The Popish Plot
Today’s post brought a copy of the most recent Times Literary Supplement. It contained a piece by Madoc Cairns, a staff writer at the Catholic Publication, the Tablet, of Victor Stater’s new book on the Popish Plot of 1679 entitled Hoax: The Popish Plot that never was. Cairns began by describing the plethora of plots to which credence was given by contemporaries and the willingness to believe the claims of Titus Oates that a plot to restore Catholicism in England was in existence. The death of the magistrate, Edmund Godfrey, who had heard Oates’s claims, lent apparent substance to these allegations. The Earl of Shaftesbury was willing to exploit such fears for his own political aims aided and abetted by jurists like Chief Justice Scroggs. Eventually, however, the panic subsided. Charles II called the bluff of the Whigs seeking to exclude his brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession and first adjourned Parliament to Oxford and then dissolved it. Cairns concluded by praising Stater’s prose, his story-telling abilities and the lessons that conspiracy theories hold for our own time.[1]
Curiously, Cairns omitted to tell readers of the TLS
what if any new evidence Stater has found. Did Stater’s arguments offer novel
forms of analysis or interpretation and, if so, what were they? How has
Stater’s book advanced historians’ collective understanding of the Popish Plot?
On these key issues, which ought to have been the main focus of his or any
other review, Cairns had nothing to say. I was sufficiently puzzled to write a
brief letter to the TLS setting out my concerns. Whether it gets
published remains to be seen.
23rd July, 2022
[1]
Madoc Cairns, Merry England was ill at ease. The Times Literary Supplement (22
July, 2022), Page 19.
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