A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III’s England, by Rachel Weil

Abstract

A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William Ill's England, by Rachel Weil. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013. xiii, 344 pp. $40.00 US (cloth). Rachel Weil's new book examines plots, real or contrived, of decade following of 1688 and informers who did so much to uncover or construct them. With illiberal nature of so many contemporary revolutions in mind, Weil explores tensions between liberty and security in Williamite England. She argues that we cannot understand first liberal post-revolutionary regime came to look like without taking into account impact of and fear of plots (p. 278)--and motives and actions of informers who stoked fears of such plotting. In a government established by revolution, governors could count even less than before on momentum of obedience, and perceptions of legitimacy rested even less securely on sanction of hereditary or divine right. As such, Weil notes, and credit became increasingly important categories in political discourse. But trust in what? People had to believe both that regime would survive and that it would protect their liberties, she suggests, but efforts to secure one risked other. That Tories and Whigs tended to have different answers to question of how best to ensure both security and liberty, shaped by their respective senses of what had been meant to do, further complicated responses. By taking such steps as suspending habeas corpus, delaying promised reforms to treason trial procedures, imposing oaths of loyalty, and relying so heavily on informers, regime weakened trust in its claims to protect liberties, and thus potentially, too, trust in its likely survival. The artful exposure of a well-timed assassination and invasion plot in 1696, though, brought a modicum of stability in its wake. Weil thus forcefully reminds readers of insecurity, instability, and illiberality of years immediately following revolution. She situates her work amongst those of Tim Harris, Edward Vallance, and Steven Pincus, which have critiqued Whig-Burkeian depiction of and rendered it a touch less glorious. Pincus's treatment of events in 1688 as the first modern revolution is particularly influential here. While claim that we might gain insight into difficulties of establishing liberal regimes today never quite convinces, notion that we might apply or test insights gained from studies of intervening political conflagrations to better understand events in Williamite England bears fruit. Acknowledging that late seventeenth-century England was no Jacobite France or Stalinist Russia, Weil nonetheless draws usefully upon works by scholars such as Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately on politics of informing. Seeing informing as a point of contact between governors and governed, and a point of access to politics from below, Weil asks both what informers got from state and what state got from its informers. …