Rachel Weil's "A Plague of Informers," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III's England by Rachel Weil.

The entry begins:

I will resurrect Robert Altman to direct my movie because his films gave viewers exactly the sensation that historians get working with documents. You hear snatches of conversation that you don't quite understand, and only with time in patience can you fit (some of) the parts together. That is especially true if your subjects, like mine, are spies, informers, and political spin-meisters.

A Plague of Informers is a set of linked stories rather than a grand narrative, and like many Altman films it could have a cast of hundreds. The episode I'll cast here concerns Matthew Smith, who joined a Jacobite conspiracy in 1696 to overthrow the English government (Jacobites were rebels who wanted to put King James II, who had been deposed in 1688, back on the throne of England). Then Smith changed sides and tried to reveal the conspiracy to the Duke of Shrewsbury, the "secretary of state" responsible for national security. Of course Smith asked Shrewsbury for money so that he could keep pretending to be a conspirator -- he needed to buy a horse, armor, and drinks for his Jacobite companions, he said, so that the conspirators would trust him and spill their secrets. Shrewsbury, deciding that Smith was a fraud, refused to pay him. Unfortunately for Shrewsbury...[read on]

Learn more about A Plague of Informers at the Yale University Press website.

Rachel Weil is professor of history at Cornell University. She lives in Seneca Falls, NY.

The Page 99 Test: A Plague of Informers.

My Book, The Movie: A Plague of Informers.

--Marshal Zeringue