The Popish Plot

Titus Oates, delusional paranoic
and conspiracy theorist
Public domain

This post, which follows on from the earlier post about growing opposition to Charles II,  is greatly indebted to J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (Penguin, 1972).

The Popish Plot

The ‘plot’ was the brainchild of Titus Oates (1649-1705), a delusional paranoiac, and one of the most spectacular liars in history. He was the son of a Baptist-turned-Anglican parson. He was expelled from two Cambridge colleges and though he went down without taking a degree, he nevertheless took holy orders. He was ejected from the living of Bobbing in Kent for drunkenness. He then had a spell as a chaplain at the garrison at Tangier, which ended when he was accused of sodomy. In 1676 he fell in with Israel Tonge, a clergyman with a  persecution complex focused on the Jesuits. In March 1677 Oates was received into the Roman Catholic Church. After this, at the instigation of the provincial of the English Jesuits he served briefly as a novice at Valladolid, an experience which enabled him to claim that he was a doctor of the University of Salamanca.

The 'plot' began on 13 August 1678 when the king was introduced to Israel Tonge, who presented him with a document which made known details of a ‘conspiracy’ masterminded (of course!) by the Jesuits: they would first send priests disguised as Presbyterian ministers into Scotland to incite rebellion and then stir up a Catholic uprising in Ireland. Having caused a revolt in two kingdoms they would then assassinate the king. The allegations were passed on to Danby for further investigation. Even if Charles did not believe in the plot, he could hardly ignore the allegation – neither could Danby. In the following days Oates and Tonge added more details and on 6 September Oates swore a deposition forty-three articles long before a Middlesex justice of the peace, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.

Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey
Public domain

On 28 September the matter was brought before the privy council when Tonge produced a new version of their allegations, now eighty-one articles long. They claimed that the intention was to shoot the king, but that if that failed, the queen’s physician, George Wakeman, was to poison him. Tonge also produced five incriminating letters written by Jesuits and received by Thomas Bedingfield, James’s confessor. On the following day, Tongue produced Oates as his informant. During the privy council’s investigations, Charles was able to expose Oates as a liar on points of detail. But though the king was unconvinced the privy council were impressed.

To those who believed Oates his story was convincing because it confirmed what they already believed about Catholics. Two coincidences seemed to dispel all doubts about the conspiracy.

The murder of Godfrey

On 12 October 1678 Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey disappeared. Five days later his body was discovered in a ditch at the foot of Primrose Hill; he had been strangled several days before and subsequently run through with his own sword. No-one knows why he was murdered or who murdered him, but it was widely believed that he had been killed by Catholics because he knew too much. A coroner’s jury brought in the verdict of ‘wilful murder by some person or persons unknown’. For this formula, the popular mind substituted ‘the Papists’.

The murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey
from a contemporary newspaper

The Coleman letters

Even more convincing was the fact that Oates had implicated, Edward Coleman, the duchess of York’s secretary. His house was searched and when his papers were seized, he was found to have engaged in wild schemes with Jesuits and French agents. For example, he wrote to Louis XIV’s confessor, Père François de La Chaise:

‘We have here a mighty work upon our hands, no less than the conversion of the three kingdoms and by that perhaps the subduing of a pestilent heresy which has domineered over part of this northern world a long time’.

On 1-2 November the two Houses of the Cavalier Parliament recorded their unanimous conviction that ‘there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish’ popish plot to assassinate the king. On 4 November it was proposed by the Commons that Coleman’s master, the duke of York, be banned from the king’s presence. 

The panic

The country was now gripped by anti-Catholic hysteria. It now hardly mattered whether or not Oates was a liar - the Coleman correspondence and the Godfrey murder seemed confirmation of a plot. In London the authorities called out the militia and searched the houses of magistrates. Chains were put across the major streets and the trained bands were kept on the alert. When Parliament met for its eighteenth session in October, much of the initiative lay with the ‘patriotic’ opposition, the ‘country’ party led by the earl of Shaftesbury in the Lords and William Russell in the Commons. The main political result was a new Test Act excluding Catholics from Parliament, though by a small majority (158-156). James was excluded from the Act and he continued to sit in the Lords for the rest of the parliamentary session.

Meanwhile parliamentary committees took more ‘evidence’ and compiled the names of more conspirators supplied by Oates’s fertile brain. A manufacturer sold 3,000 daggers bearing the legend ‘Remember Justice Godfrey’; ladies carried them for protection against popish assassins. A weak and discredited government was in no state to dissolve parliament or to quell the hysteria.

The fall of Danby

The impeccably Anglican Danby became the scapegoat for the Popish Plot. By the autumn of 1678 his attempts to manipulate Parliament, his hostility to religious toleration, and his refusal to disband the recently formed standing army of 20,000 all smacked of arbitrary government. The final cause of his fall was the revelation of his secret correspondence containing details of subsidy negotiations with Louis XIV in 1676. The author of the revelations was probably none other than Louis himself, determined to punish Danby for the Dutch marriage. 

On 11 December 1678, the relevant letters were read to the Commons by Ralph Montagu, former ambassador in Paris, lover of Anne Fitzroy, countess of Sussex, Charles’s daughter by Lady Castlemaine, and now MP for Northampton. The letters were from Charles to Louis and they were signed by both the king and Danby, destroying Danby's political credit at a stroke: the self-styled enemy of France was revealed pleading for French subsidies. The Commons drew up articles of impeachment against him. On 30 December Charles prorogued the session in something like panic. On 24 January 1679 he declared the Cavalier Parliament dissolved. It had sat for 18 years.

Before the new parliament met, he had ‘persuaded’ the duke of York to leave the country. James went to Brussels leaving Danby to face the wrath of the new parliament. Charles was now to face the greatest crisis of his reign.

The executions

In November and December 1678 Coleman and three priests were tried and executed, and when the new parliament met articles of impeachment were prepared against five Catholic peers. 

The execution of Coleman
Popish plot playing card

Lord Stafford, the Catholic peer was attainted, and executed in December 1680. Nine Jesuits were executed, twelve more died in prison. The last of these, Oliver Plunkett, was executed in June, 1681. From the end of 1678 to the beginning of 1681 about thirty-five people were tried and executed for their alleged part in the plot. This site gives a list of the victims of the 'Plot'.

Charles allowed the executions of men he believed to be innocent to go ahead because, as he saw it, he had no option but to swim with the tide. By this time, he was engaged in the political fight of his life. Three parliaments, called in quick succession, were to determine whether or not he would win.