The Catholic Question: Popish Plot and Rye House Plot
A Country Primed for Panic
By 1678, English Protestants were jumpy. The fear of popery ran deep: France under Louis XIV was the dominant Catholic power, Charles II had signed the Treaty of Dover (1670) with French money attached, and his brother and heir — James, Duke of York — had openly become Catholic by 1673. Into that anxiety walked a disgraced Anglican clergyman called Titus Oates, with a story that would change the politics of the reign.
The Popish Plot, 1678
In the autumn of 1678 Oates and his collaborator, Israel Tonge, swore on oath before a London magistrate that Jesuits were planning to assassinate Charles II, replace him with his Catholic brother James, and re-impose Catholicism by force. Oates named priests, dates and meeting places; almost all of it was invented. But the plot acquired terrifying credibility on 17 October 1678, when the magistrate who had taken Oates’s deposition, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was found dead on Primrose Hill, run through with his own sword.
The Popish Plot of 1678 was invented by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. Although the assassination conspiracy was a fabrication, the unsolved murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey on 17 October 1678 turned a wild story into a national emergency.
Oates fitted his lies to existing fears. Anti-Catholic feeling was reinforced by living memory of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Great Fire of 1666 (still rumoured to be a Catholic arson). Letters written by James’s secretary, Edward Coleman, to French Jesuits were genuinely incriminating about wider Catholic plans, even though Coleman knew nothing of the assassination story. When those letters were seized, they seemed to confirm Oates — and Coleman was hanged, drawn and quartered in December 1678.
Hysteria and Executions
Parliament passed the Second Test Act of 1678, barring Catholics from sitting in either House of Parliament. It was aimed at James, but the Lords forced through a special exemption that let him keep his seat. At least 22 Catholics were executed between 1678 and 1681 on the basis of Oates’s perjury, and others died in prison. They included Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, hanged at Tyburn in 1681 and the last Catholic martyr executed in England. Catholics were ordered to leave London, and a wave of trials and pamphlets swept the country.
It was inside this hysteria that the Earl of Shaftesbury launched the Exclusion campaign to bar James from the throne — the subject of the next lesson. The Popish Plot is therefore the trigger for what historians now call the Exclusion Crisis: real political consequences flowed from a fictional conspiracy.
The Rye House Plot, 1683
The mood swung the other way after Charles II dissolved the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 and ruled without one. Frustrated Whig leaders began to consider violence. The Rye House Plot was a real conspiracy: a group of radicals planned to ambush Charles and James at Rye House, a moated farmhouse in Hertfordshire, on their journey home from the Newmarket races. A fire at Newmarket forced the king to leave early, the attack never happened, and one of the plotters — Josiah Keeling — informed the government in June 1683.
The reaction was severe. Lord William Russell was beheaded in July 1683, Algernon Sidney in December 1683; the Earl of Essex died in the Tower (officially suicide). The Duke of Monmouth fled to the Continent. Charles used the plot to purge corporations of Whig sympathisers, force boroughs to surrender their charters and rebuild their governments under Tory loyalists. By 1684 the Crown looked stronger than at any point since 1660.
Borough corporations elected MPs and ran local justice, so controlling them mattered for any future Parliament. Beginning with London, challenged from 1681 and beaten in court in 1683, the government used quo warranto writs — legal challenges to a corporation’s charter — to force boroughs to surrender and accept new charters that gave the Crown a veto over key officers. By the time Charles died, more than fifty corporations had been remodelled. James II inherited a map of constituencies stacked with Tories.
The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a real Whig conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and James, betrayed before it could be carried out. Russell and Sidney were executed, Monmouth fled abroad, and Charles used the plot to purge Whig corporations and govern without Parliament until his death in 1685.
Aftermath: A Reign Saved by a Lie and a Plot
The two episodes pull in opposite directions. The Popish Plot was an invention that nearly destroyed the monarchy; the Rye House Plot was real and ended up rescuing it. Together they show how raw fear of Catholic succession and republican conspiracy could be exploited by either side. Titus Oates was finally tried for perjury in 1685 under the new King James II, pilloried, whipped and imprisoned for life — though William of Orange would release him after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.