News of the Popish plot
The 2019 object-based learning program created a headline through the Popish plot pamphlets which amazed students in the summer intensive course: The History of News from Street Ballads to Social Media. The Popish plot pamphlets are a compilation of bound printed items such as speeches, broadsides, poems, plays and ballads which are titled after the first publication in the volume: A true narrative of the late design of the papists to charge their horrid plot upon the Protestants (1679). Many brutal wars and plots took place across Europe between the Catholics and the Protestants after the Protestant Reformation was set in motion in 1517. It is a powerful and sobering experience to behold these pamphlets which are a physical record of religiopolitical terrorism. Plots such as those in 17th century England including this scheme to assassinate the Protestant King Charles II, had in other instances such as in France, resulted in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which thousands of Protestants were savagely slain. The Popish plot, however, was later revealed to be a fictitious conspiracy invented by the priest Titus Oates, but not before alleged ‘papist plotters’ had been grimly executed.
