As daylight faded on the rainy afternoon of Thursday 17 October 1678, three men discovered a body face-down in a ditch at the foot of Primrose Hill, then beyond the northern limit of London. The body was that of Sir Edmund Godfrey, a magistrate who had been missing since the previous weekend. His hat and periwig were caught on bushes at the edge of the ditch; his sword was beneath him. Some eight inches of its blade protruded from his back.
The jury at the inquest that followed wrestled with the possibility of suicide; it remains the most likely explanation. But the deceased’s brothers claimed he had been murdered by Catholics. In this, they were riding a rising wave of anti-Catholic hysteria: for some weeks two men, Titus Oates and Israel Tonge, had been peddling stories of a vast Catholic conspiracy. Godfrey had been the magistrate who took their depositions. For many, his death proved the truth of the accusations. The House of Commons set up a committee to investigate both the murder and the conspiracy. The dogs were out and running.
Both Oates and Tonge were serial failures. Indeed, Oates – an unprepossessing man with a voice “like a flawed pipe organ”, it was said – had already packed an impressive list of ignominies in his 27 years, having been ejected from one public school, two Cambridge colleges, one parish living, and a naval chaplaincy before professing to convert to Catholicism. He was quickly expelled from both the English College in Valladolid and the Jesuit college at St Omer in Flanders and had returned to England broke and further embittered. The conspiracy – better known as the Popish Plot – was largely his work.
It was, as Victor Stater says in Hoax, his gripping new account of the affair, “one of the most preposterous – and consequential – conspiracy theories of all time”. Seventeen Catholics would die traitors’ deaths on the scaffold on the basis of Oates’ sworn testimony alone. Many more died, directly and indirectly, as a result of the two-year frenzy of hate he unleashed. What then did Oates allege? His complete list of accusations ran to 81 points: Catholics had been behind the killing of Charles I, for instance, and the Great Fire of London. Their plans included the assassination of Charles II, either by poison, by dagger, or by shooting with silver bullets. Louis XIV of France would conquer and re-Catholicise England.
There was no evidence for any of this beyond the word of Oates and those of a few other fantasists – conmen, criminals, malcontents – who came forward in his wake. But what they spoke to was every Protestant paranoia about Catholicism made flesh. That’s why the plot was so readily believed: it told Protestants what they already knew to be true. “Nothing can seem strange that is testified against them,” said a judge of the defendants in one of the treason trials that followed. Protestations of innocence were merely further evidence of Catholic perfidy. Belief in the conspiracy was article of faith: the plot, said one privy councillor, “must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or not”.
No-one was safe. Indeed, the primary targets of those who used the plot for political ends were Charles’ Catholic brother James, the heir to the throne, and his Catholic queen Catherine of Braganza. The nascent Whig faction, led by the diminutive Earl of Shaftesbury, wanted to exclude James from the succession and compel Charles to divorce. Perhaps Charles might find a Protestant wife and produce a legitimate heir; if not, his illegitimate son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, was waiting in the wings.
Stater is cynical about Shaftesbury’s motives, in particular. “Let him cry as loud as he pleases against Popery,” Shaftesbury said of a rival. “I will cry a note louder.” The viciousness of politics in an age of far-from absolute monarchy is compellingly handled; “I would have lived with more ease in a powder mill,” an official later recalled. But at the heart of the book, as they must be, are accounts of the treason trials the conspiracy spawned. The drama of each is sharply realised, small tragedies of dignity and malice in the greater tragedy of the narrative. It is hard not to be moved by the courage of the accused, fighting for their lives for a brief few hours in the arena of the courts; their voices are vivid still, over 300 years later. “I am not afraid of death,” said Thomas Whitbread, head of the English Jesuits. “But I should be very loth to die unjustly.”
We live, as Stater notes, in an age of conspiracy-thinking. Reading Hoax one is constantly reminded how vulnerable even powerful institutions are to the determinedly dishonest – perhaps particularly to those who justify their dishonesty to themselves as being for a greater cause – and how readily rationality recedes before the irrational when deep-rooted beliefs are brought into play. Might Hoax, as well as being a first-rate history, help alert us to any latter-day Oates and Shaftesburys among us now?
This review first appeared in the 4 August 2022 issue of The Tablet.
Read more of Mathew’s reviews here.
Mathew Lyons 