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AbstractThis article examines the hitherto undeciphered shorthand notes of George (later Sir George) Treby, an opposition MP and lawyer and the chairman of the house of commons committee of secrecy investigating the Popish Plot (1678–81). These shorthand memoranda, draft letters and marginalia not only open up a glimpse into the secret proceedings of this mysterious committee, composed of the leading opponents of Charles II and the duke of York in the lower house, but shed new light on how Whig MPs such as Treby viewed, and justified, the prosecution of a plot now widely accepted as a convenient political fiction. This new evidence allows us to re‐evaluate the allegations of Tory propagandists that Whig investigators deliberately suppressed and distorted evidence, suborning and coercing witnesses to further their oppositional agenda. Treby's shorthand annotations paint a more complicated picture of a lawyer selecting evidence but also painstakingly verifying facts and genuinely concerned about both a 'popish plot' (broadly defined) and obstruction and witness‐tampering on the part of the court.

The death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey has baffled scholars and armchair detectives for centuries; this book offers compelling new evidence and, at last, a solution to the mystery. 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.