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This chapter discusses an outline of the key but controversial details of the Popish Plot. It studies particular misreports and misrepresentations of these details, whether unwitting or otherwise. The different media of communication used to disseminate plot information is studied, and specific examples of each media are provided. The Popish Plot ‘Narratives’ and the ‘Pope-burning processions’ are also discussed.

This introductory chapter discusses the ‘horrid Popish Plot’, which was an alleged Catholic conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II. This was done to effect an armed foreign invasion and a domestic uprising, as well as to reintroduce the Catholic faith into England. The chapter also includes a brief overview of the following chapters.

This chapter discusses the means for circulating political discourse. The discussion centres on the physical design of books, the practice and material spaces of reading, the potential impact of the spoken word, and the circulation of print and manuscript. The interpenetration of these forms of discourse is considered to be important in understanding the Popish Plot and the ensuing political crisis.

In criminal prosecutions for high treason, the crown was always represented by counsel, but the rule against defense counsel prevented the defendants from having a lawyer. In the decade preceding the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, a series of sensational treason trials occurred, most notably the Popish Plot trials of 1678-80, in which weak or perjured evidence led to the conviction and execution of many persons, including leading political figures. It became known within a few years of the Popish Plot trials that the accusing evidence had been perjured, and that the executed defendants had been innocent. Many of these defendants had complained at their trials of the unfairness of denying them defense counsel when the crown was represented. In the Treason Trials Act of 1696, Parliament evened the playing field by abrogating the rule against defense counsel, but only in cases of high treason, which were quite rare. The ban on counsel remained for cases of felony.

Restoration anti-popery is a vast topic and this chapter refers only to the salient aspects of it—in particular, the pamphlet debates of the 1660s and 1670s about whether Catholics had been loyal to the king during the civil wars of the 1640s. This helps to contextualize the outbreak of a very violent implementation of the penal laws in the later 1670s against Catholics, which itself was one of the contexts of the exclusion crisis that lasted until 1681. Whereas the Restoration period had seen something like de facto tolerance for many Catholics, the Popish Plot, or ‘Oates Plot’ as Catholics called it, led to executions of clergymen on a scale not seen since Elizabethan times. Here the shadow of Blackloism was still visible, that is as Catholics were faced with the ambiguities of their past relationship with the State.

This chapter explores William Penn’s political thought as it developed during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678–1681). During these years, Penn became an increasingly prominent member of the Quaker leadership, defending Friends in print and before Parliament. He also remained active in the nation’s political life and, given increasingly dim prospects for toleration in England, began exploring the possibility of securing land in America. Penn’s political thinking during these years focused on two primary issues: Parliament and popery. He reiterated his long-standing commitment to Parliament’s role in the governance of the realm and, while echoing popular concerns about the seditious potential of English Catholics, also attempted to find ways to guarantee loyal English Catholics their civil rights. In all these endeavors, Penn sought to articulate a social and political vision that would enable individuals to build a common life together despite their religious differences.

Oxford University could not escape the political agitation set in motion by the Popish Plot. The scaremongering associated with Titus Oates's discovery of a supposed Catholic conspiracy against the life of Charles II seriously bothered Protestants. No sooner had the anti-Catholic hysteria of the capital invaded Oxford than there was a sharp revulsion of feeling against individual papists. The inbred anti-Catholicism of the nation — never far beneath the surface of Restoration politics — became ever more strident and merciless. The local magistracy made good use of the information collected by Bishop John Fell in his primary visitation of the diocese in 1676. Vice-Chancellor John Nicholas, the trimming warden of New College, was particularly active. His officious conduct in arresting the most harmless of Catholics, such as the poverty-stricken William Joyner, was seen by his critics as a bid to curry favour at Westminster in the hope of attracting preferment.

This chapter examines political prints that responded to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679–82). It compares the political prints of the “Tory” Sir Roger L’Estrange, Licenser to the Press, with that of the “Whig” Stephen College, a “Protestant Joiner”. College was executed for his political cartoon, “A Ra-ree Show”, in 1682. This chapter uses these satirical engravings in order to contextualize the so-called “Tory Reaction” of 1681. It argues that one of the reasons why the Tories were so successful, by most accounts, in their efforts to discredit the Whigs has to do with the concept of loyalism. As the Whig agenda became increasingly tied to republican and non-conformist aims, their connection to loyalism began to dissolve. This made the Whigs vulnerable to challenges to their beliefs and practices both from without (by Tories) and from within (by the mainline elements from inside the Whig party itself).

This chapter charts the life of Greatrakes from his return to Ireland in 1666 until his death in 1683, focusing on his continuing relationship with radical groups such as the Muggletonians, as well as his burgeoning friendship with the London magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. In particular, it utilises a series of letters between the two men (which are reproduced in full as an appendix) and examines their significance in providing further insights into religious and political developments in Restoration Britain, culminating in the mysterious death of Godfrey in 1678. The work concludes by assessing the significance of Greatrakes’ life and career in an age in which many, Greatrakes among them, yearned for a return to political stability alongside a comprehensive and peaceful resolution of the nation's religious divisions.

Standing armies remained of intense concern to parliament during the years of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. After all, Charles II had yet to disband an army raised for a war with France that had not been waged. The disputed heir to the throne, the duke of York, was a self-proclaimed Catholic military man. Scottish Conventiclers were in rebellion and had to be suppressed by military force. Moreover, the king became estranged from the duke of Monmouth, who was not only the army’s captain-general but also posed as York’s Protestant rival for the succession to the throne.

A series of treason trials highlighted the increasing concerns over the succession to the throne by a practicing Catholic, James Duke of York. After rescinding the Declaration of Indulgence in 1673, the Test Act required all office holders to receive Anglican communion and acknowledge the King as the head of the Church of England. The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 increased the number of unlicensed printers and the amount of political propaganda for both sides. Plays and popular entertainments were carefully screened for political content as well as blasphemy.

The period from 1675 through the end of the century constituted one of the very coldest and most ruinous periods of that Little Ice Age. Most writing on the so-called General Crisis of the seventeenth century focus sharply on the parlous decades of the 1640s and 1650s and says little about that later crisis. Yet the religious consequences of those latter years were just as far-reaching, not least in redrawing frontiers between faiths. Unlike in the fourteenth century, Europeans now lived in a world of far-flung sea travel and colonial possessions, and persecuted populations amply exploited these opportunities to seek safe haven. Settlements in foreign lands also offered the prospect of new concepts of religious liberty removed far from the motherland, opening a dramatic new phase in attitudes to religious freedom and spiritual experimentation.

The Conclusion draws together the main threads of the book and broadens the discussion to reflect on British attitudes towards slavery and freedom, showing how Barbary coloured political discourse in both the civil war and Restoration periods. It shows how some radicals who condemned the ‘slavery’ of the English people under the so-called Norman Yoke were paradoxically willing to contemplate something very similar to slavery as a suitable punishment for offenders in England. A generation later, Whig pamphleteers warned that the accession of the Catholic James, duke of York, would reduce the English people to the misery of slaves in Algiers. The Conclusion provides an overview of the book’s findings, in particular on the much disputed issue of the conditions experienced by slaves in Barbary, and the factors that shaped them. It summarises how ransoms were raised and how redemptions were organized, comparing Britain and its continental neighbours in their approach to the challenges they shared, the responses they adopted, and the degree of success or failure that resulted.