“I do not profess myself to be any great Statesman, or exactly to know what ever is secretly transacted among us: But this I can say…I have for many years last past been as curious an observer of all the great transactions of Affairs in Church or State, and of the instruments and means by which they have been covertly contrived and carried on.”
– from A Substance of a Speech in the House of Commons (1649) by William Prynne
Some have referred to these times as the Golden Age of conspiracy theories and they may not be far from the truth. Like an invasive species of weeds, strange, extraordinarily resilient tales have sprouted up all over the planet, strangling and stretching the media ecosystem, and causing very tangible changes in public sentiment. In today’s world, technology managed by multinational platforms, empowered by a mostly unregulated internet, and instrumentalised by government agencies, has given an almost magical efficacy to fake news. In cyberspace, fantasies, which have always been one of the great engines of human innovation, have become like the multiform demons of the early modern imaginary. Commanded by calculating Prosperos and rude Merlins, they move at unthinkable speeds, playing with deep-rooted psychic energies and blowing away communities.
Covid-19 has certainly accelerated the “infodemic” phenomenon, but there is nothing new about conspiracy theories, which have featured in and shaped political narratives and policies for thousands of years. One could, however, contend that the first great epoch of the conspiracy theory occurred in seventeenth-century England and was ushered in by the infamous lawyer, parliamentarian, and pamphleteer William Prynne.
Born in 1600, Prynne rose to become a highly effective populistic agitator and as Caroline Hibbard, the author of Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983) has put it, “one of parliament’s main propaganda agents.” After being sent to prison in 1634 for using seditious language in his antitheatrical treatise, Histriomastix (1632), Prynne was branded, deprived of his ears, and jailed for six years. After his release he quickly zoomed back onto the political frontlines, whipping up with his pen-wand a tempest for which his enemies were hardly prepared. His reactionary writings during the 1640s and 50s, it is generally acknowledged, contributed not just to the defenestration of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, but also to the restoration of Charles the II. The famous antiquary Isaac D’Israeli, while mentioning Prynne’s tendency to engage in “chimerical speculation”, also recognised that his range of subjects and pertinacity were “nearly unparalleled in literary history”.
To many of his peers, however, Prynne was more than a mere mortal. John Vicars, a biographer and polemicist, said that everyone in England and “beyond the Seas” was aware of Prynne’s “never-dying name and fame”. Another contemporary said that Prynne’s writings were “more prevalent” than sermons. As Jason Peacey has shown in Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013), sections of Prynne’s books were even read aloud in both private and public settings. According to Mark Kishlansky, Prynne was also regarded by many English Calvinists as a saint-like hero. “Prynne’s portrait,” wrote Kishlanksy in “Martyr’s Tales” (2014), “adorned antiprelatical pamphlets, and the Latin verses he scrawled upon his prison walls were transcribed, translated, and preserved as if they were holy relics.”
The public’s perception of Prynne as an exemplar of long-suffering and Catonian godliness also helped to mold his later reputation as a revealer of secrets and conspiracies. Although he wrote fervidly and accusingly against many activities and parties, he reserved particular animus for the Jesuits, whom he believed constituted an “Antichristian” fifth column that would destroy Protestant Christendom “by degrees”. In this regard, Prynne was no different than other English politicians and members of the clergy who routinely hobgoblinized Catholics by reminding the public of the botched Gunpowder Plot and encouraging mob demonstrations. In fact, their messaging was so successful that it helped to facilitate the development of what Arthur F. Marotti–in his essay “The Intolerability of English Catholicism” (2013)–has called an English “nationalist mythology” of Catholics as conspirators and plotters.
The English Spanish Pilgrime: or a new discoverie of Spanish Popery and Jesuiticall Stratagems (1629). The text on the right is from the anonymously authored Looke About You (1641).
However, in 1643 Prynne brought out Rome’s Master-Peece, a book whose plot line would influence anti-popery and conspiratorial literature for years to come. In the text, which was published at critical moments during Archbishop Laud’s trial, Prynne launched a scathing attack on what he described as “the Popish party” and “Jesuiticall conspirators” in Charles I’s inner circle. Relying on a top-secret, epistolary narrative related by the Bohemian physician and political operative Andreas Habernfeld, Prynne declared that a vast cabal backed by Cardinal Antonio Barberini and comprised of Jesuits, foreign priests, spies, recusants, and popish clergymen was actively working to subvert and destroy the English nation. The headquarters of said secret society was at the house of an undercover Catholic agent (Captain John Read) on Long Acre street in Central London.
Something like a cross between a witches’ coven and a global intelligence office, the Long Acre conspirators usually met on Fridays, wore disguises, worshiped in a hidden chapel and exchanged secret letters. Members of the cell included a who’s who of wealthy aristocrats, statesmen, diplomats, and influence-peddlers, including Sir Toby Matthew (an courtier and associate of James I), George Conn (a papal representative and confidant of Henrietta Marie, Charles’s consort), and George Gage (an associate of the Earl of Arundel and an art collector). Like Gage, Matthew had in 1623 helped to negotiate the ill-fated Spanish Match, a matrimonial pairing of Charles and Princess Maria Anna of Spain. As a part of the Long Acre conspiracy, Matthew was portrayed as an international spymaster whose primary role was to compile a “Catalogue” of comprising information and share it each summer with the “generall Consistory of the Jesuites politics” in Wales.
The ultimate aim of the Long Acre plotters was, as Prynne explained, to “undermine the Protestant Religion, re-establish Popery, and alter the very frame of civill government in all the Kings Dominions”. They pursued their agenda, not only by stirring up destabilising conflicts in Ireland and Scotland, but also by bribing and blackmailing judges, politicians, and bishops. Additionally, in order to better “seduce” the upper classes, the Long Acre set carried out most of their activities near the “fairest buildings” and colleges around Queen Street (modern-day Great Queen’s Street).
In his analysis of the alleged plot, Prynne urged the King and his army to take action to “prevent the imminent ruine” of the kingdom and “all posterity”. Since Prynne had initially discovered the Habernfeld memo during a pre-trial, early morning search of Laud’s prison quarters, he was convinced that Laud was involved in a cover-up. To further persuade his readers of the conspiracy’s existence, Prynne likened the Long Acre society to a real-life Jesuit college in Clerkenwell that had been busted by city authorities in 1628. This secret facility, from which was recovered extensive books and liturgical paraphernalia, afterwards was portrayed in various pamphlets as an operations centre for a second Gunpowder Plot.
Romes Master-Peece therefore became a real political weapon, a way for Prynne to further denigrate both the personality and the record of a man who, due to his church reforms and controversial use of the Star Chamber, was already an unpopular figure in the eyes of the public. Like today’s conspiracy theories, which always draw upon cultural stereotypes and skewed interpretations of historical events, the Long Acre narrative played upon Caroline England’s preconceived notions of Catholic aspirations. It was a persuasive fiction, a canard that, due to Prynne’s pamphleteering efforts, came to be regarded as historical fact.
Nor did Laud’s execution stop Prynne from utilising the plot to further his anti-Catholic polemics. When Oliver Cromwell came into power, Prynne claimed that the general and his New Model Army were controlled by the same elite “jesuitical” and anti-monarchical organisation that had been active at Long Acre. These persons, Prynne said in his Substance of a Speech in the House of Commons (1649) had the ability to “metamorphose themselves into any shapes” and had “invisibly” insinuated themselves into the soldiers’ “counsels and actings”. Later, in his 1659 treatise A True and Perfect Narrative, Prynne alleged that the entire English revolution had been contrived by European Catholic interests, a “College of Jesuites at Longacre”, and a Jesuit “Consistory and Counsel that rules all the Affairs of the things of England”.
These themes resonated only too well in England’s national consciousness, and as indicated by Prynne’s contemporary Roger L’Estrange, they were also incorporated into the 1678 Popish Plot, a hoax that led to the deaths of several innocent men. Nonetheless, Prynne continued to have a tremendous impact on conspiratorial literature decades after his death, with his Habernfeld plot commentaries appearing in various works throughout the 1680s and 90s.
Like today’s conspiracy theories, Prynne’s conspiracisms were ideas that had real force. Early modern England, with its samizdat presses, renegade publishers (Prynne’s publisher Michael Sparke was often in trouble with the law), religious tension, civil wars, and high intrigues was a environment of divided identities and mores, a fertile ground for the emergence and propagation of extreme and intolerant ideas. In this context, Prynne’s febrile narratives spread rapidly, evaded censorship, and inspired oppressive policies.
Although the Long Acre plot preceded the dawn of Internet Age by over 350 years, it reveals much about the adaptive nature, tactics, and lifespans of conspiracy theories and their architects. In Romes Master-Peece, Prynne wove together many of the themes that would later become key elements of future conspiracy theories, such as secret societies, elite corruption and perversion, and anti-Christian or Satanic ritualism. And like today’s disinformation merchants, he relied on emotionalism and deeply ingrained prejudices, publishing his report in the midst of one of England’s most tumultuous crises.
In this way, the Civil War and the Interregnum served as a kind of Golden Age for Prynne’s conspiratorial storytelling. His tale and the tales of other pamphleteers had the same fate as Hesiod’s mythical mortals, who eventually became disembodied spirits, interacting with mankind and roaming “everywhere over the earth” in clothes of “mist”.
Conspiracy theories always have their heyday, their period of invulnerability, their moment in the limelight. As time passes, however, the ambrosia burns away, and the stories adopt a subtler, more desiccate form. Receding into the vasty deep, they take up residence in the most forlorn corners of the imagination, maintaining their basic themes and motifs. These are then called up over and over again, decade after decade, century after century, to influence the living.
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