Author: Ed K

Andrea McKenzie’s “Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England: The Mysterious Death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey” seeks to unravel the enduring murder mystery of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s death which has fascinated historians and the public for over three hundred years and spawned numerous conspiracies ever since he was found in a ditch run through with his own sword in October 1678. Sir Godfrey was a respected, knighted, Justice of the Peace for Whitehall, who just prior to his death, had taken several witness statements while investigating the allegations of the “notorious perjurer” Titus Oates who baselessly claimed to have infiltrated the Jesuits and obtained inside information on an impending Catholic conspiracy — the “Popish Plot.” (1) Oates together with William Bedloe, falsely claimed that Jesuits plotted with English Catholics to organize a diabolical plot to kill King Charles II, massacre thousands of English Protestants, burn London (again!),[1] place his brother and heir, James the Duke of York on the throne, and impose Catholicism and French absolute rule on Britian. (1-2, 33-36) In the febrile religious and political environment of the Restoration, Oates’s allegations were widely believed, even by some Catholics, and regrettably unleased a hysterical moral panic that led to a crackdown on Catholics and the unfortunate judicial murder of dozens of Catholics and the imprisonment of many others.

McKenzie’s book at times reads like a detailed true crime murder mystery – a genre which ironically was emerging in England at this time. Each chapter focuses on a potential suspect or group of suspects and explores the forensic evidence, testimony of witnesses, political environment, and motives of various people suspected by contemporaries in often elaborate conspiracy theories to have committed the crime. In chapter three, she examines evidence regarding whether Sir Godfrey’s death was a suicide, as alleged by royal propogandist Roger L’Estrange in his “Brief History,” published in 1688. Some modern historians such as Alan Marshall have promoted a variant of L’Estrange’s suicide theory arguing Sir Godfrey’s suicide was “covered up and staged by the family” to protect their estate. (8) McKenzie rejects these suicide arguments. She also explores whether Godfrey’s death was murder disguised as a suicide by a Jesuit and Catholic cabal designed to protect the “usual suspects” of Catholic conspirators behind the Popish Plot, a theory that was widely believed at the time; or a “false flag” operation launched by the ambitious and unscrupulous Earl of Danby, Charles II’s chief minister, designed to protect his position at court; or a murder directed by the Duke of Buckingham to protect what Sir Godfrey intimated was a “horrible secret” revealed to Godfrey shortly before his death. (51)

McKenzie’s detailed history is far more than a whodunit that seeks to solve a complex murder mystery.[2] Rather, McKenzie’s history explores issues of moral panic, mass hysteria, conspiracy theories, and the tendency to “scapegoat marginalized groups” (folk devils), in this instance Catholics, which has resonance with today’s modern politics where we have witnessed the QAnon movement and other conspiracies involving elites. (52) According to McKenzie, the death of Sir Godfrey gave credence to Oates’s wild allegations unleashing latent fears that “plunged the nation into an anti-Papist moral panic,” that brought dozens of Catholics to their deaths “because their religion made the trumped-up charges against them not only plausible, but unanswerable.” (181, 196) Further, Sir Godfrey’s death fueled the “Exclusion Crisis” (1679-81) which dominated British politics beginning in 1679 wherein Parliament sought to exclude the Duke of York from the succession leading to the Glorious Revolution in 1688. (53) These outcomes were possible she convincingly argues because “of the demise of a culture of civility, compromise, and coalition” akin to that experienced in modern American politics. (196) Thus, as she puts it “the aim of this book is not to pass judgment on the judicial mishaps and prejudices of the past but rather to examine the particular circumstances and contexts that gave rise to them.” (4)

Most modern historians have concluded the Papist Plot itself was a deliberate fictional invention by Oates without any factual basis. However, McKenzie astutely argues contemporaries were not “wholly irrational or without evidentiary basis” in grasping at conspiracies in this febrile climate as there were “real” plots and conspiracies afoot involving “secret French diplomacy and crypto-Catholicism at court.” (52) In fact, as rumored at the time, Charles II had entered into the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV in 1670 in which he “promised to declare war on the Dutch and to announce his conversion to Catholicism . . . in exchange for subsidies” which would enable him to avoid calling Parliament for revenue and finance a standing army that many suspected was intended for use against his own subjects rather than in foreign wars. (184, 185) Embarrassing details of this Treaty began to leak as early as 1672. (184)

In addition, Catholic zealot Edward Coleman’s letters, some of which were published at the time, revealed that possibly at the behest of the Duchess of York, for whom he served as secretary, he “had solicited foreign [French] aid to promote both a repeal of the penal laws against recusants [including Catholics] and dissolution of the intolerably Anglican Cavalier Parliament” possibly with the support of the Duke of York. (181, 195) William Lloyd wrote in a cryptic letter, first decrypted by McKenzie, in response to royal propogandist L’Estrange that Coleman had “confided sensitive and ‘horrible secrets’ to Godfrey” that made Godfrey fear for his life. (174) McKenzie argues that Sir Godfrey learned from Edward Coleman “not about Oates’s bogus Popish Plot;” rather, about Coleman’s “admission of complicity in a real plot to use French money to bribe English MPs and other people dissatisfied with Danby’s administration in order to bring about more toleration for Catholics.” (182, 207) Godfrey also learned, possibly from Coleman, that the ardent Protestant Duke of Buckingham also solicited and accepted French bribes. (208)  Another potentially dangerous secret known by Godfrey was that the Duke of York had hosted a Jesuit conference at Saint James just before the Popish Plot emerged which could implicate the Duke in the Plot in the public mind. (174)

McKenzie’s analysis complicates the traditional Whiggish historical narrative of the corrupt Charles II and Tories taking French bribes by noting that many Whigs also took French bribes including the Duke of Buckingham. (189, 208) These real plots taken together made Oates’s spurious accusations more believable to contemporaries predisposed to believe and have complicated attempts to resolve the mystery of Sir Godfrey’s death ever since.

McKenzie engages in through archival research and introduces for the first time several letters she decrypted from William Lloyd to L’Estrange. She compares Lloyd’s drafts to the excerpts that appear in his “History” indicating that he was selective and manipulated his evidence in arguing Godfrey had committed suicide. She analyzes a plethora of primary sources including the Lloyd’s letters, the writings of Bishop Gilbert Burnet, letters of the well-informed French ambassador Paul Barillon to Louis XIV, Edward Coleman’s key evidence. McKenzie has thoroughly analyzed “contemporary pamphlets and trial accounts, newsletters, parliamentary records and state papers, journals, memoirs, diaries, and correspondence.” (8)

In the Conclusion, McKenzie finally reveals, after examining in excruciating detail all other potential culprits, whom she believes murdered Sir Godfrey. She hedges but asserts: “it is possible, then, that Buckingham ordered Godfrey’s murder because the magistrate was in possession, through Coleman, of correspondence which implicated the duke in French schemes to bribe the English political opposition.” (219) McKenzie describes Buckingham as having a track record of violence and suffering from “narcissist personality disorder” such that he lacked empathy, was unscrupulous and may have directed “his equally unscrupulous henchman Colonel John Scott” to murder Sir Godfrey. (220)

[1]Many Protestants blamed Jesuits and Catholics for the Great Fire of London of 1666. Id., 20, 197.

[2]Professor McKenzie posted an hour length lecture on her work on YouTube.

Eleanor Hubbard’s Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570-1630 is a social history, maritime history, and a history of empire, focused on the agency and experiences of English seafarers as “practitioners of a skilled craft” and in-demand “global labor [force], connecting the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, the Old World and the New, the East and the West.” (4) She argues English seafarers possessed bargaining power in the aggregate due to their reputation for violence, valor in battle, accurate gunnery, and extensive maritime skills that was often sufficient to protect and even expand their unwritten customary rights such as the right to private trading, shares of prize money, and wages in the face of disaster against merchants, including even the powerful state-like East India Company. (4, 190, 197)

Eleanor Hubbard obtained her PhD in history from Havard in 2009 while working with David Armitage. She was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University from 2009 to at least 2017 focused on early modern England and maritime studies.  She is fluent in French and reads Dutch, German and Italian which is reflected in her use of Dutch East India Company and Venetian state records.

Eleanor Hubbard’s research effort for this work is impressive. In particular, she painstakingly mined the archives of the High Court of Admiralty, and used often neglected sources such as libels (i.e., complaints), written examinations from witnesses and movants in prize cases, wage disputes, spoilage cases and other matters; as well as the archives of the English East India Company, Trinity House, Venetian and English State Papers; and travel writings, including ships logs, diaries, and other sources to skillfully reconstruct from this fragmentary evidence the biographies and collective experiences of about 10,000 individual seafarers – not all of whom of course make appearances in her book. (17-21)

Her lively narrative adeptly tells the story of these forgotten seafarers while supporting larger themes regarding the development of the English Empire and role of seafarers during a predatory period under Elizabeth I to a more commercial orientation that she argues emerged after James I concluded the long running war with Spain in 1604, and onward to the 1630s. (29) She concludes that although, “they had no guild to protect them, sailors regarded themselves as practitioners of a skilled craft, a collective body in their own right, with customary rights that they were eager to protect and, if possible extend” with the result that they had more bargaining power than most land laborers. (11)  Hubbard argues convincingly, “the common rights the seamen most valued were the rights to plunder and trade” for their own account to supplement wages, thereby ignoring the monopoly rights of the East India, Moscow, and Levant Companies, and opportunistically engaging in privateering and piracy. (11, 203)

Hubbard makes substantial contributions to the history of the English Empire by tracing the transition from an Elizabethan policy of predation to the end of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) under James I and the more corporate approach of the English East India Company. She argues convincingly that the “corporate vision of empire” of the East India Company and others “clashed with the freewheeling traditions of English seafarers” who were in high demand as a resource and “essential to English enterprise” which gave them considerable agency collectively. (2) The East India Company, captains and owners had to make concessions to the customary rights of sailors because “their skills and mobility, the dangers and endemic violence of the seas, the weakness of the state, and the decentralization of the English empire all combined to give seafaring laborers more bargaining power than their fellows on land.” (10) Despite the Company’s efforts to preclude private trading, she argues “Sailors were not blank slates; they came to the Company with expectations developed on English privateers, merchantmen, and pirates’ ships as well as in foreign service.” (166) Moreover, she observes that in contrast to the Spanish and Portuguese “seaborne empires, in which the state played a more central role, English Maritime expansion remained largely a matter of private enterprise, more the uncoordinated product of a multitude of actors and their short-term interests than any coherent imperial plan.” (4-5)

Although she begins with the shipwreck in 1609 on Bermuda of the “Sea Venture” which was bound for the nascent Jamestown English colony; Hubbard’s seafarers most often roam the Mediterranean and Asian waters. Nonetheless, the geographic breadth of her work and her vivid depictions of English seafarers fluidly offering their services to Ottoman pashas, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and even the Dutch, and opportunistically roaming in and out of piracy in Ireland, Mamora, Algiers, Livorno and elsewhere, all the while anticipating pardons, and trading commodities on their own behalf, is reminiscent of themes identified in Atlantic History and the turn to global history. (73, 78-79, 136-138) Atlantic historians have long focused on the circulation by sea of goods, people, revolutionary ideas, pathogens, plants, consumer tastes, slaves and commodities.[1]  Hubbard argues similarly that “like the elite travelers who roam through Game’s Web of Empire,[2] seafarers were men with global horizons, cosmopolitans, who moved fluidly across institutional, legal and even national boundaries” with agendas that often clashed with that of the English Government, East India Company, Levant Company, and other patrons and players. (3)

Consistent with trends in Atlantic history, she observes that seafarers shaped the emerging British empire such that control and policy did not always originate in the metropole; rather, “it was also constructed within the corporations themselves and in the territorial colonies,” and by the piracy and obstinate pursuit by seafarers of their customary rights. (5) Although speaking to an earlier period, Hubbard’s work is consistent with that of Atlantic historian Tyson Reeder.  Reeder focuses on the Atlantic and persuasively argues that smugglers, privateers, and rogue officials engaged in illicit trade flows in the wild, messy periphery or “borderwaters” of the Atlantic shaped metropolitan policies in Britian, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States in the eighteenth century. Reeder further argues that “if state policies [at the core] shaped Atlantic trade networks, those networks developed just as much from contravention of state policies” in the periphery by smugglers and conniving local officials.[3]

Hubbard’s concept of nascent English nationhood or “Englishness” among seafarers is a distinctive and innovative historical intervention. Hubbard boldly argues that “persistent and lethal maritime violence and the difficulties of managing cross-cultural trade despite intense European rivalries made [English] nationhood the glue that bound global English maritime enterprise together.” (15) She argues English nationhood was important to seafarers “because foreign interlocutors found it useful to treat them as a national collective in which individuals could be held responsible for one another’s actions.” (16) Moreover, English seafarers sought each other’s assistance when under duress in foreign ports. Hubbard argues that in Asia, English merchants attempted to distinguish themselves from other traders by emphasizing the power of their sovereign and “presenting themselves as courteous and friendly people.” (222) However, Hubbard’s argument is undermined somewhat by her own evidence that English seafarers often failed to perform “manly courtesy” and foreign hosts were most often more impressed with their level of military power and trading goods to the extent they considered them relevant at all. (236) As she notes, Jahangir, and Japanese Lords perceived the English as marginal players and the Dutch VOC seized opportunities to humiliate and demonstrate their regional superiority in Southeast Asia which undermined English performances of manly courtesy. (236-240)

In contrast to the overriding importance of religion in other works in this course, Hubbard is largely dismissive of the role of religion as a motive in seafarer behavior. Hubbard situates herself in opposition to C. M. Senior’s emphasis on the “rough patriotism and anti-Spanish fervor” of English pirates. (39, 153) She argues instead that Protestant identity was not the focus of their Englishness as they “often nurtured commercial bonds with Muslims and ‘pagans,’ while the Dutch, their [erstwhile] religious allies, became dangerous and hostile rivals.” (14-15) Further, she provides numerous examples of seafarers cynically converting to Islam or Catholicism when it suited their interests and observes that “evidence of visceral hatred for Catholics is sparse . . . in the records of everyday privateering.” (44) In sum, Hubbard is a good storyteller and weaves a compelling narrative that recovers the lives of the common seafarers that formed the backbone of English maritime power in this period and makes substantial contributions to the social history of seafarers, and the early history of the nascent English empire.

[1] In her Atlantic history, for example, Ashlii White uses the metaphor of “an intricate web of connections” to describe her Atlantic framework. Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 6. See, e.g., David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British and Atlantic World 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), 11; John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) (impact of spread of pathogens in the Atlantic).

[2] Alison, Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in the Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[3] Tyson Reeder, Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 35. Coincidentally, Tyson Reeder will make a presentation at GMU on April 6, 2026.