On 8 May 1685, Titus Oates took his place within the bar of the King’s Bench, laden with his papers. Six years earlier, his testimony had helped send Jesuit priests to the scaffold for an alleged conspiracy against Charles II. Now, the Court was called upon to examine two indictments for perjury: had Oates truly attended the London gathering he purported to describe with such precision, and had he placed William Ireland in the capital on dates when credible witnesses swore he was far away?
The first indictment reached back to 24 April 1678. Oates had sworn under oath that a consult of forty or fifty Jesuits had assembled at the White Horse Tavern in the Strand. According to his deposition, the conspirators had dispersed into smaller caucuses, resolving to assassinate the King and overturn the established religion of the realm. A certain Father Mico was alleged to have drawn up this treasonous resolution. Oates claimed to have carried the document from room to room, watching Whitebread, Fenwick, and Ireland set their hands to it. In 1685, the Crown maintained that he was not in London on that day, and could have witnessed neither the consult nor the signatures.
The Crown’s first witness, Mr. Foster, had sat upon the jury that condemned Ireland, Pickering, and Grove in 1678. He affirmed that he retained a vivid recollection of the proceedings, having taken notes at the time and later compared them with the printed trial account. He testified that Oates had described the assembly, the plot against the King’s life, and his own errands between the chambers to procure the signatures. When Oates demanded whether the resolution had been agreed upon at the tavern itself or only after the company divided into separate rooms, Foster replied that his memory was clear: Oates had sworn to a resolution framed at the White Horse, followed by a document carried from room to room.
The witnesses called to disprove his presence in London came from Saint-Omer. Some twenty former scholars testified that Oates had resided continuously at the Jesuit college from Christmas 1677 until June 1678, and that he had never been absent long enough to cross the Channel to London. Their recollections were grounded in diverse scenes. Some recalled him at the refectory table, seated apart near the fathers because he claimed an inability to digest the food served to the younger pupils. Others remembered him reading during assemblies of the Sodality, or joining in games and recreation. Several remarked that he was so quarrelsome and conspicuous an inmate that any prolonged absence could never have gone unremarked.
Haggerstone confirmed that a triennial meeting of the Jesuits was indeed held in London to elect a procurator and manage the affairs of the Society. Two priests had departed from Saint-Omer for the purpose; Oates, however, had remained behind. Lord Gerrard remembered seeing him at Sunday readings and recalled his confirmation on 26 May. Samuel Morgan, who had conformed to the Church of England after leaving the college, offered a yet more particular recollection: on the very day Oates claimed to have been at the White Horse, they had been playing ball together at Saint-Omer, and Oates had borrowed a key from him after sending the ball over into another court.
Oates declined to mount his defence by proving an absence from Saint-Omer. Insisting that he had indeed been in London, he called Cecilia Mayo, a servant in the household of Sir Richard Barker. She recalled a man in Quaker dress who came to the house late in April, followed by a second visit a few days later. By her account, the household recognized the visitor as Oates. John Butler, the coachman, described a white hat, a grey coat, and short-cropped hair on one occasion, and a long wig with different attire on another. Mayo, however, recalled only a single dinner. The Court seized upon the discrepancies between their recollections: the minor details of costume and the frequency of the visits became the crucible of an alibi advanced six years after the event.
Oates then called the Earl of Huntingdon to attest to the reception he had once been accorded before the House of Lords as the discoverer of the Plot. But the Earl testified that this initial confidence had vanished as contradictions and false oaths came to light. Oates’s former credit could no longer resolve the issue. Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys brought the hearing back to its essential point: the question was not whether a Jesuit consult had taken place, but whether Oates himself was in London to attend it. The fact of a triennial assembly could never prove that he was an eyewitness.
Upon this evidence, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on the first count of perjury. On the following day, the trial turned to two further assertions: Oates had sworn that Ireland was in London on the 1st or 2nd of September 1678, and had claimed to have taken leave of him in his lodgings in Russell Street between the 8th and 12th of August. The defence argued that the chronology of these recollections was uncertain, and that the Crown had waited six years before bringing an indictment. Yet the prosecution’s witnesses traced Ireland’s journey in meticulous detail: his departure for the country in early August, his residence with Lord Aston and the Southcotes in Staffordshire and Wales, and his return toward London only in mid-September.
This journey was corroborated by a chain of witnesses. Lord Aston placed Ireland at his seat after 3 August; Sir Edward Southcote recounted their successive stages on the road to Tixall, and onward to Saint Winifred’s Well. The coachman testified to driving them forth and back. Other witnesses placed Ireland at table in Staffordshire in early September. While these accounts did not all coincide to the precise day, together they established an absence of several consecutive weeks. Jeffreys ruled that these proofs were amply sufficient to demolish Oates’s assertion of Ireland’s presence in London.
The second jury likewise returned a verdict of guilty. At the sentencing hearing, the bench overruled the points of law raised in arrest of judgment. The judges held that even though the previous judgments against the Jesuits remained of record, a witness guilty of perjury might still be prosecuted separately. The Court was not retrying the Popish Plot in its entirety; it was trying Oates’s sworn word regarding his own presence and the movements of William Ireland.
The sentence transformed the dual conviction into an enduring public spectacle. Oates was fined one thousand marks on each count, stripped of his canonical habits, condemned to stand in the pillory, and made to bear an inscription declaring his infamy. For the second count, the Court commanded a further pillory at the Royal Exchange, followed by two separate whippings: the first from Aldgate to Newgate, and the second from Newgate to Tyburn. The sentence also appointed annual penances in the pillory—at Westminster, Charing Cross, against the Temple, and at Tyburn—on the recurring calendar dates tied to his perjuries. Borrow records that he was indeed whipped three times before being returned to prison. After the Glorious Revolution, he obtained a modest pension from the Prince of Orange; the chronicle records neither the place nor the hour of his death.
The judgment bound Oates forever to the calendar dates he had once invoked to ruin others. Year after year, the crossroads of London were ordered to publish his falsehoods to every passerby. Yet the men condemned on his word could never return to the bar. Foster, who had sat among their jurors, had kept his notes; he produced them at this second trial to confirm what he had heard at the first. This time, they served to destroy the very man whose testimony he had once believed.