As we all know, the best way to get news out is to tell someone it's a secret. Somehow, everyone will soon know. But what can history teach us about genuinely keeping things secret?

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Firstly, we should choose a credible secret. Mary Toft claimed to have been startled by a rabbit during her pregnancy in 1726 and had ever since been giving birth to rabbits. Eminent medical professionals supported her story and made her a great cause célèbre – until someone pointed out that people can’t give birth to rabbits and she was exposed as a fraud.

Quite what Mary was expecting to gain from breeding rabbits remains unclear, but it was a lot of effort for a small reward. So if you’re going to have a secret, make it something everyone wants. Tudor fraudster Doll Philips claimed the fairy queen had secretly explained to her how to find gold. While everyone was out looking for the promised fortune, she would rob their houses. Shakespeare created scenes with fake fairy queens based on her.

Religious fraud

The next thing we should consider is hiding our secret. There are two schools of thought here. Firstly, conceal the secret. Secondly, don’t. The latter course was favoured by the medieval prior of Leominster Church. He installed his secret lover in a gallery in the upper reaches of the building, claiming her to be divinely inspired. As proof, communion wafers would ‘fly’ from his hand to her during mass – with the aid of a wire.

If we are to be less brazen, we might follow the example of Christopher Clayton Hutton. ‘Clutty’ worked for MI9, a branch of military intelligence, and was involved in training men to escape from PoW camps and to evade capture during World War II. He created an escape pack that included a compass hidden in a button, maps printed on parachute silk and a version of Monopoly that doubled as a prison-break kit.

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Having brilliantly hidden our secret, we must be careful! It would be really fun to let others in on it, but this can have dangerous consequences. Lady Grange was trapped in an unhappy marriage, so threatened to reveal that her husband was involved in the Jacobite Rising in 1715 if he didn’t release her. Instead he had her kidnapped and moved to a number of different remote islands while holding a fake funeral for her back in Edinburgh. She died alone and abandoned on Skye in 1745.

You cannot be serious...

Of course, when you do let someone in on your secret, there’s no guarantee you’ll be believed. Serbian Dušan ‘Tricycle’ Popov acted as a double-agent for the British during World War II, but was known as something of a playboy. When he arrived in the US, FBI director J Edgar Hoover was so horrified by Popov’s behaviour that he dismissed intelligence reports that might have helped to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Going hand in hand with deciding who we tell is the most important thing about secrets – not letting them be found out. People don’t like being kept in the dark. After the androgynous spy Chevalier d’Éon published secret information on Louis XV, he went into hiding disguised as a woman. The king’s successor, Louis XVI, later gave permission for d’Éon to return to home, but only if he spent the rest of his life as a woman.

A black and white image of a woman in period clothing
The Chevalier d’Éon (1728–1810) was a French diplomat, spy and soldier who spent much of his life living as a woman. (Photo by Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Finally, if we avoid the improbable, the brazen, the untrustworthy and the unbelievable, we might just get away with it. No one took any notice of secretary Melita Norwood, who for years worked for a UK military research organisation involved in the production of nuclear weapons. Surrounded by secrets, she had a particular secret of her own – she was a KGB spy and was only discovered when she was 87 years old, 27 years after she had retired.

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This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed

Authors

Justin Pollard is a historian, television producer and writer

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