The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood
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agreed that the papists’ program was political in nature. Unlike godly people, who focused their energies on the world to come, papists obsessed over worldly goals: the acquisition of money and power. Writing in particular about the Jesuits, one Englishman observed that “Riches, Dominion, Pomp and Glory, are the Butts they shoot at; and if ever they appear Heavenly, by tampering with Affairs of State, they mix Heaven and Earth together, to bring all into Confusion.” Their most storied tactic was to subvert and undermine Protestant princes, either by infiltrating royal councils, by encouraging subjects to rebel, or in extreme cases by assassinating the monarch—as in the case of the French king Henri IV, murdered by a Catholic zealot in 1610 partly as punishment for issuing the Edict of Nantes, a law that guaranteed limited rights to French Protestants. With governments in their hands, papists would be free to beggar, harass, and persecute the people—and the result was almost always poverty and hardship, as was proven by the relative prosperity of Protestant countries in comparison to their Catholic neighbors.8
Finally, English antipopery rested on the belief that Catholics were unnaturally violent and cruel. The most famous English works of antipopish propaganda, beginning with John Foxe’s sixteenth-century landmark Acts and Monuments, known to most readers as the Book of Martyrs, chronicled popish violence in the most graphic detail. The carnage took on two forms. First, there was the institutionalized cruelty of the Catholic Church, its tribunals like the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, and popish monarchs like England’s Mary I, who came to power in 1553 and attempted to turn back England’s Reformation. The queen presided over the burning of dozens of Protestant martyrs at Smithfield, a time when “England was become such a Theatre of Fire and Faggot, as if Rome had design’d to have chang’d her imaginary, into a real Purgatory over all this Land.” The second form of popish violence implicated ordinary people who, usually at the encouragement of scheming priests, set out to massacre Protestants, as in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, when “every Man seem’d a Fury; and as if they had bin transformed into Wolves and Tigres, out did the cruelty of Beasts.” The most frightening of all these massacres and persecutions, however, was the Irish Rebellion of 1641, in which Irish Catholics—inspired, it was said, by priests who claimed it was not a sin to spill Protestant blood—rose up against their neighbors, depopulating much of the country and killing thousands. Protestant propagandists exaggerated both the numbers and the nature of casualties, turning the Rebellion into one of the signal acts in the annals of popish cruelty—and one acted by near neighbors against English and Scottish people.9
Figure 3. This 1681 broadside provided graphic illustrations of what some English Protestants feared would come to pass under a Catholic king, including the burning of London, destruction of churches, and cruel abuse and execution of Protestant men, women, and children. A Scheme of Popish Cruelties (London, 1681).
The anti-Catholic panic of 1678 drew from these traditions, but its key inspiration came from a tense geopolitical situation. The key factor was the rise of Catholic France as a major European and global power. In 1672 the Sun King’s armies overran the Netherlands, long the center of international Protestantism, and threatened to expand his influence in Protestant Germany as well. In addition to his foreign adventures, Louis relentlessly persecuted his own nation’s Protestant minority, giving an indication of how he would treat the inhabitants of conquered Protestant territories. “His Designs are so vast,” wrote one English critic, “that in some short time all Europe will not be Elbow-room for his Ambition.” The only way to bring him to heel, in the estimation of many English and Dutch Protestants, was a general alliance of all the Reformed people of Europe, who might be able to use their combined force to thwart his designs.10
While Louis XIV ran roughshod over the liberties of Europe, England’s king Charles II proved reluctant to do his part for the Protestant cause. Indeed, the “merry monarch” seemed at times to be moving England closer to the French orbit, imitating Louis XIV’s methods of governing and joining the French in a war against the Netherlands that was wildly unpopular in England. (In fact, Charles II signed a secret treaty with the French at Dover in 1670, so many of his subjects’ fears were justified.) Even more ominously, the king’s brother and heir to the throne, James, duke of York, revealed in 1674 that he had converted to Catholicism, meaning that—barring the birth of a male heir or a change in succession—the next king of England, Scotland, and Ireland would be a papist. All these circumstances lay behind the popish plot, when it appeared that the papists intended to bring their designs to fruition. And the people “who ought to stand by us in the day of Battel”—public servants—“have been the Persons in the World most likely to betray us, and lead us like Sheep to the Slaughter.”11
The revelations of the plot, aided by the lapse of the licensing act that had allowed government ministers to police printing in the kingdom, resulted in an enormous outpouring of anti-Catholic propaganda. These tracts, books, and newspapers detailed the imminent popish threat to the English church and state, the Protestant religion in the world, and, indeed, the lives, liberties, and property of godly people everywhere. One of the most alarming publications, an anonymous tract entitled An Appeal from the Country to the City, detailed exactly what would happen if Catholics succeeded in their designs. First, the papists would set London on fire: “the whole Town in a flame, occasioned this second time, by the same Popish malice which set it on fire before.” Then, a military invasion: “Troops of Papists, ravishing your wives and your Daughters, dashing your little Childrens brains out against the walls, plundering your houses, and cutting your own throats, by the name of Heretick Dogs.” For the survivors, then, torture and fire: “your Father, or your Mother, or some of your nearest and dearest Relations, tyed to a Stake in the midst of flames, when with hands and eyes lifted up to Heaven, they scream and cry out to God for whose Cause they die; which was a frequent spectacle the last time Popery reign’d amongst us.” And if all this was not bad enough—your wives and daughters raped, your house in ruins, your parents burned at the stake, your own throat cut—business would also suffer: “Your Trading’s bad, and in a manner lost already, but then the only commodity will be Fire and Sword; the only object women running with their hair about their ears, Men cover’d with blood, Children sprawling under Horses feet, and only the walls of Houses left standing.”12
The only proper response to this danger, claimed the author and likeminded English people, was to change the line of succession to prevent the duke of York from becoming king. It was the interest, and indeed the duty of all good Protestants to ensure that a papist did not come to the throne; the Appeal’s author even suggested an alternative, Charles II’s illegitimate son James, duke of Monmouth. “If the Papists make such plottings and designes to subvert our religion under a protestant prince,” one advocate of exclusion noted, “how much more will they designe against us under a popish successour?” Contemporary circumstances in France seemed to provide the answer. In the early 1680s Louis was determined to sweep away the “Edicts and Arrests, Priviledges and Immunities, Liberties and Laws” that protected Protestant worship, and Huguenot refugees began an exodus to England where they advertised the Sun King’s cruelty. As one leading radical Protestant wrote, “the severities exercised against those of the Reformed Religion in that Kingdom, are but a Copy of what we in these Nations are to look for, in case we should come under a Popish Prince.”13
This so-called “exclusion crisis” marked the practical beginning of party politics in England. Advocates of the exclusion of the duke of York from the throne soon became known as the Whigs, and their program combined a fanatical and paranoid antipopery, a general tolerance for Protestant dissent, and a fierce advocacy of the independence of Parliament and local magistrates—the “country interest”—from the king and his royal court. As one Scottish Presbyterian noted around the same time, it was a goal of popish, arbitrary governments to bring about “a general or gradual unhinging of Legal Constitutions, made for security of our Religion and Liberty.” As a result, Whigs held fast to those “English liberties” that served as the greatest bulwarks to prevent a monarch or his “evil counselors” from pushing the kingdom toward “popery and slavery.”14
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