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The final chapter of this work takes us into the Cromwellian regime’s espionage activities that frightened so many in the era, as we saw at the very beginning of this work. This chapter will also take us into the Cromwellian regime’s office routine, its intelligence analysis and into the nature of what actually lay behind the realities of espionage and secrecy under Secretary John Thurloe and the Protectorate regime. It will also seek to show just how this secret intelligence material entered into the
This book considers in detail the culture and language of plots, conspiracies and intrigues and exposes how the intelligence activities of the Three Kingdoms of the 1640s began to be situated within early modern government from the Civil Wars to the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. It also introduces the reader to some of the personalities who were caught up in this contemporary intelligence and espionage world from the intelligencers, especially Thomas Scot and John Thurloe, to the men and women who became its secret agents and spies. The book includes accounts of espionage activities not just in England but also in Ireland and Scotland, and it especially investigates intelligence and espionage during the critical periods of the British Civil Wars and the important developments which took place under the English Republic and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.
relationship was under stress. Cromwell declaration of war against Spain in 1655 served to rejuvenate and clarify Spanish views of Ireland and the Irish. A Castilian pamphlet from 1657 rehearsed in tabloid fashion a set of draconian decrees passed against Irish Catholics by the Cromwellian regime in Ireland, accompanied by the re-publication of a letter from the head of the Franciscans in Ireland. This pamphlet, published in other provincial centres as well as Seville, was blatant anti-English propaganda. The featured decrees included the forced transportation of Irish
courier: Mary continually crossed and recrossed the English Channel, ‘quilted all over the bodice of her gown with […] pistols [coins], one upon another near 1000’, in order to provide cash to the opponents of the Cromwellian regime. 43 Some years earlier, Katherine Howard, the Royalist widow of Lord d’Aubigny, had involved herself in plots to seize London for the King, ending up in the Tower of London for her pains; later, remarried, she was described as a ‘woman of very great wit, and most trusted and
to the Cromwellian regime, during the short protectorate of Richard Cromwell, were regularly employed instead to question the legitimacy of his rule, as well as being used as vehicles for religious controversy. If these addresses failed to successfully shore up Richard Cromwell’s authority, they nonetheless demonstrated the value of these texts as a means to apply political pressure and challenge government while maintaining the outward appearance of loyalty to the regime. They also demonstrated the capacity of these texts
texts, as corporations and counties played a political game of ‘follow the leader’. 9 This is not to deny that the Cromwellian regime certainly encouraged the production of these loyal texts and exploited them for propaganda purposes. These addresses were, however, far less adulatory and uniform than may appear at first glance. The homogeneity of these texts which contemporaries found so suspicious, on closer examination proves to be deceptive: revealing widespread political and religious divisions, the variations between
a register office in Fleet Street, while the press was also heavily curbed. 6 Even so, the Cromwellian regime’s reasoning behind this severe ‘securing the peace’ was, as it usually was, a contingent one: the numerous issues it had currently with the irreconcilable elements amongst the Royalists who it said, although they knew that God had spoken against them, remained ‘restlesse in their Designs’. Such dangerous actions did indeed give it some excuse, justification and even perhaps a clear mandate to act; and so
), it gave the impression of a community unified in thought and action to the Cromwellian regime. 19 The names that immediately succeeded the text of the county’s address added further to the sense of this as a sectional document. The subscriptions were led by the county’s MPs, the regicide Francis Hacker and the Cromwellian baronet Thomas Beaumont, who was also selected to present the address to the Lord Protector. 20 Their names were followed by Thomas Pochin, named as one of the MPs for the county in 1654 and 1656. 21
after the Restoration, Roger L’Estrange used a published collection incorporating addresses to counter allegations that he had worked with the Cromwellian regime. 49 During the Exclusion Crisis, presumably as part of the general loyalist bid to connect Whig popular politics and parliamentarianism, L’Estrange reprinted some of his earlier works which had traced the origins of the civil war. One of these works was his A Memento , originally printed in 1662 and republished in 1682 in a slightly truncated edition by Joanna Brome
a diary her experiences as she saw herself meeting the Lord in the air and singing songs of praise and Hallelujah.77 Of course, the most influential (and certainly most prolific) religious writer in the last decades of the seventeenth century –Jane Lead –was actually a product of the 1650s. Lead spent time in the Behmenist family of Mary and John Pordage during the Cromwellian regime and in her first work of 1681 –The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking –she literally visualised, complete with full descriptions of physical feelings, sights and sounds, the moment of