Could anyone be trusted in Tudor and Stuart England?

‘Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,/ Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff,/ Stink, and are thrown away.’ Ben Jonson likened his fellow secret agents to a tallow candle: a grotty necessity, to be discarded without regret.

Who now remembers Arthur Gregory, and his ‘admirable art of forcing the seal of a letter; yet so invisibly, that it still appeared a virgin to the exactest beholder’? Or the scrivener Peter Bales, so dainty with his quill that he could forge any handwriting, and who touted at Elizabeth I’s court the Renaissance equivalent of microfilm, a script so minuscule that he could fit the Lord’s Prayer, the Credo, the Ten Commandments, two short Latin prayers, his name, motto, and the date ‘within the circle of a single penny… so accurately wrought as to be very plainly legible’?

These and other precarious grafters have been fished out of the bin of history by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman in Spycraft. A companion piece to Akkerman’s acclaimed 2019 Invisible Agents, about the flourishing of women spies in the English Civil War, it wears the weight of its impeccable learning even more lightly, as it canters through forgeries, codes, disguises, invisible inks and poisons.

Done badly, the book would still have what, in spy novel circles, is called ‘how-stuff-works appeal’; done well, as it is, there is joy on every page. ‘How usual it is for buffoons to be used as spies,’ observed Robert Cecil, and Clouseau moments abound. Take the hapless Gunpowder Plotter Henry Garnett, who in his correspondence from the Tower of London decided marmalade would have to do as his invisible ink; or envious reports from Venice of such gadgets as ‘a pocket Church book with a pistol hid in the binding, which turning to such a page, discharges’.