‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: Political Prints of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis –
The Revision of a Republican Mode
Christina Carlson
(Emerson College)
In this paper (a sub-section of the final chapter of my current book project, on seventeenthcentury political prints and drama in England), I consider the impact of the Restoration of
Charles II in 1660 on the political prints (broadsides, title-page illustrations, engravings,
woodcuts, and pictorial representations accompanying contemporary ballads) of the period,
focusing, in particular, on critical and satirical ‘responses’ to the Popish Plot and Exclusion
Crisis. In contrast to the period pre-1660 in which (as I argue in my book) the balance of
satirical and polemical writing was weighted more heavily on the side of those factions who
were actively resisting the policies and procedures of the central government (whether
Royalist in the pre-1649 era, or Republican in the period from 1649-1660), the evidence of
political prints in the Restoration reveals a much more even distribution of political
ideologies, conventionally described in terms of the party politics of ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’1.
One argument about the nature of ‘oppositional’ discourse in the Restoration has been that it
is too schematic (when examining the period of the 1670s and 80s) to view the Tories as the
conservative upholders of tradition and the Whigs as the revolutionary and oppositional
faction, seeking to disrupt society and to counsel rebellion against the King and his
ministers2. According to Susan Owen:
The Whigs used a rhetoric of ‘Loyal Protestantism’ and country gentry values, and owed their
success partly to their ability to appeal to conservative instincts in the face of what was
perceived as royal and ‘popish’ innovation. Whigs saw themselves as upholders of tradition,
perpetuating Protestantism against popery, English independence against France, and the
liberties of property owners against arbitrary power. Though there were a minority of
republicans such as Sidney, most Whigs were monarchists and traditionalists: they sought,
and after 1688 got, a strong central government to pursue an aggressive foreign policy.3
In this context, ‘republicanism’ (defined, specifically, as a resistance to monarchical rule)
becomes marginalized during the Restoration period, the ‘battle’ of the Whigs and Tories
depending not (as it had been in the period of the Civil War) on who was most actively
‘opposed’ the King, but on a contest over who was the more stalwart upholder of a
conservative ideal and monarchical world view.
In contrast to this view is the perspective of John Miller and other historians writing about the
Popish Plot. While the initial wave of anti-Popish sentiment around the Plot capitalized on
old fears about the resurgence of Catholicism in England, more striking was the Tory
1
For a discussion of the Whig and Tory responses to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis in drama, see: Susan
J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Nancy Maguire, Regicide and
Restoration: English Tragicomedy 1660-1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Susan Staves,
Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1979); and
Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981). For a similar analysis of the political prints of the period, see: M.D. George, English Political
Caricature to 1792: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), esp. Ch. 2: ‘Charles
II. The Plot’, 46-61; and Antony Griffiths (with the collaboration of Robert A. Gerard), The Print in Stuart
Britain, 1603-1689 (London: British Museum Press, 1998), esp. Ch. 12: ‘The Popish Plot and the Glorious
Revolution’, 280-306. In the larger project that I am working on, I compare both drama and prints. For the
purposes of this paper, however, I have chosen to focus on the prints alone.
2 Owen, 52.
3
Owen, 54-55.
response to this perceived Whig threat, which stressed instead the potential danger of a
renewed Civil War. In Tory reactions to the Popish Plot, they invoked the rhetoric of
religious sectarianism and republican dissent from the 1630s and 40s in order to suggest that
the Popish Plot was merely a Presbyterian Plot in disguise and that the real problem was not
‘popery’ but rather religious and political radicalism on the part of the Whigs.4
The Tory licenser to the Press, Sir Roger L’Estrange, provides a striking illustration of this
view, in his pamphlets The Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678) and The History of the
Plot (1679), as well as in a series of political prints descrying the Whigs more generally,
including, most notably, The Committee; or Popery in Masquerade (British Museum Satire
#1080)5. In these works, L’Estrange rejected the argument that the Papists had been disloyal
during the civil wars, asserting instead that they had been faithful, while the more radical
dissenters / republicans had acted in opposition to both Church and State. L’Estrange
believed, as did many Tories, that the greater danger was to be found in the Presbyterian
dissenters than in the Papists, He contended that there was ‘now a Presbyterian plot against
crown and church, just as there had been in 1641’.6
In this paper, I compare L’Estrange’s use of political prints with that of the most notorious of
the Whig cartoonists, Stephen College, a Protestant joiner who, as punishment for his
scurrilous and vulgar efforts to make fun of the King’s Exclusionist efforts, was executed for
treason against the state. As B.J. Rahn notes: ‘It may be the only time [in English history] that
a man was martyred for writing some naughty verses and drawing a cartoon to illustrate
them’ 7 . In his print, ‘A Ra-Ree Show; To the Tune of I am a Senceless Thing’ (1681),
College attacks Charles II’s ambivalent religious policies (his professed Anglican
Protestantism warring with his ‘true’ Catholic beliefs), his inability to work effectively with
Parliament, his decision to prorogue Parliament, his absolutism, and his ‘secret’ negotiations
with Louis XIV to finance his political and religious schemes. But College does so,
specifically, in the language of republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-monarchy, equating
the three in a way that depends upon a view (that L’Estrange and other Tories were actively
trying to demonize) that popery and arbitrary government go hand in hand.
What made College’s print so contentious, and problematic, I suggest, is that it was produced
in a culture in which Tory polemic (emblematized by L’Estrange) had problematized the
Foxean view of anti-popish rhetoric, turning it into the potentially subversive hallmark of
religious sectarianism (Presbyterianism) and political radicalism (republicanism). In the wake
of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the move, on the part of the Whigs in general and
College in particular, to evoke fears of popery and arbitrary government, as the Republicans
had done throughout the period of the English Civil Wars, was, according to the Tories, to
raise the specter of a repeat performance: another “‘41”. In this paper, I describe the
differences in Tory and Whig uses of political engraving in the debates over the Popish Plot
and Exclusion Crisis, attempting to show how republicanism was rewritten in the pro-Tory
polemic of the Restoration in order to neutralize anti-Catholic sentiments and to paint the
threat to monarchy and peace as a feature of religious radicalism (Presbyterianism) and
political rebellion. I then demonstrate the degree to which the Whigs persisted in the use of
an older anti-Catholic idiom that, wed to republican rhetoric, was inevitably damaging to
their cause.
4
John Miller, Popery and Politics, 1660-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
For a description of the print, see: Frederic George Stephens, ed., Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the
British Museum. Division I. Political and Personal Satires (No. 1 to No. 1235). Vol. I. – 1320 to April 11, 1689.
6
Miller, 178-179.
7 B.J. Rahn, ‘A RAREE SHOW – A Rare Cartoon: Revolutionary Propaganda in the Treason Trial of Stephen
College’, in: ed. Paul J. Korshin, Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History,
1640-1800 (Scolar Press, 1972), 77-98; 78.
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