17th Century fake news

How fabricated new stories, exaggerated accounts and even fake newspapers helped spread the Popish Plot

Sir John Temple’s history of irish rebellion The

John Temple’s ‘history’ of the Irish Rebellion of 16412 was first published in 1646 but republished in the 1670s. The text is subtitled ‘Barbarous cruelties and Bloody Massacres which endured thereupon’ and is now believed to have greatly exaggerated the events of the rebellion that had taken place.

As historian Ethan Shagan explains, it “contextualised the atrocity [...] within a wellestablished view of history which saw Protestants as a weak and persecuted minority, forever defending themselves against the forces of a popish Antichrist.”

Temple and those who reprinted the work also failed to adequately point out to readers that Temple was a lawyer and a member of both the English and Irish House of Commons, who had assisted the English government in putting down the rebellion.

This work was part of a concerted effort to portray Ireland as a lawless place, overrun by Catholics, to the English. Newspapers brought “strange and lamentable news from Ireland,” one of which described a “maid at Dublin” who “was found with her flesh burnt off her arms, and lying by her black like burnt leather.”

Secret histories

Titus Oates’s explosive manuscript was just one title in what could be described as genre in its own right. The Secret History Of The Most Renowned Queen Elizabeth

And The Earl Of Essex, anonymously published for ‘Will with the Wisp at the sign of the Moon in the Eclipse’ in 1680 was full of innuendo about how the queen had been manipulated by her closest minister. Later came the publication of The Secret History Of

The Medicis (1686) and The Secret History Of Charles

II And James II (1690) when both were safely in their graves. All were more like conspiracy theories rather than real works of historical scholarship.

‘True’ Domestik intelligence

During the lapse of the licensing act, after parliament had been dissolved by Charles II and so MPS could not sit to renew it, Nathaniel Thompson printed a newspaper called the Domestik Intelligence, a copy of an existing paper published by Benjamin Harris. Harris’s paper had a strong Whig and therefore proexclusionist stance whilst Thompson did not share the same view. Issue 16, dated 26 August 1679 was a hoax and its regular readers would have found a very different political hue to their usual coverage.

Eventually, Thompson started printing his paper as the ‘True Domestik Intelligence’ to distinguish itself from its rival.