Nemine contra dicente: The Sponsors of the Popish Plot, 1678-1681

Andrew Marvell’s An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England appeared in the fall of 1677. It bore the imprint Amsterdam, beyond the reach of the censors; in fact, it was printed in London. It proclaimed:

There has now for divers Years 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.

By inspiring a fear of change and a loss of rights, Marvell appealed effectively to a political opposition that was fragmented and demoralized. During the previous decades, the Puritan dissenters had seized power and executed the king, only to see their Commonwealth crumble in an interminable civil war. The absurd had come to pass: Charles II had been invited to rule over them, a free people. His sheer presence succeeded in establishing a measure of stability, yet a deep-seated ambivalence remained, rooted in the complex psychological function of the king.

The king appears to have functioned as a receptor of the public’s unresolved fantasies of fulfilled and frustrated desires, of parental love and control. The monarchy amounted to a theatrical enactment of Hobbes’ natural man: in the figure of the king, the populace vicariously realized that individual whose absolute and infinite desires would never be denied. At the same time, as a divinely sanctioned father figure, he protected an infantilized populace, commanding obedience and love. Yet these roles, even as they promoted peace, inevitably caused public frustration at the loss of individual agency and self-determination. The power bestowed on the king inspired at once an almost religious adoration and intense feelings of hostility

Page 122

and resentment. Whereas the positive feelings could easily be indulged, rage could not safely be unleashed at the king himself. The psychological cost and the fresh memories of the civil wars prevented an open rebellion. The situation called for a suitably designed displacement object.

Reality provided a potent backdrop for the imagination. While the political elites struggled to contain the king’s power, Charles himself strove to enlarge it. At the Restoration in 1660, he had been given a generous allowance and powers fit for a king; however, for his continued supply of both he remained humiliatingly dependent on Parliament. France, an unrivalled Catholic and absolutist monarchy, became his secret ally. In a private treaty with Louis XIV in 1670, he agreed to turn his back on the Protestant Triple Alliance, to keep England out of France’s territorial wars, and to declare himself Catholic as soon as “the state of his country’s affairs permit.” In return he got two million livres and the promise of 6000 French troops to help quell any resistance. It was, if you like, a plot; the king was prudent enough never to put it into action. While Parliament was kept in the dark, much was guessed and more suspected. These events and their consequences eroded vital trust between the sovereign and his people, preparing the ground for group fantasies of hidden conspiracies.

The budding conflict between the king and Parliament took several years to unfold. Under Danby’s ministry, England allied again with Protestant Holland against 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. Matters came to a head; in a symbolic substitution, Danby was impeached, as nobody dared to touch the king. However, the main force of the putative aggressive reaction to the king’s deceit was shifted towards his brother and heir, the openly Catholic James, Duke of York. As if to order, an intricately conceived popish conspiracy, fabricated out of whole cloth by Titus Oates and Israel Tong, was dished up to the public imagination 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 crown his brother. On October 31, 1678, the following resolution was passed:

Resolved, Nemine contra dicente [unanimously], 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.

The juxtaposition of the murder and sacredness of the king demonstrates the closeness of the two components in people’s minds and may indicate the satisfaction of unresolved ambivalent drives in making the two concepts approach each other. Yet this closeness of conflicting components was tolerable only in a fantasy where the aggressive inclination was displaced onto an approved enemy. It is remarkable that Parliament acted on the fantasies of the Popish Plot nemine contra dicente, without anyone speaking up against it. One suspects that the capacity to engage in an intellectual debate, potentially facilitating the establishment of differentiated and conflicting views, was disturbed by the intensity of this mobilized ambivalence.

The Popish Plot attained a genuine political significance. Its success as a conspiracy theory can be traced to an explosive mixture of entrenched conflict, political opportunism, and displaced rage. 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. While dissenters and other radicals resented their lack of political power, the collapse of the Commonwealth had eroded their confidence as well as their credibility as a political force. They lacked the courage and conviction to unseat the king; their frustrations could more safely be channeled into “anti-Popery.” The aggressive component of their ambivalence provides intensity to the denigration of the Catholics as receptors of their displaced projective rage. The imagined covert threat of a common enemy provided an opportunity for uniting the various oppositional groups into a strong and single-minded political movement.

The person who most clearly realized the potential of anti-Catholicism 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 faction. Alarmed by the prospect of a Catholic king modeled on Louis XIV,

Page 123

Shaftesbury 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 re-elections. To the dismay of the “Abhorrers” loyal to the Court, the “Petitioners” of the Country faction 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.” Shaftesbury was appointed Lord President of the Privy Council and held daily meetings with Oates and vigorously pursued the allegations.

Shaftesbury and the other Petitioners—soon nicknamed “Whigs”—ruthlessly used the mobilization of the masses to put pressure on the king and the court. In 1679 and again in 1680, they staged Pope-burning processions attended by tens of thousands of people. In private, they were convinced Charles himself was part of the plot to return England to Catholicism. In public, the collective fantasy of a Popish Plot successfully turned James and his fellow Catholics into targets of displaced rage. The results were murderous: juries convicted innocent men and women on fabricated evidence. On the strength of suborned accusations, some 35 prominent Catholics were executed as traitors to the kingdom; many more were harassed and imprisoned.

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” (Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom, 1992, p. 5).

The paranoid conviction that high-ranking European and English Catholics were plotting to kill Charles II and make way for his brother James became politically significant for several interacting reasons. Despite the relief and public acclaim that greeted the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, deep-seated hostility towards the symbolic role of the king persisted; the political situation required its containment. During the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-1681, the potential strain of co-existing feelings of adoration and resentment was partly resolved by establishing an approved receptor of displaced rage that would allow the position of the king to remain inviolate. The hysteria of the Popish Plot provided at once a conspicuous display of solidarity and a safe outlet for hatred. These emotions were cultivated by crafty politicians and put to effective short-term use, propelling Shaftesbury and the Whigs into political leadership.

The unanimous intensity of the initial reaction to the construed conspiracy might be explained with reference to the expediency with which it seemed to solve an array of political and psychological knots. Over the next few years, however, the excesses of the Popish Plot discredited their cause. The ensuing collapse of the Whig protest seems to reflect that the paranoid fantasy facilitating the outburst of constrained tensions failed to serve as a framework for integrating these energies into a functional political organization. The Whigs’ reliance on false evidence exposed them in turn to perjury and political murders. By the end of 1683, opposition to Charles had been successfully driven underground and abroad.

Page 124