Inside the Commons Committee of Secrecy: George Treby's Shorthand and the Popish Plot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".