On Michaelmas-eve Oates was brought before the Council, and entertained them with a long relation of many discourses he had heard among the Jesuits, and of their design to kill the King. He named persons, places, and times, almost without number. He said many Jesuits had disguised themselves, and were gone into Scotland, and held field conventicles there to distract the Government; that he was sent to St. Omer's, thence to Paris, and from thence to Spain; that there was a great meeting at St. Clement's; and that the result of their consultation was a resolution to kill the King by shooting, stabbing or poisoning him, and that Coleman was privy to the whole design. This was the substance of what he declared the first day; whereupon many Jesuits were seized that night and next day, and their papers sealed up.
There were many things in this declaration that made it look like an imposture. Oates did not know Coleman at first, but when he heard him speak in his own defence, he named him; he named Wakeman, the Queen's physician, though he did not know him at all; Langhorne who was the great manager for the Jesuits, he did not name; and when the King asked him what sort of man Don John (with whom he pretended to be intimate) was, he answered he was a tall, lean man, when the King knew him to be the very reverse. These were strong indications of a forgery. But what took away that suspicion was the contents of Coleman's letters, since by them it appeared that so many years ago the design of converting the nation and rooting out the northern heresy, as they called it, was so near its execution, since in them the Duke's great zeal was often mentioned with honour and many indecent reflections made on the King for his inconstancy and disposition to be brought to anything for money: and since by them their dependence was expressed to lie in the French King's assistance, and his expeditious conclusion of a general peace, as the only means that could finish their design.
A few days after this, a very extraordinary thing happened, that contributed more and more to confirm the belief of this evidence. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was an eminent justice of peace who lived near Whitehall. He had stayed in London and had kept things in order in the time of the plague, which gained him great reputation and for which he was afterwards knighted. A zealous Protestant he was, and a true lover of the Church of England, but had kind thoughts of the nonconformists, was not forward to execute the laws against them, and to avoid doing that, was not apt to search for priests or mass-houses, so that few men of the like zeal lived on better terms with the Papists than he. Oates went to him the day before he appeared at the Council-board, and declared upon oath the narrative he intended to make, which Godfrey afterwards published a little imprudently, and was thereupon severely chid for seeming to distrust the Privy Council, and presuming to intermeddle in so tender a matter.
On Saturday, October 12th, he went abroad in the morning, was seen about one o'clock near St. Clement's Church, but was seen no more till his body was found, on the Thursday night following, in a ditch about a mile out of town near St. Pancras Church. His sword was thrust through him, but no blood was on his clothes or about him; his shoes were clean, his money was in his pocket; a mark was all round his neck, which showed he was strangled; his breast was bruised; his neck was broken, and there were many drops of white wax-lights on his breeches, which being only used by priests and persons of quality, made people imagine in whose hands he had been.
Oates's evidence was, by means of this murder, so far believed that it was not safe to seem to doubt of it; and when the Parliament met, he was called before the bar of the House of Commons, where he made a fresh discovery. He said that the Pope had declared England to be his kingdom, and accordingly had sent over commissions to make Lord Arundel of Wardour, Chancellor; Lord Powys, Treasurer; Sir William Godolphin, then in Spain, Privy Seal; Coleman, Secretary of State; Belasyse, General of the Army; Petre, Lieutenant-General; Ratcliffe, Major-General; Stafford, Paymaster-General; and Langhorne, Advocate-General; besides many other commissions for subaltern officers. And he now swore, upon his own knowledge, that both Coleman and Wakeman were in the plot; that Coleman had given eighty guineas to four ruffians to murder the King at Windsor; and that Wakeman had undertaken to poison him for £15,000; and he excused his not knowing them before by the fatigue and want of rest he had been under for two nights before, which made him not master of himself.
There were great inconsistencies in all this. That one man should not know another that was a principal in a plot wherein he himself was concerned; that one man should have £15,000 for a safe way of dispatching, and four but twenty guineas apiece for doing it openly; that he should love the King so well as he then pretended, and yet suffer these ruffians to go down to kill him, without giving notice of the danger—these and some other incongruities in the pretended commissions (for Belasyse was perpetually gouty, Petre was no military man, and Ratcliffe lived chiefly in the north), were characters sufficient of a fictitious discovery, had not some other incidents concurred to give it a further confirmation.
Bedloe, a man of a very vicious life, delivered himself to the magistrates of Bristol, pretending he knew the secret of Godfrey's murder, and accordingly was brought to London and examined by the Secretary. He said he had seen Godfrey's body at Somerset House, and was offered by Lord Belasyse's servant £4,000 to assist in carrying it away, whereupon he had gone out of town as far as Bristol, but was so pursued with horror that he could not forbear discovering it, but at the same time denied that he knew anything of the plot, till, on the next day, when he was brought to the bar of the House of Lords, he made a full discovery of it, confirming the chief points of Oates's evidence.
While things were in this ferment at London, Carstairs came from Scotland to complain of Duke Lauderdale. He had brought up such witnesses as he always had by him to prove the thing,[11] and as he was looking about for a lucky piece of villainy, he chanced to go into an eating-house in Covent Garden, where one Staley, a Popish banker, was in the next room, and pretended that he heard him say in French that the King was a rogue, and persecuted the people of God, and that he himself would stab him if nobody else would. With these words he and one of his witnesses went to him next day, and threatened to swear them against him unless he would give them a sum of money. The poor man foresaw his danger, but he chose rather to leave himself to their malice than become their prey; so he was apprehended, and in five days brought to his trial. The witnesses gave full evidence against him to the purpose above mentioned, nor could he offer anything to invalidate their credit. All that he urged was, the improbability of his saying such dangerous words in a quarter of the town where almost everybody understood French; so he was cast, and prepared himself seriously for death, all along protesting that he knew of no plot, nor had ever said the words sworn against him, nor anything to that purpose.
There was one accident now fell in that tended not a little to impair Oates's credit. He had declared before the House of Lords that he had then informed concerning all persons of any distinction that he knew to be engaged in the plot, and yet after that he deposed that the Queen had a great share in it, and was, in his hearing, consenting to the King's death. But his pretence for not accusing her before was so lame and frivolous that it would not satisfy people, though Bedloe, to support his evidence, swore things of the like nature.
When Coleman was brought to his trial, Oates and Bedloe swore flatly against him what was mentioned before; and he, to invalidate their evidence, insisted on Oates's not knowing him when they were confronted; on his being in Warwickshire at the same time that Oates swore he was in town; and on the improbability of his transacting such dangerous matters with two such men as he had never seen before. His letters to Père la Chaise were the heaviest part of the evidence, and to these he did not deny but that he had intentions to bring in the Catholic religion, but only by a toleration, not by rebellion or blood, and that the aid he had requested from France for that purpose was meant only of the advance of some money and the interposition of that Court. After a long trial he was found guilty and sentence passed upon him to die as a traitor. He suffered with much composedness and devotion, and died much better than he lived, denying with his last breath every tittle of what the witnesses had sworn against him, though many were sent from both Houses, offering to interpose for his pardon if he would confess.