[citation needed] Susan was the sister of Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, an important English statesman in the seventeenth century.
[2] Burke's Peerage states that Susan married Kympton Mabbott, son of the journalist and publisher Gilbert Mabbot, and had a daughter, Diana, with him.
This information is considered questionable since contemporary documents suggest that Kympton and Diana were siblings, not father and daughter.
[3] Female spies were employed since their letters were often not examined as closely as those written by men given that they were most often thought to be simply of domestic nature.
[1] On 13 September 1656, Hyde wrote to Charles II, noting that she was in Wiltshire and warning the would-be-king of a possible double agent in their ranks.
[1] In late September 1656, after having stayed at Grittenham for five weeks and preparing to travel to London, Hyde was roughly arrested by three officers who searched her room and her pockets.
[1] She was then taken to Lambeth Palace,[1] reportedly having been scared into insanity,[5] and died a week later[1] on 23 September (3 October in the modern Gregorian calendar).
[1] Hyde was long forgotten in history, due to both lacklustre treatments by contemporary authors and imprecision on the part of historians in the twentieth century, who often glossed over female figures.
[1] Hyde was first brought to historical attention in 2018 through being devoted a chapter in the Dutch historian Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents, in which her story was reconstructed from preserved contemporary letters and reports.
[1] Hyde is alongside fellow royalist spy Diana Jennings a main character in the historical fiction novel Killing Beauties (2020) by Pete Langman, inspired by Akkerman's research in Invisible Agents.