Disinformation, Seventeenth Century-Style: The Popish Plot
Bonfire Night originates as a commemoration of the 1605 terrorist plot by a group of Roman Catholics to murder Britain’s Protestant King James I (r. 1603-25) and massacre the Members of Parliament, and as such has always had an anti-Catholic edge to it—or rather, did have, before religious belief and historical memory faded. A year when this edge was on prominent display was 1678—the effigies burned, especially in London, were of the Pope, rather than Guy Fawkes—since 5 November that year occurred a few months into what is remembered to history as the “Popish Plot”. There is a lot of concern at the present time about “disinformation” and its capacity to destabilise political systems. Looking back nearly three-and-a-half centuries at the Popish Plot—which remains “the most sensational bogus conspiracy in British history”1—eliminates any temptation to see this as a novel problem.
REFORMATION AND RESTORATION
England collapsed into Civil War in 1642. It was the last war of religion, a contest over the interpretation of Protestantism between Anglican Royalists (or “Cavaliers”) led by King Charles I (r. 1625-49) and Puritan-dominated Parliamentarians (“Roundheads”). By 1648, the Royalists had been defeated—twice—and the Parliamentarians staged a dramatic “trial” for the King in January 1649, which ended with the monarch’s “execution”. Without a plan for what to do next, England lapsed into a military-run republic and in 1653 the system was refashioned as a quasi-monarchical Protectorate under Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. After Cromwell died in September 1658, the Protectorate dissolved quickly and England reverted to monarchy. Charles’ son arrived back in England in May 1660 and was declared Charles II (r. 1660-85).
Charles II had been in exile in France, and this connection was not broken in 1660. The French “Sun King” Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715), who had taken the throne at age-4, moved from reigning to ruling in 1661. The French state was, at this time, the superpower in Europe, and Louis used it to pursue an expansionist agenda that was militantly Catholic in nature. Charles II’s restoration made England a client of France,2 literally: Charles II was a paid agent of Louis’, formalised in the secret Treaty of Dover (1670), which gave Charles II a regular personal income from French coffers, in exchange for a security guarantee from Louis—French troops would have landed in England to suppress a rebellion of the kind that deposed Charles’ father—and joining the French war against the (Protestant) Dutch.
It is not contested that Charles II died a Roman Catholic. The traditional story is that Charles converted on his deathbed, but it is likely he was a secret Catholic from the start of his reign. The evidence is, by definition, difficult to get at, but it is suggestive. While the Dover Treaty was concealed, and nobody could know that it contained ambiguous provisions that Charles II would announce his conversion and that of his realm to Roman Catholicism at some future date, the data points suggesting that Charles II was either a Roman Catholic or a Romanist sympathiser were recognised contemporaneously.
Charles married Catherine of Braganza in 1662: that she was a Portuguese Catholic caused the same kind of xenophobia-tinged anti-Catholic stir as his father’s marriage to Henrietta Maria; it was also true that the public Anglican wedding took place after a private Catholic one. The March 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence that suspended all penal laws against Catholics and other religious dissenters could be read as an extension of Charles II’s generally tolerant approach after the Restoration, embodied in the Indemnity and Oblivion Act (1660). In the atmosphere of the time, though, it was greeted with a suspicion that Charles was doing favours for his co-religionists, and that suspicion only hardened when, months later, Parliament retaliated against the Indulgence law by passing the Test Act, which required all government officials to take an oath rejecting Roman Catholicism, and Charles’ brother, James, the Duke of York—the future James II (r. 1685-88)—resigned as Lord High Admiral, revealing that he was a Roman Catholic.
The monarch’s brother being a Roman Catholic would have been an issue in England from any time since the 1550s, and in the 1670s it was a special worry because Charles II had no legitimate heir, meaning James was next in line for the throne.
The prospect of a Catholic restoration terrified the English. The Marian persecution was not forgotten. In 1570, Pope Pius V (r. 1566-72) issued an order inciting the murder of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), setting off decades of Catholic conspiracies to overthrow the Queen, often involving foreign Catholic states, culminating in the full-scale Papal-blessed Crusade by Catholic Spain to conquer and subjugate England. Even after James I reached a compact with Spain, the domestic plots continued, most obviously the gunpowder plot. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), the genocidal atrocity against France’s Protestants by the Catholic regime, remained alive in people’s memory, and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) was interpreted as a similar effort by the Catholic Habsburgs to exterminate Protestantism and Protestants in the Austrian Empire. The slaughter of Protestants in Ireland in 1641 on the eve of the English Civil War was present in this litany of crimes against the Reformed faith, and the Civil War itself was seen by its participants on the Parliamentary/Puritan side as being waged against Catholic despotism.
Since the Restoration, the worries in England, at both elite and popular levels, about Catholic influence, had not abated. There were, of course, deranged superstitious elements to this—both the Great Plague (1665) and Great Fire (1666) had been blamed on Catholics, and the prejudice against Catholics in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could take on a cosmic character more usually associated with antisemitism—but, as spelled out above, the anti-Catholic polemicists of the day were not shying at shadows when it came to Charles II.
THE ORIGINS OF ‘THE POPISH PLOT’
This background helps explain why, when Titus Oates brought forth his ludicrous accusations in the “Popish Plot” in 1678, he was taken seriously: the old fear of Catholic subversion fused with the political interest in embarrassing Charles II and forcing him to exclude James from the line of succession—indeed, the Popish Plot has to be understood as part of the “Exclusion Crisis”. The third aspect that led to the Popish Plot becoming a national scandal was that Oates knew just enough to make his accusations plausible, and he benefited from that factor that plays such a large role in all of history: luck.
Oates, born in September 1649, went to university in Cambridge in 1667, where he acquired a reputation for “canting, fanatical” behaviour and a fondness for sodomy. He tried transferring to another college to escape this reputation, but he proved as unpopular in his new environs and eventually left university in 1669 without a degree. Oates would lie about this and claim to have a BA, which enabled him to gain a post as a preacher in London and ultimately to be taken into the Church of England as a vicar in 1670. Oates was given a parish in Kent, but was dismissed in 1673 for “bad behaviour”. Oates then became curate (assistant cleric) to his father in Hastings, but this did not last long either and he had to flee to London to escape prosecution for perjury after accusing a local schoolmaster of—this is going to become a theme—sodomy with a pupil. Arriving in the capital, Oates decided to change course and become a chaplain in the Navy: he was thrown out in 1676 after a voyage to Tangier, Morocco, where he was arrested and charged with—what else?—sodomy. He would have been executed, but his status as a man of the cloth saved him. That status did not last long: the Church of England expelled him in 1677.3
In the spring of 1677, Oates “persuaded an apparently deranged Catholic priest to receive him into the Roman Catholic Church”.4 Oates convinced the priest that he had given up a rich and comfortable life for the sake of his devotion to Roman Church, and was permitted entry on 1 June 1677 to the English Jesuit College in Valladolid, Spain, where he lasted only a month, before it was realised he had neither the competence (he spoke no Latin) nor temperament (he kept making overtly outrageous statements, about religion and monarchy) to be there. At the end of 1677, Oates managed to get into another Jesuit college, this time Saint Omer in France, where he made such a nuisance of himself that one student “broke a pan about his head for recreation”. Oates was sent to another Jesuit seminary; duly caused such a ruckus he was sent back to Saint Omer; and in June 1678 was expelled from Saint Omer,5 for, among other things, sodomy—or at least the intention: he had become known as an “aggressive homosexual” and his presence had been deemed incompatible with the safety of the other seminarians. This was the end of Oates’ association with Jesuit institutions.
Oates travelled back to London, where he reconnected with a retired Protestant cleric, Dr. Israel Tonge, for whom the word “eccentric” is the politest euphemism. Oates told Tonge that he had only pretended to convert to Catholicism to infiltrate Jesuit ranks and discover their plots. Since Tonge was a zealot anti-Catholic with a particular fixation on the Jesuits, he was intrigued and told Oates to write down all he knew, which Oates did in forty-three “depositions”. This manuscript became the textual basis of the Popish Plot. Standard plans for Jesuit missionary activity were recast as sinister subversion. The heart of the conspiracy that Oates spun was a plan to murder Charles II so that the throne could be taken by his Catholic brother. Oates named about one-hundred Catholics involved in this scheme to reimpose Papal authority over England. Oates claimed to have been present at a meeting on 24 April 1678 in the White Horse Tavern on the Strand in London where the Jesuits had met to work out the details of their plan. By Oates’ account, French Jesuit assassins were already in London.6
The book-length screed Oates and Tonge concocted was then placed in some wainscot (wood panelling) of a gallery in the home of Sir Richard Barker, a physician and anti-Catholic agitator. Barker was a friend of Tonge’s, and Tonge was staying at his house at the time. Tonge claimed to “discover” the manuscript, then passed it to Christopher Kirkby, a chemist involved in the King’s scientific experiments. It was Kirkby who first informed the King of the Popish Plot on 13 August 1678 during a walk in St. James’ Park.
THE ‘PLOT’ COMES TO GOVERNMENT ATTENTION
The King seems to have been sceptical from the start, particularly about the idea there was any threat to his person. It is possible that, in addition to the absurdity of the thing, Charles II understood the danger of people looking too closely for Catholic conspiracies among the elite: he was, after all, in a very vulnerable position on this score. On the other hand, however outlandish Oates’ conspiracy theories were, the idea that the King of England was in the pay of the French monarch was pretty unlikely, too, and yet here Charles was. The King also seems to have thought that among the mass of accusations, it was possible there were some traces of truth. Ironically, the King’s brother was more insistent on the need for an investigation.
Tonge was ultimately granted a personal audience with the monarch, where he recapitulated the contents of the manuscript. Kirkby was sent to inform a member of the King’s personal staff, William Chaffinch, the handler of spy networks and relations with the Catholic and Whig MPs who did not want to be seen at Court. Thomas Osborne, better known as Lord Danby, the Lord Treasurer, was tasked with looking into the matter.
A background factor that helped Oates was that Charles II’s intelligence system was not very sophisticated. Sir Joseph Williamson could not measure up to Elizabeth I’s great spy chief, Francis Walsingham, or the guardian of the Protectorate, John Thurloe. Williamson’s main concern when it came to domestic subversion was the tittle-tattle at the burgeoning coffee houses—harmless venting that never amounted to serious threats to the regime. When faced with the Popish plot, Williamson was in no position to tell up from down.7
Between mid-August and mid-September 1678, Oates had greatly expanded on his plot: the forty-three-paragraph manuscript had grown to eighty-one paragraphs. Oates was now accusing Sir George Wakeman, physician to Charles II’s wife, of leading the plot, planning to poison the King. A backup plan was operating, said Oates, led by John Keynes, a Benedictine monk George Conyers, and four anonymous Irishmen to stab or shoot Charles if the opportunity arose. Meanwhile, the Jesuits were said to be plotting to murder the Duke of Ormond and trigger a rebellion in Ireland, while setting fires in strategic places, as they supposedly had done in London in 1666 and in Southwark in 1676.
What ended up giving the Popish Plot legs was not these accusations of assassination and political turmoil, but the details Oates gave about the financing of the Jesuits and their espionage for France, allegedly passed to King Louis through Saint Omers to Francois La Chaise, the Jesuit confessor of the French King. Oates said that the main Jesuit intelligence agent in England was John Smith, which was not very imaginative or interesting, but when Oates added that Smith was assisted in his work in Whitehall by “one Coleman”—understood by investigators (though not, it seems, by Oates) as Edward Coleman, a Catholic convert who had once been secretary to the future James II and later to James’ wife, Mary of Modena—he had touched a live wire: by connecting La Chaise and Coleman, Oates would soon have the attention of all of England.
Charles II decided things had gone too far and the Popish Plot should be shut down by bringing it before the Privy Council on 28 September 1678. Initially the plan seemed to be working: Tonge was being questioned, and his reputation as an unreliable lunatic was being reinforced. But Tonge then said that he should not really be relaying evidence he only knew at second-hand; they should speak to Oates. The King did not see a problem with this, assuming Oates would come off as badly as Tonge; he asked his cousin Prince Rupert, the dashing commander of the Cavaliers, to sit in for him in the afternoon session, and left for the races at Newmarket. Unfortunately, Oates proved rather more convincing.
Oates had just spent two months perfecting his narrative—he had recopied the final version days before—and had, or appeared to have, a complete mastery of detail. The Privy Council was working from one copy of the manuscript and the individuals had not had time to study it in any depth, making Oates’ description of names and dates seem authoritative. The one thing that could have derailed Oates was a series of five letters supposedly written by prominent priests, describing in detail parts of the plot, which the Council had correctly recognised as forgeries, but, when this was put to Oates, he was barely phased:
Shown only a line or two from each letter and never allowed to see the signatures, “he immediately named whose hands they were” … The Council had been misled, he said in effect, by a standard Jesuit trick. In dangerous correspondence, Jesuits disguised their handwriting and wrote crudely to make their letters deniable if they were intercepted. The five letters, he concluded, were genuine.
The imperturbable ease with which Oates explained away what had seemed a damaging error in his case, along with his apparent ability to recognize the handwriting of his former employers, disguised or not, finished what the barrage of facts had started; it crumbled what remained of the Council’s resistance. The balance of belief swung finally and firmly in Oates’s favor, and it would not swing back for many months.
Convinced that the country was swarming with Popish assassins, the Privy Council issued arrest warrants and called the King back. It was at the Council meeting the next day that Charles II nearly tripped Oates up. Oates claimed to have met Don Juan José of Austria (d. 1679), the General and only illegitimate son of Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621-65) to be acknowledged by the King, who had, in 1677, pushed aside Queen Mariana as regent over Spain’s King Charles II (r. 1665-1700), the last Habsburg ruler of that country who was about 16-years-old at the time.8 Upon cursory questioning, it became clear Oates had no idea what Juan José, whom Charles had met, looked like. Oates was also incapable of describing the geography of Paris. But these seemed like minor details amid the huge amount of information he had supplied. Oates, having reiterated that the Duke of York was not involved in anything, slightly modified his charges during this session: he now exculpated Wakeman, but moved Coleman to centre stage, saying: “If his papers were well looked into there would appear that which might cost him his neck”. Whether Oates made a shrewd guess or just got extremely lucky, this would prove a crucial detail—one that would change the course of an entire nation.
A NATION IN THE GRIPS OF HYSTERIA
When Coleman was brought before the Council, he said he was “proud” of his acquaintance with the Sun King, “freely admitted having met La Chaise, though he denied any correspondence with him; … [and] admitted possessing a cipher for encoding letters and decoding letters. He further admitted that he had recently made an unauthorized journey to Paris.” It was enough of an admission to render the fact patterns innocuous. Oates added claims to have carried letters from Coleman—who he had never met before—to La Chaise, which was inflammatory but might not have mattered, since Coleman had acquitted himself well verbally before the Council. What undid Coleman was on 4 October the Council finally getting around to reading the letters seized from his apartment. Coleman had had warning—he had been named five days earlier and had burned all his correspondence from 1677 and 1678—but he had missed letters from 1674 and 1675, which showed Coleman conspiring, on behalf of James, with La Chaise’s Jesuit predecessor, Jean Ferrier, who was clearly writing on the direct instructions of King Louis, about the transfer of monies from France to get the anti-Catholic English Parliament shut down (in the end it was just prorogued), praising Queen Mary I (r. 1553-58), and trying to build up James to become King so as to deal “the greatest blow to the Protestant religion … since its birth” such that this “heresy and schism” might be suppressed altogether by “the conversion of the Three Kingdoms” to Roman Catholicism.
When the Privy Council met again on 16 October, Coleman’s letters were pronounced treasonous immediately. The legality was simple; the politics was extremely messy. The letters showed the Duke of York directly conspiring with the French monarch to reimpose Catholicism on England, and portrayed the King as sympathetic to the project but too consumed with his love for money to do much about it. The Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Cooper, one of Oates’ champions in Parliament who was leading the effort to exclude James from the succession, and the anti-Catholic polemicist Andrew Marvell, who had insisted from the get-go that the King was at least a passive conspirator in the Popish Plot, could hardly have asked for more.
The delicate matter for the Council was resolved for them the next day when Oates got another lucky break. In September, Tonge had taken Oates to meet a long-serving justice of the peace, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Godfrey had not been particularly impressed with Oates, but they shared an antipathy to Catholics, and Godfrey hardly wanted the case taken up by another magistrate. As events were proceeding at the Privy Council, Godfrey had gone missing on 12 October. Godfrey’s body was discovered on 17 October, strangled, with his neck broken, and having been run through with a sword (probably posthumously). For Protestant England, here was proof of the Popish plotters at work, trying to silence the men working to uncover their evil deeds.9 An atmosphere of popular hysteria set in; there was no longer any space for doubt, the mob had to be appeased. Coleman’s fate was sealed.
It was after Godfrey’s death that the Royal household was in the most danger. Another conman, William Bedloe, came out of the woodwork and started accusing the Queen’s Catholic servants of having killed Godfrey, which led to the search of her home and emboldened Oates to accuse the Queen herself of being in league with the Popish plotters to kill the King. This was so useful to Shaftesbury, and the atmosphere was so febrile anyway, that what should have been dismissed out of hand had to be taken seriously. A motion in Parliament to banish the Queen and make her divorce Charles II was narrowly voted down. James was sent out of the country for his safety and in April 1679 it was suggested the Queen go back to Portugal for a time, which she refused, and by July 1679 the accusations against her were formally revoked and things were beginning to simmer down. There were still many months left of the mania, however.
The strange thing is that the very first execution of the Popish Plot episode was William Staley, a young Catholic banker who made a drunken remark about the King being a “great heretic” whom “I would kill … myself”. The prosecution itself seemed mildly confused about what Staley was doing on trial. Regardless, Staley was convicted without the jury leaving the box and put to death on 26 November 1678.10
Staley’s conviction was nothing like enough to slake public anger at a conspiracy supposedly involving senior Lords of the realm, though. A week later, on 3 December, Coleman was executed—hanged, drawn, and quartered. (Coleman was beatified by the Roman Church in 1929. Many of the Popish Plot’s victims were made formal “martyrs” of the Roman Church.)
A major impact of the Popish Plot on the British state was the collapse of the intelligence system. Williamson must have known Oates was a liar, but he lost his nerve in the face of the public groundswell and cracked entirely in November 1678, when the Commons discovered that Williamson had signed off on some Irish Catholic military officers being excused from swearing allegiance to the Church of England. Williamson was confined to the Tower, though quickly released by the King’s intervention. Williamson did not dare to return to his work, however, and resigned, being replaced by the Earl of Sunderland Robert Spencer, a man decidedly unconcerned about details, whose agent networks were hopelessly polluted by anti-Catholic agitators and people on the make.11
THE END OF THE AFFAIR
Coleman’s trial was not in any sense of the term “fair”: Lord Chief Justice William Scroggs knew what was expected of him, and he delivered it. What is interesting is that one can see even at this distance that Scroggs was too good a lawyer to be fooled. While Coleman’s guilt to the letter of the law for treason was clear enough, Scroggs could not help notice that he was being presented with oceans of nonsense. Scroggs exasperatedly said at one point to Oates, “You have such a swimming way of melting words that it is a troublesome thing for a man to collect matter out of them”, and was at pains to say in his summing up that Coleman’s conviction rested on the letters, not the testimony of Oates and Bedloe. Indeed, Scroggs walked right up to the brink of accusing Oates and Bedloe of perjury.12
The fever was not breaking yet, though. Possibly the primary political impact of the Popish Plot was the fall of Danby, the de facto head of government, in April 1679. Danby doubted the Plot from the beginning and made this clear in his dealings to inform Parliament about the investigation he had been carrying out at the instruction of the King since the summer of 1678. Danby’s clear disbelief in the Plot led to accusations early that he was cynically using the ravings of Oates and Tonge to advance himself and purge rivals, and after the murder of Godfrey and the execution of Coleman he was being accused by Parliament of treacherously covering up the Plot. The King sought to save Danby and tame the furies unleashed by the Popish Plot by proroguing Parliament on 30 December 1678 and dissolving it in mid-January 1679. The King attempted to dampen the backlash to the dissolution, and split some of the more moderate elements away from Shaftesbury’s campaign against the Royal House itself, by throwing two more men to the mob, Jesuits William Ireland and John Grove, who were hanged on 24 January 1679.13 It did not good. Parliament ruled that it could conduct Danby’s impeachment trial even when prorogued. Danby was imprisoned, despite a King’s pardon. Danby was finally freed in February 1684 and his impeachment was reversed in May 1685, about three months into the reign of James II.
The new Parliament in March 1679 directly attacked the Duke of York, and tried to force through the Exclusion Act, using the Popish Plot as justification. Charles II managed to dissolve Parliament before they could succeed, but the “Exclusion Crisis” dragged on until 1681, when a second effort to pass an Exclusion Act was narrowly defeated.
The acquittal of Wakeman at his trial on 18 July 1679 dealt the first major public blow to the credibility of the Popish Plot. Preceding Sir Joseph Cantley by three centuries, Justice Scroggs barely concealed his support for Wakeman during the trial, regularly mocking the prosecution, then summed up by pouring scorn on the testimony of Oates and Bedloe. Scroggs was careful to say that the truth of the Plot itself was unaffected by the acquittal, but insisted that justice cannot be “swayed by vulgar noise” and the “the humours of the times”: a conspiracy can be real without every individual accused of complicity being guilty. “Justice should flow like a mighty stream, and if the rabble, like an unruly wind, blow against it, it may make it rough, but the stream will keep its course”, concluded Scroggs.14
In November 1678, five Catholic Lords had been arrested: Viscount Stafford William Howard, the Marquess of Powis William Herbert, Baron Arundell of Wardour Henry Arundell, Baron Petre (William Petre), and Baron Belasyse (John Belasyse). With Parliament prorogued in December 1678, the Lords had languished in the Tower, their trial date in May 1679 had come and gone. In November 1680, the Parliament had come back around to them. Viscount Stafford, a Catholic recusant and Royalist veteran of the Civil War, a Fellow of the Royal Society, drew the short straw: with Bedloe—a key second “witness” against Belasyse and Arundell—dead, and with no second witness against Petre, it was decided to start with Stafford. The “evidence” against Stafford began with the word of one of Oates’ “informants”, Stephen Dugdale, who had born false witness against another previously. The prosecution then wheeled out Edward Turberville, a member of an old Catholic family, first a Dominican and then a Benedictine, who had become a professional soldier and served in the French Army. Turberville insisted Stafford had tried to hire him to kill the King, though had no explanation for why this event—supposedly taking place in Paris in 1676—had been held back until the second week of November 1680. In the event it did not matter much: Stafford was convicted of treason, and executed on 29 December 1680. Stafford’s was an unusual trial, before the Lords: it was the only one during the Popish Plot that lasted more than one day (it lasted a full week), albeit the House of Lords transpired to be no more immune to public pressure than the Commons, convicting him 55-31. Stafford had to defend himself since he was tried before the passage of the 1695 Treason Act that gave defendants a right to a defence council; he missed several contradictions in his accuser’s account that someone more legally skilled would have seen. Charles II did not like Stafford very much, but he was still furious at being forced to sign a death warrant for a man he knew was innocent. The King did the only thing he could by making the execution less grisly. Stafford was beheaded, rather than being hanged, drawn, and quartered. The other four Lords would ultimately survive.15
The final major victim of the Popish Plot was Oliver Plunkett, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered on 1 July 1681. Plunkett was convicted of high treason basically on the grounds of spreading Romanism. Plunkett was a clear case, too, where political machinations—in this case a power struggle over Ireland—led to his demise. The driver of the Plunkett frame-up was Lord Essex, Arthur Capel, the once Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (r. 1672-77) who wanted the job back. Essex thought that the show trial of Plunkett was the quickest way to undermine the current Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Ormond, James Butler (r. 1677-85). Among the accusations against Plunkett was conspiring with the French to land an invasion force in Ireland to restore the rule of the Roman Church over the British Isles; whether anyone really believed that is unclear (however far-fetched it seemed at this time, within a decade it had in fact happened, and would recur for another half-century as the French used their Jacobite proxies against England), but there does seem to have been a genuine fear of a 1641-style Catholic rising. After Plunkett had been convicted but before he was executed, Essex seems to have had an attack of conscience, lamenting to the King that an innocent man was about to be killed. The usually mild-mannered Charles II exploded: the King, like Ormond, knew the Plunkett prosecution—the whole Plot, come to that—was a ridiculous fabrication, but the state of public opinion had trapped them both; the choice was injustice to one man, or rebellion that brought injustice to the whole Kingdom. The difference was that Essex had instigated this mob, when he had no need to. “[Plunkett’s] blood be on your head—you could have saved him but would not; I would save him and dare not”, Charles said.
In July 1681, almost exactly three years after the Plot had begun and after the execution of thirty-five or so innocent people, the tide was finally turning. Justice Scroggs was regularly acquitting people and working with the King to dampen public fury. Oates was told, on 31 August 1681, to clear out his Whitehall residence, where he had been living at the government’s expense, and leave London. Oates at that point denounced the King and his Catholic brother as part of the Plot, landing him in prison for sedition and seeing an enormous fine imposed on him of £100,000.
AFTERMATH
For Britain, the Popish Plot would in many ways define politics for the next two centuries: the battle lines drawn during the “Exclusion Crisis”—the loyalists to the King versus the “Country Party” that wanted to exclude his brother—would become the Tories and the Whigs, respectively. To put it another way, a party system formed at a time when Europe was still under threat from Islamdom—in September 1683, Vienna was besieged by the Ottomans for a second time and Europe’s history would have been very different if it had fallen—broke down in the nineteenth century, when Christendom (or the West, as we now say) had turned the tide so completely that large parts of the Muslim world were under European rule and Britain felt safe propping up an Ottoman Empire then-known as “the sick man of Europe”.
Charles II died in February 1685 and was succeeded by James II, a petty and vindictive sectarian who had not forgotten the Popish Plot. Oates was retried, convicted for perjury, and sentenced to life in prison. Oates was whipped through the streets of London for five days per year, wearing a dunce hat reading, “Titus Oates, convicted upon full evidence of two horrid perjuries”.16 The lashing and maltreatment of Oates was so severe that it seems likely James was trying to kill Oates—and since Oates’ false testimony had led to the judicial murder of three-dozen people, the objections, then and since, were very few. After James was deposed, the new Protestant Monarchs granted Oates a pardon and a £260-per-year pension—at one point briefly suspended and then restored slightly increased, to £300-per-year. Oates died in obscurity in July 1705.
James II was as clumsy as he was zealous: his blatant Catholicizing policies, and purges against Protestants, angered the Anglican Tory establishment, but they likely would have stuck with their King; the attempt by James to forge an alliance with the Dissenters abandoned this solid ground and did not really pay off—the Dissenters were attracted by the idea of having the restrictions on them lifted, but unwilling to pay for it with loyalty to a Papist King.17 Having alienated everyone, James still might have survived if he named a Protestant heir. Instead, it was announced that the Queen was pregnant with a son who would be raised a Roman Catholic. In June 1688, the “Immortal Seven”—one of whom was Danby,18 interestingly—signed the Invitation to William, inviting Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange to rescue a Protestant people from a Catholic tyrant. William soon enough obliged in the “Glorious Revolution”, putting to flight James II, and becoming William III (r. 1689-1702). William’s wife, James II’s daughter, joined him as co-Sovereign, becoming Mary II (r. 1689-94).
The Society of Jesus (Jesuits), Carmelites, Franciscans, and Benedictines all suffered grievously under the Oates hoax, and of course it became a general campaign against Catholics. The emergence of the Jacobite cause meant Roman Catholics in Britain were unable to find a stable place in the mainstream until after it had been defeated at Culloden in 1746. Probably the most infamous anti-Catholic eruption after that—much more lethal than the Popish Plot—were the “Gordon Riots” in June 1780, led by Lord George Gordon, against an attempt to lift several civil penalties from British Catholics. Anti-Catholic sentiment remained too strong among the middle class at the time to be overcome. Notably, the riots had a severe international impact by preventing Britain putting together a counter-coalition to France at the height of the rebellion in the American colonies that was sustained by the French. The British could not peel Catholic Spain away from Paris and the outreach to the Habsburg Empire as a counterweight collapsed, partly because of the revulsion at violent anti-Catholicism and partly because the riots made constitutional monarchy look unstable; turmoil in the Empire had now come to the Imperial capital, and nobody wanted to strike a risky deal with a system that might soon disintegrate.
The final legacy, less directly from the Popish Plot but from that era, was that in 1771 the secret Dover Treaty was made public, and it had an enormous impact on the leadership of the American rebels: the Federalist Papers and other early documents of their Republic show an obsession with staving off foreign influence within their institutions, particularly over the President, and Charles II’s allegiance to Louis XIV was very much the case they had in mind.
REFERENCES
Christopher Andrew (2018), The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, p. 238.
Diarmaid MacCulloch (2009), A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, p. 731.
The Secret World, pp. 238-39.
The Secret World, p. 239.
The Secret World, p. 239.
The Secret World, p. 239.
The Secret World, p. 238.
Given that both Juan José and Charles II of Spain were sons of Philip IV, the difference in looks is striking: Charles, born to Mariana of Austria (Maria Anna), the niece of Philip, is the stereotype of a Habsburg that people now have in mind—the physical deformities, as well as the mental illness and sterility, that occur at the end of a long line of inbreeders—while Juan José, born to an actress, María Calderón, is rather handsome and physically able.
The Secret World, p. 238.
John Kenyon (1972), The Popish Plot, pp. 98-9.
The Secret World, p. 240.
The Popish Plot, pp. 123-25.
The Popish Plot, p. 144.
The Popish Plot, pp. 177-87.
The Popish Plot, pp. 201-03.
The Secret World, p. 241.
A History of Christianity, p. 733.
Danby lived a long life, dying during the reign of the final Stuart monarch, Queen Anne (r. 1702-14), but it was not a particularly happy life for him. Danby remained fundamentally unlikeable, so never gained the favour of William III, and Danby’s corruption also came back to the fore. While Danby was absurdly accused of Jacobitism in the 1690s, a rather better-founded accusation was levelled in 1695: that he had taken a bribe to secure a charter for the East India Company. Gold was found in Danby’s house, and seems to have been there for a year. Danby swiftly handed the gold over and explained that “it had been left with him only to be counted by his secretary”, the seventeenth-century version of “that money was just resting in my account”. The East India case against Danby ultimately collapsed—that kind of corruption was too commonplace, and the specific case ended up ensnaring several of the people running the proceedings against him. Danby went on to be commissioner of trade, and by 1696 had become the governor of the Royal Fishery Company. When Tsar Pyotr I (or Peter the Great) took his “Grand Embassy” tour of England in 1698, it was Danby who entertained him. Danby was forced to resign from public life in 1699 and ultimately died in 1712.