The King’s Smuggler

The King’s Smuggler: Jane Whorwood, Secret Agent to Charles I
By John Fox
The History Press £20, 224 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Of all the types of unsuitable men a woman may come to love, none is quite so ruinous to one’s fortunes as a king. Such was the lot of Jane Whorwood, one of the most resourceful and independent women of the English civil war, who had the great misfortune to impart all her tenacity and skills in the service of the abject Charles I.

Up until now, Jane has been depicted as something of a royalist groupie. She was the daughter of courtiers and remarkable mainly for her “unfashionable” red hair. But thanks to the discovery of new documents by the historian, John Fox, Jane can be revealed as one of the most resolute secret agents of the civil war.

A pungent atmosphere pervades the book, from the dung hills of the royal stables near Jane’s home in London, to the salted beef grease that she used to cover her smallpox-ravaged face. This is matched by the putrid corruption emanating from the king and his court. Charles was a spendthrift. When parliament refused his demands for funding, he turned to the City of London, “the liver of the Italian goose, drawing all the nutrient and riches to itself”. By granting the City’s merchants monopolies and exemptions, or alternatively raiding their warehouses, Charles feasted on their wealth and the royal finances became, in effect, privatised. But when war finally broke out the king was trapped in royalist Oxford. He desperately needed City gold to pay his army, but how was he to retrieve it from parliament-controlled London?

Fox convincingly suggests that Jane arranged the smuggling out of the City of £85,000 of gold, weighing approximately three-quarters of a ton, in barrels of soap carried by the royal laundresses, one of the few groups of people allowed to pass freely between London and Oxford. It was an audacious caper and gained Jane the king’s undying trust. When he was finally captured, she was delegated an even more important role: organising his escape.

It was a time when intrigues could best be managed and carried out by women. Jane carried letters between his sympathisers that were written in lemon juice, encrypted in cipher and folded so small that they could be stowed in the finger of a glove, by which they could be passed to the king in the act of kissing his hand. She excelled at this “whispered business”; indeed she might well have succeeded in getting the king to Holland and freedom, he had not been such an insufferable Milquetoast.

In captivity, he vacillated frantically. When he finally girded his loins and leapt through his prison window, he got stuck between the bars. Yet “Sweete Jane”, as the king called her, was not deterred. “The most loyal person to King Charles I in his miseries, as any in England” tried throughout 1648-1649 to free him. Meanwhile, the king’s trust in her grew ever greater until, Fox suggests, their relationship was consummated in his prison cell.

But upon her patron’s execution, Jane was deposited back in a drabber world. Her husband, a Whig and a drunk, had deserted her during the war. He now returned to beat and abuse her mercilessly. She had lost her most powerful patron, and when she begged for favours from the restored Charles II, she was ignored. Her war-time ministrations had been too secret, her deeds too well-disguised.

The clandestine nature of her life also affects the telling of her tale. This is a short book with narrow parameters and will be best enjoyed by those already well-versed in the period. The fragmentary nature of the surviving documents means that, rather than a full-blooded portrait of Jane, we are given us something more akin to a silhouette. Yet perhaps this is the aptest way to portray a spy’s moonlight ministrations.

George Pendle is the author of ‘Death: A Life’ (Three Rivers Press)