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

Political plots were undoubtedly considered plausible in the seventeenth century. The harmony of the Three Kingdoms had lurched from political and religious crisis to being almost irretrievably shattered by a violent cycle of civil war, battle, rebellion, and violence in the 1640s and 1650s, scarring the mind of that generation and the generations to come. How had such a catastrophe come about? One easy answer was conspiracy.

In a culture in which the occult was still prominent, where secret signs and hints were sought to explain reality, and where astrological literature had as much prominence as “scientific” tomes, it was just as likely in the face of political and religious turmoil for people to reach for supernatural rather than political explanations. Only gradually did they come to blame such trials on human agency alone. So the activities of the informer, which lie at the center of Ms. Weil’s important book, armed as they were with schemes and plots, could work their almost occult way through the culture alongside other well-known credulities: witchcraft, providences, monstrous births, and the folk tale. Plots, as this work makes clear, were actually as much a cultural phenomenon—a moral panic—as a reality. Moreover, the elite of the society, educated in classical Greek and Roman history, accepted conspiracy, where plots were rife and actually did play a role in government.

Plots, or accusations of plots, were also rhetorical, to picture the “opposition,” whoever they were, matching “our patriotism” with their plotting. Historical examples of plots—history read and digested in the era—seemed satisfactory explanations for recent events. The penchant for “secret histories” in the period also meant that the public could easily read into ongoing events an allegorical meaning that settled the matter conclusively: plots were important.

Ms. Weil’s book deals with this culture and with the Jacobite plots and conspiracy in the era of William III. She argues that it was a phenomenon linked to political activity and more importantly to trust and mistrust of government. How government earned trust in this post-Revolutionary era is a central question of this work, not only a finely written explanation of the murky world of post-1688 England but also one that asks big questions of both its sources and its readers. The “victory” of 1688, for her, was never really the “Glorious Revolution” later mythologists invented, for uncertainty permeated ideas of truth, trust, and the reality of political life in William III’s reign. It was an era of plot and party. In this book about “intelligence in the political imagination,” the emphasis is on the latter rather than a mere rendition of spies and informers. The focus of this work is not the details of Jacobite plotting but its meaning.

Chapters one and two concern ideas of national and local security and issues of basic trust in government from Whig and Tory perspectives. Chapter three examines political informers and their use. Did the government’s need to have a “plot” encourage informers to produce them? Was this as much a buyer’s market as the financial and economic surge of the 1690s elsewhere? The ideas embedded in the culture of plotting take us into the heart of the plot texts. Chapters four and five deal with the ideology of such people, when they had one, and their easy credibility. Invariably locked into a tavern culture of drink and braggadocio, or secret congregations, the resulting texts often prefigured the emergent novels of Defoe, with their reported speech and dialogue. What might be labeled the literature of plot remains in the realm of narrative storytelling and the imagination.

At the core of this world lay post-1688 ideas of security and legitimacy: a “complex interplay between the credit of informers and the credit of government.” Trust and narrative are, therefore, at the heart of the text—trust in such bodies as the Post Office...