Geoffrey Smith's Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies: Their Role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660 offers a detailed account of royalist intelligence efforts in the years of actual war and in the uneasy decade that followed. He describes the plans that were endlessly generated in fertile royalist imaginations and the agents and their handlers to whom their fruition was entrusted and whose activities ranged over western Europe as well as the three kingdoms of Britain. Along the way, he sets the background of political and military events that the agents were endeavoring to mold to the royalist interest. The result is a tour de force of complex and readable narrative. It also throws fresh light on why the royalists lost the civil war.

Smith is concerned with intelligence of many different kinds. At one level there were reports on plots for domestic coups (beginning with the army plots of 1641–42), on the intentions of enemy forces, and on the policies and intrigues of international leaders. At lower levels information might range from rumors that a disgruntled enemy official was ripe for turning, to locals’ reports of minor troop movements. The agents who collected and transmitted this intelligence were also of different kinds. They ranged from men intimately connected to king and court to obscure sympathizers and coerced countrymen. Spies in the more usual sense of the word, who infiltrated enemy ranks, camps, and councils, were often humble and anonymous men and women. Some agents turned their hands to all aspects of the trade, and double agents and side-changers were to be found in all categories. Then as now, the value of reports varied with the judgment of the reporter and the value of his connections, who might range from émigrés at the Hague to old acquaintances now allied to parliament.

In one sense all were “conspirators” in that they sought ways to defeat parliament by force of English arms or by Irish or Scottish alliance or by foreign money, ships, or troops, and Smith skillfully juggles the narratives of contemporaneous and often conflicting plots on multiple fronts. He also identifies a distinctively royalist category of plotters. They first emerged in the early “army plots,” and many regularly reappeared in the plots of later years. They tended to share certain characteristics, notably unremitting loyalty to a Stuart king and, in many cases, the uncompromising and often violent habits of the “swordsman.” Chronically indiscreet, they were political fantasists whose schemes complicated the efforts of more hardheaded royalist advisers.

One of the major contributions of Smith's book is to highlight the fissiparous nature of royalism. In theory the royalist cause had the advantage of a single head of state to whom all civilian and military departments must answer and whose directions they must follow. Practice, however, was different, and Smith tellingly suggests the weakness at the center by quoting Charles I's observation in 1643: “so many fine designs are laid open to us we know not which first to undertake” (62). The book demonstrates the connection between the plethora of plans and the failures of execution that resulted from the absence of a decisive central body, whether king or council. Smith traces changes as older court-connected figures in the royalist intelligence community gave way to more pragmatic men, but he also notes the survival of what David Underdown identified as “the lunatic fringe of royalist conspiracy” (182). Royalist quarrels and factions are already notorious. Here we see their toxic military and political consequences.

In this narrative, the heroic figures of early modern intelligence gathering are Sir Francis Walsingham and John Thurloe. Between the Elizabethan and Cromwellian masters of the craft lay a period not so much barren as one in which a thousand flowers competed for attention and nurture. Smith has his favorites, such as the constant and indefatigable Daniel O’Neill and the courageous cleric Dr. Barwick, but the royalists had no Walsingham, nor did they throw up a roughly effective ad hoc system of sorting, evaluating, and prioritizing information like that which parliamentarian committees and commanders seem to have achieved even before the advent of Thurloe. Parliamentary intelligence was far from perfect, and Smith records failures through incompetence or penetration by the royalists, but in spite of internecine quarrels and the peculiarities of some of its supporters, parliament does not seem to have suffered to the same degree from the unrealistic assessments of intelligence and erratic coordination of plans and actions that vitiated the royalist cause. It is a pity that the book does not pursue this apparent difference between the parties, for it seems relevant to the nature of royalism. If parliamentary intelligence was not as dysfunctional as the royalists’, we may conclude that the “role in the civil wars” of “royalists agents, conspirators, and spies” was symptomatic of a fatal weakness in the royalist state.

Smith acknowledges the “volatility of allegiances” and also the changing circumstances that led many to withdraw from active involvement in the royal cause (39 and chap. 5). His primary moral criterion, however, remains “unfaltering” loyalty (125). Admirable as this criterion is, it betokens a certain simplicity in addressing the context of these plots and conspiracies, while he might have done more with the complexities of retaining a sense of moral integrity over twenty years of radical changes in public and private life. The account of the historical background is conventional (if somewhat Adamsonian); it could have been enriched by more attention to recent work in relevant fields, while a wider trawl of manuscripts might have turned up more on lower-level informants. These are minor reservations. Smith's book is both enjoyable and enlightening, and it may lead historians to reflect further on the nature of human agency in shaping events.