Women and Spy Networks

In seventeenth-century Britain, women were considered incapable of independent political thought, as well as lacking courage and intellectual application. As a result of this, they were generally not employed as intelligencers. With the onset of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, however, pragmatism began to trump polemic, and women began to be employed as spies and to create their own networks. Royalist she-intelligencers were more numerous and generally of higher social status than their Parliamentarian rivals. She-intelligencers had two primary advantages over their male counterparts: they were less likely to be suspected of espionage and, should they happen to be caught, they rarely if ever faced execution and were generally released after a short imprisonment. Ultimately, the prejudice that suggested that women were incapable of undertaking espionage activities rendered them invisible, both to their enemies and to subsequent historiography.