ABSTRACT
One of the most striking features of seventeenth-century England is the strength and persistence at all levels and among all classes of society of anti-Catholicism, which from the early 1670s came to play an increasingly important part in politics. Robin Clifton has shown that in the early seventeenth century there were frequent local outbreaks of panic that Catholics were about to murder and pillage the community, notably in 1605
and 1641-2.1 Despite the growing strength of the intellectual case for toleration, there is very little sign that popular hatred of popery diminished in the second half of the century. William Prynne believed that the New Model Army in 1647-8 had been infi ltrated by Catholics and that Pride’s Purge and the execution of Charles I were ‘nothing else but the designs and projects of Jesuits, Popish priests and recusants’.2 If Prynne and sober respectable people like Richard Baxter could believe nonsense like this, then the common, uncritical assumption that Catholics were behind the Great Fire of 1666 and the widespread belief in Titus Oates’s ‘revelation’ in 1678 of a Catholic conspiracy to kill the king are more easily understandable. Henry Care’s lurid description of an imaginary Catholic England refl ects many of the elements in the seventeenth-century anti-Catholic tradition: the men
forced to fl y destitute of bread and harbour, your wives prostituted to the lust of every savage bog-trotter, your daughters ravished by goatish monks, your smaller children tossed upon pikes, or torn limb from limb, whilst you have your own bowels ripped up . . . or else murdered with some other exquisite tortures and holy candles made of your grease (which was done within our memory in Ireland), your dearest friends fl aming in Smithfi eld, foreigners rendering your poor babes that can escape everlasting slaves, never more to see a Bible, nor hear again the joyful sounds of Liberty and Property. This gentlemen is Popery.3
