Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theatre By ...

It does not seem that she was ever a kept woman. So far as her own relationships are concerned, Goreau suggests, on the evidence of a set of initials in Behn’s poem Our Cabal, that one of her lovers was Jeffrey Boys, the young law student of Gray’s Inn, which will be discussed later. There was a persistent, gossipy rumour into the eighteenth century that she was in love with, if not the lover of, John Hoyle, an unpleasant man eventually murdered in unsavoury circumstances three years after her death. Bulstrode Whitelocke described him as ‘an atheist, a sodomite professed, a corruptor of youth and a blasphemer of Christ’.³ Aphra herself called him a ‘great admirer of Lucretius’, and several of her more-moving love poems are supposedly dedicated to him. Some letters in the Gildon edition of her works are also supposedly addressed to him, which may or may not be so. One cannot be sure they were even written by her. However, it seems unlikely that she was ever some man’s mistress in the sense of surrendering her independence.

It is paradoxical that the most unlikely fact about her, that she spied for the king, is the only one that can be proved true. Janet Todd suggests she was spying for the king in Surinam and that this is how she came to be sent to spy when she was widowed. Possibly her husband had been a merchant with connections that made her trip to Antwerp easier and more plausible. Certainly she must have had strong and trusted Royalist connections, for it can be shown in the State Papers of the time that she was spying for Charles II in Antwerp from August 1666 to January 1667. She was sent to the Low Countries by Thomas Killigrew for Lord Arlington, to persuade William Scott to return to England on the promise of a free pardon. William Scott was the son of the regicide Thomas Scott, who had signed the execution order for Charles I. The Scotts had been involved in events in Surinam, and it is thought that Behn knew William there and had some influence over him. William and his father had been involved with the Commonwealth, and the new regime was anxious to get the son to turncoat and provide information of any Dutch plans to invade England.