Conspiracy, Crime, and Conflict in the Court of Star Chamber

To those living through them, the Elizabethan and early Stuart years of England’s history seemed unusually riven by plots and conspiracies. Protestants feared the public effects of the private machinations of the Scottish queen and her supporters, of Jesuits, and of perfidious “papists” more generally. Catholic polemicists countered with narratives of dark deeds done by men who subverted rather than served the Crown: “secret histories” circulated that warned of William and Robert Cecil, the earl of Leicester, and others undermining the public state of the realm. 1 Very real conspiracies by men such as the Earl of Essex and Guy Fawkes fostered fears of others. From the hard and hungry 1590s, protests against enclosures and lack of food became so common and concerning that the authorities contrived to brand some such riots as the products of treasonous conspiracies that threatened not just particular landlords or grain merchants but the public at large. 2 Over the early seventeenth century, fears of covert machinations by both the poor and the powerful only increased, culminating in the fear that King Charles himself had become a pawn in a Catholic conspiracy that endangered the lives and liberties of his subjects. 3 Talk of plots and conspiracies—real and imagined—abounded in an increasingly divided and discordant political culture, seen as threatening a “public” they arguably helped to create.