Popish Plot

Popish Plot, (1678), in English history, a totally fictitious but widely believed plot in which it was alleged that Jesuits were planning the assassination of King Charles II in order to bring his Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York (afterward King James II), to the throne. The allegations were fabricated by Titus Oates (q.v.), a renegade Anglican clergyman who had feigned conversion to the Roman Catholic church the year before and spent a few months as a student at two English seminaries abroad, from both of which he was expelled.

Encouraged by a fanatically anti-Catholic acquaintance, Israel Tonge, Oates informed the government of the imagined plot and eventually gained access to the Privy Council, where the king’s questioning showed Oates to be lying. But meanwhile, Oates also made a sworn deposition of his “evidence” (Sept. 28, 1678) to a Westminster justice of the peace, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and when the latter was found murdered in October, a popular panic was engendered. Ramifications of the plot were imagined everywhere, and in all about 35 innocent people were executed. Eventually, Oates was discredited, and the panic died down.