There was a change in public perception, as the
Whigs were thought to be manoeuvring for political position rather than for the
general good, intolerant and antagonistic, whereas Charles II began to be seen
as steady, restrained and open to compromise, and sympathy shifted in his
favour. Lord Chief Justice Scroggs sensed the change of mood and moved his
position accordingly, and began to acquit persons accused by Oates.
 |
| Titus Oates |
The most
prominent was Sir George Wakeman, the Queen’s physician, was had, apparently,
been paid £15,000 by the Jesuits to poison the King. Oates swore that he had
not seen Wakeman before and then gave evidence that he had seen him twice
before, which when pointed out, Oates said that he was ill and asked to be
excused, which Justice Scroggins refused. Bedloe accused Scroggins of not
summing up correctly and Scroggins, in effect, told him to shut up. The jury
asked if they could bring a verdict of guilty of misprision of treason, were
told that they couldn’t, so instead returned a not guilty verdict.
 |
| The Tryal of G Wakeman |
So Oates,
Bedloe and the other regular witnesses were not believed in this case, marking the beginning of
their downturn. The following day, the Portuguese ambassador called in person
on Scroggins, to thank him on behalf of the Queen. Wakeman went to the
continent until things cooled down. Scroggins was suspected of being bribed,
there was talk of a barrel of gold being delivered to his house, and
Parliament, prompted with stories of drunkenness and bad language supplied by
Oates and Bedloe, looked into charges of bias in his cases, called for his
removal from the bench, and achieved this aim in April 1681.
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| Titus Oates - An Exact Discovery - 1679 |
Titus Oates
brought charges against Adam Elliott that were disproved, with Oates being
fined £20 in a retaliatory case brought by Elliott. Oates had claimed that
Elliott, a parson, had been captured at Barbary, converted to Islam, murdered
his master and escaped, a story which fell apart when this ‘master’ turned up
in the retinue of the ambassador of Morocco, very much alive and well in
London, (he also asserted his right to owning Elliott, and demanded that his
slave return to Morocco with him). In April 1681, Oates’s allowance was reduced
to £2 per week, and removed all together in August of the same year, when he
was also banned from court.
 |
| Titus Oates, the Pope and the Devil |
In May 1684, Oates was arrested at the Amsterdam
coffee-house on charges of using defamatory language about the Duke of York and
brought before the infamous Judge Jeffreys who, after a brief trial, found him
guilty and fined him £100,000. Unable to pay this vast sum, Oates was loaded
with heavy chains and cast into the King’s Bench prison. His situation worsened
in February 1685, when Charles II died (after a deathbed conversion to
Catholicism) and his brother became King James II. The new King had two charges
of perjury brought against Oates and he was tried again on the new charges.
Jeffreys presided again and told the jury, even before they retired, that Oates
“… has deserved much more punishment than the laws of this land can inflict.”
 |
| Titus Oates in the Pillory |
Found guilty of the misdemeanours (perjury
was not a felony, so did not carry the death penalty), he was fined a further
2,000 marks, stripped of his clerical garb, was sentenced to parade all the
courts of Westminster wearing a paper above his head declaring his crimes and
then made to stand in the pillories at Westminster-Gate and at Royal Exchange
for an hour each on two days with the same paper above him, and to be whipped
by the public hangman from Aldgate to Newgate on one day and from Newgate to
Tyburn two days later. He would be close confined for life and also, for the
rest of his life, on five days per year, he was to stand for two hours in the
pillories around London.
 |
| Oates in the Pillory and Oates flogged |
The whippings were a particularly savage punishment –
Jack Ketch, the hangman, tied Oates to the back of a horse-drawn wagon, and
with a whip made with six lashes, he flogged Oates as he passed through the streets.
After a day in Newgate prison, an insensible Oates was dragged out and tied to
a tumbrel, and Ketch recommenced the flogging. It is estimated that Oates
suffered over three thousand lashes and that his back was entirely stripped of
skin – it was probably hoped that this would kill him (naval floggings of one
hundred lashes often killed a man), but he lay in gaol for ten weeks as his
back healed. Then he was loaded with chains and thrown into a cell, until the
days came round when he was taken out and pilloried (prisoners often died in
the pillory when unsympathetic crowds pelted them with stones).
 |
| Titus Oates in the Pillory |
Another version
says that Oates was treated well in prison, received numerous gifts from
Protestant well-wishers and even had an illegitimate son by a bed-maker in the
King’s Bench prison. He was released in 1688, when William and Mary were
invited to take the crown in the Glorious Revolution after James II was
deposed, (William, Prince of Orange, was James’s nephew and son-in-law, Mary
was James’s eldest surviving daughter by his first wife, Anne Hyde), but as the
House of Lords debated the legality of his sentence, Oates sent a petition for
a bill to reverse his sentence to the House of Commons. Such was the position
between the two Houses that whatever the one decided, the other would decide
the opposite; one wag suggested that as Oates had been flogged from Newgate to
Tyburn, the sentence should be reversed and he should be flogged from Tyburn to
Newgate. The Lords sentenced him back to prison for breach of privilege but the
prorogation of Parliament in August 1688 freed him again, and the Commons
managed to get him a pension of five pounds a week.
 |
| Titus Oates and the Popish Plot - 1816 |
So Oates married a
Muggletonian widow, Mrs Margaret Wells of Bread Street, who had nothing much in
the way looks but did have £2,000, causing much ribald conversation in the
London coffee-houses. He pressed the King for an increase and was granted £500
to clear his debts with £300 per year for life, and with some small economical
respite, he rejoined the Baptists as a minister. That didn’t last long, as they
objected to his bad language and his insistence on wearing clerical garb, and
after a case of assault and an attempt to defraud a widower, he was expelled
from the sect as ‘a disorderly person and a hypocrite.’
 |
| Titus Oates |
He died in 1705,
and he has been described as ‘the bloodiest villain since the world began,’
which is some going, considering the competition. Roger North, the lawyer and
biographer wrote,
“In a word, he was a most consummate cheat, blasphemer, vicious, perjured, impudent, and saucy, foul-mouth'd wretch, and, were it not for the Truth of History and the great Emotions in the Public he was the cause of, not fit to be remembered.”
He was directly responsible for the deaths
of thirty-five people by judicial murder, and indirectly responsible for the
deaths and misery of many thousands of innocent people through his lies and
fabrications.
And what of the other players ...
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