On Graduate School: The PhD Program

"The captured plotter on the ground, however, was usually in for a bitter disappointment when he discovered the reality of the situation, or when he was told that his plot was all the fantasy of a 'trepanner'--the contemporary term for an agent provocateur. It undoubtedly led to depression, given the strain. Incarcerated, in gaol or the Tower, an unpleasant experience in itself, with the threat of death above him and blind despair around him, he might well give in to defeatism."

-Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660-1685