The Widow Spy

Benjamin Britten’s popular work A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra of 1945 takes its theme from Henry Purcell’s music for the play Abdelazar, or the Moor’s Revenge, produced in 1695. The play was the work of a remarkable woman named Aphra Behn.

Much of Aphra Behn’s life remains mysterious, partly because her own accounts of it are so fanciful. We do know that she wrote fifteen plays plus a number of novels — and that she was a spy.

In 1666 — a time when England and Holland were at war — Behn was a 36-year-old widow sent to gather military intelligence by the government of Charles the Second. Her instructions were to make contact with a Colonel William Scott, a political exile in Holland and an officer in the regiment of parliamentary soldiers in the service of the Dutch government.

Scott was eager for a pardon that would enable him to return to England, and in order to get it, he was willing to spy on his fellow refugees and to forward any information he could get about the plans and actions of the Dutch.

Aphra Behn wasted no time. She met Colonel Scott in the neutral city of Antwerp and, during a carriage ride, confirmed his willingness to spy for England. But Behn’s success was gradually hampered as she began to run out of money. She wrote repeatedly to England asking for funds. She received no reply. As fall passed to winter, she was forced to borrow enough money to return to England.

When she finally returned to London, Aphra Behn was in for a double shock. In her absence, much of the city had burned to the ground, leaving many of its inhabitants homeless and starving, and Behn was soon one of them. She found herself in debtors’ prison.

Eventually the forsaken spy was released from prison. And the resilient Aphra Behn turned her imagination to fantastic and exotic tales such as the one she told in Abdelazar, or the Moor’s Revenge