Alan Marshall’s new book is a companion to his seminal Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685, which appeared in the series Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History in 1994, a book chock-full of useful biographical information on spies, informers, and other intelligence gatherers alongside their handlers, the secretaries of state. Three decades later, Marshall returns to his favorite characters: the regicide Thomas Scot (d.1660) and Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe (1616–68), the latter the more celebrated in relation to his oft-overlooked predecessor. This new study aims to redress the balance, to force Scot into the limelight. It was well worth the wait. Once again, Marshall has written a book that must figure in the reading of anyone considering the topic of espionage in this period.

In Marshall’s 1994 study, women were few and far between—certainly, Marshall’s underworld was “male-dominated for the most part” (125)—but it is fair to say my heart leapt when I realized that my own study Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2018) had apparently made enough of an impact for she-intelligencers to be woven into the very fabric of this magisterial study on early modern espionage. Marshall has uncovered a slew of new women engaged in the dangerous trade. Oxford Royalist Anne Penyall, a musician’s wife, joined forces with a Mistress Guy, a Proctor’s wife, and employed her very own network of spies, for instance, and female intelligencers were also active in Ireland in the 1640s. A notorious spy named MacCumasky disguised his own mother as a beggarwoman in order that she might work for him as an unsuspected informer. Women were often employed in this manner, the generally held view that they were incapable of political thought or action making them the perfect invisible intelligence gatherers, and it was not unknown for men to cross-dress to make use of this commonplace. At Newport Pagnell, however, the authorities were wise to both tricks, ordering that no “woman” was to enter or leave the town unsearched; the city guards were to shoot any woman who refused to be searched or attempted to slip in or out of town unobserved. Marshall cites pamphlets to show that some women spies were drowned, but in doing so, he perhaps fails to note the potentially fictional rhetoric that surrounded such instances. As Diane Purkiss has argued, frightened soldiers were apt to create an imagined reality of witches and supernatural forces at times of war. Nor does he comment upon the significance of gendered punishment: unlike male spies who met their end on the gallows for all to see, women suspected of espionage were—at least, according to the pamphlets that trumpeted their existence—often drowned, seemingly to ensure that such unnatural creatures remained hidden from view. The truth is that, more often than not, women escaped unscathed while their male colleagues were executed.

Women’s history is my obsession, of course, and not the true focus of Marshall’s work. His is a spectacular overview of intelligence systems in the English Republic and Cromwellian Protectorate, one steeped in the spoils of deep archival research. Its title, “the English Republic, c.1600-1660,” is bound to raise some eyebrows, as England was definitely a monarchy before 1649, but Marshall can be forgiven for such a smokescreen; any author knows that titles are subject to the wiles of publishers. The study traces how Republicans Scot and Thurloe were influenced by Walsingham and the Cecils, thus also capturing the Elizabethan heyday of supposed “spymasters” that the university press must have wanted to capitalize on. Marshall has his feet firmly on the ground, however, pointing out that the term “spymaster” is as inaccurate as it is anachronistic: intelligence gathering in Tudor times was reactive, diffuse, and ad hoc. In Marshall’s words, it was a “working tradition” based on individuals (67). By contrast, it was Scot who helped create a centralized state secret service during the years 1649–53, aided by the Republic’s burgeoning bureaucracy—many of the numerous committees commissioned by the Council of State during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms were charged specifically with the gathering of intelligence. Scot laid the foundations of what would become recognizable as the precursor to a modern secret service in the English Republic, but it was his successor, Thurloe, who, despite being in many ways Scot’s clone, ran off with most of the credit. Thurloe also turned the manipulation of the post into a legitimate governmental activity by receiving the legal authority to open mail through his office as Postmaster General. Scot complained about the loss of institutional memory: when he began his work, not a scrap of paper remained to show him how to operate the intelligence machinery. Thurloe’s first action as Secretary of State, an office through which all intelligence was channeled, was to seize all state papers. If he had his shortcomings as an intelligence chief, then it was simply because he was soon overwhelmed by paperwork; the Cromwellian Protectorate was a period that saw only one Secretary of State rather than two.

Marshall exposes intelligence gathering for what it was: a system of notetaking, the surreptitious opening of letters, the writing of endless reports, the wading through ever-increasing piles of papers. In comparison, Scot was the more successful of the two spy chiefs because he delegated. Thurloe, in attempting to stem the tide alone, soon succumbed to this monstrous administrative burden. It is perhaps ironic that Thurloe’s reputation, like that of Walsingham, a man he greatly admired, has grown out of all proportion to the true extent of his power, while his predecessor, Scot, has remained hidden in the wings. With this masterful study, Marshall has finally caught the slippery Scot in the act, forcing him onto the stage, where he exposes him as far more than a supporting actor in the story of early modern espionage.