Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England by Andrea McKenzie is a book quite unlike any other we have read during the course of this semester. At first glance I assumed this was going to be a straightforward microhistory, not unlike Anatomy of a duel by Bowen, however McKenzie directly refutes this characterization of her work stating that “This book is not simply… a case study or ‘microhistory’. Rather, it is the story of how accusations, rumours and speculations about the death of one man transformed English political culture: an anatomy of a conspiratorial crisis that shook the nation to its core.”(p11) While the story itself is undoubtedly interesting from a “murder mystery” point of view, the author takes it a step further by seeking to uncover how this particular moment in Early Modern English history gave rise to the “new age of conspiratorial politics in which we now live.”(p5)
Andrea McKenzie is not only an expert in the fields of Crime and Legal History and Conspiratorial Politics, but manuscript history as well which lends an additional layer of credibility to her work.[1] Some of the sources she refers to throughout this book include shorthand marginalia and drafts of the chairman of the House of Commons Committee of Secrecy, George Treby, as well as draft copies of William Lloyd’s letters to Roger L’Estrange discussing Godfrey’s death which she personally decoded.(p9) The body of this text is composed of five chapters which range from dominant theories regarding the cause of death of Edmund Godfrey, rumours about the possibility of suicide, and subsequent information that emerged after the fact.
The first Chapter begins not with an account of Godfrey’s life, but rather one of his funeral, where clergyman William Lloyd posed the question ‘Qui Bono” or, whose interest was it? McKenzie points out that while Lloyd did not outright accuse Catholics of being the masterminds behind the conspiracy to murder Godfrey, she notes that he ended his funerary sermon with a “casual reference to the groundless conspiracy theory that Catholics had been responsible for the catastrophic Great Fire of London…” (p20) As Ed pointed out in his review, the comments of Lloyd, as well as Titus Oates, whom Godfrey had taken witness statements from prior to his death, were likely the cause of mass hysteria and violence directed towards English Catholics. However McKenzie also believes they were “more than simply a rallying call to the villagers to burn down Dr Frankenstein’s castle” instead arguing that they offer a “snapshot about what was known and believed about Godfrey… before any witness had come forward or any arrests had been made.”(p17)
Essentially, what the author is trying to do is to reject straightforward explanations regarding Godffrey’s death which had been put forth by subsequent historians as late as the 20th century, and instead return the historiography to a 17th century lens which can paint a more accurate picture of the complexity of the political life at the time. In doing so, McKenzie does not shy away from investigating the “surprising plausibility of some of even the wilder theories,”(p11) noting that the initial prosecution of Berry, Green and Hill as his killers rested on shaky evidence given by a man who repeatedly recanted and altered his testimony.
In chapter 3, she therefore examines the widespread speculations that Godreys death was actually the result of a suicide, a theory that had already been debunked even before Robert L’estrange and other contemporary Catholic propagandists put forth the idea.(p88) Mckenzie revisits forensic evidence put forth by L’estrange and asserts that the possibility of a suicide was incredibly unlikely, however she does not completely write off his theories, adding that one particularly “compelling contribution to the debate was in his psychological portrait of Godfrey as a man deeply distracted and depressed in the weeks leading up to his disappearance.”(p105) The academic integrity and honesty behind McKenzie’s methodology and research is one aspect of this work I really appreciated. She does not fall into pitfalls which settle for simplistic answers like robbery or suicide, yet she also does not completely write off the testimonies of L’estrange solely because he may have had alternative motivations in order to protect catholics.
In Chapter 4, McKenzie dives headfirst into the political machinations which were present in London during this period, especially related to Whigs who were anti-catholic and heavily opposed to the succession of James II. She points out that the so-called “Popish Plot” which accused Catholics of engaging in a conspiracy to assassinate Charles II had begun to run out of steam at exactly the same period when Godrey’s death reinvigorated it, making the timing incredibly suspicious.(p124)
As mentioned in her introduction, one of Mckenzie’s main goals in writing this book was to create a link between the conspiratorial nature of early modern England, and that of contemporary Anglo-American society. While I personally think some of these connections are too distant from one another to justify a correlation, it is a literary device which not only engages her audience, but allows them to empathize with the politics and cultural trends of a 300 year old society, something that is certainly no easy task. To quote just one example of this technique, McKenzie states “Much as the O.J. Simpson trial… helped spawn a cottage industry in television crime scene investigations and cold cases in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Godfrey’s death seems to have spurred this late seventeenth-century fascination with true crime.” (p128)
Throughout this work, McKenzie engages heavily with the existing historiography on the subject, an aspect of historical writing which we have not seen from every author during this semester. This willingness to not shy away from academic debates is what, in my opinion, makes for a truly insightful work on any subject. Within this text, she also demands that we should “take more seriously, and literally, the fact that men like William Lloyd and Gilbert Burnet emphasised Godfrey’s tolerance for and mysterious dealings with Catholics, suggesting that they may have got him into trouble.”(p158) Godfrey’s death may well have been the result of a political conspiracy, just not the one that audiences at the time had assumed. “It is a tragic irony that Godfrey… who seems to have laboured in the cause of compromise and toleration – contributed by his death to a dramatic breakdown in trust in the government, culminating in what recent historians have termed the ‘Restoration Crisis.”(p14)
[1] University of Victoria biography on Andrea McKenzie