While dedicated to poetry as an avocation, Shelley was not
above performing the occasional clandestine service for the British government,
and often enlisted the equally impecunious Byron as an agent provocateur.
During one of these missions, Shelley was tasked with
obtaining information about Czechoslovakia’s defenses, and ordered Byron to use
his considerable charms to obtain that information by seducing Queen Caroline
Augusta of that country.
Byron supplied daily coded reports of his progress via carrier
pigeon for two weeks, but after promising that the defense plans would be
delivered via the next day’s message, he vanished from Prague and the reports
broke off.
Shelley spent the next three days in an agony of
speculation, and finally risked delivering a message to a pre-arranged safe
house through a local double agent.
The message read: “Byron—please report Status. Worried that Mission to Seduce Queen has
been Compromised.”
The next day a carrier pigeon brought Byron’s scribbled
reply: “Trust me—the male is in the Czech.”
Copyright 2015 Matthew J Wells
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