by Janet Todd
8. The name spelled Behn was uncommon in England but present in northern Germany. This Johan Behn is the only one so far found who was born at a suitable time. There are many Beans and Bens in England, variations other people used for Aphra, and a will is recorded for an ‘Afra Beane’ of Kent in 1651. Aphra was particular with the spelling of her last name.
9. Incidentally a fair number of English, Dutch and New World sea captains were called Johnson. A captain received about 50 Dutch gilders a month—the first mate would get around 36. The Holland Johnsons or Johnstons were often military and naval men and many were in shipping. For example, in August 1655, the St James, with Peter Johnson of Amsterdam as master, was taken by the English as it sailed home. The owner was William Belin de la Garde, merchant of Amsterdam who owned many ships including also the Golden Fortune with a Francis Johnson; among other Dutch ship owners there was the Widow of Heertgen Johnson, while the heirs of a Daniel Johnson, merchants of Amsterdam, lost a ship to the English in January 1657. Leonard Johnson traded illegally in negroes and sugar in Jamaica. There were also English Johnsons in shipping, such as John Johnson, the master of a ship called the Dove of London belonging to a group of English merchants; this was seized off the Shetland Islands by the Dutch some time before 1663. Such Johnsons may have been distantly related to the Kent family; if so they give Aphra Behn an appropriate maritime and international context.
10. Pepys, Diary, 3 Oct. 1665, vol. VI, pp. 257–8. This was said of an eminent merchant who died in the plague, but would also be true for small operators, especially those who had not left a will, as Mr Behn probably did not.
11. The name of the hero has some similarity to Yoruba names such as Okonkwo or Oro, but the slaves Behn portrayed were from near ‘Coromantine’. Curiously the word Coromantine may have prompted her to the choice of name because of its closeness to another nearby South American river, the Coromanine.
12. The ‘Memoirs’ account of the royal meeting, if true, tends to confirm Behn’s function in the colony: an audience with the King or even his substitute is an unlikely event for the daughter of a barber, unless she had been to the New World for a purpose.
13. In its early years the Royal Society acquired ‘rarities’ of various kinds. The first dated gift in the extant catalogue was made on 18 May 1661. A ‘Repository’ for the gifts was founded and they were sent or presented at meetings to Mr Hooke, the Curator of Experiments from 1662. In 1679 a Catalogue of the Repository was printed which included several natural and cultural objects from America, e.g. ‘A West-Indian bow, arrows and quiver’ and ‘An Indian Peruque, made not of hair but feather, a mantle also of feathers’, Musaeum, p. 367.
14. See The Lismore Papers, 2nd Series, ed. A. B. Grosart (Private Circulation, 1888), vols IV and V; F. W. Stoye, ‘The Whereabouts of Thomas Killigrew 1639–41’, Review of English Studies, vol. 25, 1949, pp. 245–8.
15. It was an odd genre to choose for autobiography, but in this he resembled Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who also wrote autobiographical and philosophical plays.
16. See epilogue to The Parson’s Wedding; Alfred Harbage, Thomas Killigrew Cavalier Dramatist 1612–83 (Philadelphia, 1930), p. 45; and ‘A Ballad, call’d a Session of Poets’, Dyce MS, Victoria and Albert Museum.
17. See Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sybils: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London, 1995), pp. 197–213.
18. For a discussion of Killigrew’s politics, see J. P. Vander Motten, ‘Unpublished Letters of Charles II’, Restoration, Spring 1994, vol. 18, 1, pp. 17–26, and ‘Thomas Killigrew: A Biographical Note,’ Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, LIII, 1975, 3, pp. 769–75. See Thurloe State Papers, vol. VII, a letter to Thurloe, October 18, 1658: ‘As for Charles Stuart his having been in Holland; surely you had my memoriall complaining thereof, which was even at the very time while he was in Holland; and at the very time I had an accompt from one Killigrew of his bed-chamber of every place where he was, and the time, with his stay and company of which also I gave you an accompt in mine by the last post.’ Although both Thomas and his son Henry could have been referred to here, it is rather more likely to have been Thomas. The letter puts Killigrew into an ambiguous light but Vander Motten warns against jumping to premature conclusions.
19. Killigrew was a friend of Willoughby’s and Harley’s and had two sons in the West Indies.
20. See Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess, p. 66.
21. MS V a 20, Folger Shakespeare Library.
22. If Mr Behn died of the plague he was not recorded. The bills of mortality listed numbers rather than names as the pestilence increased.
23. There is a Johan Behn born in Hamburg in 1635, who went to Gluckstadt and then to Copenhagen where he died in 1709. If this is the King David Behn, and Aphra’s husband, he would have been a widower for twenty years and Aphra never a widow. In view of The Abraham’s Sacrifice reference, this seems unlikely. See Chapter 10.
24. Works, vol. 1, no. 67.
25. A similar libel on the Dutch was printed by Behn in her Miscellany of 1685. It was by ‘Mr. Nevell’, which probably indicated her friend Henry Nevil Payne.
26. See Pepys, Diary, 2 Feb. 1664.
27. An Exact Survey of the Affaires Of the United Netherlands (London, 1665), pp. 81–2.
28. Pepys, Diary, 10 July 1666.
29. Works, vol. 1, no. 64.
Chapter 7
1. The description comes mainly from the letters quoted in the ‘Memoirs’.
2. CSP, Dom., 1664–5, pp. 426–7. The allusion is almost certainly to Scot.
3. The letters to De Witt are in The Hague archives. Bampfield writes in French.
4. Oudart had a long Royalist past, having been amanuensis to Charles I. After his period as an agent in Holland, he would return to England to become Latin secretary to Charles II. Corney was proud of having won over a secretary of the directors of the East India Company, although the man wanted a handsome salary for any information, 3000 florins a year and a thousand in advance. Whitehall of course wanted his information before payment.
5. The taking of Corney and Oudart formed part of a series of intelligence acts and followed the arrest in London of a secretary to the Dutch ambassador. See H. H. Rowen, John de Witt (1986), p. 617.
6. CSP, Dom., 1666, pp. 318, 343, 358.
7. In the Act of Parliament 1665, such men as Scot and Bampfield would be deemed guilty of treason if they did not surrender by an appointed date.
8. It was not easy to engage someone new on the spot for, since the outbreak of war, there had been no direct packet-boat service from Holland to England and all letters had to go through Flanders.
9. Arlington was just concluding the rivalries of the Interregnum by helping to oust the old chancellor, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Clarendon had taken a moral stand with the King while Arlington, in Burnet’s words, had the ‘art of observing the King’s temper, and managing it beyond all the men of that time’. At the height of the Anglo-Dutch conflict he would follow Killigrew in improving his estate by marrying a Dutch heiress who brought him the huge dowry of 100,000 gilders. Killigrew’s part in the ousting of Clarendon was even less honourable. Clarendon had been as dismayed as anyone to hear of the pregnancy of his own daughter Anne by the Duke of York and her insistence on marriage. Queen Henrietta Maria was loud in opposition to her son’s match—which to his credit the King insisted must go forward—and Killigrew, her long-time friend, helped out by claiming he had bedded Anne, so that the child she was carrying was not necessarily James’s.
10. Colepeper did not succeed, but he did become one of the King’s gunfounders, responsible for the movement of ordnance round Kent. CSP, Dom., 1662–3, p. 3.
11. It was not a mission that a very respectable lady would have undertaken. The secret relationship with a man, if discovered, would have blasted the reputation of anyone. Even in the more turbulent times of the Interregnum, Ann Murry had found her name compromised by her visits to the dashing Colonel Bam
pfield.
12. See The Right Honourable the Earl of Arlington’s Letters to Sir W. Temple, Bar. from July 1665...to Sept 1670, 2 vols, ed. Thomas Bebington (London, 1701), vol. 1, p. 83.
13. Inevitably all groups declared their prime motive to be the service of the King. In the posthumous ‘Memoirs’ of Aphra Behn, her employer is given, with some romance, directly as the King; he employed her because of her reputation for wit, secrecy and her ‘Management of Publick Affairs’.
14. Thomas Cheney, son of another Thomas Cheney, is the only suitably aged Cheney from Kent in the very incomplete Morman archives. He was christened on 5 February 1636. A George Cheney, son of George and Elizabeth Cheney, was born in Bishopsgate and christened in April 1648 but there seems no reason to connect him with Behn.
15. Charles Cheney’s captain was Nicholas Stewart of Sir John Norton’s regiment in the division of Alton, co. Southants. See Treasury Books.
16. Since there is a Piers mentioned in the Countess of Leicester’s letter to her husband about Sir Thomas Colepeper, it is also possible that he was from Kent. See the De L’Isle Papers C 82/14 1 Feb 1637 in the Centre for Kent Studies.
17. Finally Behn was to pump Scot about the dissident English and Scots in Holland. She was especially to gain information about Edmund Ludlow, the old Commonwealth leader whom the English feared. Neither Aphra Behn nor her masters realised that Ludlow had been transformed into the arch-enemy by earlier misinformation from Scot himself, trying as Scot always was to impress the authorities by his knowledge of important men.
Chapter 8
1. Desmarches was doing another errand for Williamson with a young lad called Robert Yard. The boy was to go to Holland to continue his study of languages and Sir Antony was happy to escort him; indeed he declared to Williamson a little later that he was caring for the lad as if he had been his own son.
2. CSP Dom., 1665–6. The letters from Behn and others which chart her progress are held in the Public Record Office, London, SO 29. Parts are quoted in CSP and a transcript of the Behn letters is provided in W. J. Cameron’s New Light on Aphra Behn (Auckland, 1961). Corney’s correspondence is in PRO SP 77/35.
3. One daughter, who was originally in the convent in Louvain, was persuaded to leave by Stafford, who thought the location unsafe in time of war. In 1667 she went instead to the convent of the Augustinian Canonesses in Antwerp. Possibly Behn met her there.
4. Ogniate moved about a good deal and might just have been on the boat with Behn and Desmarches. A correspondent of his, writing on 17 July 1666, directed a letter to either England or Flanders.
5. Antwerp had been the home of the learned Anna Maria Van Schurman, who had argued the fitness of women for intellectual endeavour. But Behn seems not to have known of her. She did not refer to Van Schurman or, in later years, add her name to the list of female writers into whose company she wished to insert herself.
6. The records are in the Antwerp city archives: Pk 2259 Ket.4; 2295 Off. A 17; 2320 Off.B17; Rk 2259 Ket.4; 2295 Off A17; 2320 Off. B17. There was more than one tavern called the Rosa Noble in Antwerp, but the one in St Katelijuevest O. seems to be the only flourishing establishment at the time Behn was in the city. It was, alternatively, called the Roode Lelie.
7. Beyond desire for vengeance, Corney had legitimate business in Antwerp. With England ranged against both Holland and France, Arlington was trying to negotiate other alliances, usually scotched by the French through their network of agents and large sums of money. Only Munster remained neutral and Corney, established in Brabant, was to help negotiate between the English government and the Bishop for a full twelve months.
8. Sara Heller Mendelson makes the suggestion that Behn was sent by Killigrew precisely because she would not be known as an agent and jeopardise Scot’s position with the dissidents. Scot’s palpable fear every time he was in Behn’s company suggests, however, that he expected others to know who she was. See The Mental World of Stuart Women (Brighton, 1987), p. 122.
9. Perhaps Scot did not like the sight of a brother associated with Albemarle. His father had mistakenly regarded Albemarle, then George Monck, as his ‘greate friend’ and the mistake had cost him his life.
10. Scot also confided to Behn what she probably did not know, that he had dealt with Arlington the year before. Now he gave information on a man in Ludgate prison in London pretending to be an informer, when he was really a ‘Rogue’ and agent of the Dutch; the man was signing up agents in English ports to gain information on merchant shipping. Unfortunately Arlington knew this already.
11. BM Luttrell Collection, III 95. See also A True and Perfect Narrative of The great and Signal Success of a Part Of His Majesties Fleet Under His Highness Prince Rupert, and His grace the Duke of Albemarle, Burning One hundred and Sixty Dutch Ships within the Ulie: As also the Town of Brandaris upon the Island of Schelling, by some Commanded Men under the Conduct of Sir Robert Holmes, the Eighth and Ninth of this instant August (London, 1666).
12. The troop movements and the disgrace of Admiral Tromp were not presented as information from Scot, although Scot did later provide some details of Tromp’s fall and replacement. Perhaps in her desire to please or pad out her points, Behn was showing how dispensable Scot was.
13. Another associate of the treacherous Bampfield was a John Wright or Write, who had been a merchant in London employed by the Dutch to spy for them within England. It seems unlikely, but it remains a possibility, that this was Behn’s brother-in-law or a relative of his. Her sister Frances had, according to Colepeper, married a man possibly called Write who had been with Mr Behn on the King David, a ship with Dutch connections. Arlington probably knew of Wright, but the proposed treachery of Temple could well have been new to him.
14. Algernon Sidney’s work was not printed until 1698, long after sections of it had formed part of the prosecution in his trial for treason.
15. Works, vol. 7, p. 226.
16. Arlington, Letters, vol. 1, p. 96.
17. Behn did not appeal to Sir Mark Ogniate possibly because he was back in England in December. At that time he was issued a pass to export six geldings to Flanders.
18. It must have sounded pretty absurd in London but in fact Antwerp was notoriously expensive. A Richard Brathwait was writing from the Low Countries to a Daniel Fleming asking urgently for £100 to discharge a bond. He pointed out that ‘tymes make money very difficult to Come by’ (Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.226).
19. In presenting Scot, Corney had the problem of wanting to portray a sottish rogue and a dangerous traitor.
20. Possibly Halsall had been fooled by Write who, Corney asserted, was in league not only with Bampfield, as Scot had declared, but also with Scot himself. Despite his protestations to Behn, Scot was still Bampfield’s lackey, Corney averred.
21. Someone else was having a go at Corney as well, and Whitehall was wary of using him in further undertakings. See Arlington, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 100–1.
Chapter 9
1. ‘Sir Thomas’ may also have been another man within the intelligence network, Maureen Duffy makes a case for Sir Thomas Gower. Or he could be a relative of Colonel Colepeper’s such as Sir Thomas Colepeper of Hollingborne. Or he could be Sir Thomas Godfrey of Hackington, the nearest Sir Thomas to Behn’s childhood home, one of the various Sir Thomases mentioned in the De L’Isle papers, or even Sir Thomas Taylor, father of Elizabeth Taylor with whom Behn was later acquainted. None is quite right. For example, Gower seems too highly placed to be upset that Aphra Behn did not use him as a messenger and too influential to see a close friend’s daughter threatened so ferociously by debt as she was, while Sir Thomas Colepeper of Hollingbourne was a pedantic man who seems an unlikely associate for a female spy and her mother.
2. This proposed use of him is the last that is heard of Behn’s brother. Possibly he died, for Behn implies that she was free of male relatives in the 1670s. Possibly he is the Samuel Johnson in the Treasury papers who turns up in August 1680 as a soldier in Barbado
s, petitioning for arrears of pay. Samuel had been in Sir Tobias Bridge’s company and had been promised preferment in Flanders.