Abstract
Daniel Szechi, ed., The Dangerous Trade: Spies, Spymasters and the Making of Europe, University of Dundee Press: Dundee, 2010, xvi + 199 pp., 24 illus.; 9781845860608, £25.00 (hbk)
The Dangerous Trade: Spies, Spymasters and the Making of Modern Europe brings together a collection of essays which provide an important and accessible addition to the burgeoning works on early modern espionage. Focused strongly on ‘espionage and covert action to defend the interests of the state’ (2), Szechi draws together a series of studies of individual lives in which espionage or ‘the dangerous game’ was a significant component, although rarely a complete career. However these studies are not merely biographical, but engage also with the wider questions of direction, organizational structures and assessment of individual influence within the early modern state and the European state system, ranging from the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. Drawing heavily on contemporary scholarship and intelligence nomenclature for analytical structure, contributors seek to assess the success or failure of their subject in a shifting, patronage based system of personal networks largely without institutional intelligence structures. Influence is thus related to circumstance, opportunity and proven reliability as an agent or informer and, not infrequently, to formal diplomatic or military office.
Despite appointment as Spanish ambassador to Venice in 1571, Diego Guzmán de Silva is shown by Michael J. Levin to have failed in his attempt to read Venetian policy or influence it in Spain’s favour. Designated as a ‘case study in structural intelligence failure’, Guzmán’s difficulties in obtaining accurate information from one of the most secretive of states were never overcome. Steve Murdoch’s study of Sir James Spens, a Scot appointed as ambassador to Sweden but whose loyalties spanned both countries, shows an effective spymaster who took full advantage of his contacts and opportunities to intervene in the complex relations between Sweden, Poland-Lithuania and Britain in the 1620s. Sir Robert Walsh’s career in the mid-1650s as a failed royalist double agent provides an example of the opportunist adventurer. While recounting Walsh’s failure to become a trusted agent either in the Royalist community in exile or with John Thurlow as intelligence chief to Cromwell, Alan Marshall uses Walsh’s career to explore the methods and priorities of the Protectorate intelligence system, in the process casting doubt on the extent of Thurlow’s control on intelligence in England during the 1650s and the amount of state finance devoted to intelligence gathering.
As in Walsh’s case, espionage offered an opportunity for reinstatement and return from exile to the Spanish political and legal reformer Melchor de Macanaz. Christopher Storrs’s account of Macanaz’s exile in France from 1715 to 1760 examines his less well known interventions within the wider context of Spanish policy and European politics, in which Mancanaz sought to provide diplomatic guidance and intelligence, drawing on secret correspondence, agent networks and occasional diplomatic appointments during the uncertainties of the French succession crisis and shifting diplomatic alliances. Paolo Preto’s essay on Giacomo Casanova’s short-lived career as a Venetian domestic informer highlights an episode which Casanova largely omitted from his Histoire de ma vie, but also explores the nature of Venetian intelligence during Venice’s last years as an independent Republic, both as social fact and political instrument. Daniel Szechi’s account of the career of Nathaniel Hooke explores the actions of a more successful agent, who used his contacts and a growing reputation for reliability to advocate covert operations in Scotland. Hooke acts as a focus for an analysis of the Jacobite exile community and French policy, and their attempts to undermine British involvement in the war of Spanish succession, culminating in an unsuccessful invasion attempt in 1708.
Although the subtitle of the work refers to the ‘making of Europe’ it is perhaps debatable how far the individuals mentioned had a direct influence in key events as many were failures and physically removed from direct involvement at court or government level. However this volume does illustrate the importance of the network and the individual as part of the system of intelligence and information transfer underlying diplomacy in early modern Europe, and in this sense they were undoubtedly part of the ‘making’ of it. Inevitably, given the format, the volume appears to be made up of a series of biographical vignettes, but the authors place their subjects firmly within their historical and historiographical contexts. The result is a well written and stimulating volume which will appeal to both the specialist intelligence scholar and those with interests in international diplomacy, exile communities and the states system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.