In February 1649 the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus characterised ‘Parliament Jone', aka Elizabeth Alkin, as ‘an old Bitch' able to ‘smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best Blood-hound in the Army'. Elizabeth later claimed that during the Civil Wars she was ‘imployed as a Spye by the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, & the now Lord Generall ffairfax'. Her husband was hanged by the Royalists at Oxford for spying and she had put her life in danger in the service of the state. The intelligence-gathering of Elizabeth and other women, often paid as nurses by Cromwell's spymaster John Thurloe, has usually been treated as a footnote to the real business of warfare. The invisibility of female spies, or ‘she-intelligencers', was compounded by contemporary beliefs that women were incapable of keeping secrets.
In this scintillating book, Nadine Akkerman demonstrates that women were unlikely to be suspected as intelligencers and, if unmasked, were usually treated more leniently than men. Their secret communications were couched in innocent domestic terms, but were encoded with references to high politics and dangerous enterprises. Women used such subterfuges to avoid prying eyes, but such wiles have rendered their words of little importance to historians. In some cases their words, originally written in invisible ink, have literally disappeared. Invisible Agents is the first study of early-modern female spies and it draws the reader into the murky world of 17th-century letter-locking, ciphers, informers and imposters through a series of case studies.
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