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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. The fellow is described by a writer of the period, as "a low man of an ill cut and very short neck," with a mouth in the middle of his face; "whereas," says the old biographer, "the nose should always form the scenter."
"If you had put a compass between his lips," continues the quaint chronicler we quote, "you might have swept his nose, forehead, and chin within the same diameter." This places the nasal organ in a high, but certainly not a very proud position, bringing it nearly flush with the eyes, and making it a sort of inverted comma on the summit of that index which the face is said to afford to the human character.
The stories got up by Oates were of the most elaborately absurd description, betraying an equal ignorance of grammar, geography, and every other branch of information, polite or otherwise. He contradicted himself over and over again, but this only rendered his story the more marvellous, and as the lower orders of English were always fond of the most extravagant fictions, the terrific tales of Oates were not too absurd to be swallowed. 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. One of these speculators on royal and public credulity was a man named William Bedloe, a fellow who, having failed as a thief, and been detected as a cheat, attempted to repair his fortunes by turning patriot. With the usual injudicious energy of mere imitation, he went much further than even Oates himself in the audacity of his statements. These two miscreants between them sent many innocent people to the scaffold, for if Oates only hinted his suspicion of a plot, Bealoe was at hand to swear to the persons involved in it. As surely as Oates declared his knowledge of some intended assassination, Bedloe would come forward to indicate not only the assassins themselves, but to point to the very weapons they would have used, when, if it was replied they did not belong to the parties against whom the charge was made, he would not scruple to swear that the instruments would have been purchased on the next day for the deadly purpose. All the rules of evidence were outraged without the slightest remorse, and poor Starkie * would have gone stark, staring mad, could he have witnessed the flagrant violations of those principles which he has expounded with so much ability.
* Starkie and Phillips are, at this day, the two
acknowledged authorities on the Law of Evidence.
The Parliament which sat during these proceedings, was in existence for seventeen years, and has gained, or rather has deserved, an undying reputation by the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act. This glorious statute prohibited the sending of anyone to prison beyond the sea, and allowed anyone in jail to insist on being carried before a judge to inquire the cause of his detention. A troublesome captive might therefore, by pretending never to be satisfied with the explanation of the court, keep running perpetually backwards and forwards to ascertain the reason of his captivity. The Oates conspiracy had not yet undergone the winnowing which the breath of public opinion—universally right, in the long run—was sure at one time or another to bestow, when a new affair, called the Meal-Tub Plot, burst on the attention of the community. A fellow of the name of Dangerfield affected to have discovered a new field of danger in an alleged design to set up a new form of government. This reprobate had been in the pillory, where it is believed the quantity of eggs that met his eye gave him the notion of hatching a plot, and he obtained the assistance of one Cellier, a midwife, to bring the project into existence. There was something very melodramatic in the mode of getting up accusations of treason in the days of Dangerfield, for it was only necessary to drop some seditious papers in a man's house, or stuff the prospectus of a revolution into his pocket, in order to make him responsible for all the consequences of a crime he had perhaps never dreamed about. Colonel Mansel was the intended victim in the Dangerfield affair; and some excise officers who had been sent to his lodgings under the pretence of being ordered to search for contraband goods, found the heads of a conspiracy cut and dried, crammed in among his bed-clothes. The colonel succeeded in showing that he had nothing to do with the transaction, and declared that, "as he had made his bed, so was he content to lie upon it." His words carried conviction home to the minds of all, and Dangerfield was obliged to admit the imposture he had practised; but he confessed another conspiracy, the particulars of which were found regularly written out and deposited in a meal-tub in the house of Cellier, the midwife.