Elizabeth Sparrow (1) (1926–2016)

Elizabeth Sparrow was born Elizabeth Mary Wykes-Sneyd at Locrenton Vean, a house in the village of St. Keyne, in Cornwall, England. She was the only child of Vice-Admiral Ralph Stuart Wykes-Sneyd and his wife Harriet Rose Mary Fursdon. She was sickly as a child and received little formal education. She developed her love of history from the stories her father told her about her grandparents, who had been born before the Battle of Waterloo. During World War II, he led the local Home Guard, and Elizabeth, at age 13, served as his secretary, chauffeur, and aide-de-camp.

In 1953, she married Captain Benjamin Sparrow, a Cornish gentleman-farmer, with whom she had two children. She became an independent scholar and historian of espionage, specializing in the early history of the British secret service. Despite her lack of academic credentials, she got funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy for research in Paris, and in 1990 and 1992 she published two essays about the Secret Service in the Historical Journal, a publication normally reserved for scholarly pieces by academics.

She spent the next few years visiting archives in Switzerland, Germany and France. In 1999, she published her groundbreaking history Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792-1815. In 2013, she published Phantom of the Guillotine, in which she showed that a young Frenchman named Louis Bayard, a master of disguise, was a real secret agent employed by the British during the French Revolution, and acted much like the fictional Scarlet Pimpernel.