Conspiracy Culture In Stuart England

On a cold October afternoon in 1678, the Westminster justice of the peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey left his home in Charing Cross and never returned. Within hours of his disappearance, London was abuzz with rumours that the magistrate had been murdered by Catholics in retaliation for his investigation into a supposed 'Popish Plot' against the government. Five days later, speculation morphed into a moral panic after Godfrey's body was discovered in a ditch, impaled on his own sword in an apparent clumsily staged suicide. This book presents an anatomy of a conspiratorial crisis that shook the foundations of late Stuart England, eroding public faith in authority and official sources of information. Speculation about Godfrey's death dovetailed with suspicions about secret diplomacy at the court of Charles II, contributing to the emergence of a partisan press and an oppositional political culture in which the most fantastical claims were not only believable but plausible. Ultimately, conspiracy theories implicating the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.ng the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.ng the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.ng the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.

For many generations, Guy Fawkes and his gunpowder plot, the 'Man in the Iron Mask' and the 'Devils of Loudun' have offered some of the most compelling images of the early modern period. Conspiracies, real or imagined, were an essential feature of early modern life, offering a seemingly rational and convincing explanation for patterns of political and social behaviour. This volume examines conspiracies and conspiracy theory from a broad historical and interdisciplinary perspective, by combining the theoretical approach of the history of ideas with specific examples from the period. Each contribution addresses a number of common themes, such as the popularity of conspiracy theory as a mode of explanation through a series of original case studies. Individual chapters examine, for example, why witches, religious minorities and other groups were perceived in conspiratorial terms, and how far, if at all, these attitudes were challenged or redefined by the Enlightenment. Cultural influences on conspiracy theory are also discussed, particularly in those chapters dealing with the relationship between literature and politics. As prevailing notions of royal sovereignty equated open opposition with treason, almost any political activity had to be clandestine in nature, and conspiracy theory was central to interpretations of early modern politics. Factions and cabals abounded in European courts as a result, and their actions were frequently interpreted in conspiratorial terms. By the late eighteenth century it seemed as if this had begun to change, and in Britain in particular the notion of a 'loyal opposition' had begun to take shape. Yet the outbreak of the French Revolution was frequently explained in conspiratorial terms, and subsequently European rulers and their subjects remained obsessed with conspiracies both real and imagined. This volume helps us to understand why.

Conspiracy Culture investigates conspiracy theories in contemporary American culture, asking why conspiracy narratives are so popular and so ubiquitous, and relates conspiracy culture to postmodernity and millennial anxieties.

What did people in Restoration England think the correct relationship between church state should be? And how did this thinking evolve? Based on the author's published essays, revised and updated with a new overarching introduction, this book explores the debates in Restoration England about "godly rule". The book assesses some of the crucial transitions in English history: how the late Reformation gave way to the early Enlightenment; how Royalism became Toryism and Puritanism became Whiggism; how the power of churchmen was challenged by virulent anticlericalism; how the verities of "divine right" theory revived and collapsed. Providing a distinctive account of English thought in the era between the two revolutions of the Stuart century, "Contesting the English Polity, 1660-1688" discusses the ideological foundations of emerging party politics, and the deep intellectual roots of competing visions for the commonwealth, placing the power of religion, and the taming of religion, squarely alongside constitutional battles within secular politics.

Civil Religion - a tradition of political thought that has argued for a close connection between religion and the state - made an important contribution to the development of religious and political thought at key moments of early modern British political and colonial history. As this volume shows, it was at work not just during the Enlightenment, but within a much wider periodical framework: the Reformation, the rise of the Puritan movement, the conflict over the Stuart state and church, the English Revolution, and the formation of key American colonies in the eighteenth century. Advocates of Civil Religion tried to reconcile a national church with religious toleration and design a constitution capable of preventing the church from interfering with affairs of state. The volume investigates the idea of Civil Religion in the works of canonical thinkers in the history of political thought (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau), in the works of those who have been recognized as shaping political ideas (Hooker, Prynne et al.) during this period, and in the advocacy of those perhaps not previously associated with Civil Religion (William Penn). Although Civil Religion was often posited as a pragmatic solution to constitutional and ecclesiological problems created by the Reformation and the English Revolution, they also reveal that such pragmatism was not at odds with religious conviction or ideals. Civil Religion certainly enhanced citizenship in this period, but it did so in ways which depended on the truth claims of Protestantism, not on their domestication to politics.

For many generations, Guy Fawkes and his gunpowder plot, the 'Man in the Iron Mask' and the 'Devils of Loudun' have offered some of the most compelling images of the early modern period. Conspiracies, real or imagined, were an essential feature of early modern life, offering a seemingly rational and convincing explanation for patterns of political and social behaviour. This volume examines conspiracies and conspiracy theory from a broad historical and interdisciplinary perspective, by combining the theoretical approach of the history of ideas with specific examples from the period. Each contribution addresses a number of common themes, such as the popularity of conspiracy theory as a mode of explanation through a series of original case studies. Individual chapters examine, for example, why witches, religious minorities and other groups were perceived in conspiratorial terms, and how far, if at all, these attitudes were challenged or redefined by the Enlightenment. Cultural influences on conspiracy theory are also discussed, particularly in those chapters dealing with the relationship between literature and politics. As prevailing notions of royal sovereignty equated open opposition with treason, almost any political activity had to be clandestine in nature, and conspiracy theory was central to interpretations of early modern politics. Factions and cabals abounded in European courts as a result, and their actions were frequently interpreted in conspiratorial terms. By the late eighteenth century it seemed as if this had begun to change, and in Britain in particular the notion of a 'loyal opposition' had begun to take shape. Yet the outbreak of the French Revolution was frequently explained in conspiratorial terms, and subsequently European rulers and their subjects remained obsessed with conspiracies both real and imagined. This volume helps us to understand why.