Janet Todd
speaker
181 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Janet Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, not a lot, but she was clearly humbly born.
We think that her father was a barber in Kent.
She was born into this tumultuous time, as you've already mentioned, and for the rest of her life she had a horror of civil strife and Puritan rule, the notion of a government that has to control behaviour and morality.
Her mother appears to have been a wet nurse in a more elevated family.
And I think it's probably through that connection that she gets to know a man called Killigrew, who, when the restoration comes, is both involved in the Secret Service and in the theatre.
And of course, Ben comes into history first as a secret agent.
That is what we are doing, I think, rather substantially.
I hope one day there will be more known.
I think the barber bit is pretty secure.
It's all circumstantial because she's not born into the kind of family that keeps letters in the attic and that has a big house where they can control and hold their own archives.
So it's not surprising that very little is known.
And the fact that she is constantly referred to as someone humbly born, I think, is fair enough.
What I think is almost more important than exactly what her provenance was is where did she get her amazing education.
She is obviously an autodidact.
She obviously makes a great use of everything and everybody she knows.
And she's just a very, very clever girl.
But nonetheless, she learns how to write in all genres.
She learns how to comport herself among the learned, among men who are at the ends of court.
She learns all that somewhere.
Well, please don't, because I don't know.
Showing 1–20 of 181 · page 1 of 10
Next →