People in Holland and Germany, as well as in England, had now felt the new spirit of religious liberty, so that William Penn and George Fox found more men and women in those countries eager to listen to their teachings than they had found elsewhere. The Quaker leaders traveled from one town to another, meeting many people, giving them copies of the pamphlets that Penn and others had written, and urging them to join the new Society of Friends. The Quaker missionaries met with considerable success, although by no means all the people who listened to them became Quakers, but many joined one or another of the new sects that were springing up at the time. When he returned to England, Penn found the condition of the Quakers there as unsatisfactory as ever. The majority of the English people were so afraid that King Charles II. wanted to turn the country over to the Catholics that they were making the laws more and more strict against all who were not members of the Church of England, and this, of course, included the Quakers. They were being fined and imprisoned right and left, and treated worse than if they had no religion at all. As it was against the Quaker rule to take an oath of any kind, members of the new sect were at a great disadvantage in courts of law and in all places where an oath of allegiance to the government was required. To help them in this difficulty, Penn succeeded in inducing the House of Commons to allow Quakers to affirm instead of taking an oath, but before he could succeed in having the House of Lords pass the same bill the king dissolved Parliament. Then, in the summer of 1678, occurred what was known as the Popish Plot. This plot was probably largely invented by a man named Titus Oates, who claimed that he had discovered evidence that the Catholics intended to seize the government of England, kill the king and the leading statesmen, set fire to the shipping on the Thames, at a given signal murder all the Protestants, and seize Ireland with a French army. The people were so excited that they were willing to believe even such a wild story as Titus Oates told them, and immediately the authorities began to arrest and imprison Catholics as zealously as they had been imprisoning Quakers. The Quakers kept out of the dispute between the Church of England and the Catholics as well as they could, following the advice of Penn, who told his people to keep away from all worldly controversies. "Fly as for your lives," he wrote them in a letter, "from the snares therein, and get you into your watch-tower, the name of the Lord." He urged the Protestants to treat the followers of other creeds more fairly, trying to show them that in their persecution of others the Protestants were themselves guilty of doing the very things which they had most feared from others.