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Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England
0 - Default Title
Description
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.
Product details
Number of Pages:
286
Release Date:
2022-12-20
Publication Date:
2022-12-20
Publisher:
Boydell Press
Languages:
Original:
English
ISBN10:
1783277629
ISBN13:
9781783277629
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
Weight:
596 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
20 cm
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