TITUS OATES
Titus Oates has justly been considered one of the world’s great impostors. By birth he was an Anabaptist, by prudence a clergyman, by profession a perjurer. From an obscure and beggarly existence he raised himself to opulence and an influence more than episcopal, and, when he fell, it was with the fame of having survived the finest flogging ever inflicted. De Quincey considered the murder of Godfrey to be the most artistic performance of the seventeenth century. It was far surpassed by the products of Oates’ roving imagination. To the connoisseur of murder the mystery of Godfrey’s death may be more exhilarating, but in the field of broad humour Oates bears the palm. There is, after all, something laughable about the rascal. His gross personality had in it a comic strain. He could not only invent but, when unexpected events occurred, adapt them on the instant to his own end. His coarse tongue was not without a kind of wit. Whenever he appears on the scene, as has been said of Jeffreys, we may be sure of good sport. Yet to his victims he was an emblem of tragic injustice. Very serious were his lies to the fifteen men whom he brought to death. The world was greedy of horrors, and Oates sounded the alarm at the crucial moment. In the game he went on to play the masterstrokes were his. Those who would reduce him to a subordinate of his associate Dr. Tonge, the hare-brained parson whose quarterly denunciations of Rome failed to arouse the interest of Protestant London, have strangely misunderstood his character. Tonge was a necessary go-between, but Oates the supreme mover of diabolical purpose.
In the year of the execution of King Charles the First Titus Oates was born at Oakham in the county of Rutland. His father, Samuel Oates, son of the rector of Marsham in Norfolk, had graduated from Corpus College, Cambridge, and received orders from the hands of the Bishop of Norwich. On the advent of the Puritan Revolution he turned Anabaptist, and achieved fame in the eastern counties as a Dipper of energy and sanctity. In 1650 he became chaplain to Colonel Pride’s regiment, and four years later had the distinction of being arrested by Monk for seditious practices in Scotland. The Restoration returned him to the bosom of the established church, and in 1666 he was presented by Sir Richard Barker to the rectory of All Saints’ at Hastings. Shortly before, his son Titus went his ways to seek education and a livelihood in the world as a scholar. Ejected in turn from Merchant Taylors’ School and Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, he found a refuge at St. John’s College, and some three years later was instituted to the vicarage of Bobbing in Kent. “By the same token,” it was remarked, “the plague and he visited Cambridge at the same time.”
Oates was a bird of passage. He obtained a license not to reside in his parish, and went to visit his father at Hastings. Long time did not pass before he took wing again. He had already once been indicted for perjury, though no further proceedings were taken in the case.[1] Now he conspired with his father to bring an odious charge against the schoolmaster of Hastings, who had incurred his enmity. The charge fell to the ground, Oates’ abominable evidence was proved to be false, and he was thrown into gaol pending an action for a thousand pounds damages.[2] Escape from prison saved him from disaster, and he fled to London. As far as is known, no attempt was made to prosecute him. The men of Hastings were probably rejoiced at his disappearance. There was no profit to be made out of such a culprit as Oates. If he were caught, it would only bring expense and trouble to the authorities. It was the business of no one else to pursue the matter. So Oates went free. Without employment, he managed to obtain the post of chaplain on board a vessel in the Royal Navy. The calling was rather more disreputable than that of the Fleet parson of later times. Discipline on board the king’s ships was chiefly manifest by its absence; under the captaincy of favourites from court the efficiency of the service was maintained only by the rude ability of men who had been bred in it; and the standard expected from the chaplain was “damnably low.” Nevertheless Oates failed to achieve the required measure of respectability. He was expelled upon the same grounds as he had formerly urged against the fortunate schoolmaster.[3]
The mischance marked the beginning of his rise. Again adrift in London, the tide threw him upon William Smith, his former master at Merchant Taylors’ School. It was Bartholomew-tide in the year 1676. With Smith was Matthew Medburne, a player from the Duke of York’s theatre, and by creed a Roman Catholic. The two made friends with Oates, and on Medburne’s introduction he became a member of a club which met twice a week at the Pheasant Inn in Fuller’s Rents. The club contained both Catholics and Protestants, discussion of religion and politics being prohibited under penalty of a fine.[4] Here Oates made his first acquaintance with those of the religion which he was afterwards to turn to a source of so great profit. The rule which forbade controversy applied only to the meetings of the club, and beyond its limits discussion between members seems to have been free. It was perhaps by the agency of some of these that in the winter of the same year Oates was admitted as chaplain into the service of the Duke of Norfolk.[5] Testimony to character on the engagement of a servant in the seventeenth century was probably not severely examined.
In the house of the great Catholic noble Oates found himself in the company of priests of the forbidden church. Conversation turned on the subject of religion, and Oates lent ear to the addresses of the other side. Though he wore the gown of an English minister, his faith sat light upon him, and he did not scruple to change it for advantage. On Ash Wednesday 1677 he was formally reconciled to the Church of Rome.[6] The instrument for the salvation of the strayed lamb was one Berry, alias Hutchinson, a Jesuit whom Oates had afterwards the grace to describe as “a saintlike man, one that was religious for religion’s sake.” 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. Consulting with his fellows, Strange gave consent to the proposal, and before the end of April, Oates was shipped on a Bilboa merchantman with letters to the English Jesuit seminary at Valladolid.[7]
There was little that Oates could hope from a career as an English parson. Almost any other calling, especially one that took him abroad, offered better chances. He probably believed that Jesuit emissaries led a merry life and a licentious. Perhaps it is true that, as he said, vague talk in the Duke of Norfolk’s household of the glorious future for Catholicism had come to his ears. At least the times must make him credulous of Catholic machinations. To his sanguine mind the future would present unbounded possibilities. On the other side, stout recruits for the Catholic cause were not to be despised. Oates’ character was tough, and he was not the man to shrink from dirty work. Had they known him well, his new patrons would hardly have welcomed him as a convert. The plausible humility he aired was the outcome of a discretion which rarely lasted longer than to save him from starvation. By nature he was a bully, brutal, sensual, avaricious, and gifted with a greed of adulation which, in a man of less impudence, would have caused his speedy ruin. From earliest youth he was a liar. Yet he was shrewd enough, and shrewdness and promptitude were qualities not without a certain value. His vices had not yet grown to be notorious. So he was taken to serve masters who generally succeeded in giving their pupils at least the outward stamp of piety. In person Oates was hideous. His body was short, his shoulders broad. He was bull-necked and bow-legged. Under a low forehead his eyes were set small and deep. His countenance was large and moon-like. So monstrous was his length of chin that the wide slit mouth seemed almost to bisect his purple face. His voice rasped inharmoniously, and he could tune it at will to the true Puritan whine or to scold on terms with such a master of abuse as Jeffreys. The pen of Dryden has drawn a matchless portrait of the man—
Sunk were his eyes, his voice was harsh and loud,
Sure signs he neither choleric was nor proud:
His long chin proved his wit, his saint-like grace