“We may smile at the mystifying style of James the First, but it veils a dark truth: ‘You must not dip too deep in what kings reserve among themselves, among the arcana imperii.’”

– from Commentaries on the life and reign of Charles the First, King of England, vol. I, by Isaac D’israeli

As with storms and earthquakes, which from time to time uproot long-buried artefacts, America’s electoral upheaval of 2016–earth-shattering in many respects–brought a slew of political concepts back into the public eye. One of these was the theory of the deep state.



During the Democratic and Republican war of words, a number of political operatives and rabble-rousers, chief of which were Roger Stone and Alex Jones, effectively weaponised the term, invoking it to convince voters that a heterodox presidential contender was needed to drain Washington’s “swamp” of untouchable elites.



Drawing both from conspiracy theories and from real accounts of government cover-ups, they described the Deep State as a cryptocracy comprised of Davos-set corporatists, intelligence heads, and senior members of the state department. Accountable to no one, these secret overseers kept working Americans in subjugation by controlling “Establishment” apparatchiks, “fixing” bureaucratic processes, and bumping off dissidents.



While 2016 saw the idea of a secret state used to further an alarmist and irreverent election campaign, far less democratic eras saw older iterations of the concept employed to illustrate the godlike cunning and power of kings and their ministers. The secret doctrines of these grandees were known, down from the days of Tacitus, as the arcana imperii: “mysteries of the state”.

An emblem from Juan de Solórzano’s Emblemata centum (1653). The caption reads: “Human governance requires the gods”. In the image Mercury symbolises the ideal earthly king, a pastor and pontifex who drives human souls in whatever way he sees fit to fulfill the mandate of providence.

Nowhere was the practice of the arcana so widespread as in 17th century Europe. This period, wrote an essayist in History of the Works of the Learned (1700), “may justly be stil’d an Age of Intrigue.”

“The more we Reflect upon those dark Times,” he noted, “the more we are at a loss what to Infer from them; for all things seem’d to be Intricate, and the Arcana Imperii, the Mysteries of State were Vail’d with so thick a Cloud, that they were Skreen’d not only from Vulgar View, but even from the Eyes of those who pretended to be sharper Sighted than others.”



To learn more about this world of “dark and intricate practices” and “cabals of statesmen” (as Isaac D’israeli put it), The Thinker’s Garden spoke with Professor Alan Marshall, a historian at Bath Spa University. Professor Marshall’s forthcoming book, Arcana imperii: a history of espionage in early-modern Britain, 1598-1715, is set to be released in 2020. It has been described as the “first full academic historical analysis” of espionage systems in Britain’s “long seventeenth century”.

Giovanni Botero, the Jesuit author of the influential 16th-century political manual Ragion di Stato (Reason of The State) declared that secrecy made sovereigns “similar to God”.

The Custodian: How would you define the “secret state”? When in your opinion, did this sort of organ being to materialise in Britain?

Professor Alan Marshall: We can, if we probe deeply enough, define a growing culture of secrecy and an attitude towards it in the early modern period that shows how ideas, and language in particular, were being created that could be used to reference an incipient “secret state”. It was a secret state that was thought necessary to protect the nation, to protect Protestantism, and, to some extent, to protect those individuals who were involved in its work.

So, it’s definable as that part of the early modern state that began to engage in clandestine activities and used the techniques and justifications of arcana imperii and raison d’état as a façade under which intelligence practices could develop and operate. Spies, informers, assassinations, political kidnapping, breaking conspiracies, secret diplomacy, and secret finance, were all becoming available as secret elements of rule whose urgent nature meant they could to be cheerfully engaged in. However, they were still externally morally damned and so in the end, they were activities that needed a philosophical explanation.

Frontispiece from a later edition of De arcanis rerum publicarum libri sex, a seminal work on the arcana imperii by Arnold Clapmar, a German humanist and political thinker.

Meanwhile, from the monarch’s point of view we do find an increased unwillingness to discuss such high arts of rule, and by implication its actions and its subject matter. And therein, of course, lay a new problem for any monarch and their state in the seventeenth century. For within an apparently emergent new media landscape, the public sphere, bolstered as it was by increased literacy and a decided interest in such matters, secrets of state, or rumours of such, were soon bleeding into the public domain and becoming a part of print culture. The development of various printed histories, secret or otherwise, for public audiences who simply wanted to know why things happened, and usually who was to blame for them, meant that the arcana imperii itself began to be bandied about by the “vulgar” and thereby, or so it was thought, respect could be lost and the magic of rule broken.

Even the actual presence of absolutist and contractual theories in print in the era, whether in their theoretical, or historical frameworks, giving formal explanations as to the very nature of government, could be said to have eventually weakened the arcana imperii they actually described. Any explanations of such dark matters merely acted to dispel some of the magic of secrecy of government and, potentially, such explanations could even begin to dissolve the boundaries between rulers and the ruled.

C: To what extent did the fear of Catholic conspiracies–the

“mythology of ultra-Protestantism” as J.P. Kenyon described it–factor into

the development of Protestant tradecraft?

A: It had an important part to play. Here we must eschew however the alleged facts of any plot as a plot, and instead focus on the more interesting, to me at least, cultural idea of conspiracy–the plot mentalitiè of the seventeenth century itself.

This had very deep historical and societal roots that especially focused upon the history of the very well-known Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth I, and particularly in the most famous plot of the seventeenth-century, which was celebrated each year on 5 November: The Gunpowder Treason. Indeed they provided models of what a plot should look like and how they could be destroyed. Added to this was a conspiratorial version of the events of the Great Fire of London (1666) and other events of the era that were also soon being embedded into a general arc of contemporary conspiratorial and secret history. They all fed into the ’elaborate fables of the age, mainly due to the anxieties of the period, and emerged fully formed as very suitable fare for men such as Titus Oates and his fellow informers to exploit in 1678-79, where the Popish Plot is in the end merely an amalgam of all the other plots combined.

Ultimately, for many people of the era such a general belief in a “plot”, especially a Catholic plot, was needed to explain why things went wrong and to provide easy solutions to the very chaotic nature of contemporary politics, religion, and society and its complex day-to-day questions. We may add to this the fact that intelligence work in the day in particular also tended to throw up very similar versions of the plot, and time after time information was used in a particularly figurative language that was itself common currency. The use of rhetorical devices, motifs, and clichés of this language were common in the contemporary mind and were grasped at for explanations of plots.

Frontispiece from Plots of the Jesuits (1653), an anti-Catholic treatise published by the renegade printer Michael Sparke. The book argues, somewhat fancifully, that Robert Parsons, Cardinal Richelieu, and other agents of the Roman Church were the architects of a violent conspiracy to both subvert the English monarchy and eradicate Protestant Christendom. Image courtesy of the British Museum.

Importantly, however, such narratives were invariably given a public voice in restricted linguistic forms by what can only be called the “mechanism of interrogation”. This is the real matter behind the supposed facts that government uncovered about plots. It stemmed from the actual techniques of repeated questioning, under pressure, of suspects, or through collusion, often unspoken between interviewer and interviewee, who were using similar conceptual languages, ideas and words of explanation, or through the voluntary revelations of the informer or spy.

Such questioning would already have had within it preconceived assumptions embedded in the interviewer’s techniques in order to explain and make sense of what otherwise could be chaotic and apparently meaningless oral then textual product. The aim in such interrogations, which affected interpretation, lies under the surface but was really an ever present: it was the maintenance of the elite view of the political norm.

Frontispiece (detail) from Pyrotechnica Loyolana (1667). Here the Pope appears as a diabolical mastermind who calls upon the “infernal gods” to carry out his plan for world domination. His Jesuit agents, busy raising hell all over the world, are shown next to a house for the”Arcana imperii”. Image via the British Museum.

C: William Prynne, arguably the most effective pamphleteer and

conspiracist of 17th-century England, played a tremendous role in

propagating numerous conspiracy theories, some of which were used to denounce Cromwell and the New Model Army. To what kind of spy network did Prynne and others like him have recourse?

A: Various individuals who were sometimes replete with what was thought as arcane knowledge, like Prynne, or John Dee, gained it from various domestic or European wide networks and channels of open information exchange. Not everyone used spies or informers. Such information networks and their producers often fell or were simply pulled into government orbits of information gathering others stuck out on an independent angle. They are all, like Prynne, part of the “Public sphere” of the day.

Much of this however was information that was gathered openly and indeed was open and above board. It was flowing though a burgeoning political culture of information exchange in the era especially in London and was not necessarily related to espionage at all, but was in fact more related to the many circulating manuscript newsletters services, to the press and to oral information gathering sitting in pubs and coffee houses and listening basically in the day.

In his pamphlet Substance of a Speech (1648), Prynne suggested that he was well-acquainted with “mysteries of State or Politicks”. Elsewhere, Prynne claimed that the New Model Army under Oliver Cromwell was controlled by a “conclave of Jesuits and Popish priests”.

C: What similarities have you noticed between today’s information

operatives and yesteryear’s intelligencers?

A: As its core objective my book aims to provide a general survey, and an explanation, of the idea of the early-modern “secret state” in the British long seventeenth-century. As such it means to go against the grain somewhat, which affects the answer to this particular question. I would stress there the lack of real links between the modern and yesteryear in this area.

Basically the book will examine the meanings and the usage of the terms the early-modern state acquired and used to express itself in such secret matters. In itself, as I hope to show, this was not the habitually assumed visions of some proto-MI5 and MI6 of legend operating in the darkness of a deep state, but instead, and especially within the British context, it was generally a series of somewhat halting and stuttering developments, using “intelligence systems”, not “secret service” organisations that were created, just as often abandoned, and then recreated, only to be abandoned once again.

It was also a world in which the key individuals who managed such affairs were often the most significant players. It was a world in which failure in this area was common, and where this occurred it was often simply due to a lack of money, rather than any lack of skill.

Essentially, the early-modern “secret state”, and its espionage elements, it will be argued here, needs a much more fluid interpretation as to what contemporary monarchs, ministers, spies and their masters actually got up to in this era than is usually given elsewhere.

In this respect merely borrowing the clothes and wardrobes of their modern espionage counterparts, and especially their language of “moles and ‘double agents” somewhat akin to the novels of John le Carré, actually prevents us from seeing the true picture of such matters in an early-modern context. For in this era not all spies were, or even considered themselves, spies in the modern sense, and even the overuse of the rhetorical label of “spy” can often mislead us as to their real activities and motives.

It will also be argued here that in any case early-modern espionage itself, which became an important part of this state, was never just about gathering secret information, but was rather a part of a succession of moral and social discourses within contemporary government.

These discourses operated in distinctive personal, historical, and cultural environments. Decisions in this world were made in particular circumstances, and by individuals who were habitually grasping towards different forms of goal from those of any their modern counterparts. What is more, while such matters may have been secret, sometimes for no other reason other than a love of mere secrecy, they did conflict with an emergent, more public, exchange mechanism in information that was developing within the broader contemporary economic and public world, what Peter Burke has called the ‘commodification of information’, and within the developing general news networks of the era. Crucially, the intelligence systems that did emerge also had important social links to that great fluid of all politics in this period: the client-patron system.

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