Political Lying

Abstract

Nothing illustrates the case of casuistry as well as dishonesty and it is hardly surprising that the whole seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have been seen as an age of dissimulation. At the Gun- Powder Plot end of the seventeenth century, the catholic Anthony Copley attacked the Jesuits for their ‘Art’ in manipulating ‘half fac’d Tearmes’ and ‘whole and demi dublings’1 Thomas Morton’s A Full Satisfaction, excoriated against equivocation, ‘the notablest Art of lying … that ever the prince of darkness did invent’; shortly after Isaac Causabon was to call it a new science; and then Henry Mason elevated the New art of Lying to titular significance.² At the Treaty of Utrecht end of the long seventeenth century, Arbuthnot published his proposals for a synthesis of The Art of Political Lying. Between these book-ends extended what might fancifully be seen as a pervasive lunatic fog of lies in word and deed, an age of endemic faithlessness, oath-breaking and sundry forms of ‘cogging’.³

‘So many parsangs betwixt word and heart’

Robert Burton Anatomy of Melancholy, 1, p. 61.