he ruin of English freedom and of
English religion. That there was such a plot we know; and from the
moment of the Treaty of Dover the hopes of the Catholic party had
mounted even faster than the panic of the Protestants. But they had
been bitterly disappointed by the king's sudden withdrawal from the
prosecution of his schemes after his four years' ineffectual struggle,
and roused to wild anger by his seeming return to the policy of
Clarendon. Their anger and disappointment were revealed in the letters
from English Jesuits which were afterwards to play so fatal a part in
begetting a belief in the plot, and in the correspondence of Coleman.
Coleman was secretary of the Duchess of York and a busy intriguer, who
had gained sufficient knowledge of the real plans of the king and of his
brother to warrant him in begging money from Lewis for the work of
saving Catholic interests from Danby's hostility by intrigues in the
Parliament. A passage from one of his letters gives us a glimpse of the
wild dreams which were stirring among the hotter Catholics of the time.
"They had a mighty work on their hands," he wrote, "no less than the
conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of
a pestilent heresy which had so long domineered over a great part of the
northern world. Success would give the greatest blow to the Protestant
religion that it had received since its birth." But while the despair of
the Catholic party was unknown their previous attitude of confidence had
stirred suspicions in the public mind which mounted into alarm when the
Peace of Nimeguen suddenly left Charles master--as it seemed--of the
position, and it was of this general panic that one of the vile
impostors who are always thrown to the surface at times of great public
agitation was ready to take advantage by the invention of a Popish plot.

[Sidenote: Titus Oates.]

Titus Oates, a Baptist minister before the Restoration, a curate and
navy chaplain after it, but left penniless by his infamous repute, had
sought bread in a conversion to Catholicism, and had been received into
Jesuit houses at Valladolid and St. Omer. While he remained there he
learnt the fact of a secret meeting of the Jesuits in London which was
probably nothing but the usual congregation of the order, and on his
expulsion for misconduct this single fact widened in his fertile brain
into a plot for the subversion of Protestantism and the death of the
king. His story was