This Day in British History (Charles II Hears of Fake “Popish Plot”)

August 13, 1678—A stroll in London’s St. James Park by King Charles II had shattering political consequences when chemist Christopher Kirkby stopped him and claimed that Roman Catholic conspirators were plotting to murder the British monarch. The resulting “Popish Plot” led to five years of turbulence at the British court, the rise of modern political parties, treason accusations against the Queen, temporary exile on the same charges against the Duke of York, and the execution of 35 innocent Roman Catholics.

I first heard of this affair through a name—Titus Oates, the man at the center of it all—mentioned in two sources in the early ‘80s: my Columbia University class on English Restoration literature, taught by the excellent Michael Seidel, and Alistair Cooke’s book of commentaries on "Masterpiece Theatre," Masterpieces. Cooke likened Oates to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and when you hear what I’m about to tell you about this knave who could have sprung from a Shakespearean drama, you won’t think the comparison farfetched in the slightest.

But let’s go back first to that walk in the park.

Now, if I were King Charles and had heard Kirkby’s claim, I would have been more than a little astonished. “Why,” I would have wondered, “would Catholics want to kill me when so many Englishmen say I am a secret Catholic myself?”

When Charles recovered his senses, he asked the chemist how he heard of the plot. Kirkby said he heard it from Dr. Israel Tongue. (Why does this sound like a name that could have been created by Dickens?) The almost hysterically anti-Catholic Tongue, in turn, claimed he’d heard it from Titus Oates.

And who was Mr. Oates? Like Tongue, he’d been an Anglican minister. But travels abroad did not broaden his mind so much as bend it. Before long, he’d put together enough stray pieces of information to be able to contoct what Sen. Joseph McCarthy called a few centuries earlier, “a conspiracy so immense.”

England’s Privy Council waned to hear more about this plot. Nearly three-quarters of a century before, they remembered, the Gunpowder Plot to unseat King James I and install in his stead a Catholic had been foiled. Now, another Stuart was the subject of a conspiracy.

Preparing for testimony, Oates and Tongue created 43 separate plots—all the easier to do if you’d taken a lively interest not only in perjury but also forgery, as Oates was now doing. Oates had had this air of the disreputable about him, but there were enough bits of truth to what he said that suddenly, like the alcoholic Sen. McCarthy in the early 1950s, he found himself propelled out of obscurity and into fame as a seeming patriot.

One piece of great good fortune for Oates’ tall tales was the discovery of the body of Edmund Berry Godfrey, who had only recently taken his deposition about the case. Even the deceased’s name became a kind of clue, in popular thinking—an anagram for “Dy’d by Rome’s aveng’d fury.” Within months, Oates was claiming the following:

* King James I had been murdered.
* The Jesuits had been behind the Great Rebellion of the 1640s and Charles I’s death; and
* The Duke of York, Charles’ Catholic brother and heir to the throne, was responsible for the Great Fire that devastated London in 1666.

And, like “Tail-Gunner Joe,” the lies became more outrageous and more dangerous to those accused of treason. Matters became hot enough that the Duke of York had to go into exile for a short time. Charles’ wife, also a Catholic, was likewise accused of treason. (I think you can see by now the McCarthyite “guilt by association” game here, too.)

Well, if the country could swallow this many lies, why not more? So Oates upped the ante, now doubling the number of conspiracies.

By now, nearly three years after the initial reports, Charles had had enough. Two political factions had solidified because of the accusations—both, interestingly enough, originating as terms of abuse inspired by national groups. The “Tories” (Irish robbers) believed in the Church of England and the divine right of kings; the “Whigs” (Scottish outlaws), generally Presbyterian, advocated the power of Parliament and the supremacy of law. The Whigs allied themselves with Oates, sticking with him even after he’d outworn his usefulness and provoked the wrath of Charles.

When Charles moved against the Whigs, the reign of terror inaugurated by Oates came to an end. He was jailed, stripped of his pension and died nearly two decades later.

Even British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay allowed that Oates was a liar—although, Macaulay being Macaulay, he couldn’t help but claim that “The credulity which the nation showed on that occasion seems to us, though censurable enough, yet not wholly inexcusable.” (I love that very Victorian use of the first-person plural, by the way--speak for yourself, Tom!) It had to do with those Catholics, you see, and all their machinations, including the Duke of York, that “bigoted member” of the Church of Rome who eventually succeeded his brother and sparked a revolution that “purified” English institutions.

(Sigh.) All of Macaulay’s caterwauling leads me to appreciate anew Lord Melbourne’s supposed jest about the historian: "I wish I were as sure of one thing as Macaulay is of everything." He would have been the Daily Kos or Drudge of his time.

If you look on the Web for “Popish Plot,” most of the material would overwhelmingly deal with English matters, but it touched Ireland, too. The major victim was Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, who was forced to endure three trials in connection with the fictitious conspiracy.

The first trial, held in Ireland, ended with his release; a second, this time in London, had the same result; and only a third had what could be considered for his accusers a satisfactory result, with Plunkett convicted of “propagating the Catholic religion.” Tantamount to treason, in the terms of the times, this led to his execution, an absolute travesty of justice redeemed only by the archbishop’s public forgiveness of the perjurers who assured his death. In 1975, this Irish Catholic martyr was officially canonized by the Church.

Plunkett was among those executed; even more were tortured to force confessions out of them, though they did not endure his penalty.

I mentioned Professor Seidel’s class. Oates came up in class because of John Dryden, who made the controversy swirling around him and the Earl of Shaftesbury the subject of a satire, Absalom and Achitophel. (In those pre-Saturday Night Live days, ridicule came courtesy of poets such as Dryden and, 40 years later, the even greater Alexander Pope.)