Edmund Everard
London: D. Newman, 1679
[Rare] (VII) Cc [Popish Plot] fol.
The divisions engendered by the Reformation remained active and volatile throughout the seventeenth century. In 1678 Titus Oates invented the Popish Plot: an alleged Catholic plot to murder Charles II by bullet (a silver one, so that the wound could not be treated) or poison, with the possibility of stabbing as a back-up. Three thousand Protestants would be slain in the subsequent bloodbath. Oates backed up his claims with apparently concrete details, including a description of a secret meeting of Jesuits to discuss treason at the White Horse Tavern on the Strand, London. His stories impressed the House of Commons and for a while Oates was regarded as England’s saviour. Anti-Catholic sentiment peaked, and ultimately thirty-five men were killed on the basis of Oates’s trumped-up evidence. Only in 1681 was he discredited for perjury. Edmund Everard’s Depositions and Examinations is one of fifteen items pertaining to the plot bound here into one volume. Everard was a minor informer who claims here to have been told of a plot while a spy in Paris in 1673, and threatened with imprisonment if he disclosed it. He did indeed spend four years in the Tower of London, charged with treason.