The Tichbornes, The Doughtys and Douglas Woodruff

Abstract

Of what he called ‘The Great Fear of Popery’, Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘that fear … constantly renewed, had acquired a momentum of its own. It was the English equivalent of the great European witch-craze, and it would remain formidable for three centuries, a national neurosis which could be awakened again and again: in the myth of the great Irish massacre of 1641 (still repeated, over a century later, by John Wesley), in the great scare of the Popish Plot of 1678, in the fable of the Warming Pan in 1688, even, though with dwindling force, in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the “Papal Aggression” of 1851, ‘(sic). He might have added the Tichborne trial to the list.