Popish Plot

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I'm going to jump forward quickly to article Charles II's Forgotten Fleet, how the Popish Plot nearly unraveled the construction and recording of Britain's new navy.

Richard Ensdoor wrote this.

Begins, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, cheekily but accurately described King Charles II's lifelong passions, saying he could sail a yacht from a barge, love ducks, tarts, and buttered buns.

King Charles, aware of the project, employed the famous Dutch marine artist, Van de Velde, to make large-scale drawings of the ships for Drummond to use as his guide to embellish.

None of them could have known what they were letting themselves in for.

While Drummond was dutifully measuring the structures of the new ships, fear of the Popish Plot was spreading and he would unwittingly find himself wrapped up in it.

The fictitious plot that the Jesuits were plotting, the assassination of Charles II and replacing him with his Catholic brother James, Duke of York.

Born in Meath, Plunkett was appointed the Archbishop of Armagh in 1669.

He's implicated in the Popish Plot of 1681, whereby Catholics were alleged to have planned the assassination of Charles II.

He was subsequently sentenced to death.

He was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

At Edinburgh perhaps the public opinion might have been against him, but in London the controversy seems only to have raised his character.

He was regarded as an Anglican divine of eminent merit, who, after having heroically defended his religion against an army of Popish rapperees, was rabbled by a mob of Scotch covenanters.

he presented to the commons a petition setting forth the destitute condition to which the widows and orphans of some brave men who had fallen during the siege were now reduced the commons instantly passed a vote of thanks to him and resolved to present to the king an address requesting that ten thousand pounds might be distributed among the families whose sufferings had been so touchingly described the next day it was rumoured about the benches that walker was in the lobby he was called in the speaker with great grace and dignity informed him that the house had made haste to comply with his request commended him in high terms for having taken on himself to govern and defend a city betrayed by its proper governors and defenders and charged him to tell those who had fought under him that their fidelity and valor would always be held in grateful remembrance by the commons of england about the same time the course of parliamentary business was diversified by another curious and interesting episode which like the former sprang out of the events of the irish war

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Again moderation was despised as cowardice, or execrated as treachery.

all the lessons taught by the cruel experience were forgotten.

The very same men who had expiated, by years of humiliation, of imprisonment, of penury, of exile, the folly with which they had misused the advantage given them by the Popish plot, now misused with equal folly the advantage given them by the revolution.

The second madness would, in all probability, like the first, have ended in their prescription, dispersion, decimation, but for the magnanimity and wisdom of that great prince, who, bent on fulfilling his mission, and insensible alike to flattery and outrage, coldly and inflexibly saved them in their own despite.

And the great anxiety of what will happen if a Catholic does become king, you begin to get people who started to claim that there was a conspiracy at the top of government to assassinate Charles, to hasten James's accession to the throne.

This is called the Popish Plot, and the claim that there were a large number of people who were conspiring to assassinate the king, and that if James didn't know about it, he was turning a blind eye to it.

And in any case, he was the beneficiary of what they were doing, and the way to prevent the assassination of the king and the succession of the Catholic ruler.

was to pass an act that would mean that the Catholics couldn't benefit from the assassination.

In 1678, someone called Titus Oates fabricated a Catholic conspiracy to murder Charles and place his Catholic brother, James, on the throne.

The resulting Popish Plot, as it was known, produced arrests, executions, and a campaign to exclude James from the succession.

Pepys and Deane were falsely accused of passing naval secrets to France and were actually imprisoned in the Tower.

Dummer's project survived the crisis.

Um, uh, so this is what he did, and he went about doing that.

Um, the process, um, he recorded, uh, in a little, in little notebooks.

Um, unfortunately, while he was halfway through this project, along came the Popish Plot, which completely scuppered things.

Because Samuel Pepys and, uh, and his mentor, Sir Anthony Deane, they were both arrested.

And before we nod too much in agreement, we have to remember the Protestants did the same thing.

There's a famous Popish Plot of the 17th century in England when a man, a P- Protestant clergyman, Titus Oates, falsely claimed that the Jesuits were conspiring to kill King Charles II and have his Catholic brother put in his stead.

It led to the execution of 20 Catholics.

Later, Titus Oates was shown to be a liar and a perjurer, and convicted of it.

There arose a cry on which the opposition could appeal to a sensitive nation.

The Popish Plot, a tissue of falsehoods weaved around a slender thread of fact, was announced by a depraved villain named Titus Oates.

He and others like him declared that there was a deep-rooted plot by which Roman Catholics were endeavouring to subvert the freedom of the country, assassinate the king, and restore England to the papal allegiance.

The nation was alarmed.

Parliament caught the alarm, papists were hurried to execution on the slenderest evidence, and the opposition leaders, some of whom believed genuinely in the story, fanned the flames.

An act to disable papists from sitting in either house of parliament was passed.

As if to show where the real Popish Plot had been, the secret of a letter written by Danby at the king's bidding, in which the English ambassador was instructed to ask Louis for money, was now made public by Danby's enemies.

The old Treaty of Dover was as yet only suspected.