Fear of Popery

Abstract

Among London newspapers and pamphlets published after 1642 no explanation of the Civil War was more common than the assumption that Catholics and Catholicism were in some way to be found at the heart of it. Taking their cue from the House of Commons, which reiterated at every crisis that it was acting ‘to maintain and defend…the true reformed Protestant religion…against all Popery and popish innovations’,¹ almost every despatch reporting the progress of the armies described Charles’s forces as ‘papistical’ or ‘jesuitised’ or ‘Romish’. The writers recorded incessantly the crucifixes found on royalist dead, the ‘mass-books’ found in the enemy baggage, and the supposed frequency of Mass in the King’s garrisons. From every town near the Irish Sea enormous and largely mythical reinforcements of savage Irish Catholics were reported, hurrying to join the King. The Venetian ambassador dryly calculated that by the end of 1643 alone, 60,000 men had been added to Charles’s army in this way — sufficient to treble or quadruple his actual strength. The number of English papists in London grew with a speed no less phenomenal: in the summer of 1643 Speciall Passages assured its readers that ‘it is conceived that there were not so many of them when they ruled the Kingdom’. Other papers carried reports of royalists charging into battle with cries of ‘In with Queen Mary’ and waving flags bearing ‘the inscription of the Popes Motto’, doubtless buoyed up with the news that Prince Rupert was about to be replaced by the legendary Piccolomini as commander of the King’s forces.²