by Janet Todd
In the new year of 1667, William Scot was released from prison and promptly banished from Holland. He went to Antwerp but, despite his former pleas, he probably did not risk another meeting with Aphra Behn, nor inform her how little she need have worried about his debts, or indeed about his treatment from the Dutch. In all the time of his dealings with her, he had never broken his contact with them and, despite her belief in his affection for her, she did not figure at all in the story he told to them.
This formed a long letter in which, far from being contrite, Scot actually took the Dutch to task for ever doubting his loyalty to them. He demanded a repeal of the banishment that had taken him to Antwerp where he was ‘abandoned to death by the vengeance of the king of England’. His magnificent obsession with Bampfield continued, but Furley, against whom Scot had been informing to Behn, now appeared to have been his close friend all along, and Scot asked that Furley be given his papers in Holland. All in all, it was a cringing, lying letter, which Behn ought to have seen.22
Meanwhile, having offended Arlington, Behn and Corney were desperate to get to England to tell their version of events. Also, Behn was running up more debts. Fortunately she managed to leave first by borrowing £150 from an Edward Butler, possibly in Flanders, possibly from London.23 So, after missing the Christmas convoy she’d been so eager to catch, she was enabled to take one many expensive months later.
Behn set off home as she had come, via Ostend, but then she journeyed on to Dunkirk, where she met Sir Bernard Gascoigne. He had obtained a pass to cross to England and he left in a fleet of sixty vessels on 1 May. Since she travelled with him, this was also her date of leaving the Continent. Despite his anglicised name, Sir Bernard was formerly Bernardo Guasconi, a Florentine merchant and financier, a flexible man of refined taste and few scruples. He had also been a Royalist soldier and spy and had been richly rewarded by Charles II with a fat pension—though, as usual, it tended to be in arrears. He was now returning from Italy, where he had gone to arrange for intelligence to be gathered from Venice and Vienna for Lord Arlington, since there were no English functionaries there. At the same time, he had ministered to other English needs and had written back about buying and dispatching a eunuch.24 As well as being connected with Arlington, he was a friend of Lord Stafford’s and, if she had not much appreciated that nobleman already, Sir Bernard’s praise now recommended him to her.25
Later, according to the ‘Memoirs’, Behn told a tale of this voyage, of an apparition which both she and Sir Bernard looked at through the new ‘Telescopes and Prospective Glasses’ brought from Italy. At first, they assumed the glasses had painted scenes on the end, but then they realised the apparition was really there: a floating floor of marble, supporting fluted and twisted pillars with vines, flowers and streamers entwined and a hundred little fluttering cupids. Behn was not given to magical imaginings or to omens, and the most likely explanation of this is that they were seeing the Fata Morgana, an effect of wind and light in stormy weather in the Channel, apprehended by some as castles and battlements, but by a reader of romance as flowers and cupids.26
Behn herself did not write of the phenomenon, tending to be wary of telescopes as revealers of what their users wanted to see, but her memoirist clearly saw in the incident some expression of the romantic and amorous nature of Behn’s future life. For the allegory, it was a pity that, as usual, the Fata Morgana preceded a great storm. This drove many of the ships on to the coast of England and wrecked them, with great loss of canary wine, as well as of the fancy goods Sir Bernard was trying to bring back to England. Some ships floundering in the sea became prey for French marauders, but, happily, the passengers and crew of Behn’s vessel were saved by small boats that came from England to row them ashore.27
Soon Sir Bernard was in London; so probably was his fellow-passenger. ‘Astrea arriv’d safe, tho’ tired, to London, from a Voyage that gain’d her more Reputation than Profit. The Rest of her Life was entirely dedicated to Pleasure and Poetry,’ so concluded the memoirist. There was some truth in these statements. Behn was weary when she arrived and she had gained no more reputation than profit from her trip to Antwerp. Her life would have its ‘Pleasure and Poetry’, but above all it had to be dedicated to the getting of money. She would be helped in this by some of the psychological and literary skills of telling a convincing story, interpreting people, and investigating conflicting motives, which she had honed during her time as a government spy.
As for Scot, he was not heard of again. Perhaps he ‘dy’d at Amsterdam of a Fever,’ as the ‘Memoirs’ reported of Albert; perhaps Corney succeeded in murdering him.
Chapter 10
In and Out of Prison
‘I would break through all, get to the King, and never rise till he had paid the money.’
The London to which agent 160 returned in the spring of 1667 was not a happy place. Its population thinned by between seventy and a hundred thousand from the plague, it lay charred and black from the Great Fire, with some of its debris still smouldering. Dryden had imaged the conflagration as Virgil’s burning of Troy, with ‘wond’ring fish’ gazing ‘in shining waters’, but the ashes were beyond poetry. The fire had been so ferocious it had obliterated streets, and rebuilding was a mammoth task. Abused in Antwerp, Behn had at least avoided life in the tents and temporary sheds in the fields of Islington and Hampstead, as well as the hysteria that blamed the calamities now on a sinful court, now on the Dutch, but mostly on the Catholics.
Low-spirited, people longed for peace, for the war drained resources needed for rebuilding and destabilised the country. London and the southern ports were made dismal by the unpaid, wounded soldiers whom Evelyn saw trudging from Deptford to Chatham to Gravesend, finding no refuge in the towns, so that the villages were ‘peopled with the poor miserable creatures’. Perhaps Aphra Behn, poor but not destitute, had now some fellow feeling for them. Or perhaps she took the robust line on mutilation seen in so many jokes. In one, a captain has both arms blown off three inches below the shoulders; as his wounds are dressed, he laughs heartily: he used, he explains, to want ‘his P—’ as long as his arm and now it was.1
Soon after Behn arrived in London, Atlantic ships came with news that, back in February, a Dutch fleet had easily captured Surinam. Writing dejectedly to Robert Harley, Deputy Governor Byam knew exactly whom to blame: ‘In February following arrived a Dutch fleet from Zealand, by the advice of Scott, to take the colony.’2 Through Scot, the Dutch had known the place was ‘ill armed, and our fort not half built, but one bastion perfected’. Even more fortunate for the Dutch had been the outbreak of fever that carried off half the inhabitants, including Behn’s friend George Marten; the rest remained ‘in a most weak condition... miserably weak’. The loss of Surinam did not much trouble the English government, but Behn lamented it.3 She heard of Banister’s efforts to negotiate for the remaining English settlers abandoned by the crown, but she did not change her opinion of him.
After more mishaps and military mistakes, feelers for peace were extended and accepted. In mid-May, Dutch and English assembled at Breda, wrangling over precedence so intensely that a room with two separate doors was provided for the ambassadors to arrive simultaneously, as well as an Arthurian round table with no one at its head. During these political skirmishings, the Royal Navy, already dilapidated, gently decayed. In Holland, however, where Holmes’s bonfire burnt in the mind, shipyards and dockyards hummed with activity. A spectacular revenge was planned to strike at England’s naval heart. Echoing many earlier, vaguer informants, including Behn, an agent now warned Arlington specifically of the plan, but he regarded the show as bravado.4
The Dutch raid on the Medway was meticulously designed by De Witt and carried out by his admirals. Dutch ships were to sail to England, enter the Thames estuary, then the Medway, capture and burn the vessels at anchor and destroy the military installations at Chatham. As peace negotiations grew irritating, it was added that the men-of-war should be captured rather than burn
t, so that the English would be thoroughly humiliated.
Even when the raid started, few feared its success. Behn’s brother had probably returned to his post and may have been dispatched with the Duke of Albemarle to Chatham. Things were moving, but ‘backwardly’, as Pepys put it. Then, suddenly, the raid did become real, and panic and flight ensued as the inhabitants of Chatham and Gravesend rushed their belongings and themselves into small boats to escape. From the Dutch perspective, all went brilliantly and a large portion of the English fleet was burnt or taken. Albemarle tried unsuccessfully to save the ships further up the river but did manage to fortify Chatham, mainly because the Dutch, having used up their fire ships and blocked the river with sunk vessels, had begun to withdraw. As they left the Thames, they cheekily dragged with them the Royal Charles, on which the King had returned to England in 1660.
As intended, it was a national disaster for the English. The London Gazette tried to play it down by claiming that ‘the loss we have received has been hitherto so fully returned on [the Dutch], that they can have but little reason to Brag of their Success’ and there was an attempt to write off the great flagship as unlucky and expendable because it had been built by Cromwell.5 None the less, most people were appalled, and both court and city betrayed ‘Distraction and Consternation’.6 Pepys’s diary expressed the general feeling, ‘all our hearts do now ake’ (12 June): he had joined the rush in getting his money together and sending his wife and his diary out of London. It would not, said many, have happened in Cromwell’s day.7
The disaster did not benefit the secret agents, who, despite their warnings, became scapegoats, and a committee set up to inquire into the miscarriages of the war included discussion of faulty intelligence.8 In such an atmosphere, neither Behn nor Corney found much joy in England. Corney complained that he had ‘not received the least recompense for my charge, services, or sufferings’.9 His dreary experience over the next months is fully documented. His trade in ruins, his banishment from Holland unrepealed, and his estates gone, he needed a paying post quickly. So he tried to make Williamson persuade Arlington to give him the modest one of storekeeper in the ordnance office in Chatham, now the previous incumbent was in Newgate prison for embezzlement. He was due for a long wait. One year and many self-pitying petitions later, he was still trying to flatter Williamson into action. Like Behn before him, Corney proceeded from lesser men to Arlington, urging him to ‘move his Majesty to establish me’ in the office which his Lordship had ‘so frankly’ promised and without which he would be ‘completely ruined’. The final misfortune occurred when Corney was robbed of all his clothes and grew ‘ashamed to stir abroad’.
Only the possibility of the ordnance post, open of course solely to men, separated Corney’s debt-ridden plight from Aphra Behn’s. Mr Butler now wanted the repayment of his loan and he was implacable.10 No doubt she tried her dead husband’s friends, her mother, ‘Sir Thomas’, everyone she knew. Since superficial charm and civility were much prized, probably no one repulsed her with hard words, but those to whom she appealed were unforthcoming. As in Flanders, probably many friends sympathised and entertained her to a meal.
Behn’s main hopes had to be her old employers. Convinced that Killigrew’s silence had been an error or a fault of the post, she may have promised speedy repayment to Butler primarily on his credit. Her new letter to him, kept among the state papers, suggests that he tried to do something through official channels, but he had nothing to offer personally. £150 was a large sum and Killigrew, though possessed of a fat income, was always in debt. Behn also petitioned Lord Arlington and even suggested that Butler apply directly to him. Arlington did not have personal ties to her, however, and he roundly told her creditor that no money would come from him. The expenses of Aphra Behn were not in the secret service budget and no one had given him orders to pay her more. Since, apart from the King, he was the highest authority to whom she could appeal, she must have found this hypocrisy galling, and her petition was probably her last direct application.11 In the comic letters quoted in the ‘Memoirs’, there are hints that Behn suspected Arlington of treachery during the Dutch War; perhaps she got her own back by spreading rumours.12
With this absolute refusal, Behn grew desperate. She composed a further, more pathetic letter to Killigrew, declaring she would be dragged to prison on the very next day if no one helped her. Only the physical debility that dogged her at times of crisis kept her from dramatically dashing to Whitehall: ‘I could find it in my heart to break through all & get to the King & never rise, till he weare pleased to pay this [money]; but I am sick & weake & unfitt for yt.’ Failing strength to enact this fantasy, she would send her mother with a petition. She hoped the threat would bring Killigrew to his senses.13 The letter was as unstable as Behn’s mood. Now she saw herself as a poor victim brought low by the machinations of wicked men, now as a strong woman who would not, whatever men did to her, ‘perish in a prison’ or ‘starve’. Butler was indeed demanding ‘the uttermost farthing’. She had heard this kind of threat at least once before: from the innkeeper at the Rosa Noble. This was more serious.
When Arlington declared he had no money to give, Butler carried out his threat and Aphra Behn went to prison. There she needed money even more urgently if she was not to ‘starve’. The ‘common’ side was dismal and cold, much of it ventilated directly through glassless windows. Prisoners had to sleep on boards and the company could be seriously mad and dangerous. To avoid this, Behn would have tried for the ‘state’ side where, for payment, she could have had a bed and possibly a chamber. She would have needed more money for any legal writs necessary to her case and the paying would continue throughout the stay. If matters were sorted out, she would have to pay for her own discharge. Certainly it was as possible to end up with new debts from a stint in debtors’ prison as it was from the King’s service in Flanders.
Behn was, however, not witless and may well have stayed in prison for only a short time. Possibly she came to some compromise with the persecuting Butler, or the King, who would have done nothing directly for her, may have received her petition and jolted Killigrew into acting on her behalf and paying off Butler after she had served some time in prison. In which case, there is one other possibility: that, in return for money from Killigrew extricating her from debts and prison, she was persuaded to go to Italy, particularly to Venice, on a further mission. The suggestion is speculative but, like the secret Interregnum trip, it has some features in its favour.
When he met Behn, Sir Bernard Gascoigne, her fellow-passenger from Flanders, had been returning from Venice, where he had been setting up channels of intelligence for Whitehall. Now he went back to the Continent, and ‘Mrs Affora’, the agent, may have travelled some of the way with him. Killigrew was interested in events in Venice, where he had been the King’s Resident in the Interregnum. Venice was fighting the Turks, in Crete and asking other Europeans to help—Arlington was prepared to give aid but only covertly since he feared to displease the Turks who would retaliate by seizing the considerable holdings of English merchants in their territories. Negotiations with Venice had, therefore, to be hidden and any aid provided ‘with Secresie’. Agents would be needed for such a delicate operation. In addition, the government suspected the French of reneging on their promise to disarm in the recent peace by pretending to send a force of soldiers to the help of Venice. The English would like to know the truth.14
Years later, dedicating a work to Henry Howard, Earl of Arundel, later Duke of Norfolk, Behn mentioned that she had seen ‘with what Transports of Joy, with what unusual Respect and Ceremony, above what we pay to Mankind, the very Name of the Great Howards of Norfolk and Arundel, have been celebrated on Foreign Shores!’15 Arundel’s father, another Henry Howard, had spent much time in Venice and, after the Restoration, had been eager to become the British ambassador there, but was prevented by his Catholicism. He was much appreciated for his ‘passionate devotion’ to the republic and Behn may have heard his praises in
Venice.16
In a posthumous short story, ‘The Dumb Virgin’, the narrator, identified with Aphra Behn the dramatist, liked Venice as she had liked Surinam, for its ‘benign climate’. She made no great claims for her status there: wanting to take her to a ball her young friends thoughtfully provide her with a costly masquerade costume and carry her along in their own coach. She had, she said, been living three doors down from a wealthy Turkey merchant’s family in Venice when the grotesque tragedy of trauma and incest took place. In the story, the narrator made a point of knowing some Italian, for, as she listened to a man believed to be English, she was struck by his ‘pure Italian’ and realised he could not be her countryman.17 This knowledge was used again in the play The Feign’d Curtizans where, amongst the cacophony of foreign languages, one or two words of Venetian dialect unexpectedly appear.18
Such hints remain hints, but, if Behn did have an acquaintance with Venice, the late 1660s is the best moment for her to have made it. Later mentions of Venetians refer to this time: her second performed play, The Amorous Prince, and the short story set in Ghent, The History of the Nun, both allude to struggles of Venice against the Ottoman Turks which occurred then. That no record exists of Behn’s activity proves little; reports from missions where no follow-up was needed were usually oral.19
Behn had, too, another cause that might have led her to Italy, as it may have helped justify her presence in Flanders. Widows of men in the business of shipping often retained their interest after their husband’s death; so the mention of a ‘Widow Behn’ in connection with her dead husband’s involvement is not unusual.20 The ship at issue was the Abraham’s Sacrifice.