The thing I enjoy the most about my podcast on England’s story is that, as I read around the subject, I keep confirming that wherever we are today, we’ve been there before. Somehow, it’s consoling to know that even if things are pretty awful today, they were just as bad before, and often worse.
After all, we survived then, however painful the times became.
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| Playing card celebrating the execution of five Jesuits on the basis of the false Popish Plot denunciations |
It didn’t matter how often judges said, “no, actually, you didn’t”. It didn’t even matter that they were judges he’d appointed. It didn’t matter how often election officials, even Republican ones, declared the election fair. None of that would stop him insisting that he’d won, and not just won, but won in a landslide, after which the election had been stolen from him.
That’s the way fake news works. You keep repeating the lie. You get your followers to keep repeating it too. The aim is that, it it’s said often enough and loud enough, eventually people will believe it’s true. It seems that plenty of people in the US believe the election was rigged against Trump – fortunately not a majority, but still a large number – showing that a falsehood, however blatantly untrue it is, can seem believable by those anxious to believe it.
The most wonderfully contradictory aspect of all this process is that you denounce, as liars, the very people who expose your lie as untrue.
Actually, that’s the worst part of fake news. It’s when you’re not just pushing a lie, but using it to whip up anger, even violence, against others. Trump called those in the media who criticised his untruths as ‘enemies of the people’, which made them targets of violence. Most shamefully of all, he spent time on 6 January whipping up hatred against Congress, before sending a mob down there, with the nearly inevitable result that it assaulted the Capitol building violently.
All deeply depressing and ugly. But, you may or may not be glad to know, not new. My latest podcast episode is about Titus Oates. He was never head of state, thank God, but in all other respects, he was the Donald Trump of the reign of Charles II.
A curious character, he got kicked out of Cambridge University, but that didn’t stop him claiming he had a degree so he could become an Anglican priest. He was kicked out of his parish for stealing and blasphemy. He then decided he wanted to become a schoolmaster, but there was already someone in the position he coveted, so he invented some fake news against him, claiming he’d sodomised one of the pupils.
When that was shown to be a complete fabrication, he had to escape before he was prosecuted himself for the slander. Despite his track record, he talked himself into a job as a chaplain with the Navy. And, in what’s becoming a bit of a pattern, they kicked him out. Funnily enough, for sodomy, just what he’d accused the schoolmaster of. In a decision with echoes in our own times, the Navy took no further action against Oates, because he was – a priest.
Next he apparently converted to Catholicism. That was a hell of a step back then. The atmosphere in England towards Catholics was exactly like the atmosphere in 1950s America towards Communists. They were seen as agents of a foreign power (the Pope), ready to undermine everything right thinking people stood for, overthrow the king and set up a ‘Papist’ tyranny in England.
Of course, later he’d claim he hadn’t really converted, he just selflessly penetrated Catholic ranks to discover what evil plots they were concocting.
Meanwhile, he managed to talk the Jesuits – and, for the conspiracy theorists, Jesuits were to the Catholics what the KGB would be to Communists in modern times – to send him to their college for English candidates in Spain.
Which kicked him out.
So he went to the equivalent college in France.
Which kicked him out too.
Back he came to England, ready to tell anyone who’d listen that he’d uncovered a terrible plot by ‘Papists’ against dear old (Protestant) England. And not a plot that was going to happen at some time in the future. One that had already got started.
The ‘Popish Plot’, as it came to be known, was a conspiracy to murder Charles II to put his brother James, a Catholic, on the throne instead. Several attempts had been made and had only failed due to misfortune – things like a gun misfiring.
Oates next had a stroke of luck. He swore his testimony before a magistrate. Shortly afterwards, that magistrate was murdered.
Clearly, the conspiracy theorists would believe, it was because he now knew too much, so the ‘Papists’ had assassinated him. As it happens, we still don’t know who killed the magistrate.
The beauty with Oates’s fake news was that he had such an excellent memory that he could repeat the story he’d invented in exactly the same detail every time he was questioned. He told his lies consistently, without contradiction, and that made him all the more believable.
So Oates achieved an impact like Trump’s in sending his loyal supporters (the ones he’s betrayed since) to attack the US Congress. But worse. Catholics were fined or banished from London. Twenty-four were put to death. Seven more died in prison. Overall, the atmosphere, already tough against them, became even more harshly toxic towards Catholics.
That lasted three long years, before Oates was finally exposed. He’d made everything up. He spent some time in gaol, and some time in the stocks (when people threw unpleasant things at him), and he was even whipped across London twice, which must have been pretty nasty. But he ended up with a pension voted him by the state and, having been an Anglican priest and a failed Jesuit seminarian, he spent his last years as a Baptist Minister (like his father).
The Popish Plot had simply been a series of poisonous falsehoods designed to whip up hatred against a small and powerless minority of the nation. Like Trump whipping up hatred against supposed ‘Antifa’ people, or Joseph McCarthy whipping up hatred against alleged Communists.
Horrible. Vicious. And when you know what kind of a man Oates was, unbelievable that he should have had such success.
Just as it’s unbelievable that either McCarthy or Trump found supporters.
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