or that purpose. Oates
said that he had left the Church and returned to his former faith
because of the terrible character of the conspiracy which he had
discovered. His story was not even plausible; he was known to be a man
of vicious life; moreover, Catholic plotters would hardly murder a king
who was at heart devoted to Catholic policy. England, however, was in
a nervous state of mind; Charles II was known to be intriguing with
France; and a cruel fury surged through the nation. For a share in the
supposed plots, a score of people, among them one of the great nobles of
England, the venerable and innocent Earl of Stafford, were condemned to
death and executed. Whatever Charles II himself might have thought,
he was obliged for his own safety to acquiesce in the policy of
persecution.

Catholic France was not less malignant than Protestant England. Though
cruel severity had long been shown to Protestants, they seemed to
be secure under the law of France in certain limited rights and in a
restricted toleration. In 1685, however, Louis XIV revoked the Edict
of Nantes by which Henry IV a century earlier had guaranteed this
toleration. All over France there had already burst out terrible
persecution, and the act of Louis XIV brought a fiery climax. Unhappy
heretics who would not accept Roman Catholic doctrine found life
intolerable. Tens of thousands escaped from France in spite of a
law which, though it exiled the Protestant ministers, forbade other
Protestants to leave the country. Stories of plots were made the excuse
to seize the property of Protestants. Regiments of soldiers, charged
with the task, could boast of many enforced "conversions." Quartered on
Protestant households, they made the life of the inmates a burden until
they abandoned their religion. Among the means used were torture before
a slow fire, the tearing off of the finger nails, the driving of the
whole families naked into the streets and the forbidding of any one
to give them shelter, the violation of women, and the crowding of the
heretics in loathsome prisons. By such means it took a regiment of
soldiers in Rouen only a few days to "convert" to the old faith some six
hundred families. Protestant ministers caught in France were sent to the
galleys for life. The persecutions which followed the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes outdid even Titus Oates.

Charles II died in 1685 and the scene at his deathbed encouraged in
England suspicions of Catholic