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The Popish Plot was an alleged Jesuit conspiracy to kill King Charles II and install his Catholic brother, James, as king. The conspiracy was entirely fabricated, concocted by an inglorious character by the name of Titus Oates (pictured above), who, in September, 1678, made a sworn deposition to Edmund Godfrey, a justice of the peace, detailing his claims.
Godfrey was murdered just a few weeks later, fuelling public fears that Catholic rebels were on the offensive. Oates’s allegations were widely believed to be true, and from 1679 to 1681 Catholics were the victims of mob attacks and punitive laws. Exact numbers are debatable, but it seems likely that hundreds were imprisoned, some of whom died in appalling conditions, and at least 22 – among them Oliver Plunkett (the Primate of All Ireland) and the Jesuits William Barrow, Edward Colman, John Fenwick, William Ireland and David Lewis – were executed, either at the time or in the ensuing anti-Catholic purge.
It finally became clear that Oates was lying through his back teeth, but scant reparation was made to the Catholic community. For example, measures prohibiting Catholics from living within ten miles of London, and the legal requirement for anyone taking up public office to deny the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, remained in force even after the plot had been exposed as a hoax.
As the title pages to these works indicate, there was no shortage of people eager to attest to the truth of Oates’s allegations of a plot. They can be accessed in the index and read in text-searchable PDF facsimiles.
This work, published in 1683, contains the protestations of innocence made by Catholics accused of complicity in the alleged plot before they were put to death. The fact that they were indeed innocent does not appear to have led to any softening of public or official attitudes.
The Popish Plot ran roughly concurrently with the Exclusion Crisis. Between 1679 and 1681, three Exclusion Bills were put before Parliament, in an attempt to prevent King Charles’s Catholic brother, James, from taking the throne. The two issues became intertwined as fears grew that, were James to become king, the country would be under the rule of a Catholic tyrant.
John Pollock’s The Popish Plot (1903), available in Project Gutenberg, gives a detailed account of the plot.