Papist conspiracy
The Popish Plot ( "Popish Plot" ) was a fictional conspiracy in England the years 1678 to 1681. She was placed in the world to the Catholics to discredit the country and led to numerous arrests and 35 executions of innocents.
history
trigger
In 1678 a corrupt cleric named Titus Oates announced that he had discovered a "papist conspiracy" with the aim of murdering King Charles II and his Catholic brother, the then Duke of York and later King James II , for the throne bring. All leading Protestants in England were supposed to be murdered as well.
Oates, an Anglican pastor, fled to the University of Valladolid in 1677 after repeated charges of sodomy and soon afterwards to the Jesuit house of Saint Omer . After he was thrown out for fornication there, too, he returned to England and pretended to have only appeared to have joined the Jesuit order to spy on him. He also got knowledge of the murder plans against King Karl. He spread these allegations with the help of his old friend Israel Tonge, a brutally anti-Catholic clergyman who used to explain the failures of his books and his lost trials without exception with the conspiratorial machinations of the Jesuits.
Tonge reported the alleged conspiracy to the king, who did not believe in the matter, but nevertheless passed it on to his courtiers. Shortly thereafter, Oates testified before Justice of the Peace Edmund Berry Godfrey, after which an investigation began, in the course of which Oates named numerous (apparently arbitrary) names of celebrities, including many Jesuits, the Queen's personal physician and Edward Coleman, the Private Secretary to the Duchess of York. As it turned out, he was actually in correspondence with French Jesuits. Oates' statements resulted in a total of 81 charges.
Persecutions
Oates' allegations were without objection believed they were able to match many anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit prejudice and conspiracy theories: In the years before that were plague of 1664/65 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 on the alleged action by agents of the pope returned been. The fact that Justice of the Peace Godfrey was murdered by strangers shortly after Oates' testimony gave the myth of a violent Catholic conspiracy additional credibility. Added to this were the political interests of the Anglican opposition, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had just been released from prison . The opposition detested the king's Catholic wife, Catherine of Braganza , and the party of the royalists, the later Tories , whose power they wanted to break.
With the help of the alleged papist conspiracy, Shaftesbury and his friends succeeded in winning the numerous Protestant sects on their side and winning a majority in the House of Commons in the elections. Under their pressure and that of public opinion, although King Charles never believed Oates' claims, he had to order further investigation.
An atmosphere of hysteria and terror spread among the public: noble ladies began to carry firearms with them at night, silk-covered breastplates became fashionable, and the House of Commons was scrupulously investigated fearing a second powder conspiracy was threatening - naturally without result . Anyone suspected of crypto- Catholicism was banned from London and allowed to approach the city limits within ten miles.
Oates built on his conspiracy theory and charged five Catholic members of the House of Lords , after which Shaftesbury had them thrown into the Tower . When Oates also accused the Queen herself of being involved in the murder plans, he was questioned personally by the King, who was able to convict him of various lies and had him thrown in prison. Shaftesbury's majority in the House of Commons forced his release after a few days. At the end of 1678 this majority enforced the Test Act , according to which Catholics were no longer allowed to belong to either House of Parliament. In 1679 the House of Commons also passed the Exclusion Bill , which excluded the Duke of York from the line of succession. The House of Lords refused to give its consent.
Oates, who had been given a stately home in Whitehall and a state pension as the “savior of the fatherland” , produced more and more accusations. Other rumors spontaneously spread among the public, for example that the French were preparing to land on the island.
Exposure
It was not until 1681 that one of Oates' accused was acquitted for the first time that the mood changed. Charles II ordered Oates to leave his government apartment and when the latter refused and instead personally charged the king himself and his brother, he was fined £ 100,000 for riot and jailed. After James II had ascended the throne in 1685, Oates was also sentenced to three-day pillory annually for perjury, followed by flogging and life imprisonment. However, after the Glorious Revolution , Oates was released. Those falsely accused by him were rehabilitated.
consequences
Proof that all the cabal and intrigues were in fact Oates' inventions weakened the opposition around Shaftesbury, who had taken advantage of his lies. At the same time, the crisis surrounding the alleged papist conspiracy and the Exclusion Bill also led to the formation of the British party system: the anti-absolutist and Anglican opposition to the Stuart monarchy became the Whigs , whose conservative supporters were soon called the Tories . The third and perhaps most momentous change was a fundamental modernization of English political thought: When the Tories declared themselves to be the "loyal opposition of his majesty" to the new King William of Orange after the Glorious Revolution , conspiracy thinking in England was permanently undermined. The climax and end point of which was the Popish Plot : If the respective political or religious opponent was no longer up to anything illegal, he no longer needed to do it in secret and he was no longer understood as a conspirator : Conspirators to be fought under criminal law became conspirators political opponents that one tried to fight but no longer tried to destroy.
literature
- Douglas Green (Ed.): Diaries of the Popish Plot. Being the Diaries of Israel Tonge, Sir Robert Southwell, John Joyne, Edmund Warcup and Thomas Dangerfield and including Titus Oates's. A true narrative of the Horrid Plot (1679) . Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, New York NY et al. 1977, ISBN 0-8201-1288-7 .
- John Kenyon: The Popish Plot . Phoenix Press, London 2000, ISBN 1-84212-168-5 .
- John Pollock: The Popish Plot. A Study in the History . Nabu Press, Philadelphia PA 2010, ISBN 978-1-143-45322-9 .
- Caroline M. Hibbard: Charles I and the Popish Plot . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC 1983, ISBN 0-8078-1520-9 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Helmut Reinalter : Jesuit conspiracy . In: the same (ed.): Handbook of conspiracy theories. Salier Verlag, Leipzig 2018, p. 156.