Titus Oates

English priest and dissembler

• Born: September 15, 1649
• Birthplace: Oakham, Rutland, England
• Died: July 12 or 13, 1705
• Place of death: London, England

A miscreant throughout his life, Oates fabricated a conspiracy by Catholics to murder King Charles II and replace him on the throne with his Catholic brother, James. False reports of this nonexistent conspiracy, known as the Popish Plot, caused an anti-Catholic frenzy to sweep England.

Early Life

Born in Oakham, Titus Oates was the son of Samuel Oates, a Baptist preacher who later became an Anglican and served as a rector in Norfolk and as a chaplain in Colonel Thomas Pride’s regiment, a position from which he was dismissed in 1654 for seditious activity. The name of Oates’s mother is not known, and she had little influence on her husband or her son.

From early in his life, Oates revealed a tendency toward unprincipled behavior. The first school he entered in 1665 expelled him within one year. He eventually passed through Sedlescombe School in Hastings and matriculated at Caius College, Cambridge University. In 1669, he moved to Saint John’s College, where his father, now employed by the college, baptized him into the Anglican faith. Oates was such a poor student that his Cambridge tutor once described him as “a great dunce.” He left Cambridge without a degree.

Despite his failure as a student and his questionable character, in 1673 Oates became a vicar of Bobbing Church in Kent, and in 1674 he became a curate to his father at All Saints Church in Hastings. Within a year, both father and son were tossed out after committing various slanders. For his lies about parishioners, Oates was sent to jail. While still imprisoned, he was indicted for perjury. He escaped and went to London. Shortly thereafter, he became chaplain on a king’s ship but was promptly dismissed for misbehavior. He then became chaplain to the Protestants in the Catholic household of Henry Howard, duke of Norfolk. While in this position, Oates made many Catholic acquaintances and began to regularly appear in Catholic coffeehouses.

In 1676, the virulently anti-Catholic Israel Tonge, rector of Saint Mary’s Church in Staining, began to regale Oates about his conviction that Catholics (especially Jesuits) were planning a massacre of Protestants in England. He asked Oates to ingratiate himself with his Catholic connections and then report any subversive activities to the appropriate authorities. Oates willingly assisted, not from any belief that Tonge was right, but because such an escapade suited his love of intrigue and talent for mendacity.

Oates pursued the plan by professing his conversion to Catholicism in 1677. He then entered a Catholic seminary in Valladolid, Spain, only to be thrown out after just five months. Undaunted, he moved on to a Catholic seminary in Saint-Omer, France, from which, after six months, he also was expelled in June, 1678. By this time, he had acquired enough “evidence” of a Catholic conspiracy to feed Tonge’s rampant paranoia. They set about, between June and August of 1678, to fabricate the Popish Plot that would guarantee them, especially Oates, infamous immortality.

Life’s Work

Oates’s endeavors can scarcely be described as a positive contribution to England’s politics and society. The Popish Plot that he helped invent in the summer of 1678 led to a reign of terror against supposed Catholic conspirators that resulted in the execution of thirty-five people. Most of them died as a consequence of testimony given by Oates. Relations between Anglicans and Catholics, already tense and prone to violence in the 1670’s, were further poisoned by the hysteria Oates created.

As constructed by Oates and Tonge, the Popish Plot was a scheme to kill Charles II and place his Catholic brother, James, duke of York (later James II ), on the English throne. Eventually, as Oates found it necessary to expand the conspiracy from time to time, Charles II’s Catholic wife, Catherine, and her physician were implicated. The nature of the “plot” was revealed to the king as he strolled through Saint James’s Park by Christopher Kirkby, a Lancashire gentleman who had been given a written account of the “conspiracy” by Oates. To his credit, the king never believed the tale. Later, after he questioned Oates directly, Charles II became convinced the plot was all nonsense.

The first public revelation of the Popish Plot came when Oates and Tonge appeared before a London justice of the peace, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and told their story. Shortly thereafter, Godfrey was found murdered, a sword in his back. The circumstances of his murder were never learned, but Oates seized upon it as proof that the Catholic conspiracy existed. There followed a chorus of accusations against Catholics that did not abate for two years. It was during this time that many Catholic “suspects” were put to death.

In the autumn of 1678, the House of Commons contributed to the panic by listening to “conclusive evidence” provided by a number of street people primed by Oates. The Commons impeached Catholic peers and strengthened existing anti-Catholic legislation. Members of Parliament were predisposed to believe conspiracy stories after learning, in 1672, of the secret Treaty of Dover that Charles II had signed in 1670 with French king Louis XIV , who was married to Charles’s sister, Henrietta. By terms of the agreement, Charles II proclaimed that he was at heart a Catholic and would announce his conversion at an appropriate time. In return, Louis XIV promised to send Charles an annual subsidy. To show his good faith, Charles II, in 1672, suspended all penal laws against Catholics and other non-Anglicans. Raging with anti-French and anti-Catholic sentiment, the Commons passed the Test Act in 1673, which, in effect, prevented any Roman Catholic, including the king’s brother, from holding office.

The fact that Charles II had not yet announced his conversion to Catholicism by 1678 seemed, in the parliamentarians’ convoluted thinking, circumstantial evidence for Oates’s fantastic assertions. It was surmised that Catholics had decided not to wait any longer. When the king realized that members intended to pursue charges against his chief adviser, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, and against Queen Catherine, he dissolved Parliament in January, 1679.

The political fallout from Oates’s accusations now threatened the succession. The new Parliament elected in February, 1679, imprisoned Danby and introduced an exclusion bill to keep James from the throne. Charles II dissolved this Parliament in the summer of 1679 and sent James into temporary exile for protection. Subsequent Parliaments, in 1680 and 1681, continued to press for the exclusion of James. Various factions supported either Mary, James’s Protestant daughter, or James Scott, duke of Monmouth, who was Charles II’s illegitimate Protestant son. There was, however, no agreement on which of these two should succeed Charles II.

The most dogged and violent opponent of the succession was Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, who pushed the candidacy of Charles II’s illegitimate son. The king preempted this effort by declaring officially that the duke of Monmouth was illegitimate. Aside from Shaftesbury and his followers (by this time known as Whigs), Monmouth’s support was so limited that he could not have taken the throne. The last serious attempt to pass an exclusion bill came in the 1681 Parliament. This Parliament, which met in Oxford, revealed severe hatreds and divisions, and it appeared to many that England again was heading for civil war. This fear brought a reaction in favor of Charles II and the duke of York and against those who seemed intent on undermining the Stuart monarchy.

Through most of this time, Oates was perceived as a hero and a celebrity. Tradesmen sold Oates fans, matchbooks, cookies, and hats. It was not until the second half of 1680 that the mania for Oates began to fade. This occurred mostly because the king was still alive and no obvious attempt had been made on his life.

When the furor had subsided, Oates was taken to court by the duke of York, and in June, 1684, the duke was awarded a large judgment that Oates could not pay. In 1685, after James had succeeded his brother (who died unexpectedly from a stroke), Oates was convicted of perjury and sent to prison after being flogged. He emerged from prison in 1688 to find himself again something of a hero. Opinion had turned in his favor as a result of James’s ill-advised attempt, often violently pursued, to re-Catholicize England. The news, in 1688, that the queen had given birth to a Catholic heir led Parliament to invite Mary, James’s Protestant daughter, and her husband, William III, stadtholder of the Netherlands, to come to England and restore the Anglican monarchy. Their successful campaign, aided by the decision of James to abdicate, is known as the Glorious Revolution . After William III and Mary II were established as Crowned Heads, the House of Commons voted to grant Oates an annual pension. Oates did not deserve such a recognition, but anti-Catholic sentiments again were at a fever pitch.

Oates lived out the remainder of his life in relative obscurity but not without controversy. In 1693, he became a Baptist, returning to the original church of his father. His behavior had not improved, and he was expelled by the Baptists in 1701 for spreading blatant lies. He died in London on July 12 or 13, 1705.

Significance

Through his fabrication of the Popish Plot, Oates preyed upon the dangerous anti-Catholic and antipapal strains so alive in England during the 1670’s. Although his cohort, Israel Tonge, may genuinely have believed in the existence of a plot to murder Charles II, Oates did not. He participated in the great lie for the excitement and perhaps for the adulation he knew it would engender. The Popish Plot built on already existing fears, confirming, expanding, and intensifying them. It guaranteed that anti-Catholicism would be the dominant theme in English politics for the remainder of the seventeenth century.

James II’s controversial reign seemed to prove to Protestants in England that even if the Popish Plot had never existed, it was reasonable to think that Catholics would stop at nothing to bring England back within the Church of Rome. Although the reign of William and Mary relieved much of the pressure on Catholics, parliamentary leaders were determined to prevent the Crown from ever again falling to a Catholic. The 1701 Act of Settlement provided that future English monarchs must be members of the Church of England. The act also further limited the power of the Crowned Head in relation to Parliament. Oates, sinister reprobate that he was, had made his contribution to this major constitutional development.

Bibliography

Bryant, Arthur. King Charles II. London: Longmans, Green, 1931. Reprint. London: House of Stratus, 2001. A pleasant melding of a popular writing style with respectable scholarship. Bryant’s work, though dated in some ways, is fundamentally reliable. Discusses Titus Oates in the context of Charles II’s reign. Includes notes, bibliography, and index.

Greaves, Richard L. Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688-1689. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. The book, one of three Greaves has written about radicalism in seventeenth-century England, focuses on the events of 1688-1689.

Hibbard, Caroline M. Charles I and the Popish Plot. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Based on extensive research of manuscript sources, Hibbard examines what she terms “political antipopery and court Catholicism” in England from 1637 to 1642.

Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714. 1961. Reprint. New York: Norton, 1982. An account of tumultuous seventeenth century politics by a distinguished Marxist historian. It contains extensive coverage of the Popish Plot and its impact. There is an index and a list of books for further reading.

Kenyon, J. P. The Popish Plot. London: Heineman, 1972. Reprint. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. A carefully researched, scholarly, and highly readable account of the events involving Titus Oates. Emphasizes the impact of the Popish Plot on Catholics in England after 1678. Includes notes, bibliography, and index. Recommended for all readers.

Miller, John L. Popery and Politics in England, 1660-1688. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Focuses on the development of an anti-Catholic political tradition in England. Miller argues that antipopery was the major political factor in late seventeenth century England. Written for advanced undergraduates and scholars, it contains notes, bibliography, appendices, and index.

Ogg, David. England in the Reign of Charles II. 1934. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Ogg covers the Titus Oates affair, placing it in the context of Charles II’s monarchy. Although somewhat dated, this remains a useful introduction to the king’s many problems in the 1670’s. There are footnotes, a bibliography, and an index.

Pollock, Sir John. The Popish Plot. 1903. Rev. ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1944. Pollock, a lawyer, allows his anti-Catholic bias to seep into his account, which is therefore considered unreliable. His work, however, did inspire others to study Titus Oates and the Popish Plot more closely.