Robert Harley as secretary of state and his intelligence work: 1702-1708

This article will examine Harley’s role as secretary of state (1704-1708), and particularly his work in the world of intelligence and espionage. By probing Harley’s motives and practices, it will link these to the important administrative developments that were taking place in the era. For how such secret material was handled, and how office practice worked, dictated the practices and the use of intelligence material. What Harley’s secretaryship of state does reveal is that by the early eighteenth-century espionage, however well or badly handled it was, had become an essential part of the routine of the early-modern state.