Catholic Conspirators in English Comedy of the Glorious Revolution (2002)

The so-called Glorious Revolution began in late 1688, when William of Orange invaded England on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November. It was not a bloodless revolution, as it was so-called by Whig historians, for although King James II fled England to France, he attempted to return via Ireland, where his Jacobite army, abetted by French troops, was decisively defeated by William's army at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690.Invading on Guy Fawkes Day was brilliant political theater, for Fawkes was the Jesuit agent who in 1605 attempted to lift the English Parliament to lofty heights by means of black powder. As Linda Colley has argued, anti-Catholicism was a defining feature of the emergent sense of English nationhood,1 and with good reason. Ever since Henry VIII's revolt from Rome, the Pope had ordered England's return to the Catholic fold at all costs, and the English marked the next century and a half of their history with such figures and events as Fawkes, Bloody Mary, the invasion of the Spanish Armada, and the Stuarts' secret unholy alliances with Catholic France. The recent Popish Plot of 1678 had unleashed a series of popular Pope burnings-in effigy, of course, and ever since his coronation, James Stuart's alliances with Catholics were no longer secret. Unlike his brother Charles, James was publicly a Catholic himself, and during his short reign, as Christopher Hill sums it up, he flaunted his religion in outrageous ways: he collaborated with judges to dispense with the Test Act, which required office holders to take Anglican communion, and he issued a Declaration of Indulgence, which allowed public worship on the part of both Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics, he appointed a Catholic Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, where a Catholic army was being raised, and a Catholic admiral of the navy, and he brought troops to England in 1688; he created a Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, which was used to impose Roman Catholics upon Oxford and Cambridge. Hill describes perhaps James's most egregious flauntings thus:A Jesuit, Edward Petre, was made a Privy Councillor The Lord Privy Seal was a Catholic [...]. The chief minister, Sunderland, did not proclaim himself a Catholic until June 1688, but he certainly had no Protestant scruples. A papal nuncio was publicly received. Houses of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Benedictines were opened in London.2Adding insult to injury, James's Catholic queen, Maria de Modena, produced a Catholic son and heir to the throne, James Edward Stuart, in June of 1688. Several prominent Englishmen invited William to invade.Paul Kleber Monod has revisited the threat of Jacobitism in England during the Long Eighteenth Century, and he describes it as a potent force among several elements of the English population from recusant gentry down to tradesmen.3 Indeed, the threat manifested itself in the major Jacobite risings of 1689, 1715, and 1745. Less well known, perhaps, are lesser uprisings and protests in the north and west of England (particularly Bristol), beginning in 1689, and the assassination plot against William in 1696, part of a larger conspiracy that involved Louis XIVs amassing an army in Calais waiting to invade.4 Not all Jacobites were Catholics, according to Monod, but anti-Catholicism, anti-papism was the rallying cry. Indeed, Tim Harris has argued for the potency of rumor in spreading fears of Catholic subversion during the tumultuous month of December 1688, before James left for good, from the Irish scare [...], which provoked antiCatholic rioting in both England and Scotland, to the Edinburgh scare, which prompted two days of violent anti-Catholic rioting, wherein crowds chanted, 'No Pope, No Papist, [... ] No Father Petres. '5From the spring of 1690 into the winter of 1691, the theater proper of England, that ideological state apparatus, responded to this fear of Jacobite faction with the fiction of virulent anti-Catholicism. But some of the fiction was quite close to fact. …