Nemine contra dicente:
The Sponsors of the Popish Plot, 1678-1681
Francis Steen
University of California, Santa Barbara
A shorter version of this paper is currently being revised for a special issue
(December 2000) of Clio's Psyche on the psychology of conspiracy theories.

A poet started it. In the fall of 1677, An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England was traded in the dark corners of coffee houses and back alleys. As a titillating fig leaf, it bore the imprint Amsterdam, refuge of English dissidents and beyond the reach of the censors; in fact, it was printed in London [1]. "There has now for divers Years," it proclaimed, "a Design been carried on, to change the Lawful Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to Convert the Established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery: than both which, nothing can be more Destructive or contrary to the Interest and Happiness, to the Constitution and Being of the King and Kingdom " (3). It was an open secret that the pamphlet's anonymous author was Andrew Marvell, better known for his persuasive lines to a coy mistress,

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball

The political opposition that Marvell appealed to was indeed fragmented and demoralized; the parties could use a rallying cry to unite them in a common purpose. During the previous decades, the puritan dissenters had seized power through protracted civil wars and the execution of Charles I, only to see their Commonwealth crumble in interminable squabbles. The absurd had come to pass: Charles II had been invited back to rule over them, a free people. Even though the status quo ante was in practice irrecoverable, he succeeded in establishing a measure of stability. The sources of conflict, however, had merely been submerged; when they sporadically resurfaced, the dissenters and other radicals found no common voice. There was something in the times that favored the formation of smaller cells of power -- likely, it was the printing press itself, nurturing a proliferation of imaginative communities with cheaply produced divisive tracts. Amsterdam vied for the title of the capital of the Republic of Letters (Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 99), yet this virtual republic, the paradise of political hackers and utopians, the cyberspace of the print revolution, had no single center and provided nothing resembling a unifying ideology to be embraced by all. If a radical poet sowed the seeds of conspiracy theory, it took the wholesale manufacture of details, supported by a political machinery and a deep purse, to turn fear and hatred into a potent political force.

Reality provided a potent backdrop for the imagination. At the Restoration in 1660, Charles II had been given a generous allowance and powers fit for a king; however, for his continued supply he remained humiliatingly dependent on Parliament. "His very Prerogative is no more than what the Law has determined," Marvell wrote with pride; "a King of England, keeping to these measures may without arrogance be said to remain the only intelligent Ruler over a Rational people" (ibid.). The King himself took a distinctively dimmer view. Looking to France, he saw a stable and unrivaled Catholic absolutist monarchy, a culture that he had learned to admire and that shaped his own ambitions. Protestantism, which in the age of the Tudors had been a scourge to assert the sovereign’s power, had under the Stuarts become a halter held by Parliament. Still, the King retained executive control of foreign policy, a privilege that could be turned to ready money. In May of 1670 Charles met secretly with representatives of Louis XIV at Dover. In return for bribes that freed him from the dank hand of his partners in power, he agreed to turn his back on the Protestant Triple Alliance. "The King of England," he further promised, "being convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic religion, [is] resolved to declare it and to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the state of his country’s affairs permit" (Treaty of Dover, in Browning, 864). In return he would get two million livres and six thousand French troop to help quell any resistance. It was, if you like, a plot; the King was cautious enough not to put it into action (Hill, Century of Revolution,194-96). The secret Treaty of Dover was followed by an official Traité simulée presented to Parliament; even as people were kept in the dark, much was guessed and more suspected. "I know you have heard much of my alliance with France; and I believe it hath been strangely represented to you, as if there were certain secret Articles of dangerous consequence," the King told the people's representatives in December, "but ... I assure you, there is no other Treaty with France, either before or since." The secret treaty was to haunt Charles II for the rest of his reign; he remained in fear that the French king might reveal its contents to his subjects, producing irreconcilable antagonism. "From 1674 onwards, in fact," Andrew Browning writes, "Charles was in the unfortunate position of being virtually blackmailed by the French king" (English Historical Documents 1660-1714, 9). These actions and their secret consequences eroded vital trust between the sovereign and his people, laying down fertile soil for imaginative conspiracy theories.

The realization of this potential took several years to complete. Under Danby's ministry in the late 1670s, a middle course of sorts was staked out: Dissenters and Catholics alike were suppressed, but England allied again with Protestant Holland against the increasing territorial incursions of Catholic France. In early 1678, Parliament passed a bill financing the war, only to discover that Charles II had used the occasion to negotiate another massive bribe for himself from the French king to stay neutral. According to Swift, the King's latest proposals to France were approved with the secret stipulation he limit his standing army. "This unexpected Proposal put the King in a Rage, and made him say, –––'d's fish, does my Brother of France think to serve me thus? Are all his Promises to make me absolute Master of my ––––– come to this? Or, does he think That a Thing to be done with Eight Thousand Men" (Sir William Temple, Letters to the King, 355-6). Yet the King’s actual dealings remained in the shadows; instead was dished up to the public imagination an intricately conceived popish conspiracy, fabricated out of whole cloth by Titus Oates and Israel Tong and presented in all solemnity to Parliament. Oates had spent time at the Catholic seminary at St. Omer and claimed to have uncovered a vast scheme involving the Pope to assassinate Charles II and install his brother, the openly Catholic James, Duke of York. On 31 October 1678 the following resolution was passed: "Resolved, Nemine contra dicente, That this House doth declare, that they are fully satisfied by the Proofs they have heard, That there now is, and for divers Years last past hath been, a Horrid and Treasonable Plot and Conspiracy, Contrived and Carried on by those of the Popish Religion, for the Murthering of His Majesties sacred Person, and for Subverting the Protestant Religion, and the Antient and well established Governement of this Kingdom" (An Impartial Account, 2). On the strength of suborned accusations, some thirty-five prominent Catholics were tried and executed as traitors to the kingdom; many more were harassed and imprisoned. At the end of the day, in August of 1680, Tong's son testified before the Privy Council that his father and Oates had invented the conspiracy and forged some of the letters to substantiate it; "no serious historian now questions that the Popish Plot was manufactured" (Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom, 5). How did it achieve its power?

The success of the Popish Plot as a conspiracy theory can be traced to an explosive mixture of entrenched conflict, long-standing suspicion, and political opportunism. These dimensions of history, I suggest, can fruitfully be explored within the context of what Sperber (1996) terms the epidemiology of representations. Certain ideas and representations, he points out, spread more effectively and have a greater impact because they tap into and resonate with human psychological structures. The proliferation of political and religious pamphlets during the seventeenth century made possible a loosely coordinated but effective popular activism, yet this barrage of print had to compete for access to the emotions as well as the intellect. What was the nature of the ideas that succeeded in uniting people in a common cause, mobilizing their energies, emotions, and thoughts for collective action? In retrospect, this period has become famous for defining the founding principles of liberal democracies: a free press, a wide franchise, power in the hands of an elected body. Yet the ideas that successfully mobilized people -- as if the word meant "to turn citizens into a mob" -- had a dominant religious component. Religion defined membership in a community through belief, tapping into a powerful coalitional psychology. Religious beliefs may be treated as a special form of group fantasies; they are not primarily reality-based and may indeed place a premium on the slightly counterintuitive (Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas, 48). Adherence to an attention-grabbing and otherwise implausible proposition is an effective marker for group membership, since nonmembers are so unlikely to hold the same views. Yet this limited, coalitional rationality came at the expense of a more general epistemic rationality. The numerous communities built around religious credos developed no common ground for resolving disputes of faith. By constructing personal and collective identities grounded in nonnegotiable belief structures, the Protestant dissenters -- chiefly Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers -- reproduced the logic of the institutions that sought to suppress them, whether Anglican or Catholic. The centrality of belief in the formation of individual and collective identities ensured a continuous and lethal conflict. In France, Louis XIV was moving towards a revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which nominally granted religious freedom to Protestants; intolerance was the order of the day. Protestants cherished the memories of the Marian burnings, the papacy's repeated attempts to deprive Elizabeth of her crown, the infamous Gunpowder Plot, and the "popish conspiracy" of the early 1640s as a way to construct a vulnerable collective identity. While the dissenters resented their lack of power, the fragmentation of Protestantism into sects militated against effective political action and the collapse of the Commonwealth had eroded their confidence as well as their credibility as a political force. The threat of a common enemy, however, financed by external powers, provided an opportunity for uniting the various oppositional groups into a single political movement.

The person who most clearly realized the potential of anti-Catholicism -- in the jargon of the day, "anti-Popery" -- to form a political base was Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, the de facto leader of the so-called Country party, an informal political faction from a time before political parties. Alarmed by the prospect of a Catholic king modeled on Louis XIV, he championed the story of the Popish Plot to spur Parliament into proposing a bill to exclude the Duke of York from the succession. Charles II reacted in anger, dissolved parliament and called for reelections. The Country party returned with an increased popular mandate. "If we do not something relating to the Succession," Lord Russell defiantly declared in April of 1679, "we must resolve, when we have a Prince of the popish Religion, to be Papists, or burn. And I will do neither" (Journals of the House of Commons 1547-1714, 9: 605). Shaftesbury was appointed lord president of the Privy Council; he held daily meetings with Oates and vigorously pursued the allegations (Greaves, Secrets, 8). Coincidentally, the chief concern of the French King was to keep Protestant England out of his Continental campaigns; domestic trouble was to be encouraged. Discussing the possibility of sponsoring Shaftesbury, the French ambassador wrote in December of 1679, "It would be a very proper means to stir up new embarrassments to the king of England, and Lord Shaftesbury would be still more bold if he found himself secretly supported by your Majesty" (English Historical Documents, 253); he advised a sizable sum would be required. Even James threw himself into the controversy with full force, hoping to use it to discredit all anti-Catholic propaganda; unfortunately, his poorly executed counter-plot of forged letters was revealed, lending strength to the original accusations.

On the 17th of November in 1679 and again in 1680, on the birthday of Queen Elizabeth, a "solemn mock procession of the Pope, cardinals, Jesuits, fryers, nuns" wound its way through the streets of London. In 1679, the roles were played by people in flesh and blood, led by a crowd of rowdy torchbearers, a bell-ringer with a crosier, a dead man on a horse, a richly robed divine displaying the host on a tray and proclaiming the transubstantiation, and a Black Friar carrying a large crucifix. Dressed up in gray habits, two groups of nuns and tonsured monks followed, muttering prayers as they fingered their their rosaries. A band of colorful trumpet players and drummers preceded a bevy of mitered cardinals, their rich gowns dragging the ground, and several pairs of Jesuits engaged in learned disputes as they walked. Finally, announced by a caller striking a gong and two friars carrying large crosses, on a raised dais with flowing curtains, came the Pope in all his magnificence, with a black devil, horns and whip, at his back, sheltered by a baldachin. In 1680, perhaps with financing from the Catholic Louis XIV, [2] the actors were supplemented by elaborate effigies carried on a dozen large wooden platforms; at the market in Smithfield they were set alight in huge bonfires (see fig.1).

Fig. 1.

These Pope-burning processions, attended by tens of thousands of people, were organized by the Green Ribbon Club, the propaganda arm of what was soon to be called the Whig party. They provided an imaginative enactment of various aspects of the story of the Popish Plot, making visible and palpable what people had only dreaded in the imagination. The desecration of the Catholic icons, vestments, and rituals and the burning of effigies established a new set of associations that were public and shared; united in the detestation of one symbolic reign, a community of rage and hate was facilitated. The mock solemnity evoked the original power of these symbols even as it denied them validity, thus establishing a conscious resistance to the symbolic language of the enemy. Cold-blooded opportunism recruited the solidarity and peer pressure generated and held in place by the conspiracy theory. The results were murderous; blinded by fear, juries convicted innocent men on fabricated evidence, reaching deep into the Royal household.

In the annals of political paranoia, the imagined plot of high-ranking English Catholics to kill Charles II and make way for his brother James appears, finally, as a self-destructive solution to a real problem. The fragmentation of society into a multiplicity of imagined communities based on printed texts created the need for new modes of collective action. The hysteria of the Popish Plot momentarily brought people together against a single common enemy. A psychology of fear and hatred was recruited by crafty politicians and put to effective short-term use, propelling Shaftesbury and the Whigs into political leadership. Over the next few years, however, the excesses of the Popish Plot discredited their cause. The Whigs' reliance on false evidence exposed them in turn to perjury and political murders (cf. Steen, "A Story to Kill For"). By the end of 1683, Browning writes, "open opposition to Charles in England had ceased to exist" (English Historical Documents, 15). There were real issues; as the years before the revolution of 1688-89 were to demonstrate, James did indeed intend to establish a more powerful monarchy and return England to the Catholic fold. In the intermediate term, however, the lies of the Popish Plot eroded trust and seriously damaged the Whig cause; by January 1683, Shaftesbury had fled the country. A broken man, he died within days of arriving in Amsterdam.

Notes

[1] Donald Wing comments, "The imprint is false; from the typography, printed in London." ESTC R22809.

[2] For a discussion, see Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics, 86-92. The evidence suggests several Whigs were supported by the French King at this period.

Bibliography

Browning, Andrew (ed.). English Historical Documents 1660-1714. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

ESTC. Early English Short Title Catalog. Electronic database of works in English 1473-1800. British Library and ESTC/North America, 1986-2000.

Greaves, Richard L. Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals From the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688-1689. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714. Rev. ed. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1972.

Lacey, Douglas Raymond. Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661-1689: A Study in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969.

Marvell, Andrew (anonymous). An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England. More particularly, from the long prorogation, of November, 1675, ending the 15th. of February 1676, till the last meeting of Parliament, the 16th. of July 1677. Amsterdam [i.e., London]: privately printed, 1677. ESTC R22809.Reissued under Marvell's name in 1678 and "recommended to the reading of all English Protestants." ESTC R15579.

Sperber, Dan (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwells.

Steen, Francis. "A Story to Kill For: The Death of Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex." 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (forthcoming).

Temple, William. Letters to the King. Edited by Jonathan Swift. London: Timothy Goodwin and Benjamin Tooke, 1703.

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