Thome 2
PUBLIC OPINION AND THE POPISH PLOT:
HOW RELIGIOUS TENSIONSFUELED POLITICAL CHAOS IN ENGLAND, 1678-88
Allie Thome
Newberry Seminar final essay
December 9, 2012
PUBLIC OPINION AND THE POPISH PLOT:
HOW RELIGIOUS TENSIONS FUELED POLITICAL CHAOS IN ENGLAND, 1678-88*
Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
–John Milton, Aeropagetica
I. Introduction
On September 6, 1678, Titus Oates was presented as a witness before Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, a magistrate of the Stuart monarchy.[1] He testified that there was a Catholic conspiracy to murder the king, and that this plot included many important clergy of the Catholic Church and members of the English Catholic nobility. The conspirators had allegedly plotted to kill King Charles II and establish his Catholic brother on the throne. It was theorized that this would result in not just a political coup, but also a total reversal of Church policy. In reality the plot was nothing more than a sham. The Popish Plot of 1678 had political consequences that went far beyond Oates’ original intentions. Public opinion took hold of it and created the spectacle that became widely known and debated in contemporary newspapers and pamphlets. The intrigue surrounding this Popish Plot was compounded when Sir Edmundbury Godfrey mysteriously disappeared just a month after hearing Oates’ evidence, and was later found murdered.[2] This new, highly suspicious mystery helped to intensify these events and give credence to Oates’ plot, but the popular conspiracy that ran through the newspapers and pamphlets was based more on the public’s irrational fears of a Catholic insurrection and their fears of a repetition of the events of the Civil War of 1641 than Oates’ testimony from September 6. His report was only the spark of what became a national anti-Catholic mania in seventeenth-century England. An anti-Catholic ballad details the height of the anger against Catholics in this period after the Popish Plot when it says,
Stop all his Grounds, that he may be
Defenceless ‘gainst his Destiny:
His Jesuitick Cubs Immure,
If Jesus Flock you would secure;
Spare not for Horse-flesh, follow on,
The Day already is half gone;
Chase him through every Disguise,
He’ll piss on’s Tail to blind your Eyes,
But run him home, for soon he Dyes;
If he chance t’Earth, dig after him,
The Country will with Spades come in:
Never then let your Spirits droop,
Till you have cought, incas’d, and cry’d who whoop.[3]
The violence and anger present in this ballad demonstrate the power of anti-Catholicism in this period. Catholics, rather than being seen as a scattered, vaguely wicked group, were instead viewed as a highly organized malevolent force that had to be rooted out, with spades if necessary, and destroyed. A hand-written note on this ballad shows that it was published in 1679, only one year after the events of the Popish Plot began to unfold. Anti-Catholic sentiment became increasingly present and progressively more dramatic within public opinion as the details of the Popish plot were revealed to the public.
This paper will argue that regardless of the highly chaotic, irrational nature of the events surrounding the sham plots of the late seventeenth century, that these intrigues, and the public opinion that formed them, still had very real political effects. This paper will examine public opinion surrounding the religious tensions and the sham plots through the press. Tim Harris describes one author’s view of the media when he writes, “Kathleen Wilson describes the press as ‘that preeminent instrument of politicization in the eighteenth century;’ its ‘political impact,’ she asserts, ‘lay in its ability to organize knowledge, shape expectations, mobilise identities and proffer ideals, perspectives and attitudes through which politics could be interpreted.’”[4] It is in this sense of the press as a body that shaped public opinion that I will use newspapers and pamphlets from this period. News documents formed the highly polarized, chaotic sphere of public opinion that arose in England in the late 1670s through the 1680s, and this in turn had a destabilizing effect on politics in England.
In order to understand the implications of the argument presented by this paper, it is important to recognize the different strands of thought within the existing scholarship on this topic. There are two important schools in the secondary literature concerning public opinion in late seventeenth-century England with a number of scholars bridging a middle-ground between them. The first group are scholars who argue that a rational, Habermasian public sphere arose in this period, partly as a result of advances in printing and the rise of the coffeehouse as a place where people could publicly discuss political issues. Habermas suggests that the rational discourse of the public sphere arose “at the turn of eighteenth century” after the Glorious Revolution of 1689,[5] although he does see the seeds of a political sphere in the late seventeenth century.[6] He explains how the public sphere began to develop before 1689 without becoming real when he writes, “Not that this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses, the salons, and the societies; but as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realized, it was at least consequential.”[7] Habermas describes the public sphere a rational, literary group that understood itself and its role in society.[8] This group participated in “rational-critical debate” and had an effect on the political sphere.[9] David Zaret places the development of Habermas’ ‘public sphere’ much earlier than 1689.[10] In his essay “Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England,” David Zaret argues that Habermas’ sphere is too focused on economic factors rather than political forces, and further claims that revolutions in science and printing led to the formation of a public sphere earlier than Habermas suggests.[11] Zaret argues that the public sphere developed some time during the mid-to-late seventeenth century rather than later.[12] In his article about coffeehouses and seventeenth-century politics, Steve Pincus argues that a rational public political discourse arose in English coffeehouses during the late seventeenth century, and though he resists calling this a ‘public sphere,’ he falls on the Habermasian side of the spectrum.[13]
The second group is made up of scholars who argue that public opinion, as expressed in various forms, was too chaotic and disorganized in the seventeenth century to have any political effect. In his exploration of mob activity in the Revolution of 1688, William L. Sachse writes,
The mob was never politically minded enough, or sufficiently well led and organized, to present a people’s charter; the closest, it seems, that it came to political negotiation was in the presentation of the petitions on behalf of William and Mary. There appears to be no evidence that any advantages, directly affecting the various turbulent bands, followed upon their demonstrations and ravagings. Rather, where possible, they were proceeded against as criminals or miscreants.[14]
This group of scholars views a politically effective group as one that is organized and well-led. The idea of a ‘people’s charter’ also suggests that a politically effective group must have a cohesive, sensible, rational outlook. The group discussed earlier, that argues for the development of a rational public sphere before 1689, ground their work in the more high-minded principles of the seventeenth century, while those who side with Sachse seem more concerned with the gritty details of public opinion in this period. While the two positions seem almost entirely contrary, some scholars have mediated a middle-ground between these points.
In Mark Knights’ article on the Petition of 1680, he argues that the petition was more motivated by fear of Catholics than the Exclusion Crisis.[15] He writes about how the petitioners were viewed as factious dissenters rather than individuals contributing to a political discussion.[16] Knight goes on to say that although these things were true, that the petition “offers evidence of the importance of political clubs, and shows that a significant number of dissenters were involved, with Baptists and independents being particularly prominent. It also shows that dissatisfaction with the Court’s policies was prevalent among higher as well as lower social groups,” and that furthermore, “The petition reveals a popular local reaction to national politics.”[17] Knight offers an analysis of this petition that allows for a disorganized public motivated by fear, and says that although the petition did not offer concrete political results that it is representative of a move towards a kind of public political sphere through the increased interest and participation of the public in national politics.[18] In her essay “The Results of the Rye House Plot and their Influence upon the Revolution of 1688,” Doreen Milne argues that the 1683 plot had very concrete, wide-reaching political effects, including the execution of a certain faction of dissenters and the destruction of the government’s opposition party.[19]
Geoff Kemp bridges the gap between these two spheres of thought by examining, “what might be called the ‘L’Estrange paradox’—Sir Roger’s simultaneous inflation and deflation of the sphere of public discussion, as journalist, polemicist, critic and sensor—to show that material culture and ideological feasibility are necessary but not sufficient criteria in identifying a public sphere of Habermasian hue.”[20] Rather than picking between a Habermasian public sphere and a chaotic realm of public discourse, Kemp argues that identifying a public sphere is more complicated than has been suggested previously. In the end though he does end up on one side of the spectrum, and he determines that, “Habermas’s original dating of the public sphere to the period after the Glorious Revolution remains more persuasive than rival earlier datings.”[21] Knight, Milne, and Kemp all argue that a rational, Habermasian public sphere did not exist, but each recognizes or acknowledges an aspect of the politically effective nature of the period’s public opinion.
Unlike Knights’, Milne’s, and Kemp’s essays, this paper will argue that public opinion as represented by pamphlets and other news documents had immediate as well as broader political effects, and that these effects arose from the chaotic nature of the pamphlet literature and pre-established anxieties concerning instability. In this way it will bridge the two theories of seventeenth-century politics without choosing between examining more general political trends or concrete political effects. Printing demonstrates a dichotomy in this scholarship; it represents both rationality and irrationality. On one side it signifies the creation of a rational polity through the dissemination of information to a wider public and an increase in literacy among the public. The great political theories of Lock and Hobbes that were being printed during this period seem to demonstrate the progress towards a rational public sphere, but the chaos of printing is clearly noticeable when we delve into the facts of the plots, and it seems that the high-minded principles of the empiricism presented in this period did not trickle down to the public. In an essay on the public sphere in the 1680s, Geoff Kemp writes, “Engagement in political discourse was not the same as the self-perception of being a member of a critical public legitimately possessed of political influence, even if the two were linked.”[22] This suggests that people could operate as a political force without engaging in the kind of Habermasian public sphere suggested by a people’s charter or rational discourse. By exploring public opinion as it was influenced and expressed by news documents, this paper will examine this contradiction.
This research is significant because it goes to the center of the chaos of public opinion in this time period, or the proliferation of pamphlets driven by fear and rumor, and demonstrates how the public opinion had specific and more general political effects that were influenced by its chaotic nature. Like Knight, Milne, and Kemp, I will connect a chaotic public opinion with the politics of the period, but this paper will go further in that it will demonstrate that the chaotic public opinion both arose from the fears of political instability in the seventeenth century and then directly contributed to the creation of an actual destabilized political environment. The main problem presented by the previous scholarship surrounding this subject is one of a theoretical, rational public sphere that was highly politically effective versus the reality of a highly disorganized public opinion that had little or no political effect. I bridge the gap between these by arguing that public opinion was highly disorganized, chaotic, and irrational, while still having a political effect.
This paper will be divided into four main sections. The first will give the historical background of the plots and also delve into the meanings and implications of the words ‘public opinion,’ ‘political,’ and ‘religious’ in the late 1670s and 1680s. The second main section will explore how rumor and fear influenced the production and distribution of the sham plots of the 1670s and 1680s, and in doing this impacted the irrational and chaotic nature of the plots. In this section I will also examine the roles of the city and the country in the dissemination of pamphlet literature, and speculate on what role this relationship had in shaping the evolution of the plots. The third main section will demonstrate the effects of the plots on the political situation in this period, and the fourth will explore the British government’s responses the plots. Some of the primary documents used are pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads from the period. Roger Morrice’s Entring Book, which was a contemporary witness’s observations about events spanning from 1677 to 1691, is also used because it often references public opinion and mass demonstrations. It is important to recognize the inherent bias of Morrice’s book, including his Puritan religious views, his status as a Protestant Dissenter, and the fact that some of his reported facts were based on the same rumors that accentuated the sham plots, and cannot be entirely trusted. Although Morrice’s chronicle is not entirely unproblematic, he is an observant and detached chronicler of the events of the late seventeenth century.[23] Sir Roger L’Estrange’s moderate government newspaper, The Observator, and several other documents are used to gauge government reaction to these schemes. Pamphlets concerning the plots will play a pivotal role both in proving that they were motivated by rumor and fear and in proving that the chaotic public opinion had a destabilizing political effect.