John Oates

“ This was a happy day for the lords in the Tower, who, expecting their trial, had this gone against the prisoners at the bar, would all have been in the utmost hazard. For my part, I look on Oates as a vain, insolent man, puffed up with the favor of the Commons for having discovered something really true, more especially as detecting the dangerous intrigue of Coleman, proved out of his own letters, and of a general design which the Jesuited party of the Papists ever had and still have, to ruin the Church of England ”

“ Hearing this, his majesty inquired what kind of person Don John was. Oates said he was tall, lean, and black; whereas the monarch knew him to be small, stout, and fair. And on another occasion, when asked where he had heard the French king's confessor hire an assassin to shoot Charles, he replied, "At the Jesuits' monastery close by the Louvre;" at which the king, losing patience with the impostor, cried out, "Tush, man! the Jesuits have no house within a mile of the Louvre!" ”

“ Another proof of genuineness has still greater force, the extreme moderation of the whole narrative. A scoundrel following in the track of Oates and Bedloe would never have concocted such a story. So far from being to his advantage, what Scott said might actually put him into a most unpleasant predicament. The chief point of the plot which Oates had discovered was the king’s assassination. ”

“ The letters sent to Bedingfield at Windsor were produced. Oates skated over the thin ice as best he could, declaring that Jesuits used to make their letters appear foolish to conceal their meaning. He pursued his tale with unbroken confidence. Arundel and Bellasis were mentioned. Charles remarked that those lords had served him faithfully, and that without clear proof he would not credit anything against them. Oates protested to God that he would accuse none falsely; he did not say that they were partners in the plot, only that they were to have been acquainted with it. ”

“ By others the instrument was thought to be somewhat weak-minded; at a later date he seceded to the Protestant faith and became curate in the city, later still to be welcomed back into the bosom of his previous church; withal a very pious person, removed from politics, and much given to making converts. Neither conversion nor piety alone was an end to Oates. He soon made his way to Father Richard Strange, provincial of the Society of Jesus, and notified him of a desire for admission into the order. ”

“ Written at length and with the promise of more to come, Oates’ True and Exact Narrative of the Horrid Plot and Conspiracy of the Popish Party against the life of His Sacred Majesty, the Government, and the Protestant Religion filled a folio pamphlet of sixty-eight pages. The Pope, said Oates, had declared himself lord of the kingdoms of England and Ireland. To the work of their reduction and government the Jesuits were commissioned by papal briefs and instructed by orders from the general of the society. Jesuit agents were at work fomenting rebellion in Scotland and Ireland. ”

“ On the fourth day of this ponderous trial Lord Stafford closed his main defence. He pointed to the turpitude of Oates’ character, and spoke with emotion of his abhorrence that a man guilty of such immorality as to profess a change of religion which he did not [366] experience should be allowed to give evidence against a peer among his peers. “I appeal to your lordships,” he cried, “whether such ... is not a perjured fellow, and no competent witness? No Christian, but a devil, and a witness for the devil.” ”

“ Animated by a belief, that this would be agreeable to the king, Oates had the boldness, at the bar of the House of Commons, to utter these words, in his affected phraseology, "Aye, Taitus Oates, accause Catherine, Quean of England, of haigh traison!" The grounds of his accusation are stated in the trial of Wakeman, the queen's physician, who, he alleged, was bribed with 15,000l to poison the king, in case he should escape the poniard of a Jesuit, named Coniers, and the pistols of Pickering and Groves. ”

“ At the trial Gifford, Palmer, and Parry were produced to give evidence of their personal knowledge that Oates had been there the whole of the time.681 No credence whatever can be given to such witnesses. It is worthy of remark that they were housed and entertained by no other than Mrs. Cellier, who was afterwards deeply concerned both in the Meal Tub Plot and in the case of Knox and Lane, and was pilloried for an atrocious libel in connection with the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.682 No doubt can exist on the subject of Oates’ repeated and astounding [345] perjuries. ”

“ The fact must be faced that so late as December of the year 1680, more than two years after Oates’ first revelations, and after the disclosure at Wakeman’s trial had rendered certain the fact of his perjury, many of the most honourable and intelligent men in the kingdom sincerely accepted as credible the evidence offered against Lord Stafford, and as earnest of their belief sent to the scaffold one of their own number, a man bowed down with years and infirmity, the victim of miscreants supported by the enemies of the king, for the false plot against whose life he was now to die. ”

“ They had pretended to discover a Catholic plot in Ireland, which, if one had existed any where, was doubtless the place where it might have been found. Their evidence, however, contained pretty much such a raw-head and bloody-bones story as that of Oates, and equally unworthy of credit. Yet Shaftesbury constituted himself their protector, and had them brought over to England, where he doubtless intended, that their Irish plot should be as warmly agitated in the Oxford parliament, as the English conspiracy in that of 1679. ”

“ On October 17 his corpse was found in the fields at the foot of Primrose Hill. From that moment belief in the Popish Plot was rooted in the mind of the nation. The excitement throughout the country rose to the mark of frenzy. Godfrey’s death seemed clear evidence of the truth of Oates’ sanguinary tales, and the prelude to a general massacre of Protestants. It became an article of faith that he had been murdered by the Catholics. To deny it was to incur the most awkward suspicion. No man thought himself safe from the same fate. Every householder laid in a stock of arms. ”

“ The infamous Oates fared, at the Revolution, not so well as he wished, though much better than he deserved. James II. by the extreme cruelty of the punishment, which Jefferies doomed, and he suffered to be inflicted, contrived to excite the public commiseration even in favour of this miscreant, whose forsworn tongue had occasioned more murders than the dagger of the most sanguinary bravo. After the Revolution he obtained a pardon, or rather remission of his inhuman sentence, to be imprisoned during life, and pilloried five times every year. ”

“ This much may be gathered from the reports of letters which he was said to have sent to Coleman and the Duke of York. Coleman then met him at Welden’s house, and together they went through Oates’ information, [152] “Oates,” said Godfrey, “is sworn and is perjured.” This alone was hardly a secret so dangerous as to make him fear for his life. Many believed it. It was not an uncommon thing to say. The most grievous consequence that could ensue would be to gain the reputation of a “bloody papist,” and possibly to be threatened with implication in the Plot. ”

“ Oates and Bedloe were the chief witnesses against the prisoner, and Scroggs in his summing up had the indecency to declare that ‘no man of understanding but for by-ends would have left his religion to be a papist’ (ib. vii. 1–78) . At the trial of William Ireland, Thomas Pickering, and John Grove, for high treason, at the Old Bailey on 17 Dec., though it was clear that the testimony of Oates and his associates was perjured, Scroggs insisted that ‘it is most plain the plot is discovered, and that by these men ”

“ The author alludes to the wonderful project to assassinate the king by Pickering and Groves, to which Oates bore testimony. Pickering, a man in easy circumstances, and whom religious zeal alone induced to murder his sovereign, was to have 30,000 masses ”

“ Seccombe’s monograph on Titus Oates in Twelve Bad Men, and of Sir George Sitwell’s study of The First Whig. I am unable however to follow these writers, and especially Sir George Sitwell, to whom I am much indebted for a loan of his book, in placing much reliance upon witnesses on the Catholic and Tory side. These labour under as great a bias as their opponents, and on some points are convicted of falsehood. This applies in particular to the evidence of L’Estrange and Simpson Tonge, upon whose authority the story of the deliberate concoction of the Plot by Oates and Dr. Tonge rests. ”

“ When Oates and Bedloe exhibited in 1680 “articles of high misdemeanours” against Scroggs before the privy council, they charged him in one that at the previous Monmouth assizes he “did say to Mr. William Bedloe that he did believe in his conscience that Richard Langhorn, whom he condemned, died wrongfully.” To which the Chief Justice answered “that at Monmouth assizes he did tell Mr. Bedloe that he was more unsatisfied about Mr. Langhorn’s trial than all the rest; and the rather, that he was credibly informed, since the trial, that Mr. ”

“ He became the most successful political novelist ever known, and received a pension of £1,200 a year, besides lodgings in Whitehall, by way of recognition for his services in contributing to the amusement of the people, by frightening them out of their propriety.
The success of Oates induced a number of imitators, each of whom contrived to discover a plot to murder the king, with a complete set of written documents, to prove the existence of the foul conspiracy. ”

“ To the majority, any inconsistencies in Oates's tale seemed more than counterbalanced by the mass of circumstantial, and often quite irrelevant, detail which he had woven with no little ingenuity into his narrative. He had doubtless while living among the Roman catholics picked up many little facts which they and their friends would have preferred to conceal. Thus Symon Patrick relates how, in the early days of the plot, a certain Father Dupuis was brought before Oates, who looked earnestly upon him and said: ‘This is Father du Puis, who was to write the king's life after they killed him. ”

“ Oates proved an instrument absolutely devoid of scruples. He set himself laboriously to learn the secrets of the jesuits, haunted the Pheasant coffee-house in Holborn and other favourite resorts of the catholics, with whom he lost no opportunity of ingratiating himself. In April 1677 he formally professed reconciliation with the church of Rome. He picked up acquaintance with Whitbread, Pickering, and others of the fathers at Somerset House, where Charles's queen-consort had her private chapel, and eagerly sought admission among the jesuits. ”

“ Just at this time, when he was in the frame of mind in which men are open to the worst temptations, he fell in with the worst of tempters, in truth, with the Devil in human shape. Oates had obtained his liberty, his pardon, and a pension which made him a much richer man than nineteen twentieths of the members of that profession of which he was the disgrace. ”

“ Oates was now (the author is speaking of a time soon after his first examination before parliament) in his trine exaltation; his plot in full force, efficacy, and virtue: he walked about with his guards (assigned) for fear of the Papists murdering him. He had lodgings in Whitehall, and 1200l. per annum pension. And no wonder, after he had the impudence to cry to the House of Lords in plain terms, that if they would not help him he must help himself. ”

“ We old fogeys know our tastes are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know, at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man, a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the æsthete in Florence.”
“Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It reminds me of the grand slap-up [168] advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper. ”

“ But it was not alone a passion for justice which animated those who insisted on the illegality of the sentence. Oates was [204] by many regarded as one who had rendered inestimable services to the cause of liberty and religion.
Paul may plant, Apollos may water: the labour of each supposes that of the other. Shaftesbury, Burnet, Oates—to which of the three are we to award the palm? It is certain that but for Oates there would have been no Popish Plot; it is arguable that but for the Popish Plot there would have been no Glorious Revolution. ”

“ Oates's hopes revived as the protestant current gathered strength under the auspices of the Prince of Orange. Sarotti, the Venetian ambassador, wrote to the signory that when Oates stood on the pillory the people would not permit any to inflict the least hurt upon him. Soon after the landing of William of Orange he emerged from prison, and was received by the new king early in 1689. ”

“ Aghast at so horrible a relation, the council knew not what to credit. The evil reputation Oates had borne, the baseness of character he revealed in detailing his actions as a spy, the mysterious manner in which the fanatical Tonge accounted for his possession of the document, tended to make many doubt; whilst others, believing no man would have the hardihood to bring forward such charges without being able to sustain them by proof, contended it was their duty to sift them to the end. ”