James Salgado: Anti-Spanish Sentiment and the Popish Plot

The case of James Salgado, the Romish priest turned Protestant, is extremely interesting in the context of the Spanish Black Legend. Writing in the 1670s and 1680s, Salgado claims to be a Spanish ex-priest who was imprisoned by the Inquisition, served time rowing as a galley slave, escaped to Europe (France, the Low Countries), and finally arrived in England. Although his works contain anti-Spanish propaganda, his treatisedescription of bullfighting in particular includes numerous laudatory commentaries about Spanish culture that envision Spanish mores in a positive (or at least neutral) light. The ambiguity between the ideological and propagandistic purpose of his work and the author’s origins reflects the nature of much pamphlet literature about Spain as both the land of romance and religious fanaticism.

‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’:1 political prints of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis – the revision of a republican mode

This chapter examines political prints that responded to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679–82). It compares the political prints of the “Tory” Sir Roger L’Estrange, Licenser to the Press, with that of the “Whig” Stephen College, a “Protestant Joiner”. College was executed for his political cartoon, “A Ra-ree Show”, in 1682. This chapter uses these satirical engravings in order to contextualize the so-called “Tory Reaction” of 1681. It argues that one of the reasons why the Tories were so successful, by most accounts, in their efforts to discredit the Whigs has to do with the concept of loyalism. As the Whig agenda became increasingly tied to republican and non-conformist aims, their connection to loyalism began to dissolve. This made the Whigs vulnerable to challenges to their beliefs and practices both from without (by Tories) and from within (by the mainline elements from inside the Whig party itself).

Public Spectacles: The Popish Plot and Public Mass Media

The Exclusion Crisis arose over the Whig party’s attempt to block the Catholic James Duke York, from inheriting the throne. It led to a series of public demonstrations playing on fears of a fictional Catholic treason plot created by Titus Oates, the Popish Plot. As series of treason trials based on perjured testimony and forged documents led to the execution of several Jesuit priests in 1679, while the Queen’s physician Sir George Wakeman was acquitted. Whig politicians encouraged anti-Catholic sentiments with public pope-burning pageants, scripted processions held on Queen Elizabeth’s birthday.