The hope that Charles II would be a Catholic king was realised late in his reign. He was received into the Church on February 6th 1685, six hours before he died. The King was in great pain – as much from the treatment he had received from his numerous doctors as from the still-undiagnosed disease they sought to alleviate or cure. So the Duke of York took some time to satisfy himself that his brother was in a fit state of mind to understand the significance of the request to be admitted to the faith which, for all of his life, Charles had claimed to reject. Those precautions left no doubt that the decision to become what he had once denounced was undoubtedly his own, although several pious Catholics took credit for putting the idea into Charles’ troubled head.
During the week that followed the King’s death, the Duke of York claimed that, shortly before his sudden illness prevented a steady and orderly journey to Rome, Charles had composed a statement asserting his wish to become a Catholic. A year later, James II – as the younger brother had then become – published the precis of two declarations of Catholic faith which he said had been found in the dead King’s strongbox. No one was allowed sight of the original manuscripts. From time to time James told an alternative story. In exile, seven years later, he explained to the nuns of Chaillot, in France, that, on the evening of his brother’s death, he had suddenly (and perhaps providentially) been inspired to send for a priest. No mention was made, in that version of events, of Charles’ declaration of faith.
There were several other claimants to the title of shepherd to the royal sheep. Charles Barrillon d’Armoncourt, Marquis de Branges and Ambassador of France, boasted to King Louis that the idea of sending for a priest was his. Father Benedict Gibbon, an English priest, published a pamphlet which claimed that he had told the Duke of York that his brother was ready to become a Catholic. However, Father John Huddleston – who received Charles into the Church and performed the last rites – was a model of circumspection. He merely recorded that the bedchamber had been cleared of everyone except the King, his brother and two Anglican witnesses (the Earls of Bath and Faversham), confirmed that Charles had been conscious, that he had declared his willingness to be received and listed the rites that had been performed. But Father Huddleston was not looking for a place in history. His only intention was to protect the memory of the dead King as he had protected his life more than thirty years earlier.
During his escape from the Parliamentary army after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Charles – as well as hiding in the famous oak tree – had taken refuge in houses that were owned by the Catholic gentry of Worcestershire, Shropshire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire. Moseley Hall, the home of Thomas Whitgreave, on the Hereford border of Worcester, had a priest-hole and a priest to go with it. His name was John Huddleston and in 1688 – shortly before James II was deposed – supporters of Catholic emancipation published a pamphlet which contained testimonies from both the priest and his employer. Charles, they said, had visited the chapel in Moseley Hall and told them that, as a boy, he had possessed ‘an altar, crucifix and silver candlesticks of his own’.1 Opponents of the campaign to confirm Charles’ genuine Catholicism dismissed the feeling of peace, which the King was said to have experienced within the chapel, as an aesthetic rather than spiritual experience. The rest of the two men’s testimonies was more difficult to discount. It went on to claim that, on the same evening, Charles had been read a defence of Catholicism and pronounced it unanswerable. He had also joined Father Huddleston in a recital of the catechism. Most important of all – to Catholics who were concerned about their own hopes of salvation – he had promised that Catholics would have freedom of worship after the restoration of the monarchy. It was a promise that he was to make time after time during his eventual reign – sometimes meaning it and sometimes not. But in 1651 it was enough to make Father Huddleston follow Charles Stuart into exile and return with him to England in 1660 as chaplain and confessor to his Roman Catholic queen.
It seems unlikely that the day of his death was the first occasion, during his reign, on which Charles had considered the possibility of becoming a Roman Catholic. Throughout his life he had been surrounded by Catholics who, by nature of their conviction, constantly reminded him which Christian denomination was the true faith. His mother, Henrietta Maria, accepted that, despite the marriage settlement, her children would be brought up as Protestants. But her son must have been influenced by her pious example as well as his father’s open admiration for Catholic liturgy, ceremony and ritual. Charles’ wife, Catherine of Braganza, was as devout as her mother-in-law, and at least two of his many mistresses were Catholic. So was his brother, the Duke of York – openly and formally after 1669, and secretly much earlier. However, the Marquess of Halifax was almost certainly wrong to claim that Charles, ‘when he came to England [after the Restoration], he was certainly a Roman Catholick as he was a Man of Pleasure’.2 Catholicism came to him gradually – almost casually.
Charles II did not think deeply about anything, and it is unlikely that he thought about theological questions at all. His attitude towards the Church of Rome was best illustrated during his exile when, on the eve of a journey to encourage German support for the Stuart cause, he left Henry – his youngest brother – in Paris with their mother. The Dowager Queen promised not to exploit the opportunity of Charles’ absence to convert the boy to Catholicism. She did not keep her word. As soon as Charles left Paris, she sacked the Prince’s Protestant tutor and sent him to a nearby abbey for instruction in preparation for admission to the Church. On his return, Charles was scandalised and immediately despatched his brother to the safety of Protestant Holland. Charles’ anger had nothing to do with the rival theological merits of the two views of Christianity. His complaint was that making his brother a Catholic would dishonour his father’s memory and ensured that his restoration to the throne remained completely unacceptable to the English Parliament. He was a gambling man and, until the day of his death – when only the kingdom of heaven was at stake – continued to see the Catholic Church as a gambling chip to be played according to the circumstances of the time. Sometimes he gambled on Catholic support keeping him on the throne of England. More often, he secured his hold on the crown by responding to Parliament’s (often hysterical) calls for punitive action against imagined Papist intrigue and invented popish plots.
When the Pope learned that Henry had been sent to Holland explicitly to save him from the clutches of Rome, he was deeply offended by Charles’ refusal to contemplate the conversion of his brother. The Venetian Ambassador in London echoed the Pontiff’s anticipation of divine retribution. ‘The House of Stuart, being expelled from the kingdom of this world will now have to submit to banishment from the Kingdoms of Heaven.’3 Rome should have grown accustomed, if not reconciled, to Charles judging Catholicism – both his own public position and the conversion of England – as no more than an aspect of his determination ‘not to go on his travels again’. A few months after his escape from England, he had written to Rome offering to return England to Catholicism if the Pope supported his attempts to regain the English throne. The Pope had replied that Charles’ personal conversion must precede even discussion of the subject. So the idea was abandoned and the Restoration was achieved without papal support.
Estimates of the number of Catholics in Charles II’s England vary both because of the difficulty of definition and the unreliability of seventeenth-century statistics. Claudius Agretti, the Apostolic Minister to Flanders, put the 1669 figure at 200,000, including 230 secular priests and at least 255 regulars, including 120 Jesuits and 80 Benedictines.4 Agretti’s figures were almost certainly an underestimate. But even allowing for the social composition of the Catholic population – persecution having decimated the working classes and left the gentry almost untouched – the numbers did not justify the fears of a successful domestic uprising. Something between 4.5 and 5 per cent of Charles II’s subjects were Catholics. Despite continual evidence to the contrary, many of them persisted in believing that King Charles would set them free.
It had all begun so well. The 1660 Declaration of Breda – the prospectus that Charles offered England as he negotiated his return – had been explicit: ‘We do declare a liberty to tender conscience and that no man shall be disquieted or called to question for differences of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom.’ And it seemed that the prospect of tolerance, if not civil liberty, increased with Charles’ arrival in England and the confidence that his restoration engendered. In December – following the release from gaol of the Nonconformists who had been imprisoned by the Commonwealth – he issued a Declaration of Indulgence. Its good intentions were not in doubt. The Act of Uniformity of 1559 should, in effect, be repealed. So should all other penal legislation directed at Catholics. The choice of verb was important. The Declaration simply set out reforms which a cautious King proposed to consider suggesting to Parliament. It did, however, include a robust justification of the course of action he might possibly take. ‘The Roman Catholic subjects of this kingdom, having deserved well from our royal father of blessed memory and from the Protestant religion itself in adhering to us with their lives and fortunes for the maintenance of our Crown’,5 should be rewarded by the gift of a measure of religious liberty. They were rewarded by the Act of Conformity, which (pointlessly) prohibited Catholics from holding Church of England Office, and by the Conventicle Act, which made acts of worship outside church premises illegal if more than four persons were gathered together – a measure primarily intended to prohibit Nonconformist open-air payer meetings, but which also added to the list of laws that were broken at Mass centres.
The ‘Cavalier Parliament’ indicated that it was not likely to agree that Catholic royalists should be rewarded, and the King, not a man to stand on principle, retreated before his plan could be rejected. By February 18th 1672, the day on which the House of Commons, in its fourth Restoration session, declared itself ready and willing to consider the Declaration of Indulgence, Charles had lost his nerve and amended his proposals. He still asked for both Roman Catholics and Nonconformists to be relieved of the penalties that were imposed upon them, but – in order to make the repeal more palatable to the House of Commons – he also proposed that Catholics should still be disqualified from holding office. For good measure, he also expressed the hope that their numbers should not be allowed to increase. He did not suggest any ways in which that desirable state of affairs might be achieved. The Commons was not impressed. The King’s proposals were rejected without a division.
From the very beginning of his reign Charles’ cynical equivocation spawned a patchwork of legislation which sometimes relaxed the penal laws, but more often extended and strengthened them. In 1661 the powers of the English ecclesiastical courts were revived, but although they recorded the names of men and women who had offended against Church laws, no attempt was made to punish them. In the same year, the Corporations Act excluded from municipal office and employment anyone who failed, within twelve months of the new law passing, to take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and refused to take the sacraments as prescribed by the Church of England.
Charles was proclaimed King of Ireland on May 14th 1660. Peace was made with the Irish lords in an agreement which included the promise that they would be free to practise their religion. The promise was repudiated by the Irish Parliament. Twelve years later, after the Restoration had been firmly established, Ormond – by then a duke – tried to broker another deal. As always in Ireland, the barrier on the road to religious reform was erected by the Protestant Parliament. Ormond attempted to overcome the objections by providing assurances about temporal sovereignty. Influential Catholics were asked to draw up a ‘Remonstrance’ which would be accepted as proof of good faith by King and Parliament. The Remonstrance was ingenious as well as explicit. Sovereigns, it declared, were ‘God’s lieutenants’6 and disobeying them was, therefore, a denial of His dominion. In consequence, any foreign power or potentate who challenged their authority was disobeying God’s law. The attempt to recruit Providence as an ally in the Pope’s battle with the Irish Parliament’s dispute failed. Twenty-one peers and numerous Catholic laymen signed the Remonstrance, but only seventy of Ireland’s 2,000 priests. Another attempt at compromise had failed – rejected, as was so often the case, not because of differences over the status of statues, transubstantiation, the intercession to saints or prayers for the dead, but over the authority of the Pope. The dispute, like the Reformation itself, concerned theology’s political dimension.
The following year, Ormond replaced the Civil War’s General Monck as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Ormond was Irish born and bred and realised that rebellion was as likely to be provoked by land-hunger as by religious persecution. Disputes over ownership – the result of Oliver Cromwell’s misappropriation – continued and Ormond’s attempt to resolve them en masse was included under the provisions of the Settlement Act. It was passed by the Irish Parliament in the face of bitter hostility and only after much amendment. The result was legislation of such confused complication that its meaning had to be clarified by an Act of Explanation. The muddle was compounded by King Charles intervening to influence individual adjudications – according to Ulster Protestants, invariably on the side of Catholic claimants. If their complaints were justified, the King’s involvement did little to rectify the overall injustice. At the beginning of the Civil War, Catholics owned more than two-thirds of Irish land. After the Ormond ‘reforms’, they owned less than a quarter.
King Charles’ real attitude towards Catholicism and the religious freedom of his Catholic subjects remains a mystery. The likelihood is that he was vaguely in favour of limited tolerance, but – in that as well as in other matters – was not prepared to antagonise those on whom his continued reign depended. The French Ambassador wryly reported to King Louis that Charles ‘will do nothing against our religion – except under pressure from parliament’.7 That gave him more credit than he deserved. It would have been more true to say that he never stood up to Parliament (whether under pressure or not) and often bowed to its anticipated wishes before they were formally expressed. Occasionally he tried to frustrate its will by deception and prevarication. When he was found out, he either weakly submitted or – when religious liberty was the issue – actually added fuel to the flames of intolerance. Only in one particular did he take a firm stand: the religious freedom of his Catholic brother and, therefore, the security of the Stuart succession.
The process of protecting his own position at all costs had begun with one of the regular revisions of the Prayer Book – originally in a gesture of ecumenism. The first draft was to be drawn up by a joint committee of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, but Charles again lost his nerve and agreed to the whole job being done by the Church of England Convocation. The result was a new definition of the liturgical and theological character of Reformation in England. All clergy who had not been ordained according to the rites of the Church of England were excluded from the ministry, whether or not they had renounced their allegiance to Rome. Those who remained were required to accept the Book of Common Prayer in every detail and to subscribe to all the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. Nine hundred and sixty ministers – many of them with sympathy for ‘Roman practices’ – either left or were ejected from their livings. It was not only ‘Anglo-Catholics’ who were penalised. Four thousand Quakers were imprisoned after their refusal to accept the doctrine of the Established Church. Despite having sanctioned the Act, Charles concurred in attempts to soften its impact. Edward Hyde – First Earl of Clarendon, father-in-law to the Catholic Duke of York and Charles’ principal adviser – proposed that the King should be empowered to relieve some ministers of the more onerous provisions of the new dispensation. Charles agreed, but the notion of flexibility in the face of dissent was defeated in the House of Lords.
Charles II was far less nervous about the activities of Catholics than he was about the discontent of the defeated Puritans. But legislation directed towards the discouragement of dissent and Nonconformity inevitably bore down on all religious denominations, save the Established Church of England. The Conventicle Act of 1663 was intended to prevent the ‘field preaching’ to which Puritans were addicted. But it was another obstacle in the way of organising ‘Mass stations’. In 1665 the Five Mile Act – which prohibited dissenting ministers from living within five miles of a parish from which they had been ejected – was directed explicitly at Nonconformists. But it was used to harass priests. A year later the Catholics were found guilty of an offence that transcended in wickedness all the crimes and misdemeanours of which the Dissenters were guilty. Parliament agreed that Papists had set fire to London.
On the first day of the Great Fire, a rumour that 50,000 French troops had landed on the south coast swept through London. It was taken for granted that the Catholics in the capital had been complicit in the plan to burn down the city, in preparation for a French invasion. Men suspected of collaboration with the supposed enemy were hunted down. Clarendon wrote sympathetically of the indiscriminate arrest of known Catholics. ‘Some of them, and of quality, were taken out of their houses and carried to prison.’8 One of the Portuguese Ambassador’s servants – seen fumbling in his pocket with a piece of bread – was accused of preparing a fire-bomb. The mob reacted so violently that he had to be taken into protective custody. Men of swarthy complexion and shopkeepers who were known to have foreign-sounding names were beaten in the street.
Charles reacted with commendable good sense. Troops had been sent into the city to restore order. Hysterics claimed that their deployment was proof of imminent invasion. The King ordered that they be withdrawn. On the second day of the panic he visited the smoking ruins and, speaking from the graveyard alongside what was left of St Paul’s, told the anxious crowd which surrounded him, ‘Many of those who have been detained upon suspicion I have myself examined and I have found no reason to suspect connivance in burning the City.’9 For added reassurance, Charles asked the Privy Council to examine the possibility that the fire had been started maliciously. Their report was unambiguous. ‘Nothing had been found to argue the Fire in London to have been caused by other than the hand of God, a great wind and a very dry season.’ London was not in a mood to be reassured. So when Robert Hubert – the clearly demented son of a Rouen watchmaker – ‘confessed’ that he had been hired to start the fire, his ramblings were accepted as incontrovertible proof that France, no doubt as the agent of Rome, had burned down London. The magistrates who examined Hubert were sceptical about the truth of his story. But he argued his guilt with such passion that they felt an obligation to send him for trial. He was found guilty and hanged.
Within a month of Hubert’s execution, Parliament had set up a Committee to inquire into the origins of the fire. Before it reported, the House of Commons asked Charles to banish all Catholic priests from England. It is only possible to guess at the spirit in which he acceded to their request. He certainly did not regard it as justified. And he could not have regarded the English Catholics (by then somewhere between 1.6 and 4 per cent of the population10) as a threat in themselves. But he may have been fearful that anything other than an enthusiastic response would encourage the suspicion – absurd, but common – that he, in league with his Catholic mother at the Court of King Louis and his French Catholic wife in London, conspired to suborn his own kingdom. Or he may simply have lacked the energy and courage to fight Parliament. In any event the Commons – the epicentre of prejudice – could not have complained about his response. Andrew Marvell, the Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull, told the Mayor of that city ‘all Popish priests and Jesuits, except those attached to the queen [are to be] banished in 30 days or else the law be executed upon them’.11 That was only the beginning. Justices of the Peace were instructed to apply, with consistent severity, penal laws which in many parts of the country had been ignored for years.
Rumours about the origins of the fire were not confined to the ignorant and superstitious lower orders of society. Sir Thomas Crew assured Samuel Pepys that the House of Commons Committee, of which he was not a member, would ‘conclude it as a thing certain that it was done by a plot … that endeavours were made in several places to increase the fire and that it was bragged by several papists that upon such a day and in such a time we should find the hottest weather there ever was in England’.12 And so it did. The report, published on January 22nd 1667 was, according to Andrew Marvell, ‘full of manifest testimony that [the fire] was by wicked design’.13
The House of Commons retained the power to influence the King’s conduct by refusing to ‘Grant Supply’. So Charles’ requests for extra funds were usually accompanied by popular initiatives – most often new proposals for the suppression of Papists. The same palliative was employed to soothe the pain of national humiliation. The Treaty of Breda in 1667, which ended the Dutch Wars and confirmed British ownership of New York and New Jersey, might have been welcomed by Parliament, had not the Dutch fleet – in the final act of hostility – sunk The Royal Charles, The Royal Oak, The Royal James and The Loyal London at anchor in the Medway. The passage through the House of Commons of the Act which ratified the treaty was smoothed by the parallel announcement that, in the new peace, all public servants would be required to take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy – thus purging the military and judiciary of men with ‘popish’ inclinations.
Despite Charles’ apparent willingness to respond to Parliament’s demands to root out ‘Popery’, the House of Commons – and to a lesser extent the Lords – remained suspicious about his genuine inclinations. It did not fear that he was guilty of possessing deeply held convictions. Their concern was that, while he possessed little personal faith, he did want to make alliances with Catholic nations and would be prepared to swear his allegiance to Rome, if it was necessary for the achievement of that objective. The suspicions were justified. The 1670 Treaty of Dover – ostensibly designed to ensure that England would not face a Franco-Dutch alliance – contained secret clauses which promised Louis XIV that, in return for £150,000 (some reports say £200,000), Charles would declare himself a Catholic and, with the help of 6,000 French troops, ensure that the people of England followed suit. Charles wrote to Louis, ‘I have a desire to enter into a rich personal friendship with you and to unite our interests.’14
Neither the King’s intentions nor the uncharacteristically thorough way in which he prepared to achieve them are in doubt. He had, in early 1669 (the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul being thought a suitable day) met half a dozen of his closest friends – all of them Catholics or Catholic sympathisers – to plan both the approach to Louis and the best way to follow up what he hoped would be the French king’s sympathetic response. The likelihood is that Charles only wanted French assistance in his pursuit of absolute power and that his claims to latent Catholicism were only a charade. His brother James offered what he regarded as evidence to the contrary. According to his – admittedly fallible – recollection, at the conspirators’ meeting Charles had described the pain he felt because of his inability to declare his true faith. The statement had been made ‘with tears in his eyes’.15
It was not a fellow feeling with Catholics that made Charles, in 1672, issue his second Declaration of Indulgence – unlike the first, not a promise to initiate future reforms, but a declaration of an imminent change of policy. The King’s intention was to gain the support of Dissenters by allowing them to establish meeting houses, but the Declaration, by its nature, also made it lawful for Catholics to worship as they chose in the privacy of their own homes. Once again, King Charles was suspected of dancing to King Louis’ tune. Once again, Parliament reacted with fury and threatened to ‘withhold supply’ necessary to sustain the army. Once again, Charles responded by initiating new laws to protect the kingdom from ‘popish’ intrigue.
The Test Act of 1673 reiterated the obligation of all public office-holders – civil and military – to take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, but added a requirement which no conscientious Catholic could possibly accept. Servants of the state were obliged to swear that they did not believe in transubstantiation and were required to receive Communion according to the rites of the Church of England. There was some talk of the Duke of York being excluded from the Act’s provisions, but Members of Parliament – led by William Cavendish, soon to become the Earl of Devonshire – bridled at the idea of tacitly accepting that the heir presumptive was a Catholic. The Duke himself (either in order to avoid embarrassment to the King or to display his determination not to be bullied into apostasy) brought the argument to a sudden end. He resigned the post of Lord High Admiral.
For a couple of years Parliament and King made declarations to each other which were, in the case of the Lords and Commons, more warnings than greetings and, in the case of Charles, models of insincerity. The 1675 Speech from the Throne promised that the King ‘would leave nothing undone that might show the world his zeal for the Protestant religion as established by the Church of England from which he would never depart’16 and Parliament responded with a Humble Address which gave thanks for ‘His Majesty’s constancy towards the Protestant religion at home and abroad [but] felt bound by conscience and duty [to warn against] the dangerous growth of Popery within His Majesty’s dominions and the dire consequences of which must be prevented’.17
The fear of treason – real and imaginary – and the consequent sudden bouts of repression reached their bizarre climax in what was called the ‘Popish Plot’ – a concoction of such obvious nonsense that it could only have been believed by fools and accepted by rogues for whom truth was less important than power. To Charles’ credit, when Christopher Kirby – a natural scientist of his acquaintance – warned him of a Catholic assassination plot, he dismissed the idea as an invention. Even when Kirby introduced him to Israel Tonge – an Anglican clergyman who claimed to have documentary evidence of an impending uprising – he did no more than, dismissively, pass on the papers to the Earl of Danby, Treasurer of the Navy, royal confidant and politician of such sophistication that his failure to treat the supposed threat with casual disdain must have been a stratagem devised to strengthen his faction at Court.
The argument in favour of taking the warning seriously was strengthened by Tonge supplying Danby with letters written by the Duke of York’s private secretary to Louis XIV’s confessor. They were either forgeries or too old to be of any significance, but they were a powerful weapon in the hands of unscrupulous men who used them to provide evidence of royal duplicity. Danby agreed to meet Titus Oates, Tonge’s informant. Oates was a man of such manic prejudice that he had feigned conversion to Catholicism and enrolled in the seminaries of both Valladolid and Saint-Omer in order to accumulate evidence about the Pope’s plans to overthrow the government and reconvert England to Roman Catholicism. Having found no evidence to confirm his suspicions, he invented the ‘Popish Plot’. His story was supported, though not substantiated, by Miles Prance, a Catholic silversmith who confessed to complicity in the plot, recanted and then, under torture, confessed again. By the end of his interrogation he had implicated three innocent men, all of whom were hanged.
Anti-Catholic hysteria grew to a point at which otherwise sensible people believed Oates’ claims that the Catholic families of London would rise up and murder their Protestant neighbours, fires would be started in the hope of once more destroying the heart of the city and the King would be murdered so that the crown could be passed to his Catholic brother. A number of alternative methods of assassination were predicted – stabbing by a gang of specially recruited Irishmen, shooting (with the aid of an invincible silver bullet) while the King was walking in St James’s Park and poisoning by the Queen’s physician. Charles remained sceptical. He announced that he had ‘been informed of designs against his person by the Jesuits’ but, when asked for details and substantiation, ‘forbore to give his own opinion on the matters, lest he should say too much or too little’.18 It was a characteristic response from ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.
Oates appeared before the Privy Council on October 10th 1678. His story was too implausible to justify a formal examination. But the Council’s decision to proceed with its investigation was based on prejudice, panic and the hope of political gain. So a magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was asked to interrogate Oates and his associate, Israel Tonge, a man whose Oxford divinity doctorate was thought to confirm his credibility. However cynical their original decision, circumstances conspired to make the Privy Council, though not the King, genuinely fear that Oates was to be believed. On November 22nd, fourteen days after his appointment and before the formal examination had begun, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found dead. His murder was almost certainly unrelated to his impending task. He appears in Samuel Pepys’ diary in an entry that describes a dispute in which he offended the King by having one of the royal physicians arrested for debt.19 So he was clearly the sort of man who was not afraid of making enemies. But his death was enough to convince the Privy Council that Oates was telling the truth and to spread panic in the streets.
The Privy Council responded – as much to restore calm as to prevent rebellion – with the Proclamation of November 20th 1678. Its most important injunction took the form of a message to magistrates. The law requiring recusants to live ten miles outside the capital and the obligations required by the Test Act of 1673 – generally ignored – were to be strictly enforced. All priests arrested for offences set out in the Act of 1585 should be tried at once rather than allowed to return home. Unsympathetic local magistrates responded by sending so many priests for trial in London – usually under the pretext that they were suspected of involvement in the Popish Plot – that a second proclamation, requiring trials to be held where the arrests were made, was necessary. Most of the trials (London and local) ended in acquittals. Francis Smith, a Nottingham Jesuit, was sent to London on suspicion of being one of Oates’ associates. Interrogation led to the conclusion that he had neither met nor corresponded with the plotters. So he was sent back to Nottingham, where he was released without trial.20
A second Test Act – introduced ‘for the more effective preserving of the King’s Person and Government by disabling Papists from sitting in either House of Parliament’21 – required peers and MPs to take the oath already required of other public servants. Again special provision was demanded for the Duke of York. An amendment proposed that ‘nothing in this bill should extend to his Royal Highness’. Again there was outrage in the Commons – some from genuine friends of the Duke and some from Members who wanted to incriminate him – that the ‘House should agree to have the Duke declared a Papist by Act of Parliament’. But the bill was passed as amended.
A rumour that the French had landed at Purbeck swept through London and it was taken for granted that a fire, which gutted part of the Temple, was the work of Papist arsonists. Sir William Scroggs, the Lord Chief Justice, condemned to death William Staley, a banker, for the crime of uttering treasonable words. He had been overheard to say that the King was a great heretic and he would gladly kill him. Dozens of other suspects were arrested and arraigned. Although there was no plot, twenty-four plotters (seventeen of them priests) were arrested, convicted and executed. The Jesuits – whose name was said ‘to be hated above all else’ – bore the brunt of Protestant fury. Seven were hanged, drawn and quartered. Twelve died in gaol.22 Many more were killed by rough handling by the mob. One was committed to Bedlam lunatic asylum.23
None of the executions could be justified, even by the standards of the seventeenth century. But one stands out from the rest as an example of barbarism, corruption and sheer evil. Father Nicholas Postgate, after some years in York and briefly acting as visiting priest to the Saltmarsh and Meynell families, returned to his native East Riding, where he said Mass in houses, stables and barns all over Blackamoor, an area of 550 square miles. He also cultivated daffodils in the garden of his cottage. For thirty years he carried on his work, without persecution or prosecution, as a beneficiary of the increasingly respected convention that the penal laws would not be applied to priests in remote places who carried out their vocations without flaunting their faith. Then an accident of fate took John Reeves to Whitby. Reeves, who had been manservant to Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was probably employed by His Majesty’s Customs to investigate smuggling into the port. Whether or not that was his employment, it was not his life’s work. He was dedicated to avenging Godfrey’s mysterious death, for which he blamed rebellious Catholics. When he heard that a priest in the Whitby area openly carried out his duties, he determined to make it impossible for the locals to ignore the Papist in their midst.
Reeves persuaded William Cockerill, a local constable, to join him in his campaign. Any qualms Cockerill may have felt were removed by Reeves’ assurance that Postgate was a potential regicide as well as a priest and that, in consequence, there would be a £30 reward for his apprehension. The two men raided a prayer house where, they had heard, a baptism was to take place. Postgate was caught in the act of saying Mass and brought to trial in York, where the case for the prosecution was supported by a battery of perjured evidence, including a statement from Richard ‘Hang Priest’ Morrice.24 The judge summed up in the defendant’s favour. ‘All that we have heard is that he was reputedly a priest of Rome … What you must decide is whether or not this man is a traitor.’ Nicholas Postgate was found guilty of high treason under the act of 1585, which required priests who were trained abroad to leave the country. The mandatory sentence was death.
The execution took place on the morning of Thursday April 7th 1679. The condemned man told the crowd that surrounded the gallows, ‘I do not die for the plot but for my Catholic religion.’ Mercifully, his neck was broken by the long drop through the trapdoor in the scaffold, so he was spared the agony of drawing and quartering. Father Nicholas Postgate was the oldest martyr in the history of the Catholic Church in England. When he died he was eighty years of age.
The Popish Plot killings ended with the execution of Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland and the last of the Catholic martyrs who died for their faith in England or its Irish province – men and women of such diversity that every Catholic could, and can, identify with one of them. Nicholas Postgate and Oliver Plunkett, though united by the manner of their deaths, lived in circumstances which could hardly have been more different. Plunkett was destined – by birth as well as conviction – to become a Prince of the Church. He was born in Loughcrew, County Meath, into a family which was well established, prosperous and, since it was distantly related to the Earls of Roscommon and Fingall, by the standards of the time, noble. He was educated under the supervision of the Abbot of St Mary’s Monastery in Dublin and, when he heard the call to the priesthood, travelled to Rome under the care of Father Pierfrancesco Scarampi, a scholar of some merit. Plunkett entered the Irish College in 1646 and was ordained priest in 1654. Irish priests were required by their vows to return to Ireland and contribute to the work of saving their Church from the Protestant heretics, but Plunkett sought and obtained permission to remain in Rome. Despite his absence, in 1669 he was appointed Archbishop of Armagh. On March 7th 1670, after twenty-three years’ absence – if it was exile, it was self-imposed – he returned home.
Dispute continues about whether or not it was coincidence that he was absent from Ireland during the years of Cromwellian persecution and returned while the post-Restoration leniency still held good. Whatever his reasons for not resuming his mission before he could say the Mass in safety, Plunkett used the years of religious peace to good effect. The dispirited Irish priesthood was reinvigorated by a combination of praise and condemnation. Typical was his assault on drunkenness, their abiding weakness: ‘Let us remove this defect from an Irish priest and he will be a saint.’ His establishment of a Jesuit college in Drogheda provided an example of ecumenical Christianity which was unique for the time. Forty of the one hundred and fifty students whose names appeared on its first register were Protestants.
The work of reorganisation and reconciliation might have continued in peace, had it not been for the Test Acts and the oaths of loyalty they required. Plunkett was willing neither to swear that he rejected the Pope’s supreme authority nor to register as a dissenting Catholic and go into voluntary exile for a second time. The Protestant mob burned down the Drogheda college, but the Duke of Ormond, still the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was prepared to leave Plunkett in peace as long as he lived and worked in discreet anonymity. So he continued to perform his offices and travelled about the country, in disguise, to encourage the besieged priests in his episcopate. Plunkett became the victim of Stuart politics. The Earl of Essex – Ormond’s predecessor, who still smarted from the indignity of replacement – told the Privy Council that, in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant allowed tyranny to thrive. That, combined with the outbreak of hysteria that followed the invention of the Popish Plot, made tacit tolerance no longer possible. Peter Talbot, Archbishop of Dublin, was imprisoned. Plunkett went into hiding. He escaped capture for almost a year, but was arrested in Dublin in December 1679.
Plunkett was brought to trial in Dundalk, accused of treason and fomenting rebellion. The prosecution claimed that he had plotted an invasion of England by 20,000 French troops and had collected enough subscriptions from the Irish clergy to finance the recruitment of 70,000 Catholic irregulars. According to Ormonde, the jury at his Irish trial was made up of ‘silly drunken vagabonds … whom no schoolboy would trust to rob an orchard’.25 Despite that, or perhaps because of it, the Privy Council concluded that there was no hope of a conviction in Ireland. Plunkett was moved to Newgate Prison and the trial to London, where it was held, as show trials always were, in Westminster Hall. Plunkett’s request to be represented by qualified counsel was refused and his application to be given sufficient time to assemble witnesses was rejected. ‘Look you, Mr Plunkett,’ said the Lord Chief Justice. ‘Don’t mis-spend your own time. The more you trifle in these things, the less time you will have for your defence.’26
On June 21st 1681, the Westminster Hall jury took fifteen minutes to reach the decision that Archbishop Plunkett was guilty of ‘promoting the Roman faith’. The sentence was death and, in passing judgement, the Lord Chief Justice told the condemned man, ‘You have done as much as you could to dishonour God in this case. The bottom of your treason was your setting up your false religion, than which there is not any thing more displeasing to God or more pernicious to mankind in the world.’27 Plunkett responded, ‘Deo Gratias.’ Too late, Essex – who had provoked the purge that engulfed Plunkett – told the King that the Archbishop was innocent and should be pardoned. Charles replied, ‘Then, my lord, be his blood on your own conscience. You might have saved him if you would. I cannot pardon him because I dare not.’28 On July 1st 1681 Oliver Plunkett was taken to Tyburn and there hanged, drawn and quartered.
During the years before the Popish Plot, English Protestants had begun to exhibit a glimmering of toleration towards Roman Catholics. But the light never shone as brightly as some optimists believed. William Leslie, an alumnus of the Scots College in Rome, was wrong to claim that, during the early years of Charles II’s reign, the faith prospered ‘as it did when we had that happiness in Catholic times’, when England was ‘united and joined together under our own prince’.29 Richard Ride of Coverdale in Yorkshire left a will which included a bequest to the Church, in anticipation of the day ‘that the Catholic religion comes in’. But, by the time of Plunkett’s execution, it was clear that his hopes would not be quickly realised. The notion that the King might be assassinated had alerted the English people – now Protestant, by large and genuine majority – to a new threat. Sooner or later, King Charles II would be succeeded by his Papist brother. And a Catholic king would feel obliged to impose his beliefs on a Protestant nation.
Parliament responded to the people’s anxiety and the King, in turn, responded to Parliament’s determination to frustrate Papist ambitions – real and counterfeit. Charles pre-empted attempts to remove his brother from the Privy Council by persuading him to withdraw on his own initiative. Then, in a message to both Houses, he gave the assurance that he was ‘ready to join with them in all ways and means that might establish a firm security for the Protestant religion’.30 A firm security for the Protestant religion could only be established by removing the Catholic heir presumptive from the succession. So Parliament’s most ardent anti-Papists took the King at his word and tabled a resolution which proposed ‘that a bill should be brought in to disable James, Duke of York, from inheriting the Crown of this Realm’.31 The bill was introduced into Parliament on May 15th 1679. It included a clause which proposed that ‘all acts of sovereignty which the Duke should exercise, in case of the King’s death, be not only declared void but be declared High Treason and punishable as such’. Despite the inclusion of a proposal which contemplated the execution of a prince of the blood royal, and the conclusion that the succession should pass to the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’ illegitimate son, the bill’s early stages were endorsed by a substantial minority. It was eventually defeated by 207 votes to 128. The King dissolved Parliament.
Encouraged by Parliament’s supine reaction to its dissolution, Charles recalled his brother from brief and self-imposed exile. The Commons retaliated with a second exclusion bill, which was rejected by the House of Lords. Charles, insisting that the peers’ decision had legitimised his intransigence, dissolved Parliament again. Denied what they believed to be their constitutional rights, the most rabid Protestants convinced themselves – and each other – that high treason was their only, as well as a legitimate, option. Plans were made to murder both the King and his brother as they returned from Newmarket. The Rye House Plot failed because, having left the races early, the royal couple passed the spot chosen for the assassination before the assassins were assembled. The conspirators were captured. The Earl of Essex committed suicide in prison. Lord Russell was hanged.
The exposure of the Rye House Plot did more than rally support for the providentially protected King and his brother. It demonstrated that it was not only Catholics who plotted to suborn the constitution. Combined with the exposure of Titus Oates as a fraud – the previous year, after being convicted of soliciting, he had confessed that the Popish Plot was an invention – the bungled attempt on the King’s life helped to reconcile the politicians around him both to his autocratic style and his Catholic sympathies. He spent his last two years in comparative peace and his last hours openly in the faith in which he had secretly long believed. The scene was set for a Roman Catholic succession.