When Titus Oates and Israel Tonge tried to discredit catholics in England claiming that they had uncovered a "Popish plot" to murder king Charles in order to replace him with the catholic couple James-Mary, an (innocent) victim of the situation was the secretary of Mary of Modena.
Edward Coleman, James’s private secretary, was not precisely an innocent victim of the Popish Plot. Some of his correspondence proved that he hoped to influence James to force the English and Scottish back to Catholicism. He shared his hopes and plans with powerful people on the Continent, including Louis XIV's private confessor. Some of his letters proved that he believed James would force his people to convert when he came to the throne without his encouragement. For example:
”We have here a mighty work upon our hands; no less than the conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the subduing of a pestilent heresy which has domineered over a greater part of this northern world a long time. There were never such hopes of success since the death of our Queen Mary, as now in our days when God has given us a prince who is become (I may say by miracle) zealous of being the author and instrument of so glorious a work. I can scarce believe myself awake, or the thing real, when I think of a prince, in such an age as we live in, converted to such a degree of zeal and piety, as not to regard anything in the world in comparison of God Almighty’s glory, the salvation of his own soul, and the conversion of our poor kingdom. Money cannot fail of persuading the king to anything. There is nothing it cannot make him do, were it ever so much to his prejudice. It has such an absolute power over him that he cannot resist it. Logic in our court, built upon money, has more powerful charms than any other sort of argument.”
Thanks to Coleman’s letters, which suggested that there really was a plot of some kind to force England and Scotland back to Catholicism, Titus Oates found instant and long-lasting credibility with Parliament and the people, and the Popish Plot was in full swing. In James and Mary's defense, it’s doubtful that they knew about the above letter or others like it: James wanted to establish religious toleration, not to force people to become Catholics. However, there were letters in Coleman’s correspondence that James had clearly directed and/or sanctioned which wheedled for money from Louis XIV and/or promised that Anne would marry a Catholic, which would have guaranteed that the House of Stuart would become a Catholic dynasty. James was in big trouble with Parliament and the people, and poor Mary was too.
James tried to do damage control by claiming that Coleman was Mary’s secretary and/or that he’d fired him and/or that he'd had no idea about any of his letters; to this day, historians are not quite certain whether he was James's secretary all along, whether he was transferred from James's service to Mary's, or if he was indeed fired and when. Then and now, there was no escaping the fact that some of Coleman’s questionable letters had been written with James’s approval and under his direction, thanks to internal evidence in the text.
After a flurry of hatred and religious bigotry at the time of her marriage, Mary had become a popular member of the court and had won many people's hearts thanks to her beauty, charm, and innate goodness. Thanks to Coleman's letters and the Popish Plot, she became very unpopular and a target for malicious gossip which lasted until the resurgence of interest in the Stuarts in the early nineteenth century, when her life and character were favorably reappraised.