Jane Whorwood: The King’s Smuggler

‘My travels, accidents, dangers, more become a Romance than a letter’, wrote the royalist agent Jane Whorwood in 1648. Whorwood was a tough, genteel maverick. She was described by contemporaries as ‘red haired’ and as ‘a tall, well fashioned and well languaged gentlewoman with a round visage and pockholes in her face’. No portrait of her is known, although her stepfather, half-sister and brother-in-law all sat for court painters. Evidence of Jane’s service to Charles I (1600-49) in the Civil War is almost as scant as that for her physical appearance, partly because her role as an agent was secretive and partly because others outscrambled her at the Restoration, ‘all at daggers drawn’ as Pepys wryly observed, to reinvent themselves and their past service to the crown. Yet Jane Whorwood was much more than the ‘mistress of a martyr King’, the bit player suggested by our lack of information. The king’s final testimonial in October 1648 was clear: ‘I cannot be more confident of any.’