Exploring a Hidden Network of 17th-Century Spies

In February 1649 the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus characterised ‘Parliament Jone', aka Elizabeth Alkin, as ‘an old Bitch' able to ‘smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best Blood-hound in the Army'. Elizabeth later claimed that during the Civil Wars she was ‘imployed as a Spye by the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, & the now Lord Generall ffairfax'. Her husband was hanged by the Royalists at Oxford for spying and she had put her life in danger in the service of the state. The intelligence-gathering of Elizabeth and other women, often paid as nurses by Cromwell's spymaster John Thurloe, has usually been treated as a footnote to the real business of warfare. The invisibility of female spies, or ‘she-intelligencers', was compounded by contemporary beliefs that women were incapable of keeping secrets.