Abstract
The crisis known as the ‘Popish Plot’ was about the power of stories — testimony in court, rumors in the street and narratives in print — to persuade the English populace, and especially judges and juries, that Catholics were conspiring to reclaim the kingdom by force and by stealth. The power of stories to confirm, inflame or create anti-Catholicism was certainly not without precedent. Yet, the Popish Plot depended almost exclusively on one witness, Titus Oates, and his claim that Catholics, particularly Jesuits, were conspiring to kill Charles II and his councillors, massacre Protestants and set up a Catholic government under the Duke of York (the future James II). The rumor of yet another popish plot had legs because it served political needs. By discrediting Catholics, it fuelled the Exclusion Crisis, a Whig attempt to bar James’s succession.1
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Notes
See J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot ( London: Heinemann, 1972 )
John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–1688 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973 )
and Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seward and Mark Goldie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 107–32, esp. pp. 108–9, 111.
The Tryall of Richard Langhorn Esq., Counsellor at Law (London, 1679), F1; John Dormer, The New Plot of the Papists. To Transform Traitors into Martyrs (London, 1679), 14. According to J. P. Kenyon, ‘Not a jot of written evidence was given in, so everything hung on the oath of the witnesses’ (203).
Rachel Weil, ‘“If I did say so, I lyed”: Elizabeth Cellier and the Construction of Credibility in the Popish Plot Crisis’, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 189–209. Weil focuses on how all the texts by and about Cellier address the issue of credibility, especially that credibility a woman might achieve when participating in political culture. I am grateful to Weil for sharing her work with me in manuscript.
Mr. Tho. Dangerfeilds [sic] Particular Narrative (London, 1679), R1v; Thomas Dangerfield, The Grand Impostor Defeated (London, 1682), B2V–C1.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner, ‘Elizabeth Cellier in 1688 on Envious Doctors and Heroic Midwives Ancient and Modern’, Eighteenth Century Life 14.1 (1990): 24–34, esp. p. 25.
John Warner, The History of English Persecution of Catholics and the Presbyterian Plot, ed. T. A. Birrell, 2 vols., Catholic Record Society xlvii-xlviii (London: Catholic Record Society, 1953), 2: 425.
Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 ), 11.
In the early modern period, women were rarely identified, by themselves or others, by occupation. See Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England ( London and New York: Routledge, 1993 ), 39.
J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 ), 314.
Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 20,130, 187.
Henry Care, The Anti-Roman Pacquet: or, Memoirs of Popes and Popery, No. 11 (Friday, 17 September 1680), 87.
A. G. Petti, ‘Richard Verstegan and Catholic Martyrologies of the Later Elizabethan Period’, Recusant History 5.1 (1959): 64–90
Elizabeth Hanson, ‘Torture and Truth in Renaissance England’, Representations (1991): 53–84
and John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 2, ‘Heroic Suffering’.
Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘The English Martyrs 1535–1680: A Statistical Review’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History XXII.3 (July 1971): 191–7, esp. 194. On the women martyrs
see also Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 ( London and New York: Routledge, 1993 ), 62–8
and Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation ( Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983 ), 172–3.
Catholic martyrologies include: John Wilson, The English Martyrologie (St Omer, 1608 and 1640); G. K. [George Keynes], The Roman Martyrologe [a translation] (St Omer, 1627); and Calendarium Catholicum Or, An Almanack for the Year of Our Lord, 1689 (London, 1689 ).
J. T. Rhodes, ‘English Books of Martyrs and Saints of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Recusant History 22.1 (1994): 7–25, esp. p. 18.
See also Helen White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963 ). Saints’ lives were available in calendars of saints’ days, collections of saints’ lives, and lives of individual saints.
Alfonso Villegas, The Lives of Saints, 2nd edn (London, 1621), *2v, *3.
See Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel ( New York: Knopf, 1984 ), 459.
Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 3.
Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993 ).
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe ( London and New York: Routledge, 1994 ), 177.
Ibid., 189. On the magical attributes of criminal bodies, see also Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 )
and Katharine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 47.1 (1994): 1–33. Discussing the indistinct boundary between the criminal and the saintly body, Park identifies the martyr as the ’middle term’ between the two (23).
Samuel Rowlands, The Famous History of Guy Earle of Warwick ( London, 1649 ), A3.
Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 67, 74.
Mary Beth Rose, ‘“Vigorous Most/When Most Unactive Deem d”: Gender and the Heroics of Endurance in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Aphra Behri s Oroonoko, and Mary Astell’s Some Reflections Upon Marriage’, Milton Studies 33 (1997): 83–109.
John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 18, 208, 21.
Don Quixote was translated into English in 1612 and 1620. By that time, romance and anti-romance were intermingled in England. See Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), ch. 15; and McKeon, 52–64.
Helen Hackett, ‘“Yet Tell Me Some Such Fiction”: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the “Femininity” of Romance’, in Women, Texts, and Histories, 1575–1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 39–68, esp. pp. 40, 46. See also, Ballaster, chs. 1 and 2.
Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 ( New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995 ), 89.
Caroline Lucas, Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance ( Milton Keynes, PA: Open University Press, 1989 ).
Hero Chalmers, ‘“The Person I Am, Or What They Made Me To Be”: The Construction of the Feminine Subject in the Autobiographies of Mary Carleton’, in Women, Texts, and Histories, 1575–1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 164–94, esp. p. 186.
Thomas Overbury, New and Chaise Characters (London, 1615), J4v-J5.
See, for instance, Sharon Achinstein, ‘Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution’, Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 131–63
and Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 ).
Henry Care, The Anti-Roman Pacquet: or, Memoirs of Popes and Popery, No. 10 (Friday, 10 September 1680), 79.
In Guy of Warwick for instance, Guy enjoins his wife to celibacy, goes on Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, then ends his life as a hermit. Thomas Deloneÿ s The History of the Gentle-Craft (first published in 1627, and reprinted at least six times by 1672) begins with a martyrology — the story of Saint Hugh and his beloved, the fair virgin Winifred, both of whom are martyred for their belief in Christianity. See also Hunter, 87; Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981); and White, ch. 2, passim.
Romance was also associated with royalists, who used the form to represent their experience of the Civil War. See Salzman, ch. 11; Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration ( Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979 ), 51–73
and Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), ch. 4.
See Lorraine Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe’, Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 93–124
Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 )
and Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983 ).
Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, 146–48; Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, ed. Lynn Hunt ( New York: Zone Books, 1993 ), 125–53
and Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1648–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 4.
Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), ch. 6.
On ‘holy joy’, see Knott, 78–83. On how the cucking stool and bridle encouraged the ridicule of afflicted women, see Lynda E. Boose, ’Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42. 2 (1991): 179–213.
Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. 5 (London: Burns and Oates, 1879 ), 74.
Mary Hopkirk claims that, upon James’s accession, Cellier ‘was freed and given £90 from the secret-service money’. She also claims that Cellier was briefly in residence with the exiled Stuarts. She also claims that Cellier was briefly in residence with the exiled Stuarts: ’Even Elizabeth Cellier, the Popish midwife, reached Saint Germain somehow, though she does not appear to have remained there for long.’ The evidence for either assertion is unclear. See Mary Hopkirk, Queen over the Water: Mary Beatrice of Modena, Queen of James II (London: John Murray, 1953 ), 86, 171.
Kenyon, 189; J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Ax: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation ( London: Blond and Briggs, 1976 ), 213.
Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988 ), 21–3.
I take this characterization of one kind of feminist criticism from Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 77–94, esp. p. 78.
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Dolan, F.E. (1999). ‘The Wretched Subject the Whole Town Talks of’: Representing Elizabeth Cellier (London, 1680). In: Marotti, A.F. (eds) Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374881_9
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