A Shame to Mankind

What follows is a copy of an article I wrote for History in an Hour (www.historyinanhour.com), an e-book site, on the Popish Plot, part two of which was published earlier this evening. It covers some of the themes I’ve previously touched on here, though in a slightly more comprehensive fashion.


In October 1678 a magistrate by the name of Edmund Berry Godfrey was found murdered at the foot of Primrose Hill near London. Though he was in himself a figure of little importance his death was to have explosive consequences. For the crime, never solved, marks the beginning of an episode of anti-Catholic hysteria forever known as the Popish Plot. The roots of the ensuing crisis, by far the most serious ever faced by the Restoration monarchy, can be traced back several years.

It’s one of the great ironies of history that the assembly which dominated the reign of Charles II, known for its perceived political loyalties as the ‘Cavalier Parliament’, was in its own way almost as troublesome for the crown as the Long Parliament of Charles I. It was packed with men who were loyal to king, yes, but they were just as loyal to the established church, in some ways even more loyal. Attempts by the government to introduce a measure of relief for Catholics and dissenters, those who refused to accept communion in the Church of England, was met with an ever growing sense of suspicion.

The events of 1678 and after have to be placed against this background, against a fear over growing Catholic influences at court, compounded by suspicions over Charles’ foreign policy, which took England into alliance with the Catholic French against the Protestant Dutch.

This was bad enough but there was one additional element which made the general atmosphere quite toxic- Charles brother, James duke of York, converted secretly to Catholicism sometime in the early 1670s, a fact that became generally known when he refused to take the oath prescribed by the 1673 Test Act, specifically rejecting an important part of Catholic dogma.

In itself his conversion may have passed, especially as he was obliged to resign his offices, but for the fact that the king had no legitimate heirs. On the threshold of the Popish Plot, with Charles now well into middle-age and the queen obviously barren, England was faced with the prospect of a Catholic succession, the first since Mary Tudor over a hundred years before. It was now that one Titus Oates, a disreputable clergyman, came to the fore, with tales of a conspiracy against the crown. The king was reluctant to take the matter seriously, though he delegated the task of investigation to Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, his chief minister. Danby, in turn, passed it on to Godfrey.

The wood was bone dry; the leaves were brittle; only a spark was wanted to cause an inferno. Godfrey’s murder was the spark. At once Oates’ accusations took on a new urgency. He was a talented perjurer, who by a mixture of verisimilitude, pure speculation and good luck now convinced the country at large that a grand conspiracy was under way. At first he alleged no more than that the Jesuits and others were planning to murder the king and his brother. But by fine degrees James was removed as a prospective victim and turned into the principal beneficiary of the crime.

England went mad; there is really no other way of describing the ensuing hysteria, positively murderous in its malevolence. In the years between 1678 and 1680 the country was troubled with tales of dark riders and secret meetings. Perfectly innocent Catholics were tried and butchered on no more than Oates’ perjured evidence.

As Oates' accusations gained ground a group formed in Parliament around Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, a man of formidable political talents and a personal enemy of James, calling for the removal of the duke of York from the succession, thus beginning the Exclusion Crisis, a far more immediate political danger for the monarchy than the fictions of Oates. This was the days before political parties in the modern sense had emerged. Those who supported Shaftesbury were loosely known as the ‘Country Party,’ the inference being that that they represented the interests of the nation as a whole, as opposed to the ‘Court Party’ behind the king.

Other names soon emerged. The enemies of the Country Party started to call them ‘Whigs’, after a group of troublesome Scottish Presbyterian rebels. When it came to insults Shaftesbury and his men were just as adept. The Court Party were referred to as ‘Tories’, recalling a set of Irish brigands. It’s a sign of the eccentricity or the peculiar genius of the English that these insults were eventually adopted as badges of pride!

As the game commenced Charles showed himself a player of some genius. James was removed from the scene, first to the Low Countries and then to Scotland, while Parliament was prorogued from time to time in an attempt to reduce some of the excessive heat. Sacrifices were made to the passions of the mob of men that Charles clearly knew were guiltless, but on the central principle of legitimacy he remained firm. He absolutely refused to accept James, duke of Monmouth, his much-loved but illegitimate eldest son as a possible Protestant successor. He was also fortunate that while the Commons repeatedly returned majorities in favour of exclusion, Shaftesbury and his supporters were a minority in the Lords, where the Tories, rallied by George Saville, marquis of Halifax, rejected the Exclusion Bills.

In the end the Exclusion Crisis was no more than a great wave which broke on the rock of royal obduracy and an unwillingness of even the monarchy’s most trenchant critics to risk again the horrors of the Civil Wars. Charles knew his enemy. Parliament was summoned in 1681 to meet in Oxford, away from the febrile atmosphere of London and the importunities of the Whig mob. But no sooner had it met than it was dissolved, no further being called for the remainder of the reign.

The Whigs, though strong in Parliament, had no real organisational coherence. After the Oxford Dissolution they simply imploded. Shaftesbury eventually went into exile, where he died. James succeeded peacefully to the throne on the death of his brother in 1685, held up by a mood of Tory reaction against the Whigs and the murderous excesses of the Popish Plot. In coming to the throne no king was ever more fortunate in the loyalty of his subjects; in ruling no king was ever less fortunate in judgement and political sense.

Titus Oates, the author of the tragedy, had a mixed afterlife. Even before the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament the popular mood turned against him and the bloodletting that had seen the execution of fifteen innocent men. In August 1681 he was obliged to vacate his apartments in Whitehall. Thereafter he was convicted on a charge of sedition, fined £100,000, a prodigious sum for the day, and imprisoned. No sooner did James come to the throne than Oates was arraigned on a fresh charge, this time one of perjury. After conviction he was sentenced to life imprisonment, his shame compounded by an annual pillory. He was also tied behind a cart and whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, a punishment that was almost certainly intended to kill him. He survived, bellowing like a bull, so it is reported, during his flogging. When William and Mary came to the throne in the Protestant coup of 1688 Oates was pardoned and awarded an annual pension. It was probably the least the new government could do given the political atmosphere of the day. But his influence never recovered. He died in 1705 little regarded, a “shame to mankind”, to use the words of Judge George Jeffreys.

Most loyal subjects

The papal visit has caused me to reflect on Catholics and the fate of Catholics in my period of special study – seventeenth century England. The story begins with the most infamous terrorist conspiracy in English history and ends with the deposition of king: it begins with the Gunpowder Plot and ends with the so-called Glorious Revolution.

It’s difficult to imagine the hostility and suspicion with which English Catholics were perceived from the reign of Elizabeth to the flight of James II. In modern terms they might be said to have occupied then the position that some sections of the Islamic community do now.

To a degree the fear of the Protestant state was understandable. After all, in 1570 Pius V issued Regnans in Excelsis, a bull describing Elizabeth I as a heretic, releasing her subjects from obeying her orders and threatening excommunication against any who did. Elizabeth, who had hitherto pursued a policy of toleration, had little choice but to begin a campaign of repression, particularly against perceived agents of the Vatican. The Jesuits were obvious targets, but even ordinary priests were drawn into the net.

But it is one of the great misconceptions, a Protestant retrospective, to put it another way, that Catholics were always ready to obey the Pope in political as well as religious matters; they were not, either before or after the Reformation. By and large English Catholics remained loyal to Elizabeth and her successors, the aberration of the Gunpowder Plot notwithstanding. More than that, as the century progressed they were among the most loyal, as the Civil Wars proved.

After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II, who had direct and intimate experience of Catholic loyalty, retained a sense of gratitude, evidenced by periodic attempts to reduce the penalties and restrictions with which the community was burdened. But his good intentions were invariably frustrated by a Parliament deeply hostile to the ‘recusants’, so called because of their refusal to attend Anglican services. They continued to be barred from public office and compelled to pay fines for non-attendance at church.

Even so, life, though difficult, was not impossible, especially for England’s great Catholic families, particularly strong in the north. Then came an unexpected disaster, the greatest and most vile fabrication in English history – the Popish Plot. In modern terms it was a ‘conspiracy theory’, one conceived in the mind of a half-mad clergyman by the name of Israel Tongue but more generally associated with his principle collaborator, a wholly unsavoury individual by the name of Titus Oates.

By a mixture of verisimilitude, perjury and pure speculation Oates managed to convince the authorities that there was a grand Catholic plot to kill the King. In itself it might have come to nothing but for one crucial element: James, duke of York, the king’s brother and heir, had long been suspected as a secret papist, confirmed after he refused to take the Test Act of 1673. So, the plot to kill the king acquired an additional plausibility: that he was to be replaced by a Catholic.

In the three years from 1678 to 1680 England was gripped by a kind of collective insanity, with stories of dark riders and secret meetings across the land. Perfectly innocent Catholics were indicted on a charge of high treason, convicted and subject to the hideous butchery that followed on no more that Oates perjured evidence.

James did eventually succeed after the madness had reduced and the lies had been exposed, but the suspicion remained, not helped by his own political clumsiness. In 1688, in fear of a permanent Catholic monarchy, he was deposed by a group of aristocratic conspirators, an oligarchy whose rule was to become self-perpetuating. In one of their first acts Catholics were excluded from the royal succession, which remains the position to the present day.

For me the Popish Plot is both acutely fascinating, an insight into political pathology, and deeply shameful, even though historians are not allowed feelings in such matters! But these days are over, the hysteria is long gone, my interest is purely intellectual and academic. Not quite, sadly. I felt a renewed sense of shame over the churlish reception of Pope Benedict by some sections of our national community, shamed that his message was being drowned out, as the Spectator lead puts it, by the mendacious caricature of him as a former Nazi apologist for child abuse. It all fits with unregenerate bigots like Ian Paisley, whose imagination has not moved much beyond the days of the Popish Plot, as well as self-righteous clots like the laughable Peter Tatchell, the conscience of all gay-kind. English Catholics deserve better; they’ve earned it, my goodness, how they have earned it.

I’m not a Catholic, as I previously said, but I am a romantic. The papal visit fills me with a sense of occasion, a sense of history. I fail to see how one could not be moved by the whole thing, unless one had a soul of clay. For the first time in our history, in the history of Christianity itself, the head of the Catholic Church came to our island on an official visit. More than that, he gave a speech in Westminster Hall, in the very place where Thomas More stood trial for his life, holding to a simple principle that there was a higher duty than duty to the state. More, as a Catholic, believed in miracles. Even so he could never have conceived that the miracle of time and of circumstance would bring the successor of Saint Peter to a place where he once stood alone.

Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.

A Great Parliamentarian; a Great Englishman

History's judgement on Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury has not been kind, that much is true, though I would urge anyone interested in a more balanced and objective view to have a look at The First Earl of Shaftesbury by K. H. D. Halley, still (she says) the best biography on the Whig leader.

One thing should be made absolutely plain: the Popish Plot was indeed a groundless conspiracy, during which innocent people lost their lives. For men like Titus Oates it was no more than an opportunity to seek recognition and riches by defaming and maligning Catholics. Shaftesbury stands guilty by association, and by the use he made of Oates and his slanders. But it is crucially important to understand that Shaftesbury's hostility to Catholicism was first and foremost political not confessional in nature.

Earlier in his career he had advised Charles to stand by the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 because it extended freedom of conscience to Protestant dissenters, even though it was criticised in Parliament for its supposed sympathy for Catholics. His hostility towards Catholicism grew in intensity as it was perceived more and more as a political threat to the English constitution, a threat to the liberty of Parliament that Shaftesbury valued most highly. I can find no better clue to Shaftesbury's whole attitude at the time of the Popish Plot than the observation of one MP who said "Papists are enemies not because they are erroneous in religion but because their principles are destructive to the government."

You see, there is a well-established tendency to look at this whole period of English history as merely one of hysteria and anti-Catholic bigotry. There is, however, quite another dimension which is almost completely overlooked. Forget Oates and his ghastly associates; look more closely at the Parliamentary debates. It is there you will discover some of the real substance. I’ve gone through all of the exchanges made during the Exclusion Crisis point by point, line by line. In one session on 27 April 1679 Sir Henry Capel observed;

From Popery came the notion of a standing army and arbitrary power...Formerly the crown of Spain, and now France supports this root of popery among us; but lay popery flat, and there's an end of arbitrary government and power. It is a mere chimera or notion without popery.

The long-term danger, as Shaftesbury and his party believed, came from the France of Louis XIV. But even at home he was mindful of the misuse of power in parts of the United Kingdom; for Britain had its very own Louis in the person of John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, Charles' Secretary of State for Scotland, who ruled the northern kingdom with powers akin to that of a Roman proconsul. Here is part of Shaftesbury's speech from the debate of March 1679;

Popery and slavery, like two sisters, go hand in hand; sometimes one goes first, and sometimes the other, in a door; but the other is always following close at hand. In England popery was to have brought in slavery; in Scotland, slavery before and popery to follow...Scotland has outdone all the eastern and southern countries, in having their lives, liberties and estates sequestered to the will and pleasure of those that govern.

So, you see, for him the greatest risk was to liberty, from whatever direction it came. Yes, his understanding of liberty is far narrower than our own; and yes again, he was not a democrat, in the sense that we understand the term. He was, rather, a great Parliamentarian, one of the greatest in English history, and as such stands comparison with John Pym and John Hampden, and I have chosen these parallels with care.

Many of Shaftesbury's contemporaries satirised him as 'Lord Shiftsbury' because he changed political clothes so often: first a supporter of Charles I during the English Civil War and then a supporter of Parliament; a supporter of Cromwell, and then an opponent; a supporter of Charles II and then an opponent. Yet there is a consistent thread through all of these shifts and changes: a steadfast support for parliamentary process and constitutional liberty. He never attached himself to any regime that that set itself against frequent parliaments. He only moved into permanent opposition after James duke of York, a man he never had any time for, was known to have converted to Catholicism. He may have feared Catholic absolutism; he feared James even more: "...heady, violent and bloody, who easily believes the rashest and worst councils to be the most sincere and hearty." And those familiar with James as king will recognise how accurate this assessment was to be.

No democrat, then, but a party leader; one who was prepared to extend the debate on the future of the constitution into the public arena, using all the means at his disposal. He did so because he was ever more aware of the impotence of Parliament in isolation from the people. Petitions, pamphlets, parades, electioneering; simple messages for even simpler people; it was all part of the process of engagement. It was the beginning, in essence, of the modern political world, in all of its good and bad forms.

His success here must surely be measured by the fact that the Tories, his great rivals, began to adopt the same methods. It was indeed a high risk strategy: in the end he lost everything, dying as an outcast and an exile. But he had fought with single-minded determination for what he believed to be the highest principles of all. And as for his place in history, I think there is a good argument for rooting the Glorious Revolution in the Exclusion debates. Moreover, there is at least one modern historian who has argued that Locke's dissertations on government were first written, not as a retrospective justification of the events of 1688, but as Exclusionist tracts in defence of Shaftesbury.

Of Whigs and Tories

In October 1678 a magistrate by the name of Edmund Berry Godfrey was murdered. The crime, never solved, was to turn into one of the most explosive in English history. Godfrey, a figure of little real significance in himself, had been delegated by the government to investigate the accusations of one Titus Oates, a wholly disreputable character, that Catholics, a passive and quiescent minority in England, were conspiring to assassinate Charles II. But the accusations, seemingly given substance by the murder of Godfrey, served a political purpose; served to point to the fact that James, duke of York, the king's brother and heir, was himself a Catholic. Soon he became, in the eyes of some, the principal beneficiary of the alleged scheme to murder his brother. It was the beginning of a wave of political hysteria now known as the Popish Plot.

James himself, a stiff and unapproachable figure, had many political enemies, chief among whom was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury, a brilliant if rather unprincipled figure. A friend of John Locke, the philosopher, he was quite capable of changing political colours with ease. During the Civil War between the King’s father and Parliament he had initially been a supporter of the royalists before switching to the parliamentary side, and then back to the royalists before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Opportunist he may have been but he was one of the most skilful parliamentarians in English history, one who continued to be distrustful of royal absolutism. His politics were given an added piquancy by the fact that he loathed James, perceiving him, and his faith, as a danger to the liberties of England.

Catholicism, though long of little real political consequence in England, was associated with Continental absolutism, personified above all in the figure of Louis XIV, the king's cousin. The fact that James had converted to Catholicism was seen by many as a direct threat to the future security and integrity of England. As the accusations revealed by Oates gained ground, in Parliament a faction around Shaftesbury began to agitate for the exclusion of James from the succession, to be replaced by James, duke of Monmouth, Charles' illegitimate but Protestant son.

This faction, loosely defined, but containing some supporters of the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, was initially referred to as the ‘Country Party’, meaning that they represented the interests of the nation as a whole, as opposed to the 'Court Party' behind the king. As a badge of their unity Shaftesbury and his supporters adopted a green ribbon, and were subsequently organised in the Green Ribbon Club, which had regular meetings at the King's Head Tavern in London.

But their enemies, those who supported James and the legitimate succession, had another name for them - the Whigs. This label was new to English politics, an import from Scotland, where it was used to refer to extreme Presbyterians, disruptive, seditious and rebellious dissidents. In Parliament the opponents of Shaftesbury, headed by George Saville, marquis of Halifax, were accorded an equally derogatory label - they were described as Tories, after a group of Irish brigands. Both terms were to stick, and although intended as insults adopted by the groups in question. It was the beginning of English party politics and a two-sided contest that was to dominate Parliament right up to the twentieth century, by which time the Whigs had become the Liberals and the Tories the Conservatives.

It should be stressed, though, that in the context of the seventeenth century 'party' was a very loose term with none of its contemporary associations. There was no membership, there was no authority and there was no ideological discipline; it was merely a collection of like-minded individuals. The Whigs, though strong in Parliament, had no real organisational coherence. Although they could win elections they made little progress against the obduracy of the court, as Charles, while bending with the wind, even exiling his brother for a time, refused to concede to their principal demand. In the end, after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament of 1681, the high-water mark of the Exclusion Crisis, the Whigs simply imploded. But an idea, an attitude and a style had entered the politics of the land, one that would never go away.

The Dorsetshire Eel

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the founder of English Whigism, better known to his enemies as 'little sincerity' or the 'Dorsetshire eel'! I have lived with this man for so long that I feel that I have a closer understanding of him and his motives than I could ever wish. Who can possible forget John Dryden's sketch of the restless little nobleman in "Absalom and Achitophel";


Of these false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles or place;
In power unpleased, impatient if disgrace;
A fiery soul, which, worked out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for the calm unfit,
Would steer to nigh the sands, to boast his wit.
Great wits are to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bonds divide...
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin, or to rule the state.

Sad to say, it is almost impossible to provide a counter-balance to all this hostility, to see the world through Shaftesbury's eyes; for, fearful of prosecution by the government of Charles II, he destroyed most of his papers prior to his exile and death in 1683. Even Whig historians like Gilbert Burnet and T. B. Macaulay could think of few good things to say about him. For Macaulay he was "first a member of the most corrupt administration, then the leader of the most violent opposition of the century."

Can any defence be made of him? Well, yes, it can. He was extraordinarily able, dedicated, single-minded and hard-working. These qualities can be seen both in his work as a government minister and in his conduct throughout the Exclusion Crisis. He was also to be the first true 'party' leader in English history, the man who virtually called the Whigs into being. It was he, in this regard, who might be said to have turned politics away from the practice of elites into the arena of public debate. Yes, he was unscrupulous; yes, he was prepared to use disreputable methods and rely on disreputable people, like the truly loathsome Titus Oates.

But, you see, Shaftesbury believed that England was faced with a terrible threat, and that desperate times demanded desperate remedies. For him Catholicism was a political rather than a religious danger; a faith that rested in the forms of despotism practiced on the Continent by the likes of Louis XIV. If he was unscrupulous he had learned the technique from the Stuarts; from Charles II, a king who effectively 'sold' England in the secret Treaty of Dover, and James his Catholic brother and designated successor, rigid and doctrinaire to a quite unacceptable degree. Shaftesbury's anger was born of just frustration: that the People, that Parliament itself, had no effective say over the supreme governance of the realm. His Whigs were violent, but their violence was born of political and constitutional imbalance.

So, what is Shaftesbury's case, his final defence? It's the defence of history, the defence, it might even be said, of liberty itself; that there should be an effective challenge to absolutism; that the people have a right to decide on their forms of government; that all power should not be concentrated by sacred and received right alone; that politics is a public act, not a private conspiracy. His best epitaph was that penned by John Locke, his friend and associate. For him Shaftesbury was a "Vigorous and indefatigable champion of civil and ecclesiastical liberty." And who can say better than that?