Faith and Treason by Antonia Fraser

Author:Antonia Fraser
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385471909
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1997-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

father, or your mother, or some of your nearest and dearest relations, tied to a stake in the midst of flames, when with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven, they cry out to God for whose cause they die.

Seventeenth-century English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish men, women and children lived their lives in the perpetual fear that the next Popish Plot would be successful: the eternal vigilance of the watchful, aided by providential protection, was all that saved the godly city from the ‘black crew of papists’. The dark plot inspired by the wiles of the Roman Antichrist was potentially to manifest itself in assassination, treason, arson, rape and massacre. There was, as the single-page broadside The pedigree of Popery; or the genealogie of antichrist (1688) asserted, a historical and logical connection between the devil and the rule of popery – carnal policy and the mystery of iniquity had created the Jesuits, who had in turn inspired the monsters of ‘Atheism, tyranny, treason, assassination, perjury, inquisition, massacre, masquerade and open popery, City burning…’, the list goes on and on before concluding: ‘and all kinds of abominations, which walking abroad in a dress of religion and dissimulation, complete the whole train of Antichrist’. The evidence of the Gunpowder Plot was a providentially exposed tip of a much deeper and perdurable conspiracy: seventeenth-century Protestants were convinced that behind every political difficulty or religious corruption lay ‘popish’ subterfuge.

The vision of the triumph of popery laid a political foundation for stigmatizing any oppositional milieu. Anti-popery, inspired by the revelation of the near-miss of 1605, provided propaganda which dwarfs the effectiveness of the anti-communist scares of McCarthyite America, or even the ‘war on terrorism’ today. Anxiously conjuring up powerful images of the downfall of Protestant civilization consequent on the restoration of Roman Catholicism, Blount went on to describe how ‘Beautiful

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