In late summer 1678, public opinion against Charles II's preferred successor – his Catholic brother James – hit a new low with the Popish Plot – one of the strangest episodes of mass delusion and hysteria in English history.
It starred the most remarkable hoaxer. Titus Oates was lame, stunted, homosexual and extraordinarily ugly. Moreover, he'd failed at everything:
- expelled from school and attended two Cambridge colleges without graduating
- driven out of his parish for making a false accusation of sodomy, having been ordained on false pretences
- cashiered as a naval chaplain for committing buggery
- frog-marched out of no fewer than three Jesuit seminaries following a probably false conversion to Roman Catholicism
By July 1678, Oates was back in London, writing a pamphlet claiming that, in a widespread Catholic conspiracy, the Jesuits would murder Charles and forcibly reconvert England. On 13 August, a copy of this was handed to the king during his morning walk in St James's Park.
On 6 September, Oates swore to the truth of his account before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a fashionable, rather publicity-seeking magistrate. About two weeks later, Oates appeared before the Privy Council itself, where Charles tore his evidence apart, though his advisers were inclined to take it more seriously.
Then Oates struck lucky: one of those he had accused was Edward Coleman, secretary to James's second wife Mary of Modena who, like her husband, was Catholic. Coleman had written to the confessor of the French king Louis XIV about his desire for the conversion of England. When the correspondence was discovered, it seemed to prove that Oates's allegations were true, especially this damning paragraph:
We have a mighty work upon on our hands … no less than the conversion of three kingdoms … Success would give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion than it had received since its birth.
On 12 October, Justice Godfrey went missing in mysterious circumstances. Rumours swept through London that he'd been murdered by the Papists; five days later, the stories appeared to be confirmed when his body was found in a ditch on Primrose Hill, a sword driven through his heart. The coroner's jury returned a verdict of murder, and the London mob was sure that it knew just who had Godfrey's blood on their hands: Oates's Papist conspirators.
Fear of a Catholic plot now took hold and a national panic ensued. In a series of trials, no fewer than 35 people – most of them Catholic priests – were condemned to death as traitors simply on the word of Oates and his band of informers. To maintain his ground with Parliament, Charles had to tolerate this anti-Catholicism, but opponents of his brother's succession now turned openly hostile. By the end of the year, Parliament passed the second Test Act, excluding Catholics from membership in either House of Parliament – and Edward Coleman had been executed at Tyburn.
Oates was rewarded for his efforts with a state apartment in Whitehall and an annual allowance of £1,200. However, in autumn 1681, after denouncing the king and everyone else he regarded as an opponent (including Samuel Pepys), he was arrested for sedition, fined £100,000 and thrown into prison.
When James came to the throne in 1685, he had a score to settle. He had Oates retried and sentenced to life imprisonment, loss of clerical dress and an annual pillory. In this last, the 'false informer' would be brought out, locked in a pillory and pelted with eggs by the public. In a painting created in about 1687 and now in the Museum of London, a large crowd can be seen assembled for the spectacle, filling the balconies of Westminster Hall.
When William and Mary ascended the throne in 1688, Oates was pardoned, and he died in 1705 more or less forgotten. However, in 2005, in a poll in BBC History Magazine, he was voted the 17th century's 'worst Briton'.
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 Titus Oates (1649–1705)
www.crappublicschools.org/alumni/o/index
.html
Short biography of Oates in the 'Heroes, scoundrels and others' section of the Crap Public Schools Association website. Worth reading for the glee in which Oates's nefarious deeds are related.
Titus Oates (1649–1705), informer
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person
.asp?search=ss&sText=titus+Oates&LinkID=
mp03343
From the National Portrait Gallery website, 13 portraits of Oates, including one showing him in the pillory.
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The Popish Plot by J P Kenyon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000)
An examination of the background of the plot and the reaction to it.
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