Exit pursued by a bear: Oliver the Spy and the imperial context of British political history

Abstract

In the wake of the Pentridge uprising of 1817, the notorious agent provocateur known as ‘Oliver the Spy’ disappeared from the political scene. Or did he? In fact controversies over the alleged spy had a prolonged afterlife at the Cape of Good Hope. This article considers the way in which Oliver’s career has been separated into two phases, and treated separately in two historiographies – one South African and one British. In Oliver’s own lifetime, however, no such easy divide was made. These connections allow us to explore the relation between British and colonial politics in the early nineteenth century.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Keywords:

• British-colonial relations
• British politics
• espionage
• political scandal
• South African politics

Antigonus

Farewell!

The day frowns more and more: thou’rt like to have

A lullaby too rough: I never saw

The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour!

Well may I get aboard! This is the chase:

I am gone for ever. Exit, pursued by a bear

– William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, scene iii.

In The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus is carrying out an order to abandon baby Perdita on the shores of Bohemia when he is abruptly removed from the action by one of Shakespeare’s most famous stage directions. The phrase has since passed into popular culture, spawning mugs, T-shirts and, most recently, the inevitable ‘Keep Calm and Exit Pursued by a Bear’. Most scholars recognise the moment as a pivot in the action, one of the more dramatic of The Winter’s Tale’s complex series of genre-shifts. A subset of Shakespeare studies has spilled a fair amount of ink arguing over both the original staging and its meaning. Did the author intend that a real bear or a bear-costumed actor would appear? Should the moment be staged as frightening or overtly comic? Isthis ‘method of disposing of Antigonus’ simply a ‘crude’ and ‘unsophisticated’ mechanism in the service of the plot?¹

For the purpose of discussing the relationship between British and imperial politics in the early nineteenth century, the inspiration I find in the scene is two-fold. Firstly, in the wake of an abortive 1817 uprising in the English midlands, the government spy and alleged agent provocateur who had alerted the authorities vanished with equal abruptness. His true identity had been exposed and the agent, then operating under the name of William Oliver, was in personal danger. Perhaps more importantly, in the midst of an increasingly controversial treason trial, he had been transformed from government asset to government liability. Secondly, then, in arranging for his exit from the political scene, those orchestrating the drama from the Home Office apparently sought a genre-transition of their own. Just like Antigonus, Oliver would be ‘gone for ever’ and the action, it was presumably hoped, would move into a more positive phase. The incumbent government sought to neutralise political embarrassment by removing their agent to a remote location under a new identity. In this instance the destination selected was the colony at the Cape of Good Hope.

Tracking Oliver through mainstream histories of British politics would suggest that the stage direction worked to brilliant effect. He features prominently in the national narrative right up until the moment he exits to the Cape. From that point on it is mostly a case of out of sight, out of mind. Some accounts do not even acknowledge his off-stage destination, asserting that Oliver simply vanished without a trace. But if such modern historians have been taken in by the Home Office’s tactics, the spy’s contemporaries were not. In selecting which colonial backwater might prove suitably quiet, the Home Office plotters’ choice was unfortunate. Oliver’s destination was unexpectedly poised to transform itself into a hotbed of settler protest. As a consequence of the controversies that began to unfold at the Cape, the alleged spy was inadvertently granted a prolonged political afterlife. Indeed his supposed activities in South Africa generated a powerful feedback loop for ongoing political machinations in Britain itself.

Until recently, Oliver’s career has been separated into two phases, and treated separately in two historiographies: one South African and one British. Furthermore, where once he was widely notorious elsewhere in the British settler world, for example in Australia, there he has now been forgotten. In this article I draw on my recently published study of British imperial reforms to reflect on some key concerns raised in the recent Macquarie workshop on British history. Why, when contemporaries made such strong connections between them, have scholarly understandings of British and colonial politics in the early nineteenth century become so disaggregated? What might be the benefits of bringing them closer together? As James Vernon argues, developments in imperial history have seen new textbooks of British history increasing their coverage of a range of historical processes and events across a wider geographic reach. Yet, as he also points out, the relationship between these topics is still too often left opaque. One reason for thisproblem is clearly the tendency of British historians to treat anyone leaving for the colonies rather as Shakespeare treats Antigonus: such historical actors exit the British national drama with equal finality. Yet the problem is also multi-directional. British historians seeking to engage with colonial and settler historiography have until recently faced literatures that were carving out their own self-consciously national traditions, often in direct reaction to an imperial past.² These too have tended to treat peripatetic individuals (and the controversies about them) as relevant only so long as they operated upon national soil.³

Arguing that Oliver was significant to the histories of both Britain and South Africa does not take us very far. This is already well recognised, even if the links between these national stories are not. But while the existing historiographies disaggregate the distinct phases of Oliver’s public life, and ignore the impact of his colonial career upon wider issues of political repression, debates in the spy’s lifetime made no such easy divide. Bringing them back together shows how Oliver’s story can illuminate the mechanisms by which British and colonial politics were connected in the early nineteenth century. Rather than adding a colonial coda to a British national story, it is these relationships that I seek to emphasise.

In the light of the historiographical divides that have emerged, the first aspect of the story that needs explanation is the fame of the man who went by the names of W. J. Richards, William Oliver Jones and William Oliver. In a period that witnessed repeated scandals over government espionage and alleged agents provocateurs, it was Oliver who took on the definite article. Universally known as ‘Oliver the Spy’, he was the most hated government operative of the period. At the height of his notoriety he would have needed no introduction to an Australian readership, as the gleeful report on his death printed in the Sydney Monitor in 1828 makes abundantly clear.⁴

The events in which Oliver was involved came out of a prolonged period of post-war social unrest in which many of Britain’s middle and upper classes saw real danger of revolution. The anti-machinist Luddite attacks of 1811–15 were followed by the Spa Fields riots of 1816, the Blanketeers’ March and the Pentridge uprising of 1817. The 1819 ‘Peterloo’ massacre of unarmed men, women and children attending an open-air meeting at Manchester calling for parliamentary reform was succeeded the following year by the exposure of the Cato Street conspiracy to blow up the prime minister and cabinet. This brief sketch of the key flashpoints of conflict can only hint at the volatility of the period. Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century was characterised by profound dislocation, socio-economic upheaval and a highly fragmented and factionalised parliamentary landscape.⁵

It was within these particularly bitter domestic political circumstances that the strategic advantage of the apparently obscure set of colonial scandals in which Oliver was allegedly involved at the Cape should be seen. It was not just big-ticket political scandals, like those that engulfed Warren Hastings in the late eighteenth century or Thomas Picton in the early nineteenth century, which attracted metropolitan attention to imperial concerns.⁶ ‘Oliver the Spy’ was certainly a name to conjure with, and his fame helped to bring Cape issues onto the agenda of British public opinion and parliamentary debate. Yet my wider point is that colonial scandals were part of the quotidian business of British political life. However obscure and localised they might seem, these controversies were tactical weapons to be employed in an oppositional system in Britain, and this was well recognised by both sides.

For all the genuine anxiety about revolution, systems of state-sponsored espionage were coming under increasing criticism from a wide variety of quarters in the early nineteenth century. As Paul Pickering argues, the ‘whiff of brimstone’ that hung around informers and agents provocateurs had deep cultural roots stretching back to Judas himself.⁷ Anti-spy paranoia had a particularly rich history in association with concepts of ‘English liberty’, usually imagined in opposition to continental despotism. In the 1790s crackdown on British popular radicalism, extensive use was made of informers. The spy system of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger largely escaped mainstream parliamentary and popular censure, however, since it was justified as an extension of the war against Jacobin France.⁸ But in the aftermath of the victory over Napoleon, manifestations of popular radicalism were much harder to connect to threats of foreign invasion. If the 1817 Committee of Secrecy, convened by parliament in reaction to popular radicalism, was convinced that revolution was imminent, then much of the evidence that they had for this came from government spies. Critics argued – with more than a little justification – that when the authorities acted to stamp out established liberties, they were using as their excuse conspiracies deliberately provoked by their own informers, as the case in which Oliver initially rose to prominence bears out.

In the wake of a short-lived armed uprising centred on Pentridge, on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, ‘Oliver the Spy’ was exposed as a government agent by the Leeds journalist, editor and reform campaigner Edward Baines.⁹ Three rebel leaders were tried for treason, hanged and posthumously beheaded. Fourteen more were transported to Australia. In a series of sensational articles in the Leeds Mercury beginning on 14 June 1817, Baines alleged that the unrest had in fact been sparked by the activities of a man known to the protestors as ‘London delegate’ William Oliver. Baines revealed him to be W. J. Richards, a spy in the employ of Lord Sidmouth’s Home Office. The authorities, Baines alleged, had known from Oliver that the rising was imminent, but had let it go ahead in order to further their own political ends. Debate as to Oliver’s role and culpability in the uprising has raged ever since.¹⁰

Oliver was by no means the only government agent exposed in this period. As pamphlet literature and satirical prints suggest, he was one of a much bigger cohort. Yet it was Oliver who became ‘the spy’ and, as E. P. Thompson puts it, the ‘archetype of the Radical Judas’.¹¹ In part, this was clearly because his evidence had led to capital convictions (although the spy himself was never called as a witness after exposure made the prospect of cross-examination too risky). Equally, we must give due credit for Oliver’s notoriety to Edward Baines, a politician-in-waiting who would become a Whig MP in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act. Baines made brilliant political capital out of his exposé, both in the pages of the Leeds Mercury (under headlines such as ‘Horrible Plot of Spies and Informers to Excite Insurrection’ and ‘Exploded Plots, Oliver the Spy’) and in his History of the Reign of George III published three years later.¹²

Baines put Oliver and Sidmouth’s spy system firmly into a wider reformist agenda, arguing that the ‘object’ of the Parliamentary Secrecy Committees of the period was to create plots in order to justify their repression. In the House of Commons, opposition members such as Sir Francis Burdett and Henry Brougham took up the revelations about Oliver to launch extended attacks, accompanied by acclamation from the floor, upon the ‘moral character’ of the government.¹³ Such was the popular hostility towards Oliver that an unfortunate butler was attacked by a violent mob on the streets of London because of his fancied resemblance to the ‘arch-fiend’.¹⁴ Even after the government agent had mysteriously vanished, Olivers began appearing everywhere. As a symbol he was far more powerful than he had ever been as an informer; a protean figure who was easily accused of betrayals far removed in time and space from his original activities.

Given this context, it was clearly in the best interests of the authorities for Oliver now to exit the political scene. Removing exposed agents off-shore was an already established practice, and one of which contemporaries were again entirely aware. George Cruikshank’s 1817 satirical print Conspirators; Or, Delegates in Council, produced soon after the Pentridge uprising, pictures a group of spies and government ministers. George Canning (then a cabinet minister) asks Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, ‘Don’t you think my Lord that our friends, [John] Castle & Oliver should be sent to Lisbon or somewhere as Consul Generals, or Envoys?’¹⁵ As it turned out, Oliver never received quite such a lofty appointment.

In 1819 Henry Goulburn, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote to Cape Governor Lord Charles Somerset directing that a grant of land be made to one ‘Mr William Jones whose object in proceeding to the Cape of Good Hope is to settle in that Colony’.¹⁶ Three months later, Goulburn wrote again, recommending the services of ‘Mr Jones a builder’. Nothing incriminating was put in the official record, but some very powerful people were behind this seemingly obscure emigration. ‘[T]aking a very considerable interest in his behalf’, wrote Goulburn to Somerset, ‘Icannot resist taking the liberty of bringing his name under your notice in the hope that you may be able to assist him by your recommendation if not to employ him on behalf of the public’.¹⁷ (Oliver had been, in Baines’s words, ‘a respectable builder’ before he embarked upon his career as informer.¹⁸) And thus the most infamous of all Britain’s domestic spies was sent to the Cape Colony, apparently in the hope of getting him off the domestic public agenda. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. What the Home Office did not anticipate was that Oliver had joined what was about to become one of the most scandal-plagued British administrations in South Africa’s colonial history.

Lord Charles Somerset’s period at the Cape during his second term as governor (1821–26) was more than usually vexatious. In part, this was unavoidable in a context of escalating frontier conflict, bitter debates over unfree labour and tension between British and Dutch settlers. Britain had seized the Cape from the Dutch in 1795, relinquished it after the 1802 Peace of Amiens, and seized it again in 1806. While the second occupation eventually proved permanent, for the next two decades the conquerors relied heavily on the legal and administrative structures of the former Dutch regime at the Cape. In order to resolve the ongoing contradictions inherent in this compromise, the Colonial Office despatched the Commission of Eastern Inquiry to the colony in 1823 to conduct a thorough overhaul of all aspects of the colonial administration.¹⁹

The recent arrival of a significant number of assisted British migrants upped the ante on these investigations. The same postwar social upheaval that had prompted uprisings like that at Pentridge had also inspired the British government to seek a series of imperial solutions to metropolitan problems, in particular migration.²⁰ Landing at the Cape across the first half of 1820, around 4000 assisted migrants were established on an eastern frontier that was already in the midst of heightened tensions and episodic full-scale warfare with the indigenous Xhosa communities. The new arrivals proved rapidly and volubly disenchanted with their circumstances. Although they were far outnumbered by the existing Cape Dutch inhabitants (and even more so by slaves and indigenous peoples), they could punch above their weight in colonial disputes through their connections to high-status individuals in Britain, as well as the influence of British public opinion on parliamentary decisions. Several key players at the Cape were aligned with reformist Whig circles in Britain, setting the stage for conflict with both the Colonial Office and the High Tory Cape governor.

This context would undoubtedly have proved a challenge to any colonial administration. In this instance, however, interpersonal frictions further hampered the government’s ability to deal with the situation facing it. Following his return to the colony in November 1821, after a period of home leave, Somerset and the Acting Governor, Sir Rufane Donkin, embarked upon a long and bitter feud in which the Colonial Secretary, Colonel Christopher Bird, also became embroiled. Somerset was convinced that Bird had gathered around him a set of men who were devoted to undermining the governor at every point. The subsequent inability of the two men to work together seriously compromised both the unity and effectiveness of Somerset’s administration.²¹

In these circumstances, increasing protests over the situation at the Cape became part of the political scene in both metropole and colony, voiced directly to the Colonial Office and to Parliament, and debated in the press. Information flowed in both directions, for Cape reformers were in regular correspondence with their British counterparts and metropolitan newspapers were avidly discussed in communal reading spaces such as the African Society House and James Howell’s Circulating Library and Stationers.²² The specific allegations made against the administration, and Somerset personally, were diverse in nature, encompassing both structural problems and interpersonal disputes. The foreign legal system and the manner in which the Cape Dutch continued to dominate the exercise of routine administrative power were bitterly resented by British settlers. There was extensive criticism of the administration’s handling of the frontier situation and the problems of the assisted British migrants who arrived on the eastern border of the colony in 1820. The governor’s son, Colonel Henry Somerset, was a particular cause of complaint in this regard. The scandals reached their climax in 1824 with accusations of corruption in distributing liberated Africans, attacks on the liberty of the press, and instances of deportation without trial. These disputes were cast in the frame of Somerset’s persecution of Whig and Radical-aligned critics.

In the midst of these events an anonymous placard appeared on the streets of Cape Town accusing the governor of ‘buggering Dr Barry’, the controversial British army surgeon whose sex remains a topic of unresolved debate. The suggestion that Somerset was engaged in sexual relations with Barry further tainted an administration already mired in charges of using draconian punishments, dirty tricks and espionage against British colonial subjects. The presence of the Commissioners of Inquiry only added to the glare of parliamentary scrutiny. As the political situation in the colony went rapidly downhill during Somerset’s fractious second term, therefore, what must have seemed a good decision in 1819 blew up spectacularly in the government’s face. Given what was about to unfold at the Cape, it is perhaps hard to think of the Home Office settling on a more unfortunate destination for Oliver the Spy.

When Leeds journalist Edward Baines published his history of Oliver’s initial exposure in 1820, there were already rumours in Britain that the spy had landed on his feet at the Cape:

he no doubt trusted to the disposition of ministers to remunerate services like his. The results have shown that he was right; it is asserted on good authority (though we cannot vouch for the fact) that he has since been appointed to a lucrative place at the Cape of Good Hope.²³

At what point these vague accusations were pinned down to a specific individual is unclear, but it was an open secret in 1820s Cape Town that the government builder William Jones and the notorious Oliver the Spy were one and the same. Yet for all the circumstantial evidence that points in that direction, we cannot make the identification with Oliver definitively. Rumours abounded as to the real identity of several mysterious newcomers to the colony, some accurate, some not.

We do know, for instance, that in 1823 a man called William Edwards appeared before a Cape Town notary to draw up a complaint against George Hunt, master of the brig Emulous then lying in Table Bay, who had ‘caused a report to be circulated tending to impeach his character’.²⁴ Hunt had been spreading the news in Cape Town that William Edwards was in fact another government spy and alleged agent provocateur, one George Edwards. George Edwards had been instrumental in the infamous Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820 to murder the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and his cabinet. Exposure of that plot had helped justify the draconian Six Acts that suppressed public assembly and ‘seditious’ meetings, and that significantly retarded the radical press through draconian licensing regulations and the threat of banishment. Five of the Cato Street conspirators were hanged at Newgate on 1 May 1820. Five others were transported to New South Wales. Like Oliver, George Edwards had been spirited away by the authorities for his own protection.²⁵

But if William Edwards was particularly anxious to deny he was this other Edwards, and to establish his proper credentials before a Cape notary, it was in fact because these too were false. In reality he was a convict named Alexander Loe Kaye who had escaped from New South Wales. Ironically, there are reasons to believe (although typically these are not conclusive either) that the real George Edwards was also living quietly undiscovered at the Cape by the time that William Edwards was mistaken for him.²⁶

In summary, then, we cannot claim definitively that Jones the builder and Oliver the Spy were one and the same. But belief that Oliver was at the Cape was widely shared. Jones himself was subjected to repeated harassment in Cape Town, writing to the Colonial Secretary in 1821: ‘May I presume to beg the favour of some suggestions of yours that may tend to pacify the public mind at present so prejudiced against me’.²⁷ For both the individual himself, and for the purposes of political rhetoric, the truth hardly mattered. The allegation was powerful enough.

In the early 1820s, London’s Times newspaper kept news of Oliver before the British reading public, publishing a full (if somewhat exaggerated) account of his destination, new occupation and his supposedly secret alias at the Cape:

It is because this man is Oliver, the spy, that he rolls in affluence at the expense of the nation … But we would fain ask, must this horrible engine be naturalized in the British constitution? … Mr. Oliver, supported as he is by the Government, contrives to maintain his footing in this ill-fated colony, though his pseudonym has long ceased to conceal him from the inhabitants, who are more than anxious to be rid of his society – thinking, perhaps, that there is another English colony towards the South, in which he has more legitimate claims to a settlement.²⁸

It was commonly believed at the time that Somerset was using paid informants against the Cape ‘radicals’, and these suspicions do hold up. Somerset made frequent reference to his use of informers and his access to covert sources of information in his confidential correspondence with the Secretary of State. ²⁹ Nevertheless, we can be reasonably sure that Oliver was not among this cohort. We have no evidence, even in the most secret government correspondence, that Somerset employed Oliver as a spy. Nor would it have made any sense for him to do so. Oliver’s notoriety hardly made him useful as either a covert operative or a conduit for clandestine information. The former spy was being carefully watched and subject to local prejudice. ‘Oliver the spy seems to have engaged the attention of the Public’, wrote Cape Town diarist Samuel Hudson in April 1824, ‘his name being chalked up at the corners of most of the principal streets in Cape Town’. All the evidence suggests that while he was likely operating under local government protection, Jones pursued his trade merely as a builder (and a not very successful one at that) at the Cape.³⁰ This did not stop opposition voices seizing on his presence in the midst of local scandals, and transforming him into one of the most powerful symbols of the tyrannical excesses of the Somerset regime.

Oliver – or rather the spectre of Oliver – really came into his own in Cape political rhetoric during the hunt for the instigators of the notorious placard accusing Somerset of buggery. At the centre of the alleged conspiracy were three British settlers at odds with the Somerset regime: the William Edwards already mentioned, by this time in jail for a different seditious libel against the governor; George Greig, the printer whose newspaper had been shut down for reporting Edwards’s case; and Bishop Burnett, not in fact a cleric but a disaffected emigrant from the assisted scheme also charged with libels upon the judiciary. An extensive investigation into the placard affair was never able to provide sufficient proof to bring the real perpetrators to justice, but it gave the regime an excuse for extensive searches and seizures of papers amongst its critics. In the howls of protest that resulted, Oliver loomed large.

For Somerset’s political enemies, as for their allies in the metropole, accusations of spying were a rhetorical weapon in a much wider ideological war over the nature of the British state both at home and abroad. As a symbol with immediate political traction in both colony and metropole, Oliver the Spy was the perfect weapon to mount in response to the administration’s moves against the opposition. When news of the placard, and Somerset’s reaction to it, reached London, therefore, it was immediately cast within these broader debates about liberty and arbitrary power. The Times reported the arrival of letters from the Cape dated 10 July, and while they did not give the wording of the placard (which they only described as ‘reflecting on the character of Lord Charles Somerset’ and ‘of a very horrible nature’), they had full details of the one man who had actually seen it, and of the large reward that was being offered for information as to its author. The report was characteristically anti-Somerset, arguing that:

the placard has been made the pretext for many acts of a very offensive and arbitrary nature. The houses of several respectable individuals were searched, and their private papers ransacked, by virtue of search-warrants, to look for this supposed or ideal placard.

The Times called the actions of the government in response to the scandal ‘perhaps the greatest confusion and disorder that has ever occurred in an English settlement’, and the editor was pleased that the Commissioners of Inquiry were on hand to witness it. ‘One thing is sufficiently evident’, the paper concluded, ‘Lord Charles Somerset, notwithstanding his powerful family, cannot much longer continue to govern at the Cape of Good Hope’.³¹

Awaiting transportation to New South Wales and seeking allies in his own caseagainst the government, Edwards was careful to play the Oliver card to Radical MP Joseph Hume: ‘In England you have plots, spies, and green bags. We are as clever at the Cape … Oliver, the famous spy … is Inspector of Government workshere, in the name of Jones, and prime minister to the Lord Charles’.³² Bishop Burnett’s petition to Parliament against his wrongs at the Cape also alleged that there was:

no doubt now existing in the minds of the Cape Town colonists that it [the placard] was prepared, affixed, and withdrawn, in a desperate exigence of his Excellency’s unpopularity, by a person names Jones, but better known by the appellation of Oliver, the spy.³³

Opposition forces at the Cape were well aware that Oliver, that ‘delectable protégé of the Lord Charles’, presented the perfect opportunity for Whig and Radical parliamentarians to use the Cape scandals to attack Britain’s Tory government.³⁴

In the propaganda war that was waged over the placard incident, Oliver featured prominently as Somerset’s chief ally in a dirty tricks campaign that the Cape regime had waged against his critics. Suitably transformed into an instance of government tyranny against innocent settlers, the affair featured prominently in the parliamentary discussions over Cape policy and the possibility of embarrassing his Tory allies by impeaching Lord Charles Somerset. For those opposition MPs who had made so much mileage from the spy’s original exposure almost a decade earlier, Oliver now re-emerged as a convenient villain, with Brougham casting him in the role of placard author (for all that suspicion had been pushed onto anti-government protestors by paid informers):

Oliver the spy … had obtained the patronage and influence of the local government. Why should he not? He enjoyed the influence and patronage of the Government at home, and he deserved it equally well in both places. There was no doubt that [George] Edwards might be there too, and Castles for they also had entitled themselves to the favour of the Government.³⁵

On 2 November 1825, two months after the banned Cape newspaper received official permission to recommence publication, the South African Commercial Advertiser used these ongoing British parliamentary debates over the placard affair to meditate on the failures of local governance that were inextricably bound up with the use of spies, even in cases of ‘extreme danger’ to the state. It showed the illegitimacy of a leader who had lost the ‘loyalty of his subjects’, who considered that the ordinary rule of law was insufficient for the purposes of government, and who showed a want of confidence in the officers a sovereign had chosen to administer the law. ³⁶

A year later, as news of the Commissioner of Eastern Inquiry’s parliamentary report on the complaints of Bishop Burnett reached the Cape, the Advertiser headed its report with a quotation from St Mark: ‘Many bare false witness against Him, but their witness agreed not together’. Judas, they argued, was the original informer, and there ‘is nothing more terrible in Society than a privileged Spy, or a suborned Witness’. ‘To the Jews we can give an Oliver for their Judas.’³⁷ Greig asserted that the government’s handling of the placard scandal had been prompted by a desire to ‘divert the tide of public indignation which was beginning to set in very strongly against these unaccountable acts of power’ against the press, including the ‘arbitrary banishment of Mr Greig, without even the form of a Trial’. In order to discredit the reformers, their names had to be blackened by any means within the reach of the authorities. The placard itself had quickly disappeared and only one witness could ever be traced who claimed to have actually seen it. The paper concluded that the placard affair was far too convenient to be entirely believable: ‘it began to be generally suspected either that no such Placard had ever existed, or that it owed its existence to certain persons sufficiently notorious, who had some Political End to serve by it’.³⁸

Informers of various types were undoubtedly of utility in colonial information gathering. Yet covert sources of information increasingly carried the potential stigma of espionage and could prove to be more a political liability than an asset. Like the placard itself, Oliver was always more powerful as a mystery than as a reality. Whether or not the placard affair was a dirty tricks campaign manufactured entirely by the authorities (with or without Somerset’s connivance) is ultimately impossible to know. Somerset certainly expressed disgust over the incident in confidential letters to Commissioner John Thomas Bigge and to Bathurst.³⁹ Either way, in the ideological warfare that sought to make meaning from the incident the Whig and Radical opposition at the Cape were arguably victorious. Initially viewed as a victim by popular opinion, Somerset’s reputation ended up being further tarnished by accusations of tyranny. This dramatic shift was in part achieved through the consummate use that Somerset’s opponents made of the notorious Oliver’s alleged presence in the colony.

As I have indicated, it was no secret at the time that the government was accustomed to relocating exposed agents off-shore. British historians, however, have been too quick to assume that this practice effectively removed them from the local political scene. Oliver’s fate after Pentridge has been largely ignored by historians outside South Africa. If mentioned at all in histories of British politics, it rates a colonial epilogue, seemingly no longer significant to the issue at hand. E. P. Thompson’s monumental The Making of the English Working Class, which pays significant attention to Oliver and his role in the repression of radical politics, is emblematic in this regard. As has become well established, Thompson’s elision of empire, race and gender from his frame of reference was emphatic and had a similarly profound impact on the early development of social history.⁴⁰ In her recent study of the relationship between Thompson’s work and Australian historiography, Ann Curthoys argues that deep cultural assumptions about the relative importance of metropole and colony lie behind Thompson’s failure to engage with the fate of protestors after they were transported. Like the spy himself, the working-class radicals convicted by Oliver’s testimony disappear from Thompson’s story as soon as they leave English soil. As Curthoys points out, Thompson’s lack of interest in them in The Making was underscored by his later hostility towards the work of George Rudé on political prisoners transported to Australia. Both were bound up in Thompson’s evident dismissal of any wider relevance of Australian history or historiography to questions relating to British history.⁴¹

If Thompson ignores the colonial dimension of Oliver’s story, so too do most of the other works of British historians on the subject. An exception is J.L. and Barbara Hammond’s The Skilled Labourer which provides a short account of ‘Oliver’s later history’, to which they were alerted by the librarian of the South African Public Library in Cape Town, in an appendix.⁴² Even for the Hammonds, however, this colonial epilogue is clearly deemed outside their main topic of analysis. Bernard Porter’s wide-ranging history of British espionage fails to recognise Oliver’s colonial fate entirely, claiming that ‘nothing was ever seen or heard of him again’.⁴³ In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The failure of historians of Britain to see any political significance in Oliver after his departure from the mother country is particularly glaring when we consider how frequently Oliver’s alleged Cape activities appeared in both the British press and in parliamentary debates of the early 1820s.

It is perhaps no surprise that one of the few scholars outside South Africa to recognise Oliver’s colonial career is another historian of British politics operating from a former colonial periphery. Unaware of the harassment to which Jones the builder was subjected at the Cape, however, Paul Pickering speculates, in his study of the Australian afterlife of Chartist informers, that Oliver ‘had escaped his past’.⁴⁴ Yet as I mentioned at the start of this essay, the failure to recognise what was a mutually influential process does not extend in only one direction. If Oliver’s presence in the colony has never been forgotten by historians of South Africa (understandably given how prominently he appears in the contemporary sources) then it is usually reduced to the status of rollicking anecdote. The significance of his alleged activities at the Cape to an understanding of British politics remains equally undeveloped.⁴⁵ The historiography on Oliver the Spy underscores how what should be seen as interconnected has instead been apportioned into discrete and mutually exclusive literatures dealing with either Britain or its colonies.

In pointing out the silences on Oliver the Spy in British political historiography, my intention is not to indulge in the kind of nit-picking dissection of evidentiary support that characterised the worst excesses of the Australian History Wars.⁴⁶ Bernard Porter, who so manifestly misreads Oliver’s fate, has loomed large in the fractious debate about how prominent empire was within the context of metropolitan British life.⁴⁷ Yet bringing Oliver’s colonial afterlife into the analytical frame in fact strengthens one of the key arguments in Porter’s study of Britain’s spy systems. As he suggests, popular rhetoric around spies undercut the usefulness of political espionage in the first decades of the nineteenth century, leading to a significant shift in tactics on behalf of the British state. Demonstrating the wider imperial context of this rhetoric, and the traction that colonial spy scandals had in metropolitan circles, underscores both the depths and the relevance of this sentiment in bringing about this shift.

Nor, in emphasising what has been left out of British political history, is my argument that empire must simply (to use James Vernon’s critique) be ‘bolted on’ to the British national story that we already thought we knew. Rather it is that we need to use the view from the Antipodes to better recognise the mechanics by which colonial and British politics were connected. As Zoë Laidlaw has argued before me, the key to this is to be found in private and unofficial correspondence, and the interpersonal networks that linked a wider system together.⁴⁸ Thomas Pringle, one of the ‘Cape radicals’, put this clearly when he wrote to an ally in 1825 that it was necessary for their goals for the colony to become ‘a complete party question’. In this way they could get support from both the ‘selfish as well as the generous’ parts of the ‘House of Commons’.⁴⁹ Similarly, the unofficial correspondence between the Colonial Office and Tory MPs – often marked ‘most secret’ – emphasised strategies for neutralising the political fallout from colonial scandals, a fallout that was firmly situated in the domestic political scene. As the Secretary of State Lord Bathurst wrote explicitly to Somerset: ‘as you will be attacked upon party principles … you are entitled to party support’.⁵⁰ It is within the wider imperial context of British oppositional politics that we need to place the story of Oliver the Spy.

Oliver arguably became more widely influential as an opposition symbol than he had ever been to the government interests he served. His established symbolic power in the metropolitan scene made him a gift to colonial radicals seeking to influence British public opinion. And the reverse was equally true. The specific consequences of Cape reforms may not have been central to the interests of the majority in the British political scene, but colonial debates could nevertheless prove useful ammunition for metropolitan agendas. Thus the historiography on Oliver the Spy underscores the way what should be seen as interconnected has instead been apportioned into discrete and mutually exclusive debates. The cut and thrust of early nineteenth-century politics made no such easy divide.

About the author

Kirsten McKenzie is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne University Publishing, 2004), A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (University of New South Wales Press, 2009 and Harvard University Press, 2010) and Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict, State Corruption and the Transformation of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Acknowledgements

For their advice on earlier versions of this paper my thanks to the participants in the Writing Modern British History Today workshop; to the University of Sydney Alchemists Writing Group; to James Drown and particularly to Ann Curthoys. This paper draws on material from my recent book, Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge University Press, 2016). I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to include it in this forum.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Dennis Biggins, ‘“Exit pursued by a beare”: A Problem in “The Winter’s Tale”‘, Shakespeare Quarterly, 13, no. 1 (1962): 3–13, 3.

2 Ann Curthoys, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories and You Want Us to Stop Already’, in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

3 The turn towards transnational biography across the last decade is eroding this assumption. Among recent collections see David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, eds, Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity 1700–present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

4 Sydney Monitor, 30 April 1828.

5 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

6 Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); James Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

7 Paul Pickering, ‘Betrayal and Exile: A Forgotten Chartist Experience’, in Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform, ed. Michael T. David and Paul Pickering (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 201.

8 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790–1988 (London: Routledge, 1989), 41; Clive Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”: Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s’, Social History 6, no. 2 (May 1981): 155–84.

9 Edward Baines (jnr), The Life of Edward Baines, Late M. P. for the Borough of Leeds, by his son, Edward Baines (London: Longman, 1851).

10 J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (London: Longman, 1919); A.F. Fremantle, ‘The Truth about Oliver the Spy’, English Historical Review 47 (1932): 601–16; R.J. White, From Waterloo to Peterloo (London: Heinemann, 1957), ch. 13; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1980), first pub. 1963; John Stephens, England’s Last Revolution: Pentrich 1817 (Buxton: Moorland, 1977).

11 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 726.

12 Kirsten McKenzie, Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009).

13 Reprinted in Anon., Spies and Bloodites!!! The Lives and Political History of those Arch-Fiends Oliver, Reynolds, & Co. Treason-Hatchers, Green-Bag-Makers, Blood-Hunters, Spies, Tempters, and Informers-General to His Majesty’s Ministers … (London, 1817), 22–3.

14 Ibid., 29.

15 George Cruikshank, ‘Conspirators; or, delegates in council’ published by S.W. Fores, 1 July 1817.

16 Papers received from Secretary of State, General Despatches, 1/25, no 298, Cape Provincial Archives, Cape Town (CA), Government House (GH).

17 CA, GH 1/25, no 299. It was ironically the acting governor, Sir Rufane Donkin, who actually oversaw Jones’s initial employment, since Somerset was then on leave in England. This was a point carefully made by Somerset (and conveniently forgotten by his rival Donkin) during investigation into Jones’s somewhat dubious career as a government builder at the Cape: Records of the Cape Colony: from February 1793 to April 1831 (RCC), ed. George McCall Theal (London, 1897–1905), vol. 23, 475.

18 Edward Baines, History of the Reign of George III, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (Leeds: Long, Hurst & Co., 1820), 87.

19 See Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 749–68.

20 Amongst an interconnected series of initiatives, Australian readers will be more familiar with the extensive reforms of the convict system that followed the Commissions of Inquiry led by John Thomas Bigge from 1819. Significantly Bigge was also one of the members of the Commission of Eastern Inquiry that landed at the Cape in 1823. Raymond Evans, ‘19 June 1822: Creating “An Object of Real Terror” – The Tabling of the First Bigge Report’, in Turning Points in Australian History, ed. Martin Crotty and David Roberts (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009).

21 The commissioners alerted the Colonial Office to this problem almost as soon as they arrived at the Cape: Bigge to Robert Wilmot Horton, 25 September 1823, Wilmot Horton Papers, Derbyshire Record Office, Catton Collection, D3155/WH 2751.

22 See James Epstein, ‘The Radical Underworld Goes Colonial: P. F. McCallum’s Travels in Trinidad’, in Davis and Pickering, eds, Unrespectable Radicals?; Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

23 Baines, History of the Reign of George III, 87.

24 Declaration of William Edwards, 18 September 1823, Protocol of the notary David Passmore Taylor, 26/1, no. 10, Notarial Deeds of David Passmore Taylor, Notarial Protocls (NCD), Cape Provincial Archives, Cape Town (CA).

25 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 774.

26 A ‘George Parker’, one of George Edwards’s known aliases, was listed as a modeller (the same profession as the spy) living in Green Point in 1840. He died there three years later: see R.M. Healey, ‘Edwards, George (1787?–1843)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed 10 January 2014 www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38374; Pickering, ‘Betrayal and Exile’, 202.

27 William Jones to Lt. Col. Bird, 9 November 1821, Private correspondence, 145, Colonial Office (CO), CA.

28 Times, 5 April 1822 (see also 10 August 1821).

29 Somerset to Bathurst, ‘Secret and confidential’, 18 July 1824, Bathurst Papers, 57/54, British Library (BL). These were, however, manifestly of an ad hoc rather than a systematised nature. For a very different model of imperial intelligence gathering see C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

30 Insolvent Liquidation and Distribution Account of the estate of Harriet Dear Widow of the late William Jones, 1827, Insolvency Papers (MOIC) 2/328, no 1148, CA. William Jones was questioned before the Commission of Eastern Inquiry as to the expense of building works at the Cape: RCC, vol. 21, 91–4. Christopher Bird made dark hints before the Commissioners regarding Somerset’s continued reliance upon Jones, despite the latter’s evident incompetence and misuse of funds: RCC, vol. 21, 168.

31 Times, 5 October 1824.

32 Edwards to Hume, 28 June 1824, RCC, vol. 29, 167. The ‘green bags’ refers to the cloth bags in which informers passed evidence to the Committee of Secrecy.

33 Times, 17 June 1826.

34 Times, 6 December 1824.

35 Times, 17 June 1825. John Castle, government spy, was a key informer on the Spencean Philanthropists. Employing Castle backfired, however, for his criminal record discredited the evidence he provided in the Spenceans’ treason trial in 1816.

36 South African Commercial Advertiser, 2 November 1825.

37 Advertiser, 30 December 1826.

38 Advertiser, 26 December 1826.

39 Somerset to Bigge, undated (1824), Bigge–Somerset correspondence, MSS Afr, series 24, Bodleain Library, Rhodes House, University of Oxford; Somerset to Bathurst, 12 October 1825, BL 57/88.

40 Robert Gregg and Madhavi Kale, ‘The Empire and Mr Thompson: Making of Indian Princes and English Working Class’, Economic and Political Weekly 32, no. 36 (September 1997): 2273–88.

41 Ann Curthoys, ‘History from Down Under: E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Australia’ Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 41, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 19–39; George Rudé, Protest and Punishment: The Story of Social and Political Protestors Transported to Australia 1788–1868 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

42 Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer.

43 Porter, Plots and Paranoia, 51.

44 Pickering, ‘Betrayal and Exile’, 201, 213, n 5.

45 A. F. Hattersley, Oliver the Spy and Others: A Little Gallery of South African Portraits (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1959).

46 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

47 See Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Porter, ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 1 (March 2008): 101–107; John M. MacKenzie, ‘“Comfort” and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 4 (December 2008): 659–68.

48 Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

49 Pringle to Fairbairn, 20 May 1825, in The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle, ed. Randolph Vigne (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2011), 184 (orig emphasis).

50 Bathurst to Somerset, 19 October 1824, BL 57/65.