In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  PETER HINDS: At this moment, he did something very extraordinary, which has resonances later (it seems like a prefabricated scheme to get himself a job in a school). He accuses a schoolmaster of sodomy with a pupil, which is a total fabrication, and this is discovered and he’s bound over pending trial. But he flees to London. It’s a catalogue of disgrace really that’s emerging.

  MELVYN BRAGG: And then he becomes a naval chaplain and gets chucked out of there for sodomy.

  Then, in 1677, he converted to Catholicism. When first asked about this, he claimed that he did it to go undercover, to discover a plot, putting his body and soul in danger for king and country. Later, he changed that story and said that it was a genuine conversion, claiming he ‘was seduced by the popish sirens into a belief’. He had been taken under the wing of Father Richard Strange, the head of the Jesuit order in England, for reasons that were unclear, perhaps as Strange wanted to save a soul. He sent him off to an English college in Spain and, when Oates left there in disgrace, Father Strange had faith in him again and sent him off to Saint-Omer in northern France, but again he left there in disgrace and returned to England, where he was to meet Israel Tonge.

  Tonge, born 1621, was in his late fifties, while Oates was in his late twenties. Tonge, Clare Jackson said, was an academic with various degrees and a life of serial disappointments and failures that had engendered a seething resentment.

  CLARE JACKSON: He’s elected a fellow of a college in the 1650s, the short-lived Cromwellian college in Durham, but then it closes. He’s an Anglican chaplain to a garrison in Dunkirk, but then it’s sold to the French. But then, worst of all, he’s given a really ambitious opportunity to take a living in the city of London, St Mary Staining, in June 1666, but, less than three months later, there’s the Great Fire of London and his whole church and parish go up in flames.

  MELVN BRAGG: And he blames the Catholics.

  CLARE JACKSON: And he blames the Catholics, as many people did. And it seems to breed in him a persecution complex, a belief that this Popish Plot is out there.

  Somehow, while in conversation with Oates, Tonge expressed his belief in a plot, and Oates saw an opportunity to make money from Tonge. Oates flattered him and even claimed that the Jesuits had offered him £50 to assassinate Tonge for some of his (apparently unread) anti-Jesuitical writings. They decided to work together to expose the plot Tonge believed existed for which Oates could fabricate as much proof as anyone might need.

  PETER HINDS: Oates was destitute, in poverty, he was in London and he needed to take up with somebody. He’d met Israel Tonge briefly before and he falls back on his company because here’s some access back into London society. And he strings Tonge along. He claims he’s still undercover as an informer on the Jesuits, and Tonge buys this story completely. There’s not a close alliance between the two of them, he’s using Tonge.

  Oates embellished his evidence over a long period of time. Initially, Mark Knights said, the core of it was that there was a Jesuit plot to reconvert England forcibly to Catholicism, which involved assassinating Charles II (the ‘black bastard’, as the Jesuits called him).

  MARK KNIGHTS: Oates revealed quite graphic details about how this was to be accomplished, named individuals who were alleged to have attempted to shoot the king, their locks on their muskets jamming at the crucial moment, or Jesuits being sent with foot-long daggers, which were 6 inches wide, to plunge into the king.

  Titus Oates tells Charles II of the Popish Plot, from a playing card designed by the English painter and engraver William Faithorne in 1684.

  Oates peppered his plots with snippets of detail that were hard to assess quickly. He said, for example, that, on 24 April 1678, there was a big council of all the Jesuits in London, fifty of them, who were all in this plot. It had a ring of credibility about it and he had a fantastic memory about all the inventions that he had made, and he was very bullish about them all.

  Somehow, his stories gained traction. The details seemed to make his story more credible, such as when he ‘revealed’ a silver bullet was to be used to shoot Charles.

  PETER HINDS: Oates accuses John Grove and Thomas Pickering of attempting to assassinate the king in St James’s Park on his regular walk by shooting him, but this has failed on a number of occasions. The flint was loose in the rifle, the gunpowder was wet. Lots of lurid details, like they chose to chew the bullets to make them jagged in order that they’d do more damage and make it more possible to kill Charles II. It’s not simply a plot that is going to happen. Here is a plot that’s ongoing, we’ve been damn lucky that Charles isn’t dead already, because people are trying to assassinate him right now.

  Oates made lots of grander but vaguer claims about invasion forces and rebellion, supposedly revealed to him by his contacts at Jesuit seminaries. Apparently 20,000 Scots were prepared to rise in rebellion, joined by 20,000 infantry men and 5,000 cavalry ready to rise in Ireland. France was ready to provide troops and arms and ship them over to Ireland, bolstering the idea of Catholic encirclement.

  Then, in 1678, there was a major development that was taken as corroboration of mischief. Oates had twice given sworn depositions of the truth of his claims and, about two weeks later, the magistrate who had heard his evidence was found dead. This was Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, often described as quite a querulous individual, who took his responsibilities as a magistrate very seriously when suppressing vice.

  CLARE JACKSON: He disappears out on Saturday 12 October and then, on Thursday 17 October, his body is discovered in a ditch near Primrose Hill. Later, it’s shown that there are strangulation marks around his neck and his own sword has been very viciously driven through him, emerging out his back. This is the event, the catalyst, that electrifies or transforms what’s been a lingering alarm and anxiety and perhaps scepticism into (for those who were looking for it) concrete evidence that there must be a plot out there.

  If people believed that Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey had been murdered by papists, then they believed it was because he knew too much and that there were bloodthirsty Jesuits at large, and it would only be a matter of time before somebody else was killed.

  The success of Oates’s stories was not inevitable. The disbelievers initially included the king as, when Oates was initially revealing his information, he gave some details that Charles II knew to be false.

  MARK KNIGHTS: Charles was listening to all this so, at one point, Titus Oates describes Don John of Austria, who he claimed to have met, as a tall, fair man, and Charles II knew him as a short, dark man. There were some clear problems with some of the evidence. But it’s not really until, I think, the summer of 1679, some time after these initial revelations, that real scepticism starts to kick in. And that’s largely because Oates and his cronies pushed the story too far.

  Oates made an accusation that Charles’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, had been involved in the plot and had paid her physician, Wakeman, to poison the king. The presiding judge, Sir William Scroggs, went out of his way to question Oates’s evidence because there was a lot riding on this case. If Wakeman were convicted, then the queen would be implicated, which would have led to a crisis. Scroggs steered a very neat path between trying to expose the faults of Oates’s testimony and maintaining a belief in the plot as a whole. Wakeman got off, but others were far less fortunate.

  With Berry Godfrey’s death, a new range of informers claimed to be able to solve this mystery and introduce other evidence against different people. There was a huge amount of money available from secret service funds for informers.

  CLARE JACKSON: There’s a whole cast of people who begin to enter. It’s also coincidental that, a few days after Berry Godfrey’s body is found, parliament meets and immediately sets up its own enquiry. What was really quite a limited knowledge of this plot, and Oates’s claims, suddenly becomes much wider.

  Then the court of public opinion decided that somebody needed to be found guilty. And, although Wakeman was acquitted, lesser people on the political s
cale were convicted on the testimony of these informers, particularly in relation to Berry Godfrey’s death.

  CLARE JACKSON: And the other interesting thing, culturally, is the extent to which Berry Godfrey becomes this Protestant martyr very quickly for the whole plot. And that’s the point also at which disbelief in the plot almost becomes, as people describe it, its own form of heresy, that the minute you start saying, ‘I’m not so sure about this,’ then there’s a heresy going on.

  The lack of evidence did not seem to matter, Melvyn observed, the frenzy had its own head of steam and, if someone disbelieved, that proved something was being concealed and the heretic’s house would be searched and wrecked.

  CLARE JACKSON: In the end, there’re probably about twenty-three individuals executed directly related to the plot, and then about another seven die in prison. Scroggs does explain the sheer seriousness of what is going on, at the very first trial of Edward Coleman, and says to Oates, ‘To take away a man’s life on a false oath is murder,’ and that’s precisely why perjury punishments are so vicious. But, whenever a great event happens, there’s enormous pressure on the authorities to find those responsible and bring them to justice.

  Berry Godfrey appeared on medals, on playing cards and in processions, and his death became central to the plot’s credibility. The processions themselves played a part in maintaining the mood.

  MELVYN BRAGG: We had the popish marches with the effigy of the pope. At one stage, the effigy was filled with live cats, so, when they burned him, the cats squealed, and that was supposed to be the pope in hell, is that right?

  PETER HINDS: That’s right. There must have been some serious financial support for these processions. They happen on 17 November, the accession day of Queen Elizabeth, the Protestant queen, people clambering to get the best positions. There were places being sold near Temple Bar, where this effigy of the pope was tipped into the fire. The window places were being sold for vast sums of money.

  Amid the frenzy, Oates found time to put out a very expensively produced book, The True Narrative of the Horrid Plot.

  There were politicians for whom the plot was useful, whether true or false. There were forces in parliament who wanted to bring down two big beasts, Mark Knights said. The first was Charles II’s prime minister, the Earl of Danby, who was impeached and had a formal parliamentary trial process. The bigger target was James, Duke of York, the king’s brother, because he was the heir to the throne as the king had no children.

  MARK KNIGHTS: The king had no legitimate children anyway. And many MPs in parliament were petrified of the prospect of a popish successor, to use the language of the day. And they used the Popish Plot as a way of bringing the succession issue into parliament and to bring in legislation that would exclude James from the succession.

  With the mood of panic and hysteria becoming all the more acute, James was increasingly vulnerable. People had been talking about the possibility that Charles could be induced to divorce his Catholic queen and marry a Protestant, Clare Jackson said, or that he might retrospectively legitimise his eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, or that limitations might be placed on James and a regent put in place. Now there was an air of urgency to this talk.

  CLARE JACKSON: If Charles really is liable to be assassinated in the park any day, we don’t have time to wait for him to get divorced and marry someone else and have children. It does place James and his position under the spotlight, and there’s a lot of debate in parliament about whether the restrictions on Catholics, that they should be placed in an exclusion zone 20 miles around London, should apply to James as well.

  There were those advising Charles to keep James near, and not send him into the arms of people like Louis XIV. Eventually, Charles decided to banish James, first to Brussels and The Hague and then to Scotland, as well as to banish his eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth.

  CLARE JACKSON: Monmouth becomes the Protestant saviour to the question of the succession. If only it could be found that, really, Charles had married Monmouth’s mother, Lucy Walter. And just as there’s the people’s readiness to believe in Titus Oates’s plot, you can see the desire of people to believe in a black box that would show that Charles and Lucy had been married. And it’s Charles who comes out and says publicly, many times, ‘I’ve only ever been married to Queen Catherine. This isn’t going to work.’

  Gradually, after all the executions, the energy behind the idea of the plot started to peter out. The more unsavoury the characters who were drawn in, the less credible the evidence became. And, as Melvyn pointed out, the king was not assassinated. It was not until 1684 that the wheels really came off for Titus Oates, when James, Duke of York, took an action against Oates for having been called a traitor by him, and a huge fine of £100,000 was imposed on Oates and he was sent to prison.

  MARK KNIGHTS: There are two further trials later in 1684 for perjury. And Oates is put in the pillory, lots of stuff thrown at him, he’s whipped through London on two occasions, he says his back has got thousands of lashes on it, and he’s slung into prison, where he languishes for the entire reign of James II from 1685 to 1688. Come the [Glorious] Revolution of 1688, with the invasion of William, the displacement of James, Oates is released from prison, he’s rehabilitated a little bit, he’s given back a small pension, he re-enters the limelight, but he never quite recaptures his earlier glory.

  But he did live until 1727, Melvyn observed, which was not a bad life.

  In the studio afterwards, there was discussion of Ireland being the dog that didn’t bark in the panic, for all Oates’s suggesting that it would. Clare Jackson mentioned one of Oates’s strokes of luck, when letters were found relating to Edward Coleman, the former secretary to the Duchess of York, Richard’s wife. They did contain damaging details, although, as Coleman said, they were not treasonable. Peter Hinds drew attention to the mood on the streets of London, as people would have noticed the doubling of the militia, the tightening of security around Whitehall and Westminster, the searches and arrests and calls for information. Besides that, Mark Knights added, the government lost control of the press at this time, which led to an enormous explosion in the amount of printed propaganda that was available on the streets, and this fed the public appetite for news about the plot and stimulated it. Even Samuel Pepys was caught up in the frenzy. Clare Jackson noted that he wound up in prison for six weeks, largely for being too close to James, Duke of York, while at the admiralty, and it was harrowing for Pepys as he faced capital charges.

  ZOROASTRIANISM

  ‘Now have I seen him with my own eyes, knowing him in truth to be the wise lord of the good mind and of good deeds and words.’ Thus spake the real Zarathustra, the prophet and founder of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism. It has claims, though these are contentious in some people’s eyes, to be the world’s first ethical monotheistic creed. And, perhaps as long ago as 1200 BC, Zarathustra also said, ‘I point out the way, it is the truth, it is for all living.’ Truth is the central tenet of the religion that holds that people must, above all, do good things, hear good things and see good things. How was the religion so powerfully established in the influential civilisations of ancient Persia, what is its body of beliefs and how have they been developed and disseminated?

  A Zoroastrian Faravahar symbol over the entrance to the fire temple in Kerman, Iran.

  With Melvyn to discuss the history and philosophies of Zoroastrianism were: the late Farrokh Vajifdar, fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and a lifelong student of Zoroastrianism; Alan Williams, Leverhulme Trust research professor at the University of Manchester; and Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, curator of Middle Eastern coins at the British Museum.

  Zarathustra probably lived around 1200–1000 BC, Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis began, although certain scholars date him much later.

  He is also known as Zoroaster. He came from a priestly background somewhere in the north of central Asia, north-east of the Caspian Sea. His father’s name was Pourušaspa and his mothe
r’s name was Dugdōw. It is said, in later texts, that, when he was conceived by his mother, an enormous light shone around her, a sign of divine glory, and that he was born smiling and talking. The Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians, tells that he was a high priest.

  VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS: He had several revelations during his life, but his first revelation came to him at the age of about thirty, when he was taking part in a special ceremony (and these again are later descriptions) and he went down to the river to cleanse himself, and, when he came back, he was carried by light to a certain place and this was when he saw Ahura Mazda, or the Wise Lord. And it was then that he decided to follow the path of righteousness and also to teach the truth to people.

  The many deities that Zarathustra had been brought up with, Melvyn suggested, tended to be very muscly and seeking victory, so the replacement by one god, Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, was a radical step. It was also a very dangerous thing for him to do.

  VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS: There was an awful lot of opposition to him. A lot of the priests, the magi, were very much against his reforms, and his ideas were not welcome. The other problem was that, in his teachings, he saw people as equals; he did not see, for example, a difference between rich people and poor people, and everybody on the last day of judgement came to salvation. This was a very new idea.

  The legends say Zarathustra enjoyed the support of the king of the time, Vishtaspa, who then agreed to accept this good religion and introduce it at his court.

  The precedents for his religious or spiritual teachings were already to hand in the Rigveda, Farrokh Vajifdar continued, except Zarathustra reduced to the rank of demons or daevas many of the gods whom the Indians had elevated to devas, the shining ones.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: He kept two, at least, behind – one was Mithra and the other was Varuna. Varuna was the creator god, the king of the gods; Mithra was the enforcer of the solemnly given word, the contract, also the god therefore of friendship. Zarathustra incorporated these functions into this new Ahura, the sole Ahura called Mazda, which, as you quite rightly say, means wisdom. And that is the essence of Mazda.