It was the perfect environment for a woman like Behn. Or as literary scholar Janet Todd writes in her biography of Behn, “At home in his rambling, dirty palace of Whitehall, Charles II seemed to be presiding over a perpetual masquerade party.” “The stereotyped image of Restoration comedy was… a witty, urbane, London-based comedy, probably containing illicit sex a form of comedy which started with the arrival of Charles II, a witty, urbane king dedicated to illicit sex,” writes Derek Hughes in The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn.

In 1660, theaters reopened after years of being shuttered by Cromwell, and writers and audiences alike flocked to the stage. Charles’s reign ushered in the Restoration, which continued under his successor and brother, James II, until 1688, when it ended abruptly with an armed overthrow.ĭespite the political turmoil that ensued-England ended up going to war with the Netherlands in the Third Dutch War in 1672, and both countries were filled with spies on the lookout for plots to overthrow Charles-the Restoration was also a heady period of libertinism and pleasurable pursuits. During that period, known as the Interregnum, Oliver Cromwell and others led a series of republican governments and promoted puritan moral standards. Charles II came to power in 1660 after England spent 11 years without a king. The social world that allowed a woman to be first a spy, then a financially successful playwright and poet was one of enormous upheaval. So the spy whose true name was Aphra Behn turned to an equally unlikely profession to save herself from debtors’ prison: writing. No amount of pleading could induce the English government-already flirting with bankruptcy-to give her more. Agent 160 had £50 with which to do so.īut between the cost of travel, the unfavorable exchange rate between the pound and the guilder, and the spy’s inexperience, she quickly ran out of money. The newly minted spy for the English government, also known as “Astrea,” had a simple task: find a soldier named William Scot in the Netherlands-enemy territory-and convince him to turn spy for Charles II.

Agent 160 received her first assignment in 1666.

Aphra behn the royal slave