Popish Plot

Popish Plot, name given by contemporaries to an alleged Roman Catholic plot in 1678-1681 to assassinate King Charles II and crush Protestantism in England.

The claim that there existed a “Popish Plot” was first made in August 1678 by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. Oates was an Anglican clergyman who, in 1677, had converted to Catholicism and had studied at, and been expelled from, several Catholic seminaries. A deeply disreputable character, Oates appears to have fabricated details about a plot out of a mixture of revenge and self-advancement. He was assisted by the fanatically anti-Catholic Tonge, and Tonge’s acquaintance, Christopher Kirkby. It was Kirkby who warned Charles II of the plot.

Charles was concerned by such allegations and instructed his minister, the Earl of Danby, to investigate further, which placed Tonge in a legally precarious position. Thus, Tonge persuaded Oates to swear to the veracity of the plot before a magistrate, before they were both questioned by the Privy Council. Charles listened but was sceptical. The Privy Council, however, was alarmed and two incidents then occurred which escalated alarm into full-scale panic.

First, Oates had suggested that Edward Coleman, the Catholic secretary to Charles II’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, was one of the plotters. Luckily for Oates, it turned out that Coleman had indeed been intriguing with foreign Catholics, a finding that gave substantial weight to the rest of Oates’s allegations. Second, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the magistrate to whom Oates had sworn his evidence, was found murdered. Godfrey’s murder still remains a mystery. Contemporaries, however, jumped to the conclusion that he had been silenced by Catholic agents.

Consequently, when Parliament met in October 1678, it was in a climate of widespread hysteria, both in London and the provinces. Parliament ferociously investigated the whole affair, and called in Oates to give evidence. Oates went on to give evidence at the trials of several alleged plotters, including Coleman, who were found guilty and executed. Meanwhile, the plot took on a further turn when William Bedloe, a criminal acquaintance of Oates, made the claim in November 1678 that Jesuit-orchestrated uprisings were planned for the north and west of England. Shockingly, both Oates and Bedloe also accused Charles II’s Catholic wife, Catherine of Braganza, of being involved in the plot, and they maintained that her physician, Sir George Wakeman, had been bribed to poison Charles. Wakeman was tried but acquitted in July 1679 and consequently the case against Catherine evaporated.

Oates and his cronies were not the only ones to claim that there were plots against Charles II’s life. Thomas Dangerfield and Elizabeth Cellier, a thief and a Catholic midwife respectively, also claimed that there existed a plot to kill Charles II, but one that was backed by Presbyterians and headed by the leader of the Whigs in Parliament, the Earl of Shaftesbury, rather than by the Catholic hierarchy. When this was exposed as fraudulent, Dangerfield then abandoned Cellier and declared that it was actually a scheme by the Catholics to disguise another “popish plot” against the king, a conspiracy that was popularly known as the “Meal Tub Plot”. Thus, Cellier and several high-ranking Catholics found themselves among the accused. They were tried in mid-1680 but, like Wakeman the previous year, they were acquitted.

With claims of plots and counterplots abounding, the mood of the country remained edgy. Late in 1680, Viscount Stafford, one of five peers whom Oates had earlier accused of treason, was executed, as was Oliver Plunket, the Catholic bishop of Armagh, in July 1681. However, Charles II was starting to gain control of the situation. The king had never really believed Oates’s allegations but had felt powerless to act against the groundswell of anti-papist sentiment, emotions that merely became exacerbated by the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681. By mid-1681, though, the king’s political situation was improving. Moreover, Oates’s allegations were starting to be viewed more widely as lies, which left Oates vulnerable to attack from his many enemies, including Charles’s brother, James, Duke of York. It was only a matter of time before Oates was tried for perjury, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Although he was released after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, he was quickly sidelined by the new regime.

The Popish Plot was one of the most sensational scandals of late Stuart England. Oates’s fabrications led to a national panic, the executions of dozens of innocent men, and triggered the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious political crisis of Charles II’s reign.