William of Orange, who was extremely mortified at having to treat for peace on such terms, and rightly attributing the necessity to the conduct of Charles, took the opportunity to give a parting chastisement to the French, though he had not, as has been asserted, knowledge of the conclusion of the treaty. On the 4th of August, four days after the signing of the peace by Beverning, the Dutch plenipotentiary at Nimeguen, he attacked the Duke of Luxembourg before Mons. Luxembourg had reduced the city to great distress, and had not relaxed his siege during the armistice; William, therefore, knowing nothing, or affecting to know nothing of the signing of the peace—though at that time it was known in London—fell on the duke with all the forces he could muster, Dutch, English, and Spanish, and a desperate battle took place. William took the abbey of St. Denis in front of the French camp; Villahermosa, the Spanish general, took the ruined fortress of Casteau, but was driven out of it again before night. The English troops under Lord Ossory did wonders. About five thousand men fell on one side or the other. At night the two armies resumed their places. It was expected that William the next day would utterly rout Luxembourg; and had the continuance of the war permitted, might have made his long-contemplated march into France. But the next day Luxembourg desired a conference, and informed William that the peace was concluded, and William retired towards Nivelles, and the French towards Ath. He had managed to prevent the important fortress of Mons falling into the hands of France.
Scarcely had these events taken place, when William was surprised by an overture from Charles, to unite with him, according to the treaty between them, to compel Louis to grant the Spaniards the terms formerly offered at Nimeguen. The motive for this does not appear clear. If he knew of its conclusion, as he must have done, he could not expect William immediately to violate the peace just made. Probably he wished to appear to the Spaniards to be anxious to keep his engagement to them, for he made the same professions to them, and on the faith of that the Spaniards demanded better terms; but equally probable is the idea that he wanted an excuse for not disbanding the army. William is said, however, to have exclaimed to Hyde, who brought the message, "Was ever anything so hot and so cold as this Court of yours? Will the king never learn a word that I shall never forget since my last passage to England, when, in a great storm, the captain all night was crying to the man at the helm, 'Steady! steady! steady!' If this despatch had come twenty days ago, it had changed the face of affairs in Christendom, and the war might have been carried on till France had yielded to the treaty of the Pyrenees, and left the world in quiet for the rest of our lives; as it comes now, it will have no effect at all." Louis resented the interference of Charles at this moment, and suspended the payment of his pension. He, however, receded from some of his terms, and referred the settlement of the differences with the Spaniards and the Emperor of Germany to the Dutch. Before the end of October peace was concluded with all parties. Holland had recovered all she had lost, and obtained an advantageous treaty of commerce with France. Spain had lost Franche-Comté, and twelve fortresses in Flanders; Germany had regained Philippsburg in exchange for Freiburg; Sweden recovered what it had lost to Denmark and the Elector of Brandenburg; and Louis was left with a power and reputation that made him the arbitrator of Europe.
We now come to one of the most extraordinary displays of a succession of plots, or pretended plots, which ever occurred in the history of any nation. From a small and most improbable beginning they spread and ramified themselves in all directions, involving the most distinguished persons of the State, ascending to the royal house, threatening the lives of the Duke of York, of the queen, and even of the king. Though defeated in their highest aims, they yet brought to execution a considerable number of persons of various ranks, including several noblemen and commoners of distinction. When they appeared to be extinguished for a short period, they broke out again with fresh force, and struck down fresh victims; and whilst much of the machinery of the agitators remained in the deepest obscurity, the mind of the nation was wrought up to a condition of the most terrible suspicion, wonder, and alarm. In the half-absurdity of the charges, the half-development of ominous truths, the public was thrown into a long fever of terror and curiosity, and seemed to lose its judgment and discretion, and to be ready to destroy its noblest citizens on the evidence of the most despicable of mankind.
From the moment that some obscure indications of a secret league between the king and Louis of France had emerged to the light, the people were haunted by fears and rumours of plots, and designs against the national liberty. Especially since the Duke of York had avowed himself a Catholic, and the king had a French Catholic mistress, and spent much time with the French ambassador, Barillon, in her apartments, there were continual apprehensions of an attempt to introduce Popery, and to suppress the public freedom by a standing army. The country was nearer the mark than it was aware of, and had it come by any chance to the knowledge of the full truth that their monarch was the bond-slave of France, to favour its ambitious designs of averting the balance of power on the Continent, and extending the French empire, at the expense of its neighbours, to the widest boundary of the Empire of Charlemagne, the immediate consequence would have been revolution, and the expulsion of the Stuarts a few years earlier. But as the real facts were kept in profound secrecy, all manner of vague rumours rose from the facts themselves, like smoke from a hidden fire.
There was a party, moreover, in Parliament, called the Country party, or, in our modern phrase, the Opposition, which now included several of the displaced statesmen of the Cabal, especially Buckingham and Shaftesbury. These men had no scruples to restrain them from embarrassing the Government, and in particular from denouncing their successful rival, the Lord Treasurer Danby. They knew well the secret which the public only suspected; but they had been too much mixed up with it to render it safe to reveal too much of it. But enough might be employed to destroy the Prime Minister, and to gain another end—the exclusion of the Duke of York and the prevention of a Papist succession.
To destroy Danby, who was thoroughly anti-Gallican in his policy; to exclude James from the throne and secure a Protestant succession; to compel the king to rule by a Protestant Government, and to have recourse to Parliament for support; there certainly appeared nothing more likely than to raise a terror of a Papist conspiracy, and to link it sufficiently with suspicious connection with France. This was done with marvellous success amid a wonderful exhibition of strange events, except that of excluding James from the throne, and even this was all but accomplished. Probably the conception of the scheme was due to the fertile mind of Shaftesbury, and its execution to the same master of chicane, assisted by the unscrupulous Buckingham.
On the 12th of August, as the king was walking in the park, one Kirby, a chemist, who had been occasionally employed in the royal laboratory, and was therefore known to Charles, approached and said, "Sir, keep within the company. Your enemies have a design upon your life, and you may be shot in this very walk." Charles stepped aside with him, and asked him the meaning of his words. He replied that two men, Grove and Pickering, had engaged to shoot him, and that Sir George Wakeman, the queen's physician, had agreed to poison him. Charles showed very little change of manner or countenance, but told Kirby to meet him that evening at the house of Chiffinch, his well-known procurer, and pursued his walk. In the evening Kirby repeated what he had said, and added that he received the information from Dr. Tongue, rector of St. Michael's, in Wood Street, who was well known to several persons about the Court. This Dr. Tongue was a singular mixture of cunning and credulity, who had long been an alarmist, and who had printed yearly and quarterly pamphlets against the Jesuits, "to alarm and awaken his Majesty and the two Houses." Tongue was sent for, and brought a mass of papers, divided into forty-three articles, giving a narrative of the conspiracy, which he pretended had been thrust under his door. Charles referred him to Danby, and to him Tongue repeated the story of Grove, otherwise called Honest William, and Pickering, and said he would find out their abode, or point them out when walking, according to their daily custom, in the park. Orders were given to arrest these assassins, but they did not appear, and Tongue gave various frivolous reasons for their non-appearance. It was said that they were gone to Windsor, but they could not be found there. Charles came at once to the conclusion that the whole was a hoax, and when Danby requested permission to lay the narrative before the Privy Council, he replied, "No, not even before my brother! It would only create alarm, and might put the design of murdering me into somebody's head."
The contempt which the king showed and expressed for the whole affair might have caused it to drop, but there was unquestionably a party at work behind, which would not suffer it to stop. Tongue informed Danby that he had met with the person whom he suspected of having drawn up the papers; that he had given him a more particular account of the conspiracy, but he begged that his name might be concealed, lest the Papists should murder him. He moreover assured Danby that on a certain day a packet of treasonable letters would pass through the post-office at Windsor, addressed to Bedingfield, the confessor of the Duke of York. Danby hastened to Windsor to intercept the packet, but found it already in the hands of the king. Bedingfield had delivered them to the duke, saying that the papers appeared to contain treasonable matter, and that they certainly were not in the hands of the persons whose names they bore. The duke carried them at once to the king.
These papers now underwent a close examination, and the result was that all were convinced that they were gross forgeries. One was clearly in the same hand as the papers presented before by Tongue; the rest, though in a feigned hand, bore sufficient evidence of being the work of the same person. The king was more than ever convinced that the whole was a hoax, and desired that no further notice might be taken of it. Kirby frequently made his appearance at Court, but Charles always passed him without notice. As there appeared no prospect of proceeding with the matter at Court, the person who had conveyed the papers to Dr. Tongue now went to Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, an active justice of the peace at Westminster, and made affidavit, not only of the truth of the former papers, but also of thirty-eight more articles, making altogether eighty-one articles. This mysterious person now appeared as one Titus Oates, a clergyman, and it was ascertained that he had been lodging at Kirby's, at Vauxhall, and that Dr. Tongue had also retired thither, on the plea of concealment from the Papists. Godfrey, on perceiving that Coleman, secretary to the late Duchess of York, and a friend of his own, was named in the affidavit as a chief conspirator, immediately communicated the fact to Coleman, and Coleman communicated it to the Duke of York.
James was now more than ever convinced that, whatever were the plot, its object was to bring the Catholics into odium, and lead to his exclusion from the throne, and demanded of Charles that it should be inquired into. Danby now seemed to favour the king's view of keeping it quiet, but this only led James to suspect that the minister wished to hold it back till Parliament met, when its disclosure might be useful in an impeachment with which he was menaced. Charles, at the duke's renewed entreaty, reluctantly ordered Tongue and Oates to appear before the Privy Council. Accordingly Titus Oates, soon to become so notorious, appeared before the Council on the 28th of September, 1678, in a clerical gown and a new suit of clothes, and with an astonishing assurance delivered in writing the following strange story. The Pope, he said, claimed Great Britain and Ireland, on the ground of the heresy of the prince and people, and had commanded the Jesuits to take possession of it for him. De Oliva, general of the Order, had arranged everything for this purpose, and had named under the seal of the Society, all the persons to fill the offices of the State. Lord Arundel was created Lord Chancellor; Lord Powis, Treasurer; Sir William Godolphin, Privy Seal; Coleman, Secretary of State; Lord Bellasis, General of the Army; Lord Peters, Lieutenant-General; Lord Stafford, Paymaster. All inferior offices, and all the dignities of the Church were filled up, many of them with Spaniards and other foreigners. Moreover, the Jesuits were dispersed throughout Ireland, organising insurrections and massacres; in Scotland they were acting under the guise of Covenanters; in Holland they were raising a French party against the Prince of Orange, and in England preparing for the murder of the king, and of the duke, too, if he did not consent to the scheme. They had no lack of money. They had one hundred thousand pounds in the bank, had sixty thousand pounds in yearly rents, had received from La Chaise, the confessor of the French king, a donation of ten thousand pounds, and a promise from De Corduba, the Provincial of New Castile, of as much more. In March last a man named Honest William, and Pickering, a lay brother, had been commissioned to shoot the king at Windsor, and had been severely punished for the failure of the attempt. On the 24th of April a consultation had been held by Jesuits from all parts, at the White Horse Tavern in the Strand, to decide on the mode of killing the king; when three sets of assassins were engaged—the two already mentioned, two Benedictine monks, Coniers and Anderton, and four Irishmen. Ten thousand pounds had been offered to Wakeman, the queen's physician, to poison the king, but he had refused to do it for less than fifteen thousand pounds, which was agreed to, and five thousand pounds had been paid down. He had often seen Wakeman since amongst the Jesuits. The Irish assassins were to receive twenty guineas each for stabbing the king. Honest William was to receive fifteen hundred pounds, and Pickering thirty thousand masses, valued at the same sum. They were to shoot the king with silver bullets. A wager, he said, was laid that the king should eat no more Christmas pies, and that if he would not become R.C. (Roman Catholic, or Rex Catholicus), he should no longer be C.R. Oates averred that he had gone to the Jesuits at Valladolid, thence with letters from them to Burgos, thence to Madrid, back to England, thence had gone to St. Omer, and back to England with fresh instructions. They made him cognisant of their plans for the murder, and he saw on their papers all the names signed. Since his return he had discovered that they set fire to London in 1666, and had used seven hundred fire-balls, familiarly called Tewkesbury mustard pills, as containing a notable biting sauce. Their success encouraged them to set fire to Southwark in 1676, by which they had gained two thousand pounds above their expenses, as they had by carrying off diamonds in the London fire made fourteen thousand pounds. They had now a plan to set fire to Wapping, Westminster, and the ships in the river. There were twenty thousand Catholics in London, who had engaged to rise in twenty-four hours or less, and could easily cut the throats of one hundred thousand Protestants. In Scotland eight thousand Catholics had agreed to take arms; a general massacre of Protestants was planned in Ireland; Ormond was to be murdered; forty thousand black bills were provided for the Irish massacre, and Coleman had sent thither two hundred thousand pounds. Poole, the author of the "Synopsis," Dr. Stillingfleet, and De Brunt were also to be put to death.