

It is, perhaps, not that surprising to find secret intelligence gathering as a part of such systems of early modern social bargaining and opportunism. It was an inherent part of well-established social arrangements that often raised, and accepted, potentially underhand methods for acquiring the valuable commodity of information. Moreover, it could be useful to patrons and as such it could also be promoted by clients as valuable so as to serve their own particular ends.²⁴ Nor were these patronage systems always that secret. Indeed, it became generally expected that patrons would have clients, that clients would in turn supply them with information, open or secret, alongside their political or social support, and that such information could be valuable for use elsewhere.

Yet any secret intelligence network’s chances of survival still tended to be explicitly linked to the endurance of the individual patron who thought to sustain them. As a result, they tended to be somewhat loosely formed, even temporary and fluid expedients, created in order to resolve particular personal issues. Often their patrons saw them as mere extensions of their own personal power, rather than as a distinct branch of the business of government.²⁵ Just occasionally, and at best perhaps, some of these networks could be seen as semi-private concerns that took place under some ministerial guidance. Yet they invariably operated within visions in which the ‘state’ and its needs were generally of secondary consideration and they did not lie within the vision that commonly dictates the core elements of the modern intelligence world.²⁶

In brief, some of these intelligence systems or networks (whether open or covert) can often be marked down as momentary answers to particular problems, whether social, economic or political (especially many an individual’s own ego). They tended to be limited in scope, subject to very personal ideas of control and were marked by the preservation of the current social order, by the religious norms (as their patron saw it) or indeed by simple access to particular information through patronage power. They also occasionally dabbled in what we might see as espionage.

Yet when we turn our gaze towards the middle and the end of the seventeenth century, what do we find there? There are, of course, still many intelligence gathering networks around but by this stage we can also begin to observe the central elements of an early modern secret ‘state’ intelligence gathering and espionage system. In fact, as we shall see, the argument here is that the state’s secret intelligence systems in the mid-seventeenth century, chiefly those ones that emerged in the chaos of the Civil Wars of the 1640s and in the politically turbulent Republican 1650s, had now especially moved it towards something much more familiar and indeed much more exclusive: ‘state’ solutions to the problem of secret information