Political Trust in Early Modern Britain

Abstract

The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were full of plots. The Popish Plot, the Meal Tub Plot, the Rye House Plot, Monmouth's rebellion and the Army Plot had already characterized the 1680s as a decade of intrigue; and after the revolution of 1688 the 1690s continued in a similar vein, with a rash of Jacobite plots. These post-revolutionary plots, or rather the ‘plague of informers’ whose evidence fuelled government anxiety about them, are the focus of Rachel Weil's very interesting book. The informers raised key issues of trust (which have, of course, a strong contemporary resonance that underlies a good deal of what Weil has to say): could their word be trusted and could the government be trusted to keep the people safe? The book stresses the fragility and uncertainty of the regime from 1689 to 1697 – its permanence is a matter of hindsight. The new government received many reports of plots against it and had to evaluate their credibility. Informers were especially problematic, since their motivations were opaque and mixed, and many proved untrustworthy. Weil has particularly intriguing case studies of William Fuller and Matthew Smith, both of whom revealed information but presented problems for policy makers about how far they could be trusted. Were they, in Weil's nice phrase, ‘patriotic entrepreneurs’, prepared to take risks to help secure the regime, or more sinister, ambiguous and self-interested figures? Such men, and even those in a position to assess their credibility, were themselves often part of a shady world, since the contacts that men had, putting them in a position to make assessments or give information, inevitably also involved them in a compromised world of secrecy and intrigue. As secretary of State James Vernon put it, ‘witnesses may be pitiful fellows and such as have assisted in the same crimes, but may they not therefor be better able to discover them?’ Nor was there agreement about what made anything credible – the criteria were not clear and government was having to find its way.