Why did they believe that? Because I said so and some people are daft enough to believe anything from anyone, even me.
I was named after the Roman emperor Titus, that one who built the Colosseum, and born the year that Charles I was executed for being too Catholic and I was expelled from school for my potty mouth, and then the next school and then also expelled from Cambridge University for stealing and being drunk.
I falsely claimed to have a Theology degree and became a Protestant priest but when i was sacked for lying I switched to being a Catholic for a while and then changed back before changing careers and becoming a sailor but got into trouble for accusing the Captain of theft and had to run away so went back to the priesthood and once I remembered which side i was on, began plotting against Catholics because, well you know, they were Catholics.
I went to Catholic colleges in France to spy on them but got expelled from there for accusing a teacher of buggery so came back and came up with the idea of spreading rumours that the Catholics were plotting to King Charles II and the Catholic King Louis XIV of France will invade Britain and named 90 Catholic priests and dozens of noblemen as plotters.
We had no proof at all, but I did have two pieces of amazing fortuitous luck. Firstly, I named the King’s doctor as one of the plotters, and it was discovered that he really had been writing to the French and then a magistrate who was investigating the case went missing and was found five days later, somehow beaten and stabbed to death with his own sword. The Catholics got the blame, of course and suddenly everyone believed me and my outlandish Popish plot.
Blimey, I was a national hero and almost any Catholic was a suspect and imagined they saw plotters everywhere and the cellars of Parliament were even searched for another Gunpowder Plot and the treason trials went ahead and the King’s doctor was found guilty and hanged till he was half dead, revived so he could see himself being cut open and his intestines burned on a fire. In all, 35 innocent people died horrible deaths because of what I said.
After two more years of this terror Charles II died and like the bubonic plague, smallpox and flares, Catholicism was one of those things that you hope once gone will stay away forever but nobody seems to have told his Catholic brother James II who came to the throne and it was time for revenge and I was dragged to the pillory where I was pelted with eggs and rubbish for two days.
On the third day I was stripped to the waist, tied to the back of a cart and made to walk behind it while I was whipped. and this was repeated the next day when i was dragged on a sledge while being whipped because i was too weak to walk.
I spent three more years in prison before being released when James II fled from England and the Protestant William of Orange and Mary pardoned me and and granted a pension of £260 but the British people still hated the Catholics and I had been part of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that got rid of hopefully, Britain’s last Catholic king.
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