When he intervened in the quarrel at Woodstock in September, 1678, Danby was deep into political intrigues that trapped and left him powerless. Anti- Catholic feelings, fed by Marvell’s pamphlet against him in February 1678, grew in the weeks following as the King wavered between his open treaty with the Dutch and his secret monetary ties to Louis XIV. When the army raised to assist the Dutch left for the Lowlands too late to prevent the French from capturing Ghent and Ypres, Parliament voted funds for its disbandment on June 30. An armistice on May 23 had led Charles and Danby to maintain the standing army while they pressed Louis to accept terms of the Treaty of Nijmegen. As a result, Danby was believed to be working to submit England through military force to absolute monarchism and Popery, one and the same to the Protestant mind.

At the same time, through his fervent Catholic secretary, Edward Coleman, the Duke of York continued a surreptitious correspondence with the French King, intent upon getting funds to bribe members of Parliament who wanted to exclude Catholic heirs from the English throne. These double-dealings began to be hopelessly snarled on August 14, when the King, leaving for Windsor with Nelly Gwyn, sent a Gentleman of the Bed Chamber around to Danby with a packet of papers. These were the forty-three articles concocted by Titus Oates to “prove” that the Society of Jesuits had a plot to murder Charles II. Without knowing it, Danby had been handed the means for his own overthrow.

Titus Oates, co-inventor of “The Popish Plot,” was born in 1649, the son of an Anabaptist ex-weaver who took orders in the Anglican church and, in 1660, was given the living of All Saints’ in Hastings by Sir Richard Barker, a City physician. As a boy, Titus went to Westminster School, then to Merchant Taylors’, but was expelled. In 1667 he was expelled again from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he failed to master Latin; despite his phenomenal memory, his tutor called him “a great dunce.”