‘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’?
Secret messages could be hidden in a Royalist’s wooden leg or in an aristocratic lady’s towering bouffant
These and other precarious grafters have been fished out of the bin of history by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman in Spycraft.
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