Titus Oates (1649 - 1705)
When one considers that the majority of our public schools are hand in glove with the Church of England, it’s cheering to find the odd religious maniac among their ranks.
Unfortunately Titus Oates’ wasn’t such a man. Born at Oakham (itself the venue for a well-known school), this son of ribbon-weaver was expelled from Merchant Taylor’s School in the 1660s. He went from there to a school near Hastings, at which he pulled himself together and got into Cambridge - where he was described by a contemporary as “the most illiterate dunce, incapable of improvement”. He ran into debt and got shunted out before he had the chance to take his degree.
So far, so good. Out on his ear, Oates did the only reasonable thing, took Holy Orders in the Church of England and slipped into the Kent vicarage of Bobbing, quickly followed up by a licence for non-residence and a reputation for dishonesty.
Next stop was for Titus and his father (another so-called religious type) to trump up a charge against the local schoolmaster, which resulted in the elder Oates losing his living and Titus getting charged with perjury and put in prison. Naturally, he broke free and got a job as chaplain on a royal ship sailing to Tangier. Yet more naturally, he was expelled from the Navy within a year.
Titus Oates’ next step was to hang out with a bunch of Catholics in a boozer called the Pheasant Inn. This culminated in his appointment as Protestant chaplain to the Duke of Norfolk in 1676 – a sort of preliminary to being received into the Roman Catholic Church a year later.
Here Oates really got into his swing. Received into the Catholic Church as a repentant prodigal on Ash Wednesday 1677, he was given a trial in the English College at Valladolid. Needless to say he was expelled five months later. He was given a second pop soon after and was admitted to the seminary at St Omer’s. This time it took him till June 1678 to get kicked out.
This was the point at which he met Israel Tonge, with whom he concocted the well-known story of the Popish Plot – which has bored generations of English public schoolboys.
And because it bored you once, we shan’t bore you again. Suffice it to say, Oates became one of the most popular people in England for uncovering a so-called plot by papists to kill the King and subvert the nation to the Catholic religion. If the Guardian letters page and the internet had existed in the seventeenth century, both would doubtless have been full of people saying that, of course, they knew all along that this sort of thing was happening and that the establishment was involved in one big cover-up. Lots of people died as a result.
A while later, Oates made his big mistake – he called the Duke of York (the future James II and VII) a traitor. Bad move – he was fined by £100,000 by the notorious Judge Jeffreys. Shortly afterwards he was convicted of perjury and sentenced to be whipped, pilloried and thrown in prison for life. The murderous Jeffreys remarked coolly: "He has deserved more punishment than the laws of the land can inflict."
Oates later got a pardon and a pension after James was booted off the throne with the full support of the Papacy; but his comeback tour of fabricating another plot flopped. But he did manage to become a Baptist minister for a bit – before being expelled.
These public school perjurers, eh? Who’d trust them.
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