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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.
’. Reason of state and Machiavellianism, in fact, followed in England two different but very close paths. 33 Here the language of reason of state merged into terms such as ‘laws of state’, ‘state necessity’, ‘mystery of state’, ‘ arcana imperii ’, and it was meant as a combination of judicial discretion and the exercise of royal prerogative for the salus populi . 34 In the early seventeenth century, the
instructing of the People in the right faith of the Gospell, good life and manners … theire Discourses should noe way intrench upon the Civill Goverment, or Transactions of State businesses … by possessing the People with any scandalous suppositions … [as this] … may alienate their affections … they should not communicate … Mysteryes of State … without the speciall Comand of those which have immediate Authority reposed in them 25 Consequently, the idea of secrecy and, as much as
reasonably demands of this ‘experience of the sublime’, which, as Graham Hammill observes, ‘gives form to the central aporia between sovereignty and imagination’.57 His answer is to disaggregate ‘thrice-gorgeous ceremony’ into its items of regalia, the gaudy baubles that monarchy inherited, when, as Ernst Kantorowicz pictured the investiture in his essay on ‘The Mysteries of State’, the absolute Prince stepped literally ‘into the shoes of the Roman Pontiff ’: ‘the balm, the sceptre, and the ball, /The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, /The intertissued robe of gold
Lionel Sharp (chaplain to the Earl of Essex and later to the Queen herself) and printed in Cabala, mysteries of state, in letters of the great ministers of K. James and K. Charles (London, 1653), 260, Wing (2nd edn, 1994) C183. Available from the database Early English Books Online. 31 For the most comprehensive characterization, see Thomas Greene, “Mutability and the Theme of Process,” in Edmund Spenser, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, NY: Chelsea, 1986), 70, repr. from The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1963), “Mutabilitie is
Ancestors [ending] in a Jack Cade, or Wat Tyler’. 17 As it turned out, of course, the actual unlocking of the Caroline arcana imperii during the course of the Civil Wars did indeed enable something of a transformation to take place, as the formerly secretive Caroline ‘mysteries of state’ and the relevant documentary evidence that proved it had gone wrong were converted into a genuine ‘public knowledge’ about the King’s somewhat dubious secret dealings, his supposedly sinister actions and his rather suspect motivations
interregnum. 124 Notes 1 [Anon.], To Xeifos Ton Marturon, or, a brief narration of the mysteries of state (The Hague, 1651), p. 94; Worden, Rump , pp. 189–90; de Krey, Following the Levellers , vol. II: English political and religious radicals from the Commonwealth to the Glorious Revolution, 1649–1688 (2018), pp. 11–22. 2 Marchamont Nedham, The case of the commonwealth stated (1650), p. 63. 3 DWL MS 28.58, fo. 87
God.’ But in fact, the obligations to ‘fear God and honour the king’ had been so integrally linked by ‘the spirit of God’ as to make them virtually indistinguishable, ‘and will any, out of a private spirit, and for private ends, dare to disunite them?’ (fol. 108v; 15 December 1635). Skinner exhorted the people ‘not to be audacious in mysteries of state, nor too censorious in mysteries of religion’ (fol. 69v; 9 December 1634). There was more involved here than the fickleness and bad judgement of the people. For their always/already corrupt proclivities were now
lost out to a recognisably Brechtian view of political drama for radical critics. Margot Heinemann, for example, claimed that history plays in essence work no differently from other political plays, representing ‘issues’ and ‘grievances’, placing the audience ‘in the position of weighing and judging the action’ demystifying the ‘mystery of state’. History, then, was a source of
interfering in arcana imperii or ‘mysteries of state’ – not to be participated in by Elizabeth I’s subjects – because the earl, the brother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots, was of the blood royal and in line to the English throne.59 Elizabeth was furious when she found out and sent the dowager countess of Lennox to the Tower, put the newlyweds under house arrest and ordered Bess to court for questioning. Shrewsbury was able to smooth things over, however, assuring the privy council and the queen that the marriage was not motivated by ‘lykeng, orre insynuashon wt this Quene