Talk | Professor Andrea McKenzie

Join us as Professor Andrea McKenzie provides a talk on George Treby, an important late seventeenth-century figure at a particularly significant and tumultuous period in English legal and political history. To accompany this talk, some of the Treby manuscripts in the collection will be on display.

George Treby’s hitherto undeciphered shorthand notes provide a unique, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the mental world of a prominent late Stuart lawyer, MP and judge. Shorthand, a scribal technology first widely used in seventeenth-century England, functioned not just as a time- and space-saving tool, but also as a kind of ‘secret writing’ to safeguard private or sensitive information, or indiscreet expressions, from hostile eyes. In his Middle Temple case notes (1667-72), written when he was a young law student and newly-minted barrister, Treby’s carefully coded annotations range from commonplace editorial explanations and observations to irreverent and gossipy asides about Restoration judges such as Kelynge, Vaughan, Twisden and Hale; they also include some pointed criticisms of Charles II and his entourage. Treby’s later shorthand, held in the Derbyshire Record Office, sheds new light on his activities as Chairman of the Commons Committee of Secrecy investigating the Popish Plot (1679-81) and his evolution from a leading member of the Whig opposition to high office – as Solicitor and Attorney General and Chief Justice of the Common Pleas – under William III.

Andrea McKenzie is a Professor of History at the University of Victoria specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English legal and cultural history. She is the author of numerous articles on early modern trial and execution, last dying confessions, peine forte et dure, spouse murder, seventeenth-century shorthand and Restoration conspiratorial politics, as well as two monographs: Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675-1775 (published in 2007) and Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England: the Mysterious Death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (2022). She is currently completing a book on rumour, news and conspiracy beliefs during the “Popish Plot”, c. 1678-81.