by Janet Todd
3. Nipho had spent some £750 in two years, including a payment of £240 to one spy for expenses—it was such a large sum that he was now trying to get an increased allowance from Arlington. He cannot have had much spare money for Behn.
4. Scot also brought up Algernon Sidney from time to time, here in connection with the Quaker agent, Furley. Both men were resolved ‘to shape som designe for Ingland’.
5. See the ‘Memoirs’. Another who gave the same news was the agent Peter Du Moulin, a Huguenot used by Arlington to supply naval and political reports on Dutch public opinion. He wrote from Amsterdam at the end of May 1667 about the Dutch fleet’s preparations for assault in revenge for the incident on the Vlie.
6. Like the one for 20 September, this letter survives only in a clerk’s summary in Whitehall. It retains the pieces of information which could be speedily given, and reduces the lengthy justifications and pleadings to which Scot was addicted to the simple ‘if hee had money hee could doe much more.’
7. It is unlikely that Behn went to Holland at this juncture but there is a reference in a letter of 27 November 1666 by Thomas Corney to ‘the lady’s safe arrival in Holland’. By this time Corney was not habitually referring to Behn in this way. In the same letter he asserted that most of the treason was emanating from agents in Flanders, especially the merchants there. Antwerp was no doubt the centre. This and other letters suggest that, by November, the English agents in the Low Countries were spending more time abusing each other than spying on the Dutch.
8. The lack of reports (as opposed to letters begging money) in the series of letters in the Public Record Office between September and December suggests that a good number of Behn’s letters went astray, then or later.
9. In this long quotation, I have written out abbreviations such as ‘yt’ for ‘that’ and ‘Ldp for ‘Lordship’ to make the reading smoother.
10. PRO S.P. 29/182. Reprinted in Cameron, pp. 84–6.
11. The letters, forming part of the ‘Memoirs’, may have been partly forged but they may also have been based on real letters Behn wrote to a friend or relative in England.
12. In the ‘letter’, a ‘Woman of some Remains of Beauty’ called Catalina tells Behn that she herself is actually married to Albert, who had deserted her on their wedding night. By the end of the story both Behn and Albert seem to have forgotten Catalina.
13. Unlike Behn, Bruin with its variants Bruyne and Bruyn, is a Dutch name.
14. ‘Memoirs’, pp. 21–2. In the end, even if the suitor were prepared to become a keeping man, Behn still felt reluctant to ignore his age, bulk, and deception of his friend Albert, whom he knew to be in love with her himself.
15. Works, vol. 3, p. 35
16. Behn tended to use the initial of a real person when creating a disguise. This was espionage practice, too, as in the case of Aphra-Astrea. Cf. Thurloe State Papers, VII, 47: ‘Hee told the major, that the false names alwayes began with the first letter of their owne name, and that hee had a list of three hundred counterfeit names.’
17. Tarquini was frequently in litigation, on one occasion over a farm owned by Susanna Oosterlincx, presumably a relative of his wife’s. When, later, money was obtained, it seems not to have been shared with his wife’s sister, Anna Louisa, as it ought. So, in 1662, the two sisters were in court, Anna Louisa arguing that she had a right to half the income from the farm but had been refused it. Tarquini was ordered to pay the money but did not. Further litigation followed.
18. In Behn’s story much is made of Tarquin’s claim, shared by his Italian military family, that he was descended from the Tarquin kings of Rome. The claim is quietly dropped at the end of the tale when Tarquin returns to a merchant family. Behn’s emphasis on this descent may be a compliment to the royal James II, much in her mind at the time. For the detailed background to the story through Dutch language sources, see J. P. Vander Motten and René Vermeir, ‘“Reality, and Matter of Fact”: Text and Context in Aphra Behn’s The Fair Jilt’, Review of English Studies, New Series, vol. 66. no. 274, 2015, 280–99.
19. Stadsarchief, Antwerp, 2367, 7553; Proc supp 4006.
20. See the manuscripts in the Stadsarchief, Antwerp: Processen suppl. 7127 and 2368; Inventaris PR 198.
21. ‘[S]he ceas’d not to purstue him [the monk, Henrick] with her Letters, varying their Style; sometimes all wanton, loose and raving; sometimes feigning a Virgin-Modesty... by a Cunning peculiar to a Maid possess’d with such a sort of Passion.’ The writing does duty for sexuality which Miranda, as a young beguine, cannot display quite as easily as the uninstitutionalised Silvia in Love-Letters; so it becomes ‘wanton’ and ‘loose’. Works, vol. 3, pp. 20–1.
22. Written on 22 March 1667 to De Witt. See Brieven aan Johan de Witt, letter 6, ed. Robert Fruin and N. Jepikse, vol. 2 (Amsterdam, 1922), p. 298. The fuller originals are in the archives in The Hague: 1.01.03; 1.01.04; 3.01.17; 3.20.66.01.
23. There was an Edward Butler in Flanders, Latin secretary to the Duke of Ormonde, CSP, Dom., 1661–2, p. 47 and 1665–6, p. 349. See also H. A. Hargreaves, ‘A Case for Mister Behn’, Notes and Queries, June 1962, pp. 203–5; New Light on Aphra Behn, pp. 292–3.
24. CSP, Dom., 1663–4, p. 607.
25. It was probably more than coincidence that Behn travelled to and from the Continent with noted Roman Catholics and that both Sir Antony Desmarches and Sir Bernard Gascoigne were friends of Arlington and Ogniate. See Evelyn, 22 July, when Evelyn meets Ogniate and Gascoigne with Arlington near his house at Euston.
26. See Alistair B. Fraser and William H. Mach, ‘Mirages’, Scientific American, January 1976, pp. 102–11, and Walter Tape, ‘Topology of Mirages’, Scientific American, June 1985, pp. 120–9. I owe this reference to Mary Anne O’Donnell.
27. The incident is recorded in the ‘Memoirs’ and borne out by CSP.
Chapter 10
1. MS jest book (Va 302) in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.
2. See CSP, Col., Nov. 6, 1668, and HMC 14th report, app. 2, vol. 3.
3. Behn felt some comfort when she later heard that the English had recaptured Surinam. Shortly afterwards, it was ceded by the English to the Dutch at the Peace of Breda when the English received New Amsterdam, renamed New York, in its place. Most of the Surinam settlers were forced to leave, but a few chose to stay and agree to be loyal to the state of Zealand.
4. See Arlington, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 159–74.
5. London Gazette, 16 June, no. 165.
6. Clarendon, Life, 1759, p. 421.
7. Pepys, Diary, June 12. There seems to have been only one hero: the Scot, Captain Archibald Douglas, who died deserted on his burning ship. Marvell described him in ‘The Loyal Scot’ and set his example against that of the corrupt court. The poem’s erotic praise of valour—Douglas’s head falls ‘on the flameing plancks... / As one whoe huggs himselfe in a warme bed’—may have influenced Behn in her verses describing valour, especially the Duke of York’s.
8. See Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and Their Monopoly of Licensed News 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1956), p. 73.
9. Oudart was, however, reimbursed for his fines and, on 23 February 1666, Sir George Downing was advanced £300 for him. It was generous but the same paragraph records the advance of £700 to Sir George to bring his wife and effects back from Holland.
10. Behn gave no hint of Butler’s character, but there is a Butler in the Earl of Rochester’s correspondence described as ‘a gentleman of the cloak and gallow shoe’ (a Puritan who wore other shoes in bad weather to avoid taking a coach). Yet he is also described as having ‘debaucht’ a young maid employed as a dresser at Henry Hazards’ girls’ boarding school in Kensington. He sounds the sort of puritanical hypocrite Behn never ceased to lampoon in her works. See Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford, 1980), p. 71.
11. Arlington usually had only £2500 a year for intelligence. During the period of war the amount must have been a good deal higher,
however.
12. Albert is telling Astrea of the projected assault on the Medway, another proof that the letter was written after the events: ‘you may depend on it, my charming Astrea... we have that good Correspondence with some Ministers about the King, that... we look on it as a thing of neither Danger nor Difficulty,’ ‘Memoirs’, p. 7.
13. Behn’s petitions to the crown during this time are printed in ‘Aphara Behn’, Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. 8 (1859), pp. 265–6.
14. Arlington, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 379 and 384.
15. Dedication to The City-Heiress, Works, vol. 6.
16. See CSP, Venetian, 1667–8, pp. 30, 186; and 1669–70, p. 74; Howard became ambassador to Morocco around this time.
17. This and the other posthumous stories have been published in the complete works of Behn because they have some claim to be by her, although, in several cases, the claim is highly dubious. With its outright linking of narrator with the historical Aphra Behn, ‘The Dumb Virgin’ seems closest to the authenticated stories, The Fair Jilt and Oroonoko. For comments on the authenticity of the others, see Chapter 23.
18. For more detail on this, see Jane Spencer’s edition of The Feign’d Curitzans in The Rover and Other Plays (Oxford, 1995).
19. See Phyllis S. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II (New Brunswick, 1965).
20. Ann Leuellin, for example, was the ‘Administratris of one Robert Leuellin’, a merchant, who with Humphrey Beane and other English merchants had a ship called the Sarah seized in August 1656 off the coast of Guinea by two Dutch ships; see A Catalogue of the Damages (1664), p. 7.
21. Arlington, Letters, vol. 1, p. 397.
22. The government clearly pursued the case above and below board. The agent of Arlington, secret negotiator and expert in marine affairs, Sir Peter Pett, called the King’s advocate in Ireland, was issued a royal warrant on 13 May 1670 for £100, the money being royal bounty for services done in connection with the Abrahams Sacrifice. On 30 July, another money warrant of £100 (dated 2 Aug.) was issued to Pett in the same connection. Blathwayt was in touch with Pett but probably did not know exactly what he was doing. See Arlington, Letters, vol. 1, p. 397.
23. Incidentally Blathwayt may also have been interested in speaking to Behn about Surinam since he was involved in negotiating with the Dutch over the English settlers.. He was a great collector of maps and the owner of the most detailed one of Surinam.
24. The letter is in the Huntington Library, Pasadena. See James Fitzmaurice, ‘Aphra Behn and the Abraham’s Sacrifice Case’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 1993, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 319–27.
25. Behn probably avoided offering her services as an agent within the country, since such people were very unpopular when discovered, and she was as little likely to be paid as she had been abroad.
26. Reflections on the Weekly Bills of Mortality (London, 1665).
27. John Graunt ascribed the low birth rate to the habit of men’s keeping their wives away in the country, Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662), p. 62.
28. See Rules of Civility (London, 1673).
29. James Wright, Humours and Conversations of the Town (1693), p. 87.
30. Rochester, Letters, p. 76; The Character of A Town-Miss (1675), p. 4. The town miss was also a prostitute, but some of her manoeuvres of delicacy and dressing were necessary to any woman without family who wished to flourish.
31. Below the level of Ladies of the Bedchamber and the young Maids of Honour, taken usually from the Royalist gentry who needed rewarding for their services to the King in exile, the court could still allow some functions for women who were close to it but not quite of it. One did, however, need money for these as well.
32. ‘To my Lady Morland at Tunbridge’, vol. 1, no. 25, and ‘To Mrs Harsenet. On the Report of a Beauty, Which she went to see at Church’ (The Muses Mercury, July 1707). It seems likely that the Muses Mercury version came from an early manuscript and that, when she came to print the poem in her first volume of poetry in 1684, Behn changed the name of the recipient to use her better-known married name. By 1684 Carola had been dead for a decade.
33. Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Court of Charles the Second by Count Grammont (Bickers, 1906).
34. Rochester, ‘Tunbridge Wells’, The Poems of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1984), pp. 69–74.
35. The instruments were destroyed in the Fire. The government placed frequent advertisements in the newspapers declaring that the postal service was confidential and that the letters entrusted to its care were delivered to the recipients untampered with.
36. An Alphabetical Account of the Nobility and Gentrey, Which are (or lately were) related unto the several Counties of England and Wales (London, 1673).
37. G. J. Gray, ‘The Diary of Jeffrey Boys of Gray’s Inn, 1671’, Notes and Queries, 159, no. 26, December 1930, p. 455.
38. ‘On the first discovery’ (no. 79 in Works, vol. 1) seems more personally resonant than many other love poems and it did not appear in the 1684 volume. It is possible it was written much later but, since it was printed in The Muses Mercury from another source, it may have been in manuscript circulation long before publication in Lycidus in 1688. Perhaps it had been lodged with Boys. Another poem that appeared in the 1684 volume and in The Muses Mercury in a different version may also date from this time and concern Jeffrey Boys (although it may refer to a later—or fictional—lover) is ‘The Dream’ (vol. 1, no. 30), in which ‘Fond Astrea’ saw Cupid weeping because Amyntas had stolen his bow and tied up his wings. To this she exclaimed, ‘’twas then thy Darts / Wherewith he wounded me;... / He stole his Pow’r from thee.’ She would set Cupid free if he would wound Amyntas in return and it was agreed. She untied him and he flew off, crying ‘Farewel fond easie Maid.’ She awoke and found herself enthralled to Amyntas through Cupid’s power.
39. See Harry R. Hoppe, ‘English Actors at Ghent in the Seventeenth Century’, Review of English Studies, vol. 25, 1949, pp. 305–21.
40. James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London, 1892), vol. 1, pp. 317–18.
41. See, for example, Robert Lovelace, who was possibly tilting at Cavendish in ‘On Sanazar’s being honoured with six hundred Duckets’, Poems, ed. C. H. Wilkinson (Oxford, 1930), p. 200. Dorothy Osborne pronounced Cavendish ‘a litle distracted’. Katherine Philips’s poems appeared in 1664.
42. Evelyn, Diary, III, pp. 465–6.
43. The accusation was, however, perennial. In the 1580s Barnaby Rich found London gentry given to effeminate fashions with dire consequences for their manhood. See L. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana, 1986).
44. Rochester, Letters, p. 67.
45. See also Thomas Shadwell, A True Widow (1678), Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675), and Samuel Vincent, The Young Gallants’ Academy (1674).
46. The Gentlewoman’s Companion (London, 1675), pp. 35–6.
47. Francis Kirkman, The Unlucky Citizen (London, 1673), pp. 260–1.
48. The effect of putting on a vizard or mask was a kind of anonymity, as Pepys again noted in February 1667 when he watched or failed to watch The Maids Tragedy, having his eyes firmly fixed on the lady beside Sir Charles Sedley. She kept her mask on all through the play and yet managed to impress Pepys as ‘a virtuous woman and of quality’, while wittily taunting Sir Charles with her knowledge of him. As for Pepys, he never heard ‘a more pleasant rencontre’ though he thereby ‘lost the pleasure of the play wholly’.
49. Above these was the gallery where servants, apprentices and poorer citizens could sit for a shilling.
50. At home Behn could read plays, for it had become customary to print a text shortly after the performance. Whether Behn continued with other sorts of reading is doubtful. So she may have missed Milton’s publication of Paradise Lost, as well as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s biography of her husband, the Duke. The
collected poems of Katherine Philips she probably did see.
Chapter 11
1. See Tixall Letters, vol. II, pp. 59–61.
2. Margaret Cavendish, dramatised introduction to her 1662 collection of Plays.
3. Miss Cottington was referring to Boothby, who drew attention to ‘this uncommon action in my sex’. If Philips’s works are labelled adaptations, Boothby is the first woman to write an original play for the English public stage. Marcelia was performed by the King’s Company and licensed for publication in October 1669. Since the date of Cottington’s letter is not absolutely certain, it could just about refer to the Duke of Newcastle’s play called The Humorous Lovers at the Duke’s playhouse which Pepys thought by his wife. He regarded it as ‘the most silly thing that ever came upon a stage’. See Mendelson, p. 129. However, The Humorous Lovers is most likely to be by William, to whom it was attributed in the 1677 edition.
4. Edward Howard was satirised with his brother, Robert, in Thomas Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers (1668).
5. In A Continuation or Second Part of the Letters from the Living by Thomas Brown, Captain Ayloff and Mr Henry Barker (London, 1793) there is the unreliable suggestion that Ravenscroft was Behn’s lover and her helper.
6. See the prologue to the revised version of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1616), where Jonson takes issue with Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays.
7. In her life-long engagement with Ben Jonson, Behn came close to Margaret Cavendish, who was equally critical and fascinated (Jonson was closely associated with her husband’s family). Cavendish also praised Shakespeare for his ‘natural’ art. See Sociable Letters (1664), no. CCXI: ‘one would think [Shakespeare] had been Transformed into every one of those Persons he hath Described... he was a Natural Orator, as well as a Natural Poet.’
8. ‘To the Reader of The Jealous Lovers’ (1632), which Behn adapted as Like Father, Like Son in 1682.