by Don Jordan
CHAPTER 18
A SPY IN THE FAMILY, THE COURT AND THE THEATRE
On 1 June 1670, a secret treaty was signed between Charles II and Louis XIV.
Even Anthony Ashley Cooper, Charles’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, knew nothing about it. According to the secret terms, Charles agreed to help Louis’s expansionism in Europe, to renounce the Anglican faith, to become a Catholic and make England a Catholic country. In return, Louis would bankroll Charles, enabling him to rule without having to recall Parliament to raise taxes for the Exchequer. Charles received an initial payment in excess of £100,000, scarcely enough to keep the coming war effort running for a month or two. As a cover, a second, public treaty was prepared and signed, leaving out the highly contentious clauses regarding Catholicism. The ever-willing Duke of Buckingham negotiated it, remarking afterwards how easy it had been to achieve agreement.
The go-between in negotiations for the treaty was Charles’s younger sister Henrietta Anne. Not only was Henrietta – known affectionately to Charles as Minette – so close to her brother that he had trusted her to channel money to the kidnappers and assassins sent out to track down his father’s regicides; from her teenage years, she had been au fait with the ways of espionage and secret deals. With regard to the secret Anglo-French treaty she was the sole emissary between the two cousins, the King’s of France and England.* This placed the 26-year-old princess at the heart of one of the most extraordinary secret deals ever transacted between two countries. If word of it had leaked out, it could have led to the end of the House of Stuart.
Apart from Minette, the only others who knew of the treaty on the English side were two government ministers, Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, who had been bribed by Louis with a gift of 10,000 crowns to his wife, and Thomas, ist Baron Clifford, a Roman Catholic. The deal was kept secret from other members of the government. That Charles was willing to gamble so much on such shaky foundations said a good deal about his character and state of mind. He was willing to be reckless at the prospect of freeing himself from Parliament’s financial reins.
As for his promise to declare himself a Catholic and make England a Catholic country, the treaty’ specified no time frame. Charles could take his time over the former, while he knew the latter would be impossible. There has been much speculation regarding Charles’s intentions regarding the provisions of the treaty. One interpretation is that Louis was prepared to allow’ him to backslide as long as he was firm on his support of French expansion in Europe – and that Charles was prepared to say anything in order to receive an income stream from France.
When in England negotiating the treaty, Minette brought with her as a lady-in-waiting the beautiful young Breton noblewoman Louise de Kérouaille. She wrote to her brother about her, saying she would be an ornament to the court at Whitehall. Charles took the hint, and so arrived a woman whose role was not only to please the King of England but to report back to the King of France. Within a year, Charles and Louise would become lovers; at the same time, Louise kept the French ambassador informed of developments at court.1
On 20 September 1670, the autumn season opened at the King’s Company with a play by a new, untested author. The Forc’d Marriage was a run-of-the-mill tragicomedy featuring the tried-and-tested formula in which lovers denied the objects of their true affections were finally united, after many hiccups, and all ended well. The play, though as flawed as any first effort by a new writer might be, was a success, playing to full houses and making money for both players and writer.
What was most noteworthy, though, was that its author was a woman, one of the first professional female writers for the English stage. Equally remarkable were the circumstances that led her to take up writing.
The author’s name was Aphra Beim; today that: name is of some renown bnt for centuries it lay in obscurity. Her early life is far from well understood. It is thought she was born in Harbledown, Kent, on 14 December 1640, the younger daughter of Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson, née Denham. She was christened Eaffrey.2 Around 1663 Johnson, his wife and two daughters set sail for the English colony of Suriname, on the north-eastern coast of South America. The reason for this journey to a small and insignificant colony is unknown, though it is thought Johnson may have been given some minor appointment. At any event, he seems to have died during the voyage.
English settlers had founded the little agricultural settlement in Suriname only ten years before. The executive force behind the enterprise was one Captain Marshall, who founded a colony on a river that became known as Marshall’s Greek. The planning and money for the settlement came from Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, a professional colonial administrator and adventurer who became governor of Barbados. Suriname was sometimes known as Willoughby Land. The settlers depended upon cash crops such as tobacco, sugar and cotton that could be shipped back to England via other colonies around the West Indies.
At some stage, possibly as early as 1663, Aphra, now a young woman of twenty-three, had a relationship with William Scot, an English sugar planter and anti-monarchist who had fought on the Parliamentarian side during the Civil War. Their relationship was mentioned in letters from a colonial official. It has been suggested that Behn was engaged in Suriname on espionage for the Crown, having previously met Thomas Killigrew, who did intelligence work for Charles II before the Restoration.3 Whatever the truth of the matter, Beim left the colony the following year, accompanied by her mother and elder sister.
Back in England, possibly in London, life was equally difficult for the independently minded young woman. She seems (for all details of her early life are sketchy) to have married a merchant of German extraction named Johann Behn, but either the marriage did not last or she merely took on the title as protection in a cruel and cynical city. Almost all doors were closed for a woman without means except for those of drudgery in domestic service, or of prostitution, either of the basest type in a brothel or in its more elegant form of being kept by a wealthy man. Prospects did not look good for Aphra Beim. She turned once more to spying.
In 1666 the King’s spy master, Joseph Williamson, instructed Behn to go to Antwerp. Her orders were to rekindle her affair with William Scot, the exiled Cromwellian officer who was nowserving in an English regiment of the Dutch army. Scot was the son of an executed regicide, Cromwell’s spymaster, Thomas Scot, and as such had considerable status among expatriate antimonarchists living on the continent. If Scot could be persuaded to spy for the King, it would be a huge advantage for the London government, which was in fear of an invasion launched by the many Cromwellians at large in Europe, Scot had been ordered home under the dubious terms of the King’s amnesty for enemies of the Crown living abroad. Other parliamentarians had returned and been executed. Scot wisely ignored the invitation. Beim, codenamed Astrea (after a Greek goddess of goodness and virginity), was under orders to ensure Scot complied with the order to return, or at least to persuade him to become an agent for the King.
Behn was an efficient agent and seducer. In August she reported that Celadon (Scot’s codename, possibly after the river mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey) was extremely willing to undertake the service’.4 Scot subsequently provided intelligence on the Parliamentary and anti-royalist officers in Holland. He wrote reports not only for Behn, but also directly to Charles’s spymaster Joseph Williamson, ultimately reporting that the chances of an invasion were fizzling out.
Scot was rewarded for his work, pardoned and allowed to return to England. Behn was not so lucky. From Holland she wrote to the Secretary of State, Lord Arlington, informing him she was broke and required money to pay her debts and travel home. Arlington abandoned her to her fate. After borrowing money from a moneylender in London, Behn managed to return there, to discover the King was not inclined to pay her any time soon. Unable to repay her loan, and threatened with imprisonment for her debts, she turned to her old friend Thomas Killigrew, imploring him to find the money to save her, writing, ‘Sir, if I have not the money to
night you must send me something for I will not starve.’5 Whether she spent any time in prison is unknown. She may have been saved by court connections such as Killigrew, though he himself was always scrounging for money and favours from the King.
And so, shortly after, began the professional piaywriting career of Aphra Behn, one of the most colourful characters of the Restoration, her writing born out of necessity. She used the pen name Astrea – what else? – producing poetry and prose of variable quality, along with an acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, Oroonoko, set in Suriname. The novel’s main protagonist, the eponymous Oroonoko, is an enslaved African prince of the Fon people from West Africa, as a result of which the book has been lauded as an early anti-slavery text. In fact, the text reveals an attitude that, far from opposing slavery, deplores the enslavement of Oroonoko solely because he is of royal blood. Indeed, Behn depicted Oroonoko as a member of a slave-trading nation, which in historical fact traded slaves to the Dutch and then the English.† The work thereby reinforced prevalent attitudes regarding slavery while extolling the merits of monarchy. The descriptions of Oroonoko’s male perfection, meanwhile, were designed to ensnare a female readership. An openly female point of view was groundbreaking in the history of English literature.
Whatever the merits of Behn’s poetical and prose writings, the only kind of writing that could provide a living wage in the 1600s was that for the theatre. Dryden had been forced by necessity to turn away from his great love of epic poetry to writing for the stage. Now Beim also turned to the theatre for a living.
So when Thomas Killigrew entrusted the opening of his new season to The Forc’d Marriage by an unknown playwright he was taking a risk – but one which, if it came off, would repay him handsomely. The play’s prologue played up its novelty value, proclaiming the pseudonymous writer not only to be a woman, but one with wit as well as beauty to charm the male audience in this, her first play. The prologue warned the gallants in the audience to beware the new armaments and stratagems women would wield, along with beauty and charm, in order to their ‘lives invade’:
Today one of their party ventures out,
Not with design to conquer, but to scout.
Discourage but this first attempt, and then
They’ll hardly dare to sally out again.6
The prologue went on to give a clue to the writer’s past profession:
The poetess too, they say, has spies abroad
Which have dispersed themselves in every road,
I’th’ upper box, pit, galleries, every face
You’ll find disguis’d in a Black Velvet Case.*
There had been other female Restoration dramatists before Behn. Frances Boothby was the very first woman whose work was produced on the London stage, her Marcelin, or, the Treacherous Friend having been put on by the King’s Company the year before, in 1669. Even earlier, the renowned poet Katherine Philips’s translation from the French of Corneille’s Pompée appeared in published form in London, though it was only ever performed at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, Behn, however, was to have a much more serious and prolonged career writing for the theatre. Over a period of seventeen years, nineteen of her plays were performed and she probably had a hand in many more. Only Dryden would have as many plays produced. Behn became a renowned writer, though as was the way with the financial ups and downs of stage writing, she never made much money. She did, however, become part of the racy set that included court wits and society rakes, most notably John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, together with notable figures of the theatre including Nell Gwyn,
Of the many stories surrounding Gwyn, there is one that includes Behn. It was said that Gwyn, anxious to sabotage Moll Davies, her actress rival for the ardour of the King, obtained a laxative from Behn. Gwyn then baked the laxative into cakes which she fed to Davies before the latter’s tryst in the royal bedchamber. According to the anonymous wits reporting royal scandai in the city’s chapbooks, the cakes did their work. Davies was ejected fronr the royal bed in favour of Gwyn.
Behn credited the Earl of Rochester with helping her with her poetry. Rochester had all the credentials. He was witty and occasionally capable of excellent versifying himself; moreover, like many of his class and predilections, he had an ardent interest in the theatre. When Behn created a successful line in sexually explicit poetry and drama, the guiding hand of Rochester might be discerned, for he wrote some of the most outrageously bawdy verse ever conceived. Several of Beim s risqué poems were at first attributed to Rochester, including one in which a tree comments on the love-making taking place beneath its boughs. Behn’s plays contained character studies of rakes of a type exemplified by Rochester. In one of her poems, Behn described Rochester as ‘sweet’ and gentle’, perhaps revealing her feelings towards him, and incidentally revealing also something of the notorious rake’s amorous technique.7 When he died, she wrote his eulogy.
Behn believed the individual should be permitted to express him- or herself, free of conventional restraint. The hedonists of London were often boorish, but some were serious prosely-tisers for a new way of life. Among them were exponents of the dramatic arts sufficiently skilled to bring a vision of glittering, amoral existence, unconstrained by the Church, into life on the stage. But the presence there of female players brought something more to the theatre than their sex: it offered playwrights the chance to develop and create female characters who could exhibit emotional depth, something that had been lacking before. With this came the opportunity for playwrights to introduce major characters from lowly walks of life – harlots, orphans and even rape victims – whose representation would have been unthinkable before.
No one exemplified this new acting talent better than Elizabeth Barry. After several so-so performances, she learned her craft, becoming to tragic acting what Nell Gwyn was to comedy (though Barry could also do comedy). When she first appeared for the Duke’s Company, aged seventeen, Barry had been so bad she was fired. Then something happened to turn her into the finest actress of the age. As recounted earlier, it has been said she was coached by Rochester; at ail events, they had an affair lasting five years, resulting in a child. (Barry had another child by the playwright ‘Gentle George’ Etherege, feted following the great success of Love in a Tub, which had introduced that staple of Restoration comedy, the sparring repartee between would-be lovers, later to be refined by Dryden.)
Barry achieved the art of portraying pathos so realistically that audiences were deeply moved. ‘In the Art of exciting Pity,’ wrote the actor-manager Colley Cibber, ‘She had a Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive.’8 Unlike so many players of her time, Barry had a remarkably successful career, financially as well as artistically. She was one of the few actors of the period whose skill could rescue a bad play.
At this stage, still in the early flush of her career, having been acting professionally for two years, Barry starred in Behn’s greatest success, The Rover; which was clearly an adaptation of Killigrew’s earlier play Thomaso, or The Wanderer. Plays at this period were freely adapted from earlier works; nevertheless, Behn vvas accused in print of plagiarism. In an epilogue to the published version of The Rover.; Behn admitted using Killigrew’s story but insisted that the characters and dialogue were all her own.9 Nor was Killigrew among the accusers – he had probably suggested to the young playwright that she take his successful play as a model.
The play was an enormous improvement on Behn’s earlier work. It heralded her triumphant return to the theatre after a fallow period of three years following the failure of her play The Dutch Lover. Behn’s standard contract with the King’s Company allowed her the box office receipts every third night. The new play’s success allowed her to gain a precarious and fleeting financial independence during a career that was by its episodic nature economically fragile.
The plot of The Rover revolved around the amorous exploits of several Englishmen and a group of young Spanish noblewomen in the kingdom of
Naples. At the centre of the first group is a cynical, rakish sea captain named Willman. The name Willman sounded very like VVilmot, Rochester’s family name.
At the heart of the other group is Hellena, determined to experience love before her brother puts her in a convent. The interplay between Willman and Hellena ensured that the play struck a chord with its audience in more ways than one. Restoration audiences had come to expect a rather monochrome cynical tone from their heroes and heroines; now it seemed they also had to expect whole sections of dialogue that were almost replicas of one another. While Behn admitted reworking a play by her mentor Killigrew, her central characters bore more than a passing resemblance to those in Dryden’s Maiden Queen of three years earlier.
To a London society audience, none of this mattered very much. If the play’s sentiment chimed with the tenor of the times, the audience would lap it up. In the final scene, Willman tells Hellena, ‘Marriage is as certain a bane to love, as lending money is to friendship’. Given that divorce was almost impossible, and that marriages were made for monetary’ and dynastic reasons, there could be no escape from an unsuitable match. The play’s sparring lovers conclude that if they wish to be together they have no other course. When Hellena seems about to rebuff Willman’s advances, he asks for one kiss. She replies: ‘One kiss! How like my page he speaks; I am resolved you should have none for asking such a sneaking sum.’ do which Willman replies: ‘I adore thy humour and will marry thee.’
The lovers do not agree to marry because they believe in the sanctity of the institution or that sex should occur only in marriage – they do so because they have no option. For Hellena to avoid being forced into a convent by her brother she must marry Willman. For Willman to be with Hellena he must marry her. Behn brought to the theatre the recurrent theme that the heroine should be free to choose for herself, to give free expression to her sexual desire and decide the course of her life.