In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III's England by Rachel Weil
  • Grant Tapsell
A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III's England. By Rachel Weil. [The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.] (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2013. Pp. xvi, 344. $40.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17104-4.)

Professor Weil has written a disappointing book on an interesting subject. She sets out to study informers in Williamite England because this "illuminates the complex interplay of the credit of the state with the credit of individuals" (p. 11). The 1690s were undoubtedly difficult years, with a new governing regime that was simultaneously keen to emphasize how different it was from the Catholic rule of James II, and anxious to downplay accusations of novelty and illegitimacy after a massive invasion of the country. As Weil notes, "The two major goals of the new regime, securing itself against enemies and winning the trust of subjects, were mutually interdependent but sometimes contradictory" (p. 68). The new regime trumpeted its commitment to "liberty," but was forced to lean on the testimony of shady informers to put to death enemies who plotted its overthrow with worrying frequency. How to construct trust was thus pivotally important, both for the Williamite government, and for plot "witnesses." The book is organized in three sections: the first considers matters from the perspective of the state; the second reverses things and turns to informers; the third offers two case-studies, the Lancashire Plot of 1694 and the Assassination Plot of 1696.

It is an unfortunate irony that a book about trust undermines itself so often from beginning to end. The first sentence of main text is deeply tendentious: "In [End Page 592] 1688, the English people deposed the Catholic king James II and installed the Protestant William and Mary as joint monarchs (p. 1). There is no overall conclusion, and the index to the book is extremely patchy in its coverage. In between, there are a number of errors of fact, for instance the dates of foundation of the Royal Society, the coronation of William and Mary, and the death of Mary II. The names of places, seventeenth-century people, and modern historians are misspelled. Exclamation marks are rampant. (So too modern slang: "dish dirt"; "pack rat"; "whopping"; "trashed"; "revving up.") In terms of argument, Professor Weil is keen to emphasize the contemporary relevance of her story, and largely approves of Steven Pincus's depiction of 1688 as "the first modern revolution." Thus William's government was "the first liberal post-revolutionary regime" (p. 278). Discussions of informing and trust tend therefore to be couched in terms explicable to social scientists, and to draw on comparisons with modern totalitarian states. Why this is a better approach than examining informing in other parts of the early modern world—the Venetian Republic, say—is not clear. Nor is it obvious why so little secondary literature on courts, witnesses, and testimony is deployed. Finally, Weil's approach to the problematic written evidence of the period becomes wearisomely repetitious. Time and again the reader is offered variants on the theme that "it is impossible to tell at this distance" whether something is true: "We cannot tell"; "it is not always possible to tell the difference"; "it is hard to confirm or disprove the charge"; "remains mysterious"; 'often obscure"; "maddeningly elusive." Since analysis generally hovers at the lit.-crit. level, "whether there was or was not plotting is not important" (p. 224). A Plague of Informers. is certainly not without merit—the case-studies in particular are suggestive, and will no doubt stimulate future researchers—but it remains a frustrating and ultimately underwhelming account.

Grant Tapsell
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
...

pdf

Share