y, 1665, she found
herself helpless, without friends or funds. In her distress it was to
the Court she applied for assistance; and owing to her cosmopolitan
experience and still more to the fact that her name was Dutch, and that
she had been by her husband brought into close contact with the Dutch,
she was selected as a meet political agent to visit Holland and there be
employed in various secret and semi-official capacities. The
circumstance that her position and work could never be openly recognized
nor acknowledged by the English government was shortly to involve her in
manifold difficulties, pecuniary and otherwise, which eventually led to
her perforce abandoning so unstable and unsatisfactory a commission.

In the old _History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn_ (1696; and
with additions 1698, &c.), ushered into the world by Charles Gildon,
a romance full as amorous and sensational as any novel of the day, has
been woven about her sojourn at Antwerp. A 'Spark whom we must call by
the name of _Vander Albert_ of _Utrecht_' is given to Aphra as a fervent
lover, and from him she obtains political secrets to be used to the
English advantage. He has a rival, an antique yclept Van Bruin, 'a
_Hogen Mogen_ ... _Nestorean_' admirer, and the intrigue becomes fast
and furious. On one occasion Albert, imagining he is possessing his
mistress, is cheated with a certain Catalina; and again when he has
bribed an ancient duenna to admit him to Aphra's bed, he is surprised
there by a frolicsome gallant. [10] There are even included five letters
from Mrs. Behn and a couple of ridiculous effusions purporting to be Van
Bruin's. It would seem that all this pure fiction, the sweepings of
Aphra's desk, was intended by her to have been worked up into a novel;
both letters and narrative are too good to be the unaided composition of
Gildon himself, but possibly Mrs. Behn in her after life may have
elaborated and told him these erotic episodes to conceal the squalor and
misery of the real facts of her early Dutch mission. It is proved indeed
in aim and circumstance to have been far other.

[Footnote 10: Both these incidents are the common property of
Italian novelle and our own stage. Although not entirely
impossible, they would appear highly suspicious in any connection.]

Her chief business was to establish an intimacy with William Scott, son
of Thomas Scott, the regicide who had been executed 17 October, 1660.
This William, who ha