The belief in a Catholic conspiracy extended beyond the
circle of parliamentary leaders and their contemporary
defenders. The idea was elaborated by several quite dif-
ferent parties to the ensuing conflict. There was a Puri-
tan, or parliamentarian, plot theory, and there was a
royalist plot theory. In his political tergiversations, Wil-
liam Prynne helped to develop first one, then the other. The plot tradition
persisted into the Restoration period and provided the ideological back-
ground for the better-known popish plot late in the reign of Charles II.

William Prynne was the first to take the information thrown up by the
Long Parliament's investigations and plot exposes of the prewar period
and transform them into an extended explanation of how the popish plot
had led to the outbreak of war. From 1637 to 1640 this most vociferous
critic of the government's religious policy had been silenced by imprison-
ment. Prynne did not, therefore, observe the court Catholic activities of
that period or have occasion to comment on them at the time. Even after
his release in November 1640, his attitude toward the king evolved slowly
enough to justify William Lamont's claim that he was not a representa-
tive of the lunatic fringe of Protestant thinking. ¹

The radicalization of Prynne's thinking occurred first in 1641, in rela-
tion to the episcopacy and the royal supremacy. Whereas in 1636 and
1637 Prynne had criticized the Laudian episcopacy as a semipopish per-
version of a valuable institution, in 1641 he moved into the root-and-
branch party with Antipathy of the English Lordly Prelates. Neither in
1637 nor in 1641 did he have much to say about court Catholicism The
Jesuits' Looking Glass of 1636 ² warned of Con's mission to reconcile
England with Rome and cited rumors that Laud had been promised a
cardinal's cap. In this pamphlet, however, Prynne's main evidence had
been drawn from those Catholic writers of the early and middle 1630s,
writers such as Christopher Davenport who were optimistic about the

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