Elizabeth Alkin
Elizabeth Alkin was a publisher, nurse and spy for the Parliamentarian forces during the English Civil Wars. She was also commonly known as Parliament Joan, one of many derogatory names she was called by royalist sympathisers.
Little is known about Alkin's early life. Her husband was arrested and hanged in 1643 by the royalists during the First English Civil War for spying for the Parliamentarians; Alkin continued her husband's work, spying in Oxford, even during the city's siege.
By 1648 Alkin was involved in selling and then publishing Parliamentary newsbooks—the forerunners of newspapers. She used her role as a vendor to track down and report several publishers of royalist material. After the civil war, Alkin nursed casualties of the First Anglo-Dutch War, initially in Portsmouth, then Harwich and Ipswich. With her health failing she returned to London. It is presumed she died shortly afterwards, possibly over the 1655 Christmas period.
Pre-civil war
Little is known of Alkin until 1645; because of comments about her age made later in life, her date of birth is taken to be around 1600. According to the historian Eric Gruber von Arni, she was born Elizabeth Dearing or Deering. Several sources state her husband was Francis Alkin, although according to Gruber von Arni, she married a George Alkin at St Margaret's church, Westminster, on 12 November 1635. The couple had three children.Civil war spy and nurse
In the early part of the English Civil War, Alkin's husband was a spy for the Parliamentarians; both he and Alkin were working in Oxford—the royalist wartime capital—where she was tending wounded Parliamentarian prisoners. He was denounced as a spy by Stephen Fossett, the surgeon to the royalist governor of Oxford, and was hanged in summer 1643. Despite the loss of her husband, Alkin carried on working in Oxford, both tending the prisoners and spying for the Parliamentarians. She continued to work in Oxford—freely entering and leaving the town—during its sieges.In 1645 Alkin was employed by the Earl of Essex and Sir William Waller as a spy for the Parliamentarians; she received a similar commission from Sir Thomas Fairfax two years later. Parliamentary records show that in 1645 she received three payments totalling £6 from the Committee for the Advance of Money for uncovering the activities of George Mynnes, a Surrey-based iron merchant who was supplying metal to the royalist forces. When the war started, he had supplied the royalists with of iron and had £40,000-worth of wire and iron cached around the country.
In January 1647 Alkin petitioned Parliament for her to take possession of the sequestered house of Fossett, the man who had denounced her husband. This was granted, but before she could move in, Fossett filed—and won—a civil suit to overturn the seizure. In October that year she was granted £50. Alkin was paid much less than other spies in Parliamentarian service; some were paid as much as £200 a month, while her superior was paid £400 a year.
During the 1648 siege of Colchester in the Second English Civil War Alkin again nursed Parliamentarian soldiers and was awarded five payments for her work between August and October. She was also given travelling expenses for a trip to London which, Gruber suggests, was likely for the transportation of casualties to military hospitals.
Newsbook seller, publisher and spy
In the seventeenth century daily news was published in newsbooks which tended to be small eight-page publications, the forerunners of newspapers. They were usually sold on the street by what the historian Bob Clarke describes as "semi-destitute female hawkers, known as Mercury Women". In Parliamentarian-held areas, those publications supporting the royalist cause were closed down and the publishers prosecuted; Alkin became involved in uncovering those behind royalist publications and for some of her work she adopted the pseudonymic surname "Strof" or "Stroffe". In 1648 the royalist newsbooks the Mercurius Melancholicus and the Parliament Kite both referred to her attempts to uncover them, and the following year the royalist publication Mercurius Pragmaticus called her an "old bitch" who had "as pocky a Nose as any of her Masters" and who could "smell out a loyall-hearted man as soon as the best blood-hound in the army". Similarly, Edward Crouch, another royalist publisher, said in 1650 that Alkin was close to finding him; he described her as being fat, about fifty years old and one "who was now the most effective ferret for the government and Stationers' Hall".It is possible that Alkin was behind the capture and arrest of the editor of the Mercurius Catholicus, the Roman Catholic priest Thomas Budd, in 1648. In 1653 she petitioned for Budd's release for three months as he was in ill health. One of those she certainly uncovered was William Dugard, who ran four presses at Merchant Taylors' School in London. He was printing copies of Defensio Regia pro Carolo primo, Claudius Salmasius's defence of Charles I; he was imprisoned in February 1650. The following year she was paid £10 for discovering the printers of Edward Hall's work Manus testium lingua testium, and received further recompense from the Committee for the Advance of Money for other, unknown services. Alkin was due a reward for uncovering Dugard and was given between £200 and 300; this was kept from her by William Mills, the official to whom Alkin had initially reported the presence of the presses. The loss of money nearly led to Alkin's imprisonment for debt, but she petitioned for funds and was awarded £40; the money was deducted from the balance that had not yet been paid to Mills.
Alkin petitioned for further funds and, on 2 June 1649, the House of Commons instructed the Council of State to provide her with a house for life and further funds. The following year the Council advised that she should receive annual rents from the king's slaughterhouse to provide her with a source of income; this amounted to £7 a year.
Although Alkin also acted as one of the newsbook sellers, between 1650 and 1651 she was involved in publishing issues of different, short-lived newsbooks, including The Impartial Scout, The Moderne Intelligencer, Mercurius Anglicus and Mercurius Scoticus, or, The Royal Messenger. The historian Marcus Nevitt says that Alkin was "reappropriating Royalist titles for Parliamentarian consumption", and Clarke agrees, adding that Alkin may have chosen to use formerly royalist titles, or royalist-sounding names to win the confidence of royalist sympathisers, and get them to reveal the location of illicit printers. In total she produced ten newsbooks of differing names; The Impartial Scout is the only one in which her name appears.
The Third English Civil War ended in September 1651. In 1652 the rents Alkin received from the king's slaughterhouse stopped, as the property was sold. She petitioned for a replacement property, but was instead given a payment of £3 10 shillings and given rooms in the Palace of Westminster in lieu of her pension.
Post-civil war nursing
When the news broke in February 1653 of the casualties sustained in the Battle of Portland—part of the First Anglo-Dutch War—Alkin petitioned the Council of State to employ her as a nurse at Dover.That your petitioner hath ever since bene faithfull and serviceable to the State upon all occasions in these late warres in which she day and night hazarded her life and was from time to time a greate help to the distressed impresoned and maymed soldiers by releiving them. That she being still desirous to continue her best indeavours amongst them.
Your petitioner humbly beseecheth your honors to be pleased to appoint her to be one of the nurses for the maymed seamen at Dover.
The council agreed and Alkin was given a warrant to aid the wounded in Portsmouth. She assisted Daniel Whistler in setting up a network of casualty reception stations in Portsmouth, Harwich and East Anglia; the stations treated both English and Dutch casualties. While in Portsmouth, Alkin took a convoy of 34 serious casualties the to London. She was paid £13 6s for her work.
In mid-1653 Alkin was nursing in Harwich. With funds from the government being slow to arrive—she had only been given £5 when she arrived—Alkin found nurses to assist her and paid them from her own pocket; 200 wounded sailors soon arrived in the town. The war put a strain on the available finances and there was little money available for the care of Dutch prisoners. She petitioned for funds, explaining "seeing their want and misery to be very great I could not but have some pity towards them ". Given £10 from her superiors, she immediately spent £6 on the Dutch prisoners in Harwich and then more at Ipswich.
In December 1653 Alkin once again turned to informing when she provided evidence about "the murder committed by the Portuguese upon the new Exchange". The case concerned Dom Pantaleon Sa, the brother of the Portuguese ambassador, accompanied by Portuguese and Maltese friends, were involved in a disturbance at the new Exchange in which a passer-by, a Mr Greenway, was shot and killed. Alkin received £10 for the information.
Alkin left Harwich an ill woman and returned to London. To pay for the doctor and two nurses that attended her, she was forced to sell many of her belongings. In February 1654 she wrote to Robert Blackborne, the secretary to the Admiralty Commissioners, asking for payment of funds that were owed to her. She told Blackborne that "I am a very weak woman, having many infirmities upon me". That April she was forced to write to the commissioners once again when she and thirty others were instructed to vacate their residences in the Palace of Whitehall as Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, wanted them for himself. She found new premises in the parish of St Margaret, Westminster. Alkin was paid £10 in May and again in September. She was paid a further twenty English marks around May 1655.
The petition for financial relief from May 1655 is the last recorded note on her, and it is presumed that she died soon afterwards; Gruber von Arni suggests her death may have been over the Christmas period of 1655.