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THE TIMES OF CHARLES THE SECOND.
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bringing their business about in a natural way, but we, said he, would never admit of such a thing.[1]
28th.Colonel Fitz'Patrick and I had a great deal of discourse of this country: he told me they were in an ill condition, that they owed sixty mil-
- ↑ "It is first to be remembered that there was really and truly a Popish plot in being, though not that which Titus Oates and his associates pretended to reveal—not merely in the sense of Hume, who, arguing from the general spirit of proselytiam in that religion, says there is a perpetual conspiracy against all governments, Protestant, Mahometan, and Pagan; but one, alert, enterprising, effective, in direct operation against the established Protestant religion in England. In this plot the King, the Duke of York, and the King of France, were chief conspirators; the Romish priests, and especially the Jesuits, were eager co-operators.* ***
"The conspiracy, supposed to have been concerted by the Jesuits, at St. Omers, and in which so many English Catholics were implicated, chiefly consisted, as is well known, in a scheme of assassinating the King. Though the obvious falsehood and absurdity of much that the witnesses deposed in relation to this plot render it absolutely incredible, and fully acquit those unfortunate victims of iniquity and prejudice, it could not appear at the time an extravagant supposition, that an eager, intriguing faction should have considered the King's life a serious obstacle to their hopes.****
"Nothing could have been more anxiously wished at St. Omers than the death of Charles; and it does not seem improbable that the atrocious fictions of Oates may have been originally suggested by some actual though vague projects of assassination, which he had heard in discourse among the ardent spirits of that college."— Hallam's Const. Hist. ii. 572.
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