Popish Plot and led to conflict with parliament during the 1670s. In December 1677 an anonymous pamphlet (possibly by Andrew Marvell) spread alarm in London by suggesting that the Pope planned to change the lawful government of England. The fictitious Popish Plot unfolded in a very peculiar fashion. Oates and Israel Tonge, a fanatically anti-Catholic clergyman (who was widely believed to be insane), had written a large manuscript that accused the Catholic Church authorities of approving the assassination of Charles II. The Jesuits in England were to carry out the task. The manuscript also named nearly 100 Jesuits and their supporters who
A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot is a seventeenth-century English broadside ballad telling the story of the contemporary anti-Catholic scare in England known as the Popish Plot. The narrator of the ballad begins by placing him-/herself firmly on the side of the anti-Catholics by declaring to tell how the Jesuit, Devil, and POPE did agree, Our STATE to destroy, and Religion so old. To murder our KING, A most Horrible Thing! (S)he then goes on to tell the murder of the knight Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a member of