by Janet Todd
Meanwhile, Behn’s money troubles inexorably grew. Having written three letters to Halsall in quick time, she was aware that she had received no answers and no supplies—she may have forgotten her instruction to Halsall not to write to Antwerp when she had intended to move to Holland. She could not have known of the Fire of London which broke out on 2 September in Pudding Lane and consumed the City, including the great cathedral of St Paul’s—‘during which Calamity’, according to Arlington, ‘we did not think it fit to let any Letters go abroad.’16 Why had Halsall not written to her, not sent any word of any sort? Was she doing something wrong? Were her letters arriving? In desperation, she decided to go direct to Killigrew—perhaps Corney’s opinion of Halsall was impinging on her. With Killigrew she could be franker and sharper.17 He had landed her in this mess and should extricate her. It was awkward to be going behind the back of her control, but she had begun to suspect that Halsall had lost faith in her and she needed Killigrew to win him round.
To Killigrew, Behn could dispense with the conventional reverence for the King appropriate with Halsall, for she would ‘presume to take a ffreedom with you more then any’, and she blurted out what she knew probably from Nipho: that ‘his Majestys friends heare do all complaine upon the slenderness of their rewards’. Perhaps recalling the past, she could even indulge in a little sarcasm: ‘I supose it may not be all together Unknowne to you Sir, the Charge of these places’ and ‘you Understand this place better than I.’ The stay of the King and his courtiers including Killigrew in the Low Countries just before the Restoration had been famously extravagant, and the Dutch merchants were still trying to call in the debts. A King, even in exile, had more credit than a ‘shee spy’, however.
It was costing Behn ten gilders or just over £1 a day to live with her entourage. She was going to economise further she declared, without indicating why she had not taken this course sooner. Since her next messenger was to be her brother, presumably this would take his upkeep off her hands, although she would still have to find money for his passage. Her whole purpose would founder if money were unforthcoming: Scot could not send letters directly because it was too dangerous and he had to correspond with her through expensive private messengers. Without money, as she reiterated, there was absolutely no point in her going to Holland: indeed she could not do so if she did not first settle her debts. Halsall should be badgered into sending at least another £50—a mere £40 after the exchange had taken its cut. Actually, she needed more than that since, in waiting for the money, she would run up additional debts: ‘I think you can not do less now then let me have a hundred pownds,’ she concluded.18
For a few days, Behn nerved herself to the wait. She walked around Antwerp, fearing always to meet the ubiquitous Corney. Her brother was impatient to be gone but could not start until his passage was paid. After four days of silence, she could stand it no longer and took up her pen again to address Killigrew—she had quite given up on Halsall.
Her desperation is there in her repetition. She went over the old ground: her necessities, her frugality, her depleted money, her need to borrow to pay Scot’s expenses for travel—her going to him being now quite out of the question given her debts—and her pawning of her rings to keep herself and her party. The desired £50 had earlier become £100 to cover all expenses; now she needed almost £100 simply for the debts. She was desperate to economise by leaving the Rosa Noble but, as she droningly repeated, she could not leave without paying the bill. Scot was waiting for her in The Hague, eager to set off for Amsterdam to spy in earnest. Yet nobody could move: ‘be speedy I pray Sir in what you do for every bodyes good.’ Killigrew and Halsall must have been amused at the audacity of the request. No one had any intention of sending so much. If they paid agents at that rate, the government would be even closer to bankruptcy than it was. Neither were they pleased at her approach to Killigrew. She had been diminished in all their eyes.
When Behn opened the next packet from Scot, her heart sank further, for there again was the old refrain: lack of money, desire for the pardon and fear of Bampfield. There was a little attempt at gallantry—he ‘can deny Astrea nothing’—but it was jarring in the context of money and treachery. The letters were so disappointing that, rather than send them directly on to Whitehall and thus risk discrediting Scot, she made excerpts of their hearsay and speculation. It was the sort of information Arlington could have gained from foreign newsletters which came in to Whitehall, and indeed Scot actually referred him to these: a few titbits about the ‘universal disorder’ in the States, the readiness of the Prince of Orange, waiting at his uncle’s in Cleve, to assume command, and a little about the dissidents, including the Quaker, Benjamin Furley, said to be plotting against England with his friend, Algernon Sidney. Nothing more.
Meanwhile, of course, Thomas Corney had been writing as furiously and frankly as Aphra Behn. Not only did he endeavour to assassinate her character, but he also gave bits of information which made her suspect. For example, he knew, but should not have known, that Scot had impudently met Behn outside the city and been closeted with ‘this lady to whom hee promises to doe much as I am informed’. He also knew that Scot had talked with a man who had since returned to Holland to consult with De Witt—something Behn had not mentioned, probably because she did not know it.19
Corney was anxious to undo any favourable effect Scot had made on the gullible ‘shee spy’ and, in contrast to Behn’s reports, associate him firmly with Bampfield:
Bampfield & hee are both alike, and both in the like Capacity & willingness to serve their King & Country, when upon my very contience they both hate the King... and would upon occation rally up that little couardly couradge they have left to doe a mischief to him or any of his.
He had heard that Behn still intended going into Holland. Given her ineptitude, Corney was sure she would soon be caught. In which case the Dutch would laugh that ‘the Kings Officers can bee soe indiscreet as to send such people about a business they soe little understand which will redound much to the dishonour of his Ma[jes]tie.’ As Corney brooded over Scot, he tried out various scenarios to explain his success, forgetting that he himself had been taken in only a short while ago. He pitched again on ‘stout’ Major Halsall, who must somehow have persuaded Lord Arlington that Scot could be useful. In fact he was ‘noe more able to serve him...than the Dogg’.20
Still Corney continued to haunt Aphra Behn. As the days passed, she began to engage him against his will. She remained foolish and vain, was far too leaky a vessel for a secret agent, but she did have ‘a great deale of witt’. He wanted her to be discredited in London, but he hoped she would not be stupid enough to destroy herself by going into Holland. He had become a little sorry for her. She was in a desperate plight, one shared at some time by all Royalist agents: ‘she hath been wind bound 3 weeks at the Roosa noble in Antwerp for want of money.’
For Corney, Behn showed no sympathy at all. With her own reverential attitude to royalty, she found it galling that he boasted intimacy with King Charles. Surely such a ‘prating ffellow’ could not really be employed by London, could not really be familiar with Arlington and ‘the Ladyes at court’! She was especially angry that he had been doing her ‘great hurt by writing in to Holland’. With such slanders, any possibility of slipping there inconspicuously had vanished. Happily, she had Nipho to grumble to: he had much the same opinion of Corney as she had, and both agreed the ‘rogue’ should be silenced.
The clerks in Whitehall who decoded and copied parts of letters must have marvelled at the bilious correspondence of Behn, Corney and Scot. All were so eager to destroy the others, while gaining so little credibility themselves, and they each made such parallel accusations. Behn’s opinion of Corney—‘ever body dreads him & none abids him, he is so insufferable a scandalous Lying prating ffellow: & I am sure they do not Love his Majesty intrest that trust him with the least of secreitt’—was uncannily close to Corney’s description of Scot.21 None of the trio fully realised the
damage the others were doing. Corney, who presented himself as a discreet professional, was being written as a braggart; Scot, eager to paint himself as an invaluable double agent, appeared as a drunken rogue; Behn, regarding herself as a clever operator, was being portrayed as a naïve fool.
Chapter 9
Debts and Disappointment
‘for christ his sake Sir let me receave no ill opinion from his Majesty’
Shortly before 7 September, Aphra Behn received letters from her mother—presumably through an amanuensis—and from ‘Sir Thomas’. His last name, like her own and those of people related to her, was not given, probably for security reasons. So, although Behn’s foster-brother, Thomas Colepeper, was not titled, it remains possible that the reference is to him under his dead father’s name.1 The letters confirmed Behn’s worst fears. Marooned in Antwerp, she was being assassinated in London by ‘pregudice’. The complaints spurred her to pick up her pen and address Killigrew, yet again.
It seems that both he and Sir Thomas had been irritated that she had sent Piers to Halsall for money. He was not the sort of man to have entrusted with her secrets, they said. Why not? He was her companion and trusted servant and she was convinced of his honesty. Besides, Halsall had sent the original £50 to her by one of his servants. It was unclear whom else Behn could have sent. Her brother was being reserved for the pardon and she had no one even in England suitable to go for the money and bring or dispatch it.2 She could, she supposed, have asked ‘Sir Thomas’ or her mother. But she had been reluctant to use her mother and she was not sure Killigrew and his colleagues would have approved Sir Thomas, who was anyhow not often in London.
Behn was hurt that Killigrew and Halsall had seen fit to show Sir Thomas a supposedly secret letter, in which she had justified her choice of Piers by claiming he was the only man she could trust. Even more, she was stung by their need to inform the King of her ineptitude and so destroy His Majesty’s good opinion. How could they believe her to have been boasting foolishly of her mission? She was, of course, unaware of what Corney had been writing: that everyone around knew her business.
When her irritation at Killigrew had subsided, Behn again felt exposed—however annoyed, she could not afford to upset the men in Whitehall further. Some humility was needed:
you shall find still this that how great a Child soever I am in other matters: I shall mind dilligently what I am now about: & doubt not but to aquitt my self as becoms me, & is my duty.
Behn even conceded that, perhaps, she had ‘not posibly heather too dun so much as might be expected’. Quickly reading over this letter, she noticed the changes in mood. Yet she had no time to rewrite it. Then, suddenly struck by the enormity of losing the King’s confidence, she added an emotional postscript: ‘for christ his sake Sir let me receave no Ill opinion from his Majesty who would give my poor life to serve him in never so little a degree: & really Sir in this I have not merritted it.’ The next day, another rambling demoralised letter came from Scot, still in Rotterdam and unable to get to The Hague. He now saw what Aphra Behn could not: that the pardon would always be in the future, while information had to come in the present. He was as financially desperate as she and breaking under the strain of the cat-and-mouse surveillance with Bampfield. Yet he claimed he was as eager as ever to serve the English—‘provided I do it not as a foole’. Rightly Scot said that he had little news to give, at one point admitting that Behn and the Whitehall authorities might already know more than he about such naval matters as the engagement of the Dutch and English forces in the Channel. About merchant fleets he had nothing at all to say, they being ‘a thing so utterly out of my way’. So again he padded out his report with the sort of general information about civil unrest that could have been gained from the Dutch newspapers. A few more bits on Furley and Bampfield closed the letter: he would do better in the future when he did not have ‘difficulties to strugell with’, in other words when he had some money.
It was a jumpy, self-absorbed letter. Perhaps it was due to fear of Furley, she thought, but more likely of Joseph Hill, whom Scot had identified as Bampfield’s agent. If his dealings with Behn came to their knowledge, Scot would be exposed and at least exiled from Holland. Where would he go without his English pardon?
One piece of information that must momentarily have troubled Behn was that a letter in a woman’s handwriting had been intercepted at The Hague. Could it be hers? Scot asked nervously. If so, it would put him in extreme danger, since Bampfield would recognise it and assume it was destined for Scot. She may have wondered how this could be since she had not corresponded with Colonel Bampfield, who did not know her personally. Had Scot been showing him her letters? Happily this particular letter was not hers.
When she had finished reading, Behn copied out Scot’s missive, so that it would be in her handwriting and not endanger him. She wrote quickly, sensing that she was making silly mistakes. The messages from Scot came only a quarter of an hour before her letters were due to Nipho, and she had to catch the post, so desperate was she for money. Once she had sent the letter, however, she regretted it and later apologised: she did not wish to seem illiterate as well as incompetent.
At this point a bill of £50 appears to have arrived in Antwerp for her, perhaps with Killigrew’s help, but, when she wrote again to Halsall in mid-September, Behn grumbled at its inadequacy. The exchange had cost £4 and she had borrowed this sum to make up £50, perhaps from her Dutch merchant, now returned from his wife in Amsterdam, or from Nipho who was—though she did not know it—dealing in hefty English sums.3 Unhappily, the £50 had to be handed over to the innkeeper in its entirety—it was not even half of the £120 she now owed.
Although she moaned that she was ‘wors then dead till I am out of this expensiue hous wheare I vow to god I do not rest with continuall thoughts of my debts...’, the money seems to have cheered both Behn and Scot, who was writing regularly from Rotterdam. It was three weeks since she had seen him, although his renewed belief in the pardon suggests there might have been a fleeting encounter. Mostly, he grumbled about his fellow dissidents, exposing again his consuming jealousy of Bampfield.4 In passing, he mentioned an ex-Parliamentary sea captain who was undertaking to block the Thames for the Dutch and so make the English sailors mutiny. This sort of plan—of attacking the English fleet in its home waters of the Thames and the Medway—the authorities heard a good deal of from their agents, but never quite took seriously. Although the copying of the information to Halsall was the closest Behn came to mentioning the future Dutch triumph, she made it into something of a story when she was snugly back in England.5 As time went by, it was hard to remember much about the Second Dutch War except the Medway fiasco and a good raconteur would want to include it.
A few days on and Scot reported that the English dissidents were assembling in Utrecht—he did not know the reason, nor why a tall young man with straight black hair was travelling to England. With money he might be able to find out. Meanwhile the great Dutch admiral, De Ruyter, was ill, probably with the plague now raging in the fleet. When she copied this out for Halsall, Behn added her own view, that this was therefore a good time to attack the ships, advice that must have given her a surge of importance. The decoder in Williamson’s office underlined her point.
The next letter of five days later—about 30 September—revealed that news of the great Fire of London, occurring in early September, had reached Holland. It led to general rejoicing, many seeing it as a divine punishment for English treachery in the Vlie. Perhaps this supposed divine support heartened the Dutch, for Scot’s next letter described an upsurge of national spirits. The English dissidents were also heartened. Algernon Sidney had gone to England to reconnoitre and was expected back in ten days. There was general belief that the country was in disorder and the dissidents would exploit this when they heard from Sidney. Scot ended his dispatch with some more names of agents and seditious correspondents, as well as some advice on whose messengers to intercept.6
The
n the sudden run of letters dried up. Behn was alarmed. Given the frantic calls for money and her own predicament, she at once suspected that Scot had been taken for debt. She felt horribly guilty, sure it was her promises of reward that had ‘ffoold him with vaine expectation’. Yet she need not have worried. Instead, the event Scot had feared for so long had happened: Bampfield had betrayed him to the Dutch. Scot had probably been planning to betray Bampfield, for he had learnt that his ‘friend’ was also having dealings with the English: to pre-empt this move Bampfield sensibly betrayed Scot.
As so often, a church had staged the crucial encounter: Scot was apprehended on a Sunday in early October and dragged to The Hague, to which he and Behn had so fervently wished to go only a month before. When he heard the news, Corney was delighted—though disappointed that he had not been the agent: ‘...[it] is sum satisfaction that that Rogue Scott is catched at last...’. He put the capture down not to Bampfield, but to the trips to the Rosa Noble, the inn full of Dutch spies.
With Scot silenced, Behn’s own position came to the fore. The well-informed innkeeper grew openly insolent; instead of trying to keep her close so that she would not skip the country, he now thought it best to cut his losses and be rid of her and her party. She had already given over all her possessions to him as surety for her bill, but they were worth little. The smug Corney was on hand to depict the scene and sneer at ‘the shee spy as they call her there, where there is allways hollanders, besides the man of the house a great friend to holland; & hath affronted her severall tymes to gitt her out, but she will not goe’.