Thomas Oates

“ The tale of Oates, though it had sufficed to convulse the whole realm, would not, unless confirmed by other evidence, suffice to destroy the humblest of those whom he had accused. For, by the old law of England, two witnesses are necessary to establish a charge of treason. But the success of the first impostor produced its natural consequences. In a few weeks he had been raised from penury and obscurity to opulence, to power which made him the dread of princes and nobles, and to notoriety such as has for low and bad minds all the attractions of glory. ”

“ Only such confirmed reprobates as Thomas Oates, the bad boy of the school (whom Mr. Pocklington in his more jocular moments addressed as "Titus," much to his hearers' mystification) , could endure the stigma of being perpetually without a full complement. Thomas indeed once electrified the school by announcing to Miss Mary, when asked for a ticket in default of an unlearned lesson, that all his tickets were in pawn already, and that, until he had redeemed one of the same, he would be unable to oblige her. Mr. ”

“ In 1681, Oates appeared as a witness in defence of one Colledge, better known as the “Protestant joiner,” a busy man and a zealot against Popery, who was accused of treason upon no better grounds than had served his own party for the destruction of so many Papists. The court was eager for revenge, and by no means scrupulous concerning the means of obtaining it; the witnesses, who had supported the plot, were indifferent which way they perjured themselves, so long as perjury was profitable, and swore against Colledge as readily as against the Jesuits. ”

“ The most impudent false witnesses could hardly venture to shock the common sense of mankind by accusing him of being a conspirator. The Papists whom Oates selected for attack were peers, prelates, Jesuits, Benedictines, a busy political agent, a lawyer in high practice, a court physician. ”

“ The panic which Godfrey’s death had excited gradually subsided. Every day brought to light some new falsehood or contradiction in the stories of Oates and Bedloe. The people were glutted with the blood of Papists, as they had, twenty years before, been glutted with the blood of regicides. When the first sufferers in the plot were brought to the bar, the witnesses for the defence were in danger of being torn in pieces by the mob. Judges, jurors, and spectators seemed equally indifferent to justice, and equally eager for revenge. ”

“ We all remember it." Still the knave stood up erect, and exclaimed, with an impudence which Oates might have envied, "This hiding is all a trick got up between the Bishop and Blackhead. The Bishop has taken Blackhead off; and they are both trying to stifle the plot." This was too much. There was a smile and a lifting up of hands all round the board. "Man," cried Caermarthen, "wouldst thou have us believe that the Bishop contrived to have this paper put where it was ten to one that our messengers had found it, and where, if they had found it, it might have hanged him?" ”

“ I went early to the Old Bailey sessions–house, to the famous trial of Sir G. Wakeman, one of the Queen’s physicians, and three Benedictine monks: the first (who I take to be a worthy gentleman, abhorring such a fact) for intending to poison the King: the others as accomplices to carry on the plot to subvert the government and introduce Popery. The bench was crowded with the judges, the lord mayor, justices, and innumerable spectators. The chief accusers, Dr. Oates (as he called himself) , and one Bedloe, a man of inferior note. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A fortnight after Coleman’s execution, Whitebread, Fenwick, Ireland, Pickering, and Grove were brought to the bar of the Old Bailey. Thomas White or Whitebread, alias Harcourt, was a man sixty years of age. He had been educated at St. Omers, became a professed father in the Society of Jesus in 1652, and was chosen provincial of the English province at the beginning of the year 1678.615 It was by his means that Oates had entered the Jesuit College at St. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The testimony of Oates was so strange and improbable, that it never could have obtained credence for a moment, except at a time when men had ‘lost their reason.’ The basis of his whole narration, was his statement relating to the consult of the Jesuits in April, which we give in his own words. ‘They were ordered to meet by virtue of a brief from Rome, sent by the father general of the society. They went on to these resolves: That Pickering and Grove should go on, and continue in attempting to assassinate the king’s person by shooting, or other means. Grove was to have fifteen hundred pounds. ”

“ Shortly afterwards the king, at the request of the lower house, granted the perjurer a pension of 5l. a week.
His testimony remaining invalid in a court of law, Oates had to reconcile himself henceforth to a private career; but from the eager patronage that he extended in 1691 to William Fuller [q. v.] the impostor, who boarded for a time with Oates and his friend, John Tutchin, in Axe Yard, Westminster, it is evident that he was still interested in the fabrication of plots. Oates lent Fuller money on the security of a Jacobite plot, which the latter was prepared to divulge ”

“ Oates was hailed as the saviour of the nation and was lodged with Dr. Tonge in Whitehall under a guard. “One might,” exclaimed North, “have denied Christ with less contest than the Plot.” To add to the general confusion the king left for the races at Newmarket, scandalising all by his indecent levity. During his absence Dr. Burnet paid Tonge a visit in his lodgings at Whitehall. He found the poor man so much uplifted that he seemed to have lost the little sense he ever had. Oates appeared and was introduced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By a section of the serious world, who yet place implicit faith in all Sir Edmondbury Godfrey’s wounds, and take the inscription on the Monument of Fish Street Hill as law and gospel, Titus Oates is regarded as a species of Protestant martyr—of a sorry, slippery kind, may be, but, at all events, as one who has suffered sorely for the good cause. The government repension him; he grows fat and bloated, and if Tom Brown is to be believed (Miscellanies, 1697) , Doctor Oates, about the time of Hogarth’s birth, marries a rich city widow of Jewin Street. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Presently Oates named two catholic peers, Lord Arundel of Wardour and Lord Bellasis, as being concerned in the plot, when the king again spoke to him, saying these lords had served his father faithfully, and fought his wars bravely, and unless proof were clear against them, he would not credit they sought him ill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Upon further inquiry being prosecuted, it turned out that a low fellow, named Titus Oates, was at the bottom of this plot, to raise the apprehensions of the public. Oates was a man of straw, the son of an anabaptist preacher; and our antiquarian recollections have reminded us, that from the extraordinary propensity of Oates to deceive by false representations, the application of the term "chaff" to stories at variance with fact, most likely owes its origin. Happy had it been for many in those days, if Oates had been so dealt with, that the chaff had been all thrashed out of him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So vehement were the houses, that they sat every day, forenoon and afternoon, on the subject of the plot: for no other business could be attended to. A committee of lords was appointed to examine prisoners and witnesses: blank warrants were put into their hands, for the commitment of such as should be accused or suspected. Oates, who, though his evidence were true, must, by his own account, be regarded as an infamous villain, was by every one applauded, caressed and called the savior of the nation. He was recommended by the parliament to the king. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it appears that Oates, dreading probably the opposition of powerful enemies, had very anxiously acquitted the duke, Danby, Ormond, and all the ministry; persons who were certainly the most obnoxious to the popular leaders. Besides, the whole texture of the plot contains such low absurdity, that it is impossible to have been the invention of any man of sense or education. It is true the more monstrous and horrible the conspiracy, the better was it fitted to terrify, and thence to convince, the populace: but this effect, we may safely say, no one could beforehand have expected ”

“ New informers, too, began to appear, confirming Oates's statements, and adding new details of their own, that they might share his distinctions and rewards. These men became continually more and more bold, in proportion to the increasing readiness of the people to receive their inventions for truths. They accused persons of higher and higher rank, until at last they dared to implicate the queen herself in their charges. ”