“The Horrid Popish Plot”: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London by Peter Hinds (review)

Absurd though it was, the “horrid” Popish Plot took a long time to unwind: first it was a series of testimonies, depositions, examinations, arrests, and trials; then at Tyburn the supposed plotters were hanged, drawn, and quartered, all accompanied by a torrent of representations in a variety of media; and, finally, there was a literary masterpiece, Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel. In “The Horrid Popish Plot,” Mr. Hinds tells the story of the plot, the plotters, and their antagonists, but more especially describes the ways in which the events and principals of this drama were represented in the hectic world of late seventeenth-century political talk, manuscript, and print.

Was there in fact a popish plot to poison Charles II and install his brother on the throne? Would there indeed have been any reason by the late 1670s to secure a Catholic succession to the English throne? Charles, if he had any religion at all, may well have been a crypto-Catholic by the time of the Plot, and though Charles produced offspring with a variety of “concubines and slaves” (as Dryden was to call them), there were no children born of his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. His brother and the heir apparent, James, Duke of York, had likely converted to Roman Catholicism in 1672, refused to take the Test in 1673, and by 1676 made public declaration of his new faith. By the late 1670s, the supposed plotters need only have waited patiently and a Catholic succession would come their way. But the political climate of the late 1670s did not support patient waiting: the moment must have seemed ripe for revelations of a supposed conspiracy to kill the King. Enter discreditable and “fabulously disreputable” Titus Oates; his story of Catholic conspiracy was retailed before the King himself and the Privy Council and then at the treason trials of the supposed popish conspirators. What followed was disclosures of secret meetings, the forging of evidence, and the repeated stirrings of anti-Catholic hysteria. Enter too Roger L’Estrange, the King’s Surveyor, then Licenser, of the Press, tireless pamphleteer and combative polemicist who took on Titus Oates and his Popish Plot in pamphlets that aimed to discredit Oates and deflate the Plot. L’Estrange wrote of Oates, “He has Employ’d his Talent, from the very Cradle, in Lyes, Scandals, Treachery, Malice, Revenge, and in the Love and Practice of Wickedness, even for Wickedness sake,” and of course L’Estrange, like so many other protagonists and antagonists of the plot, got spattered with the mud that flew in every direction: he was accused of covert Catholicism, of hiding priests and conspiring against the king, and at one point in the turmoil over plots and popery had to flee for his life to Holland.

From Mr. Hinds’s careful review of evidence and of the narratives constructed to represent the plot, it seems very unlikely anything like the conspiracy that Oates fabricated existed, but there were and remain so many conflicting accounts that it is impossible wholly to dismiss all of the elements of a popish conspiracy. Fears and anxieties stirred by the “horrid plot” led to a real political crisis—of that there is no question. The events known as Exclusion—the parliamentary and extraparliamentary effort to bar James, Duke of York, from succession to the throne—form the next act in the political drama of the late 1670s and early 1680s, and though the events and texts of the Exclusion Crisis are not Mr. Hinds’s central concern, they loom over his study as does James’s brief reign, his abrupt flight from England in 1688, and the “Glorious Revolution” that followed from this vacancy. The texts and events of “the horrid Popish Plot” may seem outlandish and chimerical, but they reveal, and especially so in Mr. Hinds...