Odd this day
This was the day the Popish Plot was set in motion, the brainchild of an inveterate liar, Titus Oates, and his friend Israel Tonge, an unhinged fan of conspiracy theories. Yes, that’s right: it’s time for me to bang you over the head with my contemporary resonance sledgehammer again.
We begin with Oates — “one of the world’s great impostors”, according to historian John Pollock (The Popish Plot: A Study in the History of the Reign of Charles II, 1903). At Cambridge, young Titus “gained a … reputation for stupidity, homosexuality, and a ‘Canting Fanatical way’”, and left without a degree. He got around this by the simple expedient of telling people he had got a degree, and duly got ordained in the Church of England.
He lost his first post because his parishioners didn’t like him. Whether this was because (as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts it) he had a “limp, red face, bull neck, nasal drawl, and harsh and brassy voice … [and] a raucous and difficult personality”, or as one Roger North, writing in 1740, said, his “common conversation was larded with lewd oaths, Blasphemy, saucy atheistical, and in every way offensive discourse”, or some combination of all of the above, who can say?
So, he set out to be a schoolmaster instead. His way of going about this was to select the job he wanted and to accuse the incumbent of sodomy. According to William Donaldson (Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics, 2002) the schoolmaster
was able to prove that he was nowhere in the vicinity at the time of the alleged indecency; further, that the young man he was supposed to have committed it with didn’t exist.
Like many compulsive liars, Oates did not find that a charge of perjury caused him to see and mend the error of his ways. He ran away and got himself made a ship’s chaplain — a job from which he was swiftly “dismissed for homosexual practices” (J P Kenyon, The Popish Plot, 1972).
When the perjury charge caught up with him again, he escaped again, and became chaplain to the protestants in the Catholic earl of Norwich’s household. This was another job he mysteriously did not hold down for long, and soon he was off converting to Catholicism. Donaldson reckoned this was “to build up his inside knowledge”, so that he could start accusing the infernal papists of terrible things. Oates himself later wrote that he was “lulled asleep, by the allurements of the Popish Syrenes”, but ODNB says he started begging from priests at Somerset House, and stealing from them.
Whatever his motive, he persuaded prominent Jesuit Richard Strange to send him to the Catholic training college at Valladolid in Spain — which he was kicked out of. So, of course, he claimed he’d got a doctorate in Divinity from the University of Salamanca, and started calling himself Father Ambrose. He then went to St Omers college in France, under the name Sampson Lucy. The other pupils were children, and Oates was by this time well into his 20s. He did not, to put it mildly, fit in. Or, as Kenyon puts it:
No school would have welcomed a new pupil of his age, and especially one so bizarre. His personal appearance was grotesquely unprepossessing. His conversation was often bawdy and blasphemous, and on this count alone he was no fit company for small boys.
He was expelled. Obviously. He returned to England and met up again with a man he’d first encountered around the time he converted: Dr Israel Tonge, variously described as ‘fervent’, ‘crazy’, and ‘rabid’ in his anti-Catholic leanings, and a man who believed the Jesuits had started the Great Fire of London. Together, they wrote a 68-page manuscript, True and Exact Narrative of the Horrid Plot and Conspiracy of the Popish Party against the life of His Sacred Majesty, the Government, and the Protestant Religion. Not a solitary word of it was ‘true’, or anywhere near ‘exact’, particularly the bit about
a secret conclave of the Jesuits held at the White Horse tavern in London on 24 April 1678, at which [Oates] claimed to have been present and where matters of treason were discussed. (ODNB again)
However, they did some careful plotting. On 11 August 1678, in Pollock’s words, “Oates thrust a copy of the precious manuscript under the wainscot of a gallery in Sir Richard Barker’s house”. Barker was Tonge’s former landlord, and also… somewhat dedicated in his hatred of Rome. Rather conveniently, Tonge ‘found’ the document and read it to an acquaintance he had cultivated who had the ear of the king, Christopher Kirkby. Kirkby was appalled, and begged the king for an audience two days later.
The king told Kirkby that Lord High Treasurer Thomas Osborne, Lord Danby, would deal with this. Tonge duly told Danby that it was he who had found the manuscript (true), but that he didn’t know who had written it (somewhat less so). Danby appears to be the first person who really took the allegations — 100 Catholics want to do in the king — seriously, and Oates eventually found himself face to face with the monarch himself.
When Oates claimed he’d met Don John of Austria (who, despite his name, was Spanish regent, and therefore someone the king knew), Charles asked him to describe the man. The description did not match, and this was far from the only inconsistency in the story — but anti-Catholic feeling and fear was rife, and the Privy Council and the House of Commons were convinced.
Oates was helped by the fact that one of the people he accused was Edward Coleman, secretary to the duchess of York, a man with known Catholic sympathies who was found to have been writing to members of the French court. He was duly hanged, drawn, quartered, and buried in unconsecrated ground. Oates’ allegations were given a further boost when the first man he’d made his depositions to, magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (who hadn’t believed a bloody word of them), was found strangled and run through with his own sword. (Godfrey’s story is a ride on its own — follow that link to the Wikipedia version.) Soon, Oates was swanning about all over the shop, accompanied by soldiers, accusing people left, right and centre. In the words of ODNB again:
A mixture of boldness and bluster he always tried to mix some elements of the truth, however tenuous and convoluted, into his statements and when in doubt would construct yet another lie. With his flexible memory new revelations from Oates could never be ruled out and he increasingly struck out against those who had antagonized him in the past.
He accused five Catholic peers who were all arrested, even though they were all in their 50s and 60s, and one, John, 1st Baron Belasyse, had gout to the extent that he couldn’t stand up. He was sent to the Tower anyway. Another of the accused, William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, pointed out that since a quarrel 24 years earlier, he had been “at great distance with the Lord Arundell”, making them rather unlikely co-conspirators. Stafford was beheaded anyway, and Henry, 3rd Baron Arundell, remained in prison for six years.
This went on for some time, eventually taking 30-odd lives, and gradually running out of steam, but remarkably it wasn’t until 1684 that the wheels properly came off. Oates had by this time (presumably desperate and scrabbling around for people to accuse) denounced the duke of York as a traitor, and was arrested, tried, fined £100,000, which they knew very well he couldn’t pay, and thrown in the slammer.
He got out once William III had taken the throne, and was given a pension. But he kept writing anti-Catholic screeds, to such an extent that his pension was cut, and — despite… not hitherto being all that interested in women, let’s say — he married the daughter of a wealthy London draper to shore up his finances.
He burned his way through her money in less than six months, converted back to being a Baptist, got kicked out by them either for making trouble at a funeral or for “defrauding a wealthy widow of her inheritance” (Donaldson again; not always reliable), ranted a lot more about Catholics, and was tried at one point for assaulting a woman. He finally died in obscurity at the age of 55.
STILL, AT LEAST NO ONE CAN MAKE A CAREER ANY MORE FROM DISHONESTY, CONSPIRACY THEORY, PREJUDICE, TELLING EVER WILDER LIES WHEN THE ORIGINAL LIES ARE QUESTIONED, AND WHIPPING UP UNREST AND ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST PEOPLE THEY DON’T LIKE, EH READERS?
