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| "The bloodiest hoax in history" |
The Popish Plot
| "There hath been, and still is, a damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried out by Popish Recusants, for the assassination and murdering of the King, and for subverting and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion." |
The
Popish Plot of 1678 was the invention of Titus Oates, an Anglican clergyman of
dubious connections, and his friend, Dr Israel Tonge, a cleric and passionate
anti-Catholic. They pretended to have discovered a Jesuit plot to assassinate
the King, massacre Protestants, and set James, Duke of York, the King's Catholic
brother, on the throne.
Their story seemed more credible to an already credulous public when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the London magistrate to whom Oates had confided his story, was found murdered on Primrose Hill and when, more by accident than design, a treasonable correspondence was discovered between Edward Coleman, secretary to the Duke of York, and Louis XIV.
A national panic ensued and a series of treason trials were set in hand which led to the conviction and summary execution of twenty-four Catholics, while several more died in prison.
The witch hunt spread throughout the country, but its most brutal manifestations were reserved for London, where anti-Catholic feeling ran particularly high in the aftermath of the Great Fire (widely believed to have been started by the Jesuits), and where most political capital could be made out of the unrest.
The words "Tory" (Irish robber) and "Whig" (Scottish outlaw) were originally terms of abuse, but they served, broadly speaking, to define two opposing political viewpoints. The "Tories" stood for the rights of the Established Anglican Church and the King; the "Whigs", largely of Presbyterian background, for the power of Parliament, the constitutional rights of the subject, and the supremacy of law.
The wave of anti-Catholic, anti-monarchist feeling stirred up by the fictitious plot gave the Whigs the opportunity to gain ground over their political rivals. In the years following the Popish Plot, the party political system as we know it began to take shape, replacing the old series of groups linked variously by a common local background, by family ties, or by obligation to a great local landowner etc.
In
1679 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury and leader of the Whig
opposition to Charles II, capitalising on the hysteria generated by the plot,
brought forward an Exclusion Bill designed to bar the Catholic James from the
succession and, it was thought by many contemporaries, to establish an elective
monarchy along the lines of the Venetian Republic.
But, striving to exploit the crisis for party political ends, Shaftesbury
overplayed his hand. Moderate opinion, fearing a new civil war, rallied to the
Tory and Royalist side. Charles was able to call his opponent's bluff, and
dissolved the refractory Parliament at Oxford in 1681. Some Whig leaders,
finding themselves checked constitutionally, went so far as to plot an
insurrection. When this second, actual, conspiracy came to light, the Tory
triumph was complete. Shaftesbury fled into exile in Holland where he died in
1683. 
Titus
Oates outlived almost everyone of note connected with the plot, and died in
obscurity in 1705.
Venice Preserv'd is based on an actual plot which took place in Venice in 1618. A Conspiracy of the Spaniards Against the State of Venice by the Vischard de St Real, which was first published in French in 1674 and in English in 1675, was re-issued in England in 1679 as part of the anti-Catholic propaganda associated with the Popish Plot. Otway was in the main very faithful to his source, but added two characters, Belvidera and Antonio, who do not appear in the original account.
Antonio was immediately recognised by contemporaries as a satirical portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had recently been on trial for high treason, and it has been suggested that these parts of the play were an afterthought by Otway. But these scenes are organic both structurally and politically. In fact, Shaftesbury appears in the play under a dual aspect-as Antonio the corrupt Parliamentarian, and as Renault the flawed conspirator. But the introduction of the character of Belvidera enables the play to express with greater emotional depth a profoundly modern libertarian reaction to the intrigues of the time, which lifts it beyond the sphere of party prejudice. Venice Preserv'd's nightmarish atmosphere of treachery, untruth and conflicting loyalties is a distillation of the political climate of those years when, in the name of "truth", truth became inadmissable, when oaths became frivolities, and innocence became conspiracy, as "the bloodiest hoax in history" ran its course.