This Day in Irish History (Archbishop Plunkett Arrested on Trumped-Up Treason Charges)

December 6, 1679—Six years of living on the run, trying to minister to his flock while dodging English government persecution, came to an end for Oliver Plunket(t), Archbishop of Armagh, when he was arrested and cast into Dublin Castle.

Two trials, 19 months, and countless hours of perjured testimony later, he was put to death in London in an execution not only unique for being the last involving Catholic martyrdom in England but for reaching levels of barbarism not approached since then.

Plunkett was just one of 35 Roman Catholic victims caught up in the “Popish Plot” rocking the British Isles at this time. I touched briefly on his fate, in the larger context of this shameful episode in British jurisprudence, in a post last year, but I thought that a reminder of how he lived and how he dealt with his responsibilities might be in order, now that high Church officials in Ireland and the United States have so dishonored their positions.

Last week’s Irish government report concerning the decades-long coverup of priestly sexual abuse represented a stinging indictment of a hierarchy that not only became accustomed to deference on matters of dogma but also used to lax law enforcement. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat noted, it was also a reminder of a similar state of affairs in Boston, the epicenter of the church-abuse scandal in the United States.

Douthat pointed to the heavy Irish-American base in the Boston archdiocese, its clergy and its hierarchy, and in particular to a far more puritanical strain of Catholicism that obtained in Ireland and Boston than in, for instance, Mediterranean and Latin American cultures.

To be sure, British government intolerance pushed the Irish clergy, by necessity, into accepting help from the conservative Jansenist element in France.

But the Irish and Irish-American culture of deference, I think, took rote in more than just foreign soil. The seeds of this culture might have come from outside the Emerald Isle, but it was watered by her tales of a hierarchy that, no matter how ultraconservative they might appear to us, appeared far different to Irish Catholics of their time.

Think of it in this way: like his clerical counterparts hundreds of years later on his side of the Atlantic and ours, Archbishop Plunkett did not hesitate for one second to exert authority—to crack the whip, if you will. But he was never perceived as lording it over his flock. In the most crucial sense, he not only shared their privations but bore the full brunt of the British attempt to extirpate Roman Catholicism from Ireland, root and branch.

As a follower of the ultramontane movement among Catholic clergy—i.e., the belief that absolute power should be invested in the pope—Plunkett would, at first glance, be an ideal target for those who locate the current troubles in the authoritarian strain in the Church. I don’t think the case can be made with ease, however.

It’s not only because imposing the mindset of today on a culture and events centuries old is problematic. Two other matters loom large in any kind of assessment of his beliefs and administrative style:

1) Upon assuming his position, Plunkett encountered an environment verging on chaos. In the wake of the Cromwellian persecution of the 1640s and 1650s, the Irish Church was a morally lax, disenfranchised, dispirited wreck. Not only was the property-owning class in Ireland eviscerated, but the priesthood had increasingly fallen prey to alcoholism and concubinage. The closure of seminaries under the Cromwellian Protectorate meant that the remaining clergy had a weaker ability to understand and preach the faith. After taking over in 1669, Plunkett set about instituting the reforms of the Council of Trent, meant to stamp out abuses that had opened the way toward Protestantism. Viewed in this light, calling on greater self-discipline from priests might have made for greater institutional control, but it also had the immediate effect of fostering a purer, more enlightened priesthood.

2) Plunkett became the most visible avatar for the persecution once again sweeping across Ireland. The window of tolerance for Catholics following Oliver Cromwell’s death and the ascension of King Charles II didn’t last long. By 1673, Plunkett’s refusal, along with the rest of the hierarchy, to register for possible deportation forced him into hiding—to preach out in the open fields, to sleep out in the cold, never to rest long in any one place for fear of arrest. The people to whom he preached knew that his danger was as great as—and probably exceeded—theirs.

From his arrest to execution, Plunkett’s case was a flagrant abuse of justice and signal cruelty. When the British couldn’t obtain a guilty verdict of treason from an Irish jury because they rightly mistrusted the motives of informers, the first Earl of Shaftesbury instigated a change of venue to England, where such suspicion was not so widespread.

(Incidentally, Shaftesbury, an opportunist of the most shameless kind, was described by historian Thomas Babington Macaulay—hardly sympathetic to Catholics—as follows:

“It is certain that, just before the Restoration, he declared to the regicides that he would be damned, body and soul, rather than suffer a hair of their heads to be hurt, and that, just after the Restoration, he was one of the judges that sentenced them to death. It is certain that he was a principal member of the most profligate administration ever known, and that he was afterwards a principal member of the most profligate Opposition ever known. It is certain that, in power, he did not scruple to violate the great fundamental principles of the Constitution, in order to exalt the Catholics, and that, out of power, he did not scruple to violate every principle of justice, in order to destroy them.”)

In a matter of property rights, a Plunkett decision in favor of Dominicans over Franciscans rankled many in the latter order, and some of them committed perjury against him at his London trial. He was not allowed enough time to transport rebuttal witnesses from Ireland. His conviction and death then became a foregone conclusion.

Just before his execution in July 1681, Plunkett gave a last, moving address to bystanders, many of whom realized by now that a grave miscarriage of justice had taken place. But the archbishop had more trials to endure—an agony that will be familiar to viewers of Braveheart:

* He was strung up by rope, but the hanging stopped just short of death;

* Taken down and revived, he was dragged to the execution table, where his body was stretched taut, then disemboweled;

* Still barely alive, Plunkett was only now decapitated.

* Each of his limbs was then cut off.

Archbishop Plunkett was canonized in 1975. An enemy of corruption within the Church, he would have been appalled by its maintenance today in Ireland; an archbishop who disdained ease and safety, he would loathed the comfortable archbishop's mansion enjoyed in Boston by William Cardinal O’Connell and his successors for decades. By necessity he wielded the authority of his office, but he could not leave his people while they suffered, and he paid with his life for it.

Plunkett's legacy was ruined by men who, three centuries after he lived and died, were more intent on maintaining institutional prerogatives than on taking the gospel to the despised, disenfranchised and dispossessed as he did.

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.)