Victor Stater’s Hoax: The Popish Plot That Never Was is a work replete with implied “scare quotes.” Retelling in lively detail the events surrounding the fabricated revelations of a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate King Charles ii in the late 1670s, the book deals with “plots,” “revelations,” and “witnesses” with an attentive eye to issues of (mis)representation and a knowing nod to modern parallels. The strong indication that both author and reader know better than to take these narratives at face value might not work in all cases, but in this work, it helps. Stater establishes an almost collaborative tone with his audience in his detailed reconstruction of events. The aim is not to relitigate the veracity of Oates’s allegations, but to outline for the reader how “one of the most preposterous […] and consequential” conspiracy theories in history gathered steam and what consequences it had (ix). Chief among these consequences were the deaths of many innocent victims accused of involvement in the plot, but also the birth of the first political parties. All of this makes for an engaging if sometimes demanding, read.
Stater pulls a few punches in his assessments of the main architects of the plot, characterizing Titus Oates, the chief instigator as a “shifty vagabond” and a craven liar (ix). His comparatively genuine, if somewhat credulous, clerical associate, Israel Tonge, is introduced as “half-mad […] with an obsessive hatred of the Jesuits” (ix). This editorial line is broadly in keeping with other modern scholarship on the plot, including John Kenyon’s 1972 study, though it makes for a striking contrast to the more circumspect tone often deployed in scholarly analyses of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century anti-popery. In such work, a prevailing interpretive logic runs that irrespective of the veracity of particular anti-popish tropes, they were emergent political realities. Stater’s approach here recognizes that fact but nevertheless operates from the starting principle that in 1678 the complex conspiracy was, in its central claims, a complete sham.
As Stater ably demonstrates, however, it was a complete sham given the patina of credibility by virtue of the incidental details that Oates either got right or seemed to get right. Stater explains how despite the peregrinations of Oates’s early life—including his conversion from a Baptist tradition to the Church of England and his descent from a disgraced university student, to a disgraced schoolmaster, to a disgraced naval chaplain—he became the chaplain to the Protestant servants in the household of the Catholic Howard family. This facilitated Oates’s initial meeting with Tonge, but also served as an entrée into the underground world of English Catholicism, from which Oates would garner material to flesh out his narrative.
In March 1677, Oates converted (whether genuinely or otherwise) and met Richard Strange, the provincial superior of the English province of the Jesuits, who arranged for him to study at the English College at Valladolid in Spain. Oates’s inability to speak Latin led his teachers to return him to England. Strange then arranged for the twenty-eight-year-old Oates to undertake remedial work at St. Omer’s in Flanders, a school for the children of English Catholics. Amidst accusations of bullying his fellow pupils, Strange’s successor expelled Oates from the school in June 1678, at which point Oates returned to London and renewed his acquaintance with Tonge.
Those interested in Jesuit studies will find much value in Stater’s volume, as he synthesizes the work of several specialists, including Thomas M. McCoog and T. A. Birrell, to offer insight into the financial and administrative structure of the Society. This is a considerable strength of Stater’s approach and helps convey to the reader how Oates’s “expertise” about Jesuit personalities and structures allowed him to convince his audiences of his story. To some English Protestants, a conspiracy to murder the king seemed like the natural consequence of the fact that the Jesuits had been able to regain a comfortable enough footing in the kingdom to reconstruct a sophisticated administrative apparatus.
Not everyone believed Oates. When Charles ii was told the story, he was deeply skeptical, but nevertheless allowed for the narrative to be presented to the Privy Council in September 1678. The following month, the death of the London magistrate who had heard Oates’s evidence, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, added fuel to the fire. Stater recounts in breathless detail the performances of Oates and the small group of other “witnesses” who came forward to corroborate aspects of his claims in the House of Commons and the ensuing trials (William Bedloe, Miles Prance, and Stephen Dugdale). These led to the deaths of dozens of innocent Catholics, including the nine Jesuits executed in connection with the plot.
As the story became more convoluted, the political ramifications of the plot also grew. Catholic lords were accused of treason; potential rebellions in Scotland and Ireland were mooted; and some of those Catholics closest to Charles ii—his wife, Catherine of Braganza, and his brother, James, the duke of York—were accused of complicity. Of particular concern to Stater is the way this conspiracy theory was coopted by political elites, like Anthony Ashley Cooper, the earl of Shaftesbury, who supported Oates’s cause in order to exclude York from the succession. This Exclusion Crisis saw the emergence of the first political parties, a development Stater portrays as a “positive effect”(282), because their introduction helped to avert the sort of bloodshed seen during the mid-century civil wars. This point is perhaps overstated, a consequence of Stater’s, otherwise enjoyable, enthusiasm for his task.
Some specialist readers might question for whom a work like this is intended. By his own admission, Stater is offering a “narrative rather than an analytic account of the plot” (xii) and he certainly does not organize the volume so as to highlight new evidence or interpretations. But such a conclusion would be a disservice to Stater’s work. He deeply contextualizes a familiar narrative within recent scholarship on the Restoration, English Catholic history, and the Exclusion Crisis. This is a valuable scholarly update on Kenyon’s work and can be used to introduce this phenomenon to a new generation of students.
