So, while the army was away, August 1649 to September 1651 what had the Rump parliament been doing to build the promised new world of Liberty? We find out that social reform takes a back seat to moral reform – the Garland of the Sea – and picking fights with friends.

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Transcript

Now I have a couple of quick things to say. The first is a thank you. There are many many of you I should and do thank for supporting this podcast as members and allowing me to do this thing I love. So I’m chary of picking out individuals for want of mentioning others but there are three people who have sent me a donation month after month since way before I set out on Membership in 2016 and are still doing it, and it is staggering. So I just need to thank Patrick., Simon and most of all Oake. Thank you all so much.

Then, thanks to Bob; who got in touch and mentioned that his ancestor was a Scot MacPherson, sent as an indentured servant after either Worcester, or Dunbar, to New England along with 273 others, and seems to have thrived enough to found the dynasty which led through wiggly ways to Bob. It’s an interesting reminder that the often casual reference to indentured servitude as a death sentence, is not necessarily the case. Though obviously usually was extremely tough.

Anyway those are the announcements, now we must return to 1651, and the aftermath of Cromwell’s triumph over Charles II at Worcester. And after the battle, London welcomed its conquering hero with open arms. As Oliver came into the city on 12^th September, cheering crowds lined the streets, with such enthusiasm, that some republicans worried that he would mount this wave of relief and popularity with his blade, his soft top, and surf into a new role as head of state. But to those who see Cromwell as power hungry or a megalomaniac – well there was no sign of this kind of ambition, in neither public nor private, just a dose of humility

He was affable and humble in his carriage…he would seldom mention anything of himself but the gallantry of the officers and soldiers and gave all the glory of the action to God

Said Whitlocke to his diary. Bulstrode Whitlocke, you will notice, is around again after lying low during the trial of the king.

Our job today though, is to talk not about the English Commonwealth after Worcester, but to fill in the time when Cromwell and the army officers were away in the wars. The period between 1649 and when a certain significant event happens in April 1653 seems the most ignored part of the English revolutionary period. We’ve had the excitement of the civil wars, we’ve yet to get to the Cromwell bit of the Protectorate. The Commonwealth gets lost a bit, the cheese and pickle between the sliced white.

So, the Commonwealth was born with an act of courage, the first time a monarch had been publicly held to account, it started with the excitement about reform, a new world, and a broadened political engagement, a declaration of freedom from the past tyrannies.

There’s no getting round it, though, what followed was a little disappointing. I have always preferred the analogue systems of marking rather than the harsh brutality of numbers, so I’m going to suggest a C+. But get back to me when you’ve heard.

The Commonwealth had problems. External threats – Scotland and Ireland; money problems and excessive taxation at £90,000 a month on the shoulders of the poor citizens, economic dislocation and poor harvests, and sky high expectations for reform – of politics, law and most importantly, religion. Taking these issues one by one – let’s start with reform.

Obviously, the theory was that by broadening the franchise, you would start to show the benefits and attractiveness of this new Republic to build loyalty and engagement. On the other hand, what you might get was a parliament which immediately voted to bring the king back and hang all the regicides from the highest mountain. Nonetheless they sent Harry Vane away to come up with ideas. He came up with this thoroughly messy idea that they’d have an election, but only in the empty constituencies – a recruitment election as it were. The army thought that was a thorough cop out. Surprisingly, the radicals didn’t support free elections at all; thinking they were the only people who could be trusted to build the strong foundations of the Commonwealth. As Henry Marten put it

They themselves were the true mother to this fair child the young commonwealth

So even the feeble recruitment plan was shelved, and while the army was away, there it stuck. Buit Meanwhile, parliament introduced the requirement for all men over 18 to take an Engagement. You had to swear to

be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords

It caused some debate. But it seems that almost everyone took it.

Meanwhile as more of the excluded MPs returned, the Rump grew to something like 200 MPs, and the more that returned, the more conservative it became. So, legal reform had been a great objective of the Levellers, and folks like John Cooke, Charles’ prosecutor. An expert called Matthew Hale was commissioned. Now your Matthew Hale would be a noted jurist in the Coke, Seldon line of famous Common Law fans, and this was a brilliant chance to institute reforms to reduce corruption, cost and it’s blenchingly vertiginous complexity. Hale was against the idea of a republic actually, but despite that his Commission produced a full range of ideas, but then – ran into the phalanx of professional lawyers who were also happened to be Rumpers.

While we are here, by the way, can I just own up to my joy in being able to call MPs Rumpers? It could be the best thing about the entire English Revolution. Anyway, these lawyers, who had done so much to fuel the resistance to Charles, well, now they were poacher turned gamekeeper. Obviously a simpler system would mean fewer fees. No lawyer likes that. So they killed the vast majority of the thoroughly sensible proposals. Though one which survived was the decision that now all proceedings would be in English, not Norman French. That, it must be said was not nothing, it must have transformed people’s ability to understand. But it’s a reasonably limited success as the basis for a new world.

So much for political and legal reform. The nature of Early Modern England though, was that everyone was far, far more interested in religious reform. Commissions were set up to preach the gospel in the darker regions of the Commonwealth – which seems to mean Wales and the North. I would like to distance myself from the Rumpers on that point. But the big question of course was about the form of national religion – what would it be? Of course before Pride’s Purge, that had been clear; the Westminster Assembly had put together its directory of worship, it had been sent out to the country. England was thoroughly wedded and deeply in love with the Parish, so no one was man enough to propose getting rid of that, but of course you would have expected a Presbyterian model of church governance to follow as per the Solemn League and Covenant; Presbyters of Church and Lay Elders to be set up to direct the religious and moral lives of all the inhabitants, with local consistory courts to punish the naughty and morally wayward.

But of course after Pride’s purge, the dominance of parliament by Presbyterians had then ended, leaving the directory of worship a bit stranded and wondering where all its mates had gone. And many sectarians and Independents would agree with john Milton, who had written

New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large

So in August 1649, when there was a debate about whether or not to formally approve and implement this Presbyterian national church, there was a full and frank exchange of views. And a split right down the middle; half said yes to a Presbyterian National Church, half said no. All eyes turned to Speaker William Lenthall. And he laid the casting vote. And he said no to a national presbytertian you know the rest.[1]

The result was pretty chaotic with a wide range of things going on; in some places, priests even snuck out the old and used the banned BCP. The Recusancy laws for Catholic and all dissenters were repealed, to the extent that attendance at church was no longer required. Which seems quite close to de facto toleration.

What seems a good deal less tolerant is the range of moral reforms enacted. These follow a similar path laid down by the Covenanters in Scotland. And more than anything they demonstrate one of the biggest difference between early modern Britain and the Britain of today. Acts were passed against swearing, against non observance of the sabbath, drunkenness – moral stuff. And first and foremost, the Rump and Rumpers everywhere were most concerned about rumpy pumpy. I mean to be fair, puritans had no more objections to sex than the next woman – as long as it was legit. Within marriage. They were very against sex outside marriage, adultery and fornication. So in 1650 adultery was made punishable by death would you believe, first time adultery had been illegal since the 12^th century.

Now I’m not sure if you remember us discussing the operation of law, and the enormous discretion it gave to juries, JPs and judges; but that latitude meant that the adultery was actually prosecuted extremely rarely, and where it was, juries ere hard to persuade to convict. But you know, it’s the thought that counts.

Then there is money. Now Rumpers were not idiots. They knew how important it was to relieve some of the pressures on their suffering people, and planned to reduce the monthly assessment bill from £90,000 to £60,000. But events and ambitions conspired against them; there was Ireland to make safe, and there was Scotland and the Royalist threat to be made safe. They did what they could; so, now that there was no Crown, crown lands and palaces could be sold off and so many were, along with much of Charles’ precious art collection. Obviously some were retained for official use, such as the palace of Whitehall. But it don’t come close to solving the problem. And then there was the Navy. That needed money, a lot of money. And so instead of the monthly assessment going down by £30,000, it went up to £120,000 a month. The groans of the English filled the sky. The words ‘how much?’ had to be included in the new Blasphemy Act, and the amount of foot shuffling and eye rolling went off the scale.

Now, that is reform – sorry, that’s yer lot? Next then – the external threat from across the seas. The most powerful tool if you are facing a lot of people out to get you is what? A big gun might be one, a cloak of invisibility another but as important as those things must surely be – information, knowledge, that is the thing for to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

The quality of espionage is one of those things I suspect most people know about the Protectorate – John Thurloe and all that; but like many things actually this started in the days of the Rump. Thomas Scott, Regicide, would be a Commonwealthsman to his last breath. He was appointed in July 1649 to ‘manage the business of intelligence both at home and abroad’.

He had a relatively small budget, not more than £2,500 a year. But he was a genius at it; built a massive network of agents throughout Europe and at home, not just the big boys – Paris, Madrid, Rome, Vienna – but Danzig, Hamburg, Genoa, Loughborough. At home, royalist hoping to plot, complained that informers swarmed

All over England as Lice and frogs did in Egypt’[2]

Scott knew that to combat the array of royalists he had to break codes – and plots were legion by the way this is not paranoia, though fortunately they were as incompetent as they were legion; it’s harder to stop a cavalier talking than even a podcaster. Cryptography, wrote Scott, was

A jewel for a prince’s use

Also for a republican’s use, I guess he meant to say. And obviously not just to be used on cavaliers – on the diplomats of the world too. A diplomat’s bag was the sort of thing that made Thomas Scott dribble slightly.

So one of Scott’s masterstrokes was to recruit John Wallis, later professor of Geometry at Oxford, who was an ace at breaking codes. Scott ran a little team of breakers as well as agents and correspondents. The big change in all of this was the regularisation of intelligence which had never before all been in one person’s hand, not even back in the day of Walsingham.  Before this time, selling intelligence had been a way of getting[3] yourself favour and riches from court. So if you had a special source of information, you kept it to yourself. Which meant that nothing was joined up, nothing was managed and developed for the long term, skills and tricks were learned and forgotten, good agents used and lost. Now, and to the end of the interregnum, this was a profession. And when Thomas Scott was dumped for reasons to be explained at some unspecified point in the future, John Thurloe would pick up the ball Scott had made, and play games with it.

Ok, so espionage is a big story for defence, but bigger than that, bigger and brighter a tool for security and indeed aggression, was England’s Garland of the Seas, the Royal Navy. The need for a revitalised navy was multiple surely hardly needs stating, but let’s just do the stating and move on; for pirates, for defending merchants and trade, for guarding against war and for making war and securing those isolated parts of the Commonwealth. And more immediately, there was Prince Rupert, the Cavalier Prince who had swapped horseflesh for oak bulwarks, and was trawling the seas surviving on piracy. Often visited on English shipping, but look, beggars can’t be choosers as my mother told me frequently, and so Rupert wasn’t particularly choosy about whom he pirated.

Rupert and other pirates were operating out of that nest – being the normal word for a collection of temporarily landed pirates as I understand it – the nest of Dunkirk in the Spanish Netherlands. Also many islands and colonies had not yet accepted the glorious new commonwealth – Barbados, Jersey, Maryland, the Isle of Man, just for a few examples. And then there was trade. And the Dutch. We’ll come to the Dutch in the second half to explain that – hold onto that thought. The Dutch. Double Dutch in fact, they are that important.

So, there is a major focus on getting the navy up to speed. And it was needed; as one historian has written, John Hawkins would not have felt out of place in the fleet of the 1640s. Practices were rooted in the past, and by 1648 after years of grief it was very fragile – that year there was a major mutiny, which gave Rupert his little fleet of 3 ships. So change needed.

The dominant figure in this for a few years was Henry Vane, oddly enough; he had some experience in naval administration, and he was the leading figure on the newly created admiralty Committee; he is tyrannical, energetic and successful. They appointed 16 regulators reforming all aspects of  provisioning and supply; they also winnowed out those that hankered for monarchy, so that the service as a whole  was either loyal or at worst accepting, of the commonwealth. There’s a whole load of detail we could go into but won’t; generally speaking there is a significant increase in efficiency and professionalism. I mean it’s subject to all the private shenanigans for early modern procurement, but was comparatively corruption free; senior officials were salaried rather than expecting to make a cut as their reward for hard work.

At the same time, there was a massive increase in the size of the navy. Twenty more warships built by the end of 1651, and 25 more by capture or purchase. I hope I demonstrated back in 1588 that the English were far better at naming their ships than the Spanish, and they carry on that core skill; now, with a bit of added trash talk. So the ship formerly known as The Charles was renamed the Liberty – hurrah! The Henrietta Becomes the Paragon. You get the point.

Now we have been warbling on about how awful taxation was; and yet here we are spending more money. How can that be? Well, here, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most influential and world changing achievements of the English revolution. Because the monthly assessment was so regular and so substantial, the English government was able to borrow against it on the money markets. The rump would also prove to be prompt payers of their debts. Herein lies England and Britain’s future; access to credit. It’s not sexy, I realise that. But it could be the most lasting achievement of the whole shebang.

They had a long way to go to catch up with the masters of the Seas, the Dutch; their navy numbered 220 ships. Even with this new programme, the English had reached just 72. A lot less than the Dutch – but that capacity allowed them to carry out multiple operations at the same time. Sop now they added a re-organisation of command; the navy was separated into three squadrons, the white the red and the Blue. At their heads were new Admirals, one of whom is recognised as one of the 3 greatest seamen of British history – along with Drake and Nelson, Robert Blake[4].

Robert Blake was a landlubber as it happens, a successful general who we’ve met briefly before. He was a firm Presbyterian, and a passionate Republican. Short, stout, fierce. He personally took on Prince Rupert, blockading him in Kinsale and then in Lisbon, until in November 1650 Rupert escaped into the Med.

There could and should be a podcast on Rupert’s days of piracy. Seriously, Rupert could not even buckle on a belt without swashbuckling it. But briefly; Rupert was denied a home port by Blake and buy Rumpish diplomacy, and he had zero money and so made ends meet by increasingly desperate piracy; they preyed on English and Spanish merchantmen, until one of Rupert’s captains wrote

We plough the sea for a subsistence, and, being destitute of a port, we take the confines of the Mediterranean Sea for our harbour; poverty and despair being companions, and revenge our guide

Rupert was hounded continually by Blake’s squadrons, but eventually he  broke out of the Med, raiding down the African coast, selling enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, just one step ahead of English and Spanish pursuers. In Summer 1652, his brother Maurice died. The two brothers had stuck together through thick and thin in the civil wars, and Rupert was devastated. The adventure finally came to an end in March 1653, when Rupert arrived back in France, his fleet destroyed.[5]

By 1652, all the islands and colonies had been brought into the Commonwealth – Virginia and Maryland last of all I think. So – in terms of defence so far you have to put that down to the Rump as a success. But that now brings us to the Dutch. You and I need to talk about the Dutch.

Attitudes in the Netherlands towards the new Commonwealth fell very crudely into two camps. There were those who supported the authority of the House of Orange to exercise a quasi monarchical rule as an hereditary Stadholder. These Regents or Organists were outraged at the Regicide, sympathetic to Charles the Pretender. On the other side of the debate, was the States General; they were much more sympathetic to the new Commonwealth. As with most generalisations there are many wrinkles, but broadly.

The Dutch were in the middle of their Golden Age – a term that’s become something of a political football due to Dutch involvement in colonisation and slavery, but in terms of commerce and culture and wealth for the Dutch it looked Golden at the time and Europe looked on in envy, especially us Englanders.

In particular the Dutch East India had been formed using the principle established in 1551 by the English Muscovy Company; they brought all the various merchants together to pool their resources in a famous Joint Stock Company, the Dutch East India Company, the VOC. We are due a history of Europe some time soon, so let me not go into this in great depth, but the VOC’s strength was built on the domination of the trade of the Indonesian Spice Islands, and a variety of trading stations throughout Asia, including Bengal. Though it had faced competition from the English East India company, they had forced the English out of the Spice trade, so they had to focus elsewhere. The VOC was given rights we now think of as sovereign rights – they could make war, mint coinage and so on. And they were brilliantly successful – by 1669 the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, with over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a private army of 10,000 soldiers, and a return of 40% on original investments.

The VoC was one aspect only of Dutch commercial dominance. The basis of Dutch success was the ‘Great Fishery’, taking catches off the coast of Britain, which anyway caused antagonism. They dominated the carrying trade from the Baltic to the Atlantic; their merchant fleet was five times that of England’s. Five times, golly miss molly. The Dutch were brilliant and inventive, and after reading their classic marketing textbooks, they used their size to build ever greater market share and profits, undercutting competitors on price. So much cheaper were they, that where a Dutch ship selling wool to the American colonies would come back with little more than a 1000 sacks unsold, an English ship returned with 4-5,000 sacks unsold. The Dutch aggressively used their size to shut out competitors where they could; the best example of this was a Treaty with Denmark that effectively shut England out of the Baltic trade. That was a major worry for a seafaring nation like England – this was where essential equipment for the Navy came from – pitch and tar and rigging and wood for spars. So there was without doubt commercial tension – in Asia, in the Atlantic, in the Baltic.

But the English love the Dutch. And they had generally loved the Dutch since Elizabeth, because we shared many of their religious quirks, there was constant cultural interchange with books as well; if you had to flee the realm for whatever reason, the Netherlands were usually the first port of call. We’d fought with them for decades against their Spanish overlords, and made a small but significant contribution to that struggle. And anyway it was always the Spanish who were the traditional enemy, the sources of Catholic tyranny and invasion fears.

So in one of the loonier initiatives of the Commonwealth, in March 1651 Oliver St John led a delegation over to the Netherlands. The delegation included one John Thurloe, a fellow East Anglian, lawyer and, as St John wrote, ‘bred in his service’. John Thurloe was a clever, efficient, straight-talking, devious but basically honest man. We will hear of him again.

The background was that William of Orange had died, leaving a widow, Mary Stuart, and just one tiddler of an heir in the nought year old William. So the Organists lacked their Stadholder, the States General party was in the ascendant, and the Commonwealth had a great idea – why don’t we both get together and become one glorious Country? A shiny Protestant union, Nether Engerland Engernether. Whaddya fink?

Well, this was utterly bonkers, and as Woolrych put it, displays a touching or laughable combination of idealism, naivety and arrogance. Obviously the Dutch were having none of that, there were Orange heads exploding all over the Netherlands, and even the States General giggled. They suggested instead a nice free trade agreement.

So usually historians interpret this as the Dutch playing nice and trying to be practical, and the resulting anger at this rejection in England as silly – and the English were aggressively angry. But I am not so sure the English were over-reacting. not about the joint country thing, but about responding with a Free Trade agreement and nowt more. Certainly Your new friend John Thurloe wasn’t fooled and reported back that

‘the Dutch seemed to have learned from the Scots and the French to profess much but perform nothing, except as to their own advantage.’

The point about free trade, which will of course also become a British article of faith once they begin to dominate world trade, is that it heavily favours the larger economy doesn’t it? I am sure Adam Smith would argue with me, and as the Scots would find after 1707 free trade could generate massive wealth, but as the Scots would also find there’d be quite a lot of pain first. And certainly the playing field would not have been level; the Dutch could dominate English trade through their scale, which delivered price and efficiency advantages, and defend their advantage with force. We could possibly start a discussion here of the idea of the fiscal military state – the idea of the state which used its financial power to build its trade, allowing greater income to fund military activity to build dominance of trade fuerther and so on. And Dutch traders relied on their navy, now the most powerful in Europe.

And anyway, Adam Smith hasn’t been born yet. The dominant philosophy was not Free Trade but Mercantilism. I am very confident that you all know better than I what mercantilism is, but let’s have a brief summary-ette just to make sure we have the hymn book open at the same place before I start to sing of an Anglo Dutch war.

At the heart of mercantilism, it seems to me, is the idea of trade as a battle, with winners and losers, not quite a zero sum game but close to that; in the words of Oasis, if you get yours I don’t get mine as well. I have misquoted again, hopefully the response won’t be as bad as the Bob Dylan Jimmy Hendricks all along the Watchtower thing.  Gosh I got some grief for that. Ouch.

More specifically, the idea was to export more than you imported, and have a bullion surplus. So you are trying to gain trade from everyone else – impose big tariffs on imports – get outraged and send the gunboat in when people impose tariff on your goods.

So what the English saw was not just the rejection of a loving marriage proposal – however utterly daft; but also a sneaky attempt to grab more of England’s already piffling, paltry and tiddling trade. Which is probably harsh, but not ridiculous.

So, faced with rejection, the Commonwealth concentrated on building its own trade. It established a Commission of Trade, to try and encourage internal and external trade – and regulate trade with the colonies. It was led by that Harry Vane chap again. But the big one, the act which will have an extraordinary impact and reputation, is the implementation by the Rump in October 1651 of the Navigation Acts.

The navigation Acts specified that any trade to England or all her colonies be carried in English bottoms. Why did the clam blush? Because it saw the boats bottom. All trade to England and her colonies to be carried only in English ships. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But its ramifications are long and deep. It meant colonies would have to pay more for transport because the English were way more expensive than the Dutch. It meant other trading nations would have to use English ships to trade in England. And since the biggest trading nation was the Netherlands, it was a palm thrust aggressively into Dutch faces. The investment in the Navy, the navigation acts – here is England entering the realm of the fiscal military state. Here is England with ambition.

Now in the short term, this didn’t really matter to the Dutch. English trade was too piddling to cause the Dutch any grief. But it is the start of a process that will turn love and kisses into pinches and punches. Because just like a long walk in wet trousers, there was already some chaffing going on. One of these was the tipping of the colours thing; we heard about this under Charles. This was the policy of claiming that the English had sovereignty over the Narrow Seas. Top emphasise this, they insisted everyone else recognised this by dipping their flags when they saw an English warship.

The Dutch did this, but for diplomatic reasons only, while making it clear they were only being polite they recognised no such thing. They often did it sarcastically; the great Dutch Admiral Tromp used to whip their colours up and down so fast that if you blinked you’d miss it. It was getting irritating,  the English were getting way above themselves – Captain William Penn made a Dutch ship tip their colours in the Straits of Gibraltar for crying out loud. Another source of chafing was piracy – by English on Dutch merchants; and by Dutch Privateers on English merchants, particularly from that nest again, the port of Dunkirk.

So, relations between English and Dutch were going seriously sour. The Navigation acts, commercial rivalry and competition, piracy. It wasn’t inevitable that it would lead to war. But there was a good chance it could. And onto this pile of gunpowder came a lighted match, a trigger. The match was lit off Dover, in May 1652. There in the Downs, the sheltered roadsted in the channel off Kent,  was Robert Blake with 15 ships. When who should come along came Admiral Tromp with 45 Dutch ships. Obviously as far as Blake was concerned we are in English Waters, so he demanded the Dutch admiral should acknowledge that by dropping his topsail.

Now Admiral Maarten Tromp was a man born to the sea, unlike the lubberly Blake, and a bally hero to boot. Well, I’m not Dutch so I can’t be sure, but I’ve always assumed he’s considered a bally hero. Trump was already in possession of many victorious notches on his belt, and he also happened to be a fervent Orangist and was sick to the back teeth of suffering these wretched jumped up king killers. So he replied he’d strike his sail when there was a king in England and fired a broadside at Blake’s flag ship. Which has a reassuringly robust feel to it. Blake was not a man to back down when outnumbered by a poxy 3:1 so he had at him. When nighttime fell, Tromp made sail and made off. Leaving two of his ships sleeping with the fishes.

The Battle of Dover was the trigger of debate in both countries. In the Rump, there was a split of opinion – the likes of Vane hated the idea of war and wanted to work on the latest set of treaty proposals. But the majority were hot to trot, among them the radicals like Henry Marten. Cromwell’s view was unknown – he seemed to be having one of his soul searching moments, and was not at the Council at the time a decision was taken. In the Netherlands, the feeling was pretty bellicose, and the States General argued in vain that negotiations should be continued.

But the Jaw Jaw parties lost, and so it was to be war war. The Rump declared that the attack by Tromp was all part of an Orangist plot to put the Stuart dynasty back on the English throne. The more religiously radical were furious that the Dutch seemed to be abandoning their Calvinist mission with England, and the Rump declared the Dutch had betrayed their Protestant duty in the pursuit of Mammon. The Grand Pensionary, the political leader of the States General, remarked grimly that

The English are going to attack a mountain of gold…we have to face a mountain of iron.

The States General ordered 150 more ships. The First Anglo Dutch war was on.

We will hear how that goes next time – always good to have a nice little war, especially on boats, so something to look forward to. We will also talk about the conclusion of the war in Ireland, and what the Rump decide to do as far as settlements are concerned in both Ireland and Scotland. We’ll hear about attempts at reform and those missing elections.

[1] Woolrych, A: ‘Britain in Revolution’, 453

[2] O Siochru, M: God’s Executioner’, p201

[3] https://sites.libsyn.com/446046/episode-15-a-golden-age-of-espionage retrieved July 2024

[4] Wilson, B: ‘Empire of the Deep’, p279

[5] Healey, J: ‘The Blazing World’, p277