Francis Edwards is a unique presence in the field of early modern British history. For three decades he served as an archivist within the Society of Jesus, chiefly for the British Province, and latterly for the Archivum Romanum. This archival knowledge has informed Edwards's books, nine of which have appeared since 1964. The best of these is his biography of the important English Jesuit Robert Persons, and the most useful is his translation of Henry More's 1660 Historia missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu. Edwards's best-known book is probably his least regarded. In 1969 he published a lively narrative that revived the old thesis that the Gunpowder Plot was an invention of Robert Cecil’s, trumped up to justify further persecution of England's beleaguered Catholics. Scholars have judged this thesis unconvincing, and Edwards's continued promotion of it has allowed various of his colleagues to accuse him of being that most abused of bogeymen, a “confessional historian.” This is itself unfortunate, because Francis Edwards's work does not, on the whole, deserve to be so dismissed. Much of his research plumbs the depths of the shadowy world of late Tudor Catholic conspiracies, and his perspective is always original. His conclusion that Roberto Ridolphi, for instance, was in fact a double agent has been considered plausible by other historians of the period.

Edwards's latest book investigates the obscure Bye and Main Plots, a pair of linked conspiracies against James I exposed in 1603. The Bye Plot was supposedly the concoction of two obscure Catholic priests and consisted of a harebrained scheme to kidnap James I, eliminate his evil counselors, and secure religious toleration for Catholics. Very loosely linked was the Main Plot, an alleged scheme by Sir Walter Raleigh and Henry Brooke, Baron Cobham, to raise rebellion, facilitate a Spanish invasion, and place Lady Arbella Stuart on the throne. The Bye and Main Plots fascinated Victorian historians, largely because the latter entangled Raleigh, whose reputation as an English (and imperial) hero was then at its zenith. Recent scholars, however, have paid the plots little mind. The exception is Mark Nicholls, whose articles on the Bye and Main were until now the main efforts to gather and adjudicate the surviving evidence on the plots.

Edwards's interpretation of the Bye and Main Plots will be familiar to readers of his previous work. Both, in his view, were largely the contrivance of Robert Cecil and his creatures. The sham plots and their triumphant exposure were supposedly designed to help Cecil suppress both court rivals and a threatened toleration of Catholicism. In sustaining this thesis, Edwards's main evidentiary resources are the undoubtedly half-baked and perhaps implausible nature of the plots; the suspicion of contemporaries that the plots were at least partly contrived as weapons in court factional struggles; the absence, assumed to be suspicious, of key depositions used during the trial; and some evidence that key plotters were in fact agent provocateurs in Cecil's employ.

Evaluating the case put forward by Edwards is a difficult task. Very much undermining the force of his argument is his relentless assumption that a consistent pattern of faking plots marked the Machiavellian statecraft of the Cecil family. The culmination of this pattern was the Gunpowder Plot, which Edwards continues to portray as an intricate setup. A linked problem is Edwards's slanted account of Robert Cecil himself, who stalks these pages as a totalitarian manipulator inspired by Calvinist fervor, a pathological loathing of Catholicism, and a darkly conspiratorial cast of mind. These aspects of Edwards's interpretive frame are badly out of joint. They are assumptions that allow him to patch over gaps in his own narrative and offer a revisionist account of the Bye and Main Plots that is frequently as implausibly convoluted as the official narrative. Some depositions are missing and others survive; some double agents are pardoned and others executed. But no evidentiary gap is ever random or accidental; all trace to the nefarious double-dealing of Cecil. The problems of such a speculative argumentative style are glaring.

This is not to say, however, that Edwards's interpretation of the Bye and Main Plots is entirely without merit. Other observers, both Jacobean and modern, have doubted the veracity of the official account of these plots. The Main Plot, in particular, was a shadowy affair at best, and Raleigh's conviction (based largely on the dubious testimony of another conspirator) has long been viewed as a likely injustice. Beneath his more lurid denunciations of Cecil and all his works, Father Edwards offers a more subtle argument, positing that there was a grain of reality at the heart of both plots but that Cecil and his judicial allies intentionally inflated their treasonable implications. The Catholics behind the Bye Plot, for instance, may have sought merely to force an audience with James and petition him for toleration, rather than to kidnap the king and murder his counselors. Likewise, the undoubted receipt of Spanish funds by the Main conspirators is plausibly read as a typical effort to purchase court influence and intelligence, rather than as an effort to fund an armed rebellion. When he argues in this vein, Edwards finds much surer footing. Early modern treason trials were, after all, hardly models of procedural justice. The threat of torture, the deference paid to royal judicial officials, the willingness to overlook inconsistencies in the evidence, a high tolerance for deadly political gamesmanship: all of these factors generate vast unease in the modern observer of past treason trials, and Edwards is not wrong to criticize the prevailing historiography for a habitual credulity. It is doubtful that the Bye and Main Plots were all that Cecil claimed them to be.

More difficult to evaluate is Edwards's claim that several of the convicted plotters were in fact double agents, trying to win influence with Cecil by entangling his enemies. If true, this would vastly elevate Cecil's culpability. Did Cecil's misdeeds amount to a not atypical prosecutorial zeal and willingness to spin his evidence? Or did he go further and entrap largely innocent victims? The loss of evidence and a pervasive suspicion of Cecil are not, in and of themselves, sufficient reason to assume the truth of the latter proposition. Much hangs on Edwards's evidence suggesting the existence of double agents. That evidence is not decisive, but neither is it absent. There is not space here to evaluate all of the details, but this reader came away convinced that the crucial figure of George Brooke (Cobham's brother and his main betrayer) was quite possibly an agent of Cecil’s. This alone would not prove the direst of Edwards's conclusions, but it would obviously be of enormous relevance in evaluating the Bye and Main Plots.

Edwards is commendably exhaustive in his presentation (and often transcription) of the relevant evidence, some of which—such as the fascinating letters of the intelligencer Giovanni degli Effetti to the papal nuncio in Paris—is relevant and new. As a compilation of archival material, this book has considerable value. The value of its argumentative claims, however, is much less clear. Readers evaluating these claims are forced, unfortunately, to set aside some of Edwards's more lurid conjectures.