"The Anagrammatic Method": Titus Oates and Satiric Word Play in Post-Restoration England

ABSTRACT: This article examines the conflicting attitudes toward deception in the political discourse of late Stuart Britain, using as its example the spurious claims made by Titus Oates (c.1678) that Catholics were conspiring to assassinate Charles II and reintroduce Catholicism as Britain's religion of state. Known to contemporaries as the Popish Plot, this article serves as a departure from traditional scholarship of the conspiracy in which Oates is primarily pursued for his role as a key agitator of Exclusion era politics. Instead, it addresses the irreconciled nature of Oates's public persona as the plot's main discoverer, interlocutor, protagonist, and victim, especially in the days and months following his conviction for perjury in May 1685. Attending to issues of continuity and discontinuity with the first half of the seventeenth century, especially those which concerned the ideological origins of the civil wars, it engages with a visual satire of 1685 in which the validity of Titus Oates's anti-Jesuitical claims were denounced by reconstituting the letters of his name in anagrammatic form. Thus, arguments will be developed on the basis that the Popish Plot was a political event, but an event necessarily steeped in literary assumptions, demonstrating the era's inescapable fascination with ambiguity even as it sought to denounce it.