Not so the women: in Ireland they were banished to Barbados (no holiday then) and in England they were incarcerated or occasionally drowned, like witches, because female espionage, like sorcery, was seen as a shameful perversion of nature. The crime and the punishment were exposed. In the 17th century, male spies were executed, usually hanged, and displayed on the gibbet. Why have we not heard of her? Partly, suggests Akkerman, because she was so good at covering her tracks, but also because she has been systematically ignored. 'If you fail,' she told Charles Stuart (later Charles II), 'I break.' She was 'at the heart of things', writes Akkerman, a reader in early modern English literature at Leiden University, and she made sure that the Knot stayed tight.Īfter a failed uprising in 1655, however, it began to unravel.

Hyde's sister ran the London end of operations, communicating with the Stuart court in exile via an apothecary-clearing house in the Old Bailey.

When the Royalists lost the war, they did not give up the fight. She worked for the Sealed Knot, the Royalist secret society determined to put the Stuarts back on the throne, and she is one of several women unmasked in Nadine Akkerman's groundbreaking study of female spies in 17th-century Britain. She went by the name of Mrs Edwards, and sometimes Mistress St Barbe, Mistress Simburbe or Mr Gotherintone. The great politician and historian of the Civil War era, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, had a sister. Jessie Childs reviews Invisible Agents by Nadine Akkerman

Nadine akkerman invisible agents