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 into Londoners' homes disguised as drivers of goods vehicles, porters, chimney-sweeps, or coal sellers and then sabotaging the homes. The narrator then tells how there was a meeting between the conspirators in April at a place called the White Horse. The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara holds three seventeenth-century broadside ballad versions of this tale: two copies in the Huntington Library's "miscellaneous" collection (both numbered 183923) and another in the Crawford collection at the National Library of Scotland. All three of these documents contain cartoon illustrations. A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot