Titus Oates

“ Titus Oates—the man who got up what was called the Popish plot, and by perjury and villainy, consigned many an innocent head to the scaffold. He was assisted by a man who has, as no other judge has, disgraced the ermine—Jeffries, who drank himself to death in the tower, when his co-worker in iniquities and evil deeds with dreadful and condign punishment followed him. The effort of nature to produce so great a monster was so terrible that it required a resting spell of two hundred years before she could produce another such monster in the shape of Dr. ”

“ Under the stimulating effect of the repeated summonses of Oates before Parliament, and his continually augmenting disclosures, both Houses voted that "There had been and still was a damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried on by the Popish recusants for assassinating and murdering the king, and for subverting the Government, and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion." Titus Oates was declared "the saviour of his country," and a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year was, at the instigation of Parliament, settled on him. ”

“ Titus Oates has grown so presumptuous as to accuse the queen of intending to poison the king, which certainly that pious and virtuous lady abhorred the thought of. Oates probably thought to gratify some who would have been glad his majesty should have married a fruitful lady; but the king was too kind a husband to let any of these make impression on him. However, divers of the Popish peers were sent to the Tower, accused by Oates, and all the Roman Catholic lords were by a new Act for ever excluded the Parliament, which was a mighty blow. ”

“ Fear fell upon all men: the times of Titus Oates and his famous plot presented themselves to everybody's imagination, and the Duke's head lay more and more uneasy on his pillow every night.
Sir John Fenwick, however, was not yet taken: Sir William Parkyns and Sir John Friend died with firmness and with honour, compromising no man. Sir George Barkley had escaped; the Earl of Aylesbury, though implicated by the testimony of several witnesses in the lesser offences of the conspiracy, was not arrested ”

“ Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 29th of December 1680, the crowd hooting him on his way to the scaffold, for Titus Oates’s infamous accusations had made any Roman Catholic an object of hatred to the populace. ”

“ Oates's friends were at first content to counteract L'Estrange's strictures by issuing a pamphlet called ‘Discovery on Discovery, in Defence of Titus Oates;’ but finding this expedient unavailing, they took a bolder step. A young man named Simson Tonge, son of Ezerel Tonge [q. v.] , a friend of Oates, and author of ‘Jesuits Assassins,’ 1680, and of other works in behalf of the plot, was in the autumn of 1680 arrested on a charge of having publicly expressed doubts of Oates's good faith. ”

“ Aloysius,’ which at that period comprised the counties of Lancaster and Stafford. Father Atkins was one of the most remarkable of the victims of Titus Oates's plot. In 1679 he was living at Wolverhampton, being almost an octogenarian, and for six years he had been completely paralysed, bedridden, and nearly speechless. Nevertheless he was charged with high treason in inciting the people to rebellion. The pursuivants dragged him from his bed, and, forcing him into a most incommodious vehicle, conveyed him to Stafford gaol, eleven miles distant. ”

“ Yet even his rascality grows dim beside that of Titus Oates, whose horrible concoction of lies concerning a pretended Popish plot sent nearly forty men to the scaffold. The execution of William Lord Stafford on Tower Hill, December 29, 1680, on the charge sworn to by Oates that he planned to kill the king and place the Duke of York on the throne, was the turning-point in the agitation. When it began Oates was half deified by the excited populace as the deliverer of the country; but as time went on men shook their heads, doubtfully at first, then strongly. ”

“ To be dressed up like a tomfool, and prate like a poll parrot, as he phrased it in his own thoughts, was unutterably odious to William Massarene, but he was powerless under his enslaver’s orders. When the Easter recess was passed and the great night came, he appeared as Titus Oates, looking and feeling very ridiculous with his stout bowed legs in black silk stockings and ruffled breeches; but, after all, it was not worse than Court dress, and it had procured him admittance to Otterbourne House.
“Mind, the man is not to speak to me ”

“ That Catholics of such standing, and with such training as should have taught them better, should have engaged in so wicked a conspiracy, was one of the chief reasons why adherents of the ancient religion were treated so cruelly in England for more than two centuries. Titus Oates's invention, the Popish Plot, never would have found believers, had not men remembered the Gunpowder Plot. In Cromwell's time, and during the civil war that preceded it, assassination plots were common, and some succeeded. The Cavaliers had very loose notions on the subject. ”

“ Of all the fugitive writers on the Protestant side who contributed to foment the agitation produced by the revelations of Titus Oates, Oldham is the ablest and boldest. He is not merely the most honest representative of the spirit that actuated his party, at a period when the kingdom was convulsed by religious feuds, but the only one whose works, addressed to the passions of the hour, are worth reproduction. ”

“ One can hardly be surprised at the arrest and punishment of Titus Oates when James succeeded. At the same time to flog a man all the way from Aldgate to Newgate, and two days afterwards from Newgate to Tyburn, seems, short of the104 tortures of a Damiens, [3] the most horrible barbarity ever inflicted on a criminal since the time when a Roman could flog a slave to death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Before morning Father Ireland, procurator of the province of the Society of Jesus, Fenwick, agent for the college at St. Omers, Pickering, and other Jesuits were in Newgate. Oates returned to the council on the morning of Sunday, being Michaelmas day, to continue his examination. This [77] time the king was present. Oates was made to repeat all he had said the day before. He had named in his narrative Don John of Austria as not only cognizant of the plot, but active in it. What was he like? asked Charles. Tall and graceful, with fair hair, Oates replied promptly. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ If he survived this horrible infliction, he was to be kept close prisoner for life, and, five times a-year, he was to be brought forth from his dungeon, and exposed in the pillory in different parts of London.
59The whipping, says Neal, was inflicted with a severity unknown to the English nation. Dr Calamy tells us that he saw Oates at the cart-tail from Newgate to Tyburn, and that his back, fearfully swollen with the first whipping, looked as if it had been flayed. He adds: “Oates was a man of invincible courage, and endured what would have killed a great many others ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”