Perhaps they were also used after her death in her own Widow Ranter, which presents the Indians in heroic style.

The next years are unrecorded, but in them Aphra may have married a London merchant of Dutch or German extraction, perhaps a seaman met on the voyage from Surinam or in Surinam itself. Or perhaps he was a necessary invention to provide widowed respectability. The evidence of repetition in her plays and stories suggests that he might have been a good deal older than his wife since there are many detailed and repellent descriptions of old men forcing themselves on young girls – as in Oroonoko and The Rover, although in the latter case the description is also present in the source she used. Possibly ‘Mr Behn’ died almost immediately or possibly the couple agreed to part, thus preventing Aphra from contemplating a second marriage. Certainly there seems no further question of matrimony in her life, and many of her works end with the unlikely and perhaps wish-fulfilling option of the unwanted elderly man bowing out of the union. However it turned out in reality, there is no further mention of Mr Behn and, by 1666, the independent woman ‘A. Behn’ had been born.

In that year she entered official records, this time with her own letters. The theatrical Killigrew was also groom of the royal bedchamber and he recommended her to Lord Arlington as of use to his intelligence network during a period of political difficulty with Holland, which included the second Anglo-Dutch War. ‘Mrs Aphora’ was recruited as a spy in Antwerp on a mission which she later described as ‘unusual with my sex, or to my years’.6

Despite Byam’s conjecture, William Scot had not followed his Astrea to England but had in fact gone to Holland. There he was involved with the dissident English and Scots, who were hoping to use the hostility of the Dutch and English governments to pursue their aim of undoing the royalist Restoration and regaining political power. Behn’s assignment was to encourage Scot in his desire to become a double agent and to help him report on expatriate activities and on Dutch naval plans.

Her letters back to her control in London suggest that some mental and perhaps physical seduction was accomplished by the pair but it is unclear who was seducing and outwitting whom. Behn trusted Scot’s intelligence relayed to England, but the recipients of her coded letters in London were less credulous. To keep Scot faithful she felt bound to give him money in the mistaken belief that she would be reimbursed. In time she would come to realize that ‘his Majesty’s friends here do all complain upon the slenderness of their rewards’; soon she had pawned her rings to keep herself and was writing desperately to Killigrew, who rather harshly complained of her ‘ill management’ and sent nothing. In fact there is evidence that Scot gave some true pieces of information: he provided an early warning that the Dutch were planning to sail up the Thames, as they duly did to the surprise of the unprepared English. But soon Scot himself was in a debtors’ prison and Aphra Behn was appealing for money to return home. Nothing was paid, but she managed privately to raise a loan and so sailed for England.

Like the time in Surinam, the stay in Antwerp might have been short, but Aphra Behn was at an impressionable age and she seems to have kept ‘journal-observations’ of people and events. Much later in life she would call on these periods abroad to furnish material for her allegedly factual fictions such as Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt. For example, the London Gazette for 28–31 May 1666 describes an extraordinary event in The Hague:

The Prince Torquino being condemned at Antwerp to be beheaded, for endeavouring the death of his sister in law: Being on the scaffold, the executioner tied an handkerchief about his head and by great accident his blow lighted upon the knot, giving him only a slight wound. Upon which, the people being in a tumult, he was carried back to the townhouse, and is in hopes both of his pardon and his recovery.

A version of this incident forms the climax of The Fair Jilt, published in 1688.

Back in London, Behn found herself powerless to pay off the debt incurred in the royal service and by 1668 she was appealing directly to the King ‘after more than two years suffering’. Her urgent notes were ignored and soon she was facing prison: ‘I have cried myself dead and could find in my heart to break through all and get to the king and never rise till he were pleased to pay this, but I am sick and weak and unfit for that or a prison.’ But she concludes vigorously, ‘I will not starve.’

It is not known who paid the money but certainly Aphra Behn left prison and lived through the next years. Perhaps she became a kept woman or a whore, but there is little evidence. Perhaps she acted, but this is also unlikely since actresses too were regarded as close to prostitutes and no Restoration woman is known to have combined the roles of actor and playwright, although the combination was common for men. Probably she was writing for part of the time as she arrived fully fledged on the literary scene in 1670, ready to provide commendatory poems and edit collections – Covent Garden Drollery, a selection of theatrical pieces, appeared in 1672 and included some of her own works which had probably been in circulation for a time. She was also ready to write plays.

On his Restoration, Charles II had hurried to re-open the stage. He licensed two companies, the King’s under Killigrew and the Duke’s under Sir William Davenant, and he took the unprecedented step of encouraging women publicly to play female roles; indeed in 1662 a royal warrant decreed that they must do so in place of the boys used on the Renaissance stage. The arrival of actresses greatly affected the presentation of female characters, since the body of the woman on the stage was heavily sexualized. Several of the leading actresses were mistresses of important men – the King kept Nell Gwyn and Moll Davis, and the Earl of Rochester the celebrated Elizabeth Barry – and off-stage exploits were commented on in prologues and epilogues. Private notoriety became part of the theatrical image.

Women were also in the audience. Their effect on the drama, much commented on, is difficult to gauge since the evidence mainly comes from the complaints of playwrights.