Gunpowder Plots

by Antonia Fraser

  Blount’s short pamphlet was a powerful call to arms – it invoked every anti-Catholic stereotype to provoke a visceral and violent fear among the Protestant communities of England of the clear and present danger of popish sedition. Charles Blount’s tocsin of alarm was sounded against the fear of a Popish Plot to assassinate Charles II. The foundations of that political fear, mobilized against James, duke of York, were laid in the events and political capital generated by the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. It is no exaggeration to claim that these gut fears and prejudices determined and defined the great political crises of the seventeenth century from the outbreak of Civil War in the 1640s, to the Exclusion crisis of the early 1680s, to the final triumph of the Protestant state after 1689.

  The influence of the events of 5 November 1605 resonated down the succeeding decades. Like tiny embers, at times the power of the cultural memory of plot, conspiracy and papal threat may have lain dormant in the storehouse of the country, but it only took the mildest political crisis to encourage the fiercest flames back to life as the episode of the Popish Plot and the consequent crisis of monarchical succession demonstrates. A very rough count of printed works produced across the seventeenth century that vilified ‘popery’ shows that about 800 were produced: the great peaks of publication were, unsurprisingly, at times of the most profound political crisis – the early 1640s, the late 1670s and 1689 saw hundreds of titles in circulation, feeding public anxieties. Anti-popery was the ingredient that consistently radicalized and destabilized already difficult political situations.

  The first significant political crisis shaped by the legacy of anti-Catholic prejudice ended with the monarch on the scaffold. During the 1630s Charles I’s increasingly autocratic style of government, coupled with the religious policy of Archbishop Laud, had led many to regard his regime as tainted by popish inclination. The so-called Bishops’ War saw military conflict between a Scottish army hostile to religious innovation, and a king determined to confirm his authority. By August 1640 the Scots had invaded and defeated Charles’s forces at Newcastle; the negotiation of a truce at Ripon, the terms a postponement of final settlement until Parliament was called and royal payment of all military expenses (the massive sum of £850 a day), ensured that a new Parliament was inevitable.

  The new Parliament intended to punish the instigators of Charles I’s personal rule: evil advisers rather than the king himself were the focus of hostilities. Members of Parliament hoped to re-establish the traditional harmony of king and people by purging the body politic of corrupt and evil counsellors. Popery had contaminated the court but not the king. These political anxieties were directed against the king’s closest advisers – Thomas Wentworth (created Lord Strafford in 1640 for services to the court), architect of regal policy in Ireland and England, and Archbishop Laud, inspiration behind the anti-Puritan ecclesiastical regime. On 24 November 1640 Strafford’s impeachment began. In March 1641 Laud was formally charged with attempting to reconcile England to Rome. Strafford was indicted with attempting to alter the fundamental laws of England and treasonably encouraging Catholic designs against England.

  The fall of Strafford is an epitome of the power that the fear of popery had to poison the relationship between king, Parliament and people. Charles was loath to lose his minister, and he was prepared to turn to any source, even foreign Catholics, to strike back at the rebellious Scots. In the Commons, John Pym, the outspoken critic of royal policy in the 1620s, was determined to expose the Catholic conspiracy that threatened England. On 3 May 1641 Pym announced news of an Army Plot, hatched to spring Strafford from the Tower. London was reduced to fearful panic. In response, the Commons drew up an oath of allegiance whereby MPs, and ultimately the whole population, would swear an oath in defence of the ‘true reformed Protestant religion’, the king and Parliament and ‘the lawful rights and liberties of the subject’. By default, Roman Catholics were regarded as seditious conspirators.

  That the fear of a popish conspiracy gained popular currency at this time is indisputable. This panic converted itself into extra-parliamentary agitation and popular demonstration; fear was to drive the political crisis to a bloody end. More than 20,000 Londoners had petitioned for Strafford’s death. In the first week of May huge gatherings of ‘mechanic people’ had mobbed the House of Lords and Whitehall demanding that Charles sign the death warrant, which he duly did (with much regret) on 10 May. Strafford was executed two days later. At the same time Charles signed an Act of Parliament that ensured Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent. The pattern of constitutional reform against the practices of the personal rule being driven by an ever-increasing parliamentary and popular hysteria about the existence of a Catholic conspiracy against Protestantism was to be repeated over and over again during the 1640s. Ultimately this spiral of hostility against a Popish Plot tainted Charles I himself.

  The fear of popish conspiracy was orchestrated by John Pym in the Commons but directed to a national audience in the provinces. It was Pym’s firm belief, and one that he had held since the rise of Laudianism in the 1620s, that a Catholic conspiracy surrounded Charles I and threatened Protestant liberties. Evil counsellors perverted royal policy; Jesuit advisers haunted Whitehall; Catholic soldiers prepared for a coup. Pym aimed to root out this conspiracy and erect political and military bulwarks against its resurgence. Political and religious reforms passed through Parliament unpicking corrupted institutions and practices. Star Chamber and the other prerogative courts used by Laud and Strafford in the 1630s against the godly were abolished. Ship money, knighthood fines, purveyances and forest laws were all removed. Earlier a Triennial Act had been passed, determining that a Parliament had to be called every three years.

  Fundamental to Pym’s strategy of settlement between king and Parliament was the series of Ten Propositions put forward in June 1641. These plans consisted of purging evil counsellors, rooting out popery and defending the realm against internal and external invasion. The Commons would assume control of those who advised the king. There would be strict enforcement of the recusancy laws against Catholics. The militia and ports were to be ‘made fit for service’ against potential conspirators. The spectre of a papist plot was to be foiled.

  Pym’s strategy to force a reformed settlement reached a high point in the early days of November 1641. Pym and his fellow committeemen had been working on a much longer proposal for reform since August. Based on the Ten Propositions, the Grand Remonstrance, which was addressed as much to the people as to the king, set out in precise detail the history of popish conspiracy since the 1620s and the proposed remedies. The king’s foreign, financial and religious policies were indicted: a catalogue of fifteen years of ‘evils and corruptions’ was condemned. The Remonstrance continued to uphold Parliament as the legitimate source of such remedies and settlement with the king. Dramatically, before the document could be introduced into the Commons, revelations of the Irish rebellion reached the House on 1 November. This set the scene for the final breakdown of relations between king and Parliament. The power of Pym’s reforms had been given credibility by the fear of Catholic conspiracy – his management of revelations of Army Plots and attempts on true Protestants provided justification for such policies.

  The news of a real rebellion, complete with tales of atrocious murders and massacres of godly Protestants by Irish Catholics, gave substance to the conspiracies Pym had uncovered. Rumours of similar attempts in England and the Irish rebels’ profession of loyalty to Charles set the final seeds of distrust between king and Parliament. It is difficult now to capture the atmosphere of these days, but there was a real and profound fear of murder and massacre throughout the country and particularly in London.

  Richard Baxter’s reaction to the news of the Irish rebellion in autumn 1641 summarizes Protestant feelings: ‘it filled all England with a fear both of the Irish and the Papist at home… insomuch that when the rumour of a plot was occasioned at London, the poor people, all the counties ov
er, were ready either to run to arms, or hide themselves, thinking that the Papist were ready to rise and cut their throats.’ News of the massacre of perhaps as many as 12,000 true English Protestants by the bloodthirsty papists acted as a massive stimulant to popular political fears of a Catholic conspiracy against true religion in England. Pym’s speculations were proving to be accurate. Foreign Catholics, evil advisers, Cavaliers and Royalist delinquents became lumped together in the popular mind. People put chains across the streets to warn them of armed troops. Rumours of strangers, Irishmen and Jesuits, spread from county to county and town to town. Spontaneous attacks upon Catholics, and suspected conspirators, added to the hysteria. Thomas Beale gave evidence that two men in collusion with Catholic priests had organized 108 men to assassinate a similar number of ‘puritan’ peers and MPs as a signal for a general rising.

  In the shadows cast by the Rebellion, the light of the Remonstrance looked even more brilliant. Leading Catholics were imprisoned and Parliament took control of the militia. The Remonstrance was passed by eleven votes in the Commons, and was printed and distributed around the kingdom. It was from this point that MPs and Lords began to form into Royalist and anti-Royalist groups. Ultimately, these interests fought for their beliefs on the battlefields of England, Scotland and Ireland. The fear of popery had determined the growth of mutual distrust between king, Parliament and people. The dual fears of political tyranny and religious corruption became entangled. The worries of a plot or conspiracy against Protestant liberties had turned into a political reality by 1642.

  The popular dimensions of fear and hysteria about such a plot, made more diffuse by the massive explosion of printed newsletters and broadsides spreading rumours and tales, were a crucial determinant on the road to the Civil War. For a war to be fought two sides had to be mobilized: foot-soldiers were needed as well as generals. The evidence of the localities’ interest and close attention to developments at Westminster and the Palace of Whitehall is manifest in the numerous petitions and demonstrations for and against the plot. This politicization of the people itself led to the polarization of the nation in the summer of 1642. Some pointed to the clear evidence of a popish conspiracy to overthrow true religion and decided to arm themselves against bishops and princes, while others, gesturing at the burgeoning outbreaks of disorder and riot, suggested that the greater threat was that of social disintegration and mobilized behind the keystone of order – the king – against the Puritan rebels.

  During the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, while the generalized fear of popery acted as a white noise of political discourse, the challenge of sectarianism and popular political radicalism preoccupied both provincial communities and national magistrates. Under the helm of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, providence briefly enabled the elect nation to pursue godly reformation: this godly project disintegrated into military chaos and prophetic conflict in the late 1650s after Cromwell’s untimely death. Remarkably, many of the popular pamphlets of the period still employed the vocabulary of popish conspiracy to stigmatize oppositional groups: one explanation for the efflorescence of religious sectarianism was that the Roman Antichrist was masquerading in Protestant form. So, for example, Quakers were often represented in political prints as secret Jesuits who were cunningly using disguise to attack true religion – a theme that was carried through to the end of the seventeenth century. At a more philosophical level, writers like Thomas Hobbes extended the category of ‘popery’ to include any independent religious authority that challenged the sovereignty of the civil state.

  The restoration of regal and ecclesiastical authority in 1660 was heralded as a providential moment. Anglican order had survived the challenges of popish tyranny and sectarian sedition; Charles II re-established social order and the government of bishops imposed Protestant piety. The war against all forms of popish conspiracy was reinvigorated: again, the image of Britannia besieged was reinforced by a providential understanding of contemporary events like the Great Fire of London of 1666. The immediate perception was that plotting Roman Catholics (probably French) had deliberately torched London – discoveries of caches of daggers, arrests of firework-makers and reports of fireballs made of gunpowder and brimstone provoked panic among the urban population. Priests, recusants and visiting Frenchmen all became the focus of fear. Later engravings, like A true and full narrative of those two never to be forgotten deliverances (1671), made the explicit link with earlier threats – the Great Fire of London was simply the latest instalment of the project started with the Armada invasion and the Gunpowder Plot.

  A combination of Charles II’s pro-French foreign policy, a potential Catholic heir, the open manipulation of Parliament, and the rigorous prosecution of Protestant nonconformity meant that increasingly during the mid-1670s both the court and the government became tainted with ‘popery and arbitrary government’. To many moderate Protestants the alliance of the king with a persecuting Anglicanism conjured up the popish spectre of the 1630s. The build-up of the standing army to a figure of about 30,000 in 1678 only encouraged the anti-popish fears of many in the Commons and the localities. Studies of the counties show how during the 1670s the pattern of politics moved from the consensus of the 1660s to a process of confrontation: by-elections became increasingly the focus of bitter contestation between those who represented the court and those who represented the Protestant country. Important Protestant anniversaries such as the Fifth of November were celebrated with mass demonstrations against ‘popery’ and burnings of papal effigies. Privy Councillors and ministers were attacked in the Commons as ‘popishly affected’.

  The fear of ‘popery’ was powerfully resurgent in the late 1670s. It is important to understand that the political worry about ‘popery’ was not just a simple dread of Roman Catholics but was a complicated mixture of anxiety about politics, religion and history. Studies of the Catholic community in Britain show that after the Restoration there were perhaps only 60,000 believers, confined mainly to the north of England: a sect perhaps no bigger than that of the Quakers. Studies of the enforcement of anti-Catholic laws show how many local communities were very lax in enacting the penalties against real Roman Catholics. For example, in theory some £5 million was due to the Exchequer in fines by 1670: precisely £147 15s. 7d. had been collected. Neighbours were reluctant to persecute a largely quiescent community. For most of the 1670s, although there was a perceptible increase in the number of Catholics prosecuted (the total income from fines increased to £78 5s. 6d. in 1675), real Catholics were not scapegoated. But as Bishop Samuel Parker commented, ‘there were two inchanting terms, which at the first pronunciation could, like Circe’s intoxicating cups, change men into beasts, namely, Popery and the French interest.’

  This political terror, prompted by the fear of popery, was shaped by the aggressive military threat of the Catholic Louis XIV. Many of those who gathered in the London coffee houses or shadowy meeting houses also diagnosed a threat closer to home: it was not just the fear of Catholic invasion but a real apprehension that there was an enemy within. Famously, Andrew Marvell, the Republican poet and pamphleteer, published in 1677 a popular work, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, which, in a very similar form to the Remonstrances and Propositions of the early 1640s, condemned the corruption of the administration by popery. Works like Marvell’s became a cornerstone of an oppositional group within Parliament and the localities: this opposition was not coordinated nor yet a political party but a collection of men who felt themselves bound in common cause to defend Protestantism and their ‘lives, liberties and estates’. Since both the king and the Church of England were in explicit cooperation to persecute Dissent and to corrupt Parliament, they were implicated, just as Laud had been in the 1640s, as agents of ‘popery’.

  It was in this charged political atmosphere that the events of 1678–81 came about – a crisis that erupted over the discovery in late autumn 1678 of a Catholic conspiracy to kill the king, which brought home
the consequent danger of the Catholic James, duke of York, as the next legitimate successor. The episode of the so-called Popish Plot is clear evidence for the persistence of the fear of popery in this period. The real consternation that gripped the mind and actions of the nation between 1678 and 1681 was a potential repetition of the crisis of popery that carried England to civil war in the early 1640s – more importantly, Englishmen relived the earlier years fearful not only of the dangers of arbitrary power but also of the destruction of civil war.

  News of a Catholic plot to kill Charles II was first rumoured in late summer 1678. The supposed plot – and it seems very likely that there was no Catholic conspiracy at all – was concocted and then revealed by two informers. The mastermind was Titus Oates, a man who had been both an Anglican and a Catholic priest. His sidekick was the near insane Israel Tonge. They claimed to have infiltrated a Jesuit plot to assassinate Charles and replace him with James, backed by French arms. They presented some forty-three articles of evidence that suggested that Sir George Wakeman, the queen’s physician, was going to poison the king for £10,000. Both Charles and his Lord Treasurer and chief political manager, Thomas, earl of Danby, were doubtful of the accusation, but because of the political climate were forced to take Oates’s and Tonge’s fabrications seriously. Oates felt that in order to implicate James, duke of York, even further, he should forge letters from the conspirators to the duke’s confessor Bedinfield, which would be intercepted by Charles II’s secret service. Such was the incompetence of the fabricators that unfortunately the letters reached Bedinfield, who immediately alerted both James and Charles.