In 1919 William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming, including the lines “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” and “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Sounds a lot like the present day, doesn’t it? But Yeats was describing the world of a century ago. The conspiracy theories, fabricated nonsense, and prominence of charlatans these days feels like something new, but it’s not. And it goes back a lot further than one measly century, too.
A chap named Titus Oates was born September 15, 1649 in England. He was planning to become priest, but evidently flunked out of college in his first year. His tutor called him “a great dunce.” His one advantage was a good memory. In England, in those days, you needed a license to become a priest in the Church of England, and for a license you needed a degree. Oates had a solution, though: he just lied about it. It worked, and he was ordained as a priest in 1670.
He was the vicar of a village parish three years later when he saw an opportunity to become the schoolmaster, which paid more. There already was a schoolmaster, but Oates accused him of sexually abusing one of the students. His scheme was to get the schoolmaster ousted, then take the job for himself. It didn’t work, though; the charge was disproved and Oates was thrown in jail for perjury. He managed to escape and hid out in London, where a couple of years later he managed to lie his way into a new job: chaplain of the HMS Adventure in the Royal Navy. That didn’t work out very well either — remember his accusation about the schoolmaster? Well it turned out that Oates himself really was gay, and when the Royal Navy found out about it, they took a Very Dim View indeed — at the time, their standard punishment was hanging. But since Oates was the chaplain (even if unqualified), all they did was kick him off the ship and out of the navy.
He was chased down and arrested on his old perjury charge, but escaped again, and once again hid out in London. The next year (we’re still only up to 1677), Oates converted to Catholicism. This was a big deal in 1600s England; there was quite a bit of animosity between the Catholics and the Anglicans (Church of England). As a Catholic, Oates returned to his playbook and lied his way into a training course to become a priest, flunked out, and then claimed that he WAS a real priest. Unfortunately for him, Catholic priests need to know Latin, and he hadn’t a clue. So they kicked him out of the church altogether. Once again, he hid in London, where you could probably disappear quite effectively in the 1600s.
In London he teamed up with another con man, Israel Tonge, and came up with the story that he had just pretended to become a Catholic; his real goal was to investigate their “secrets.” And he claimed that he’d found a big one: the Jesuits (an order of Catholic priests) were planning to assassinate the King of England! When the King (Charles II) heard about it, he reportedly snorted in derision. But one of his ministers, Thomas Osborne, went to meet Oates to find out more about it. Oates parlayed that meeting into testifying in front of the King’s Privy Council — the Congress of that time and place — and made 43 allegations against specific people. He referred to five letters he’d somehow acquired, written by leading Jesuits and discussing the plot against the king. That, and his excellent memory, convinced the council, which evidently didn’t realize that he’d written the letters himself.
The matter probably wouldn’t have gone and further, except the next month, Oates swore out an affidavit about his accusations in front of a judge, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Then a couple of weeks later Godfrey mysteriously disappeared, and his body was found — he’d been murdered! Oates used that event to drum up public support against Catholics (“Papists”). He claimed that Godfrey had been murdered by (shudder) the Jesuits. In reality, either Oates or his pal Tonge probably did it.
Anyway, Oates rode a wave of popular sentiment into a handsome salary and a nice apartment, and various Jesuits began to be rounded up and executed. Fifteen of them in all. But then Oates made another misstep; he bragged to the King that he’d talked to the King of Spain about his accusations of a conspiracy. The King, though, actually knew the King of Spain and simply asked Oates what the man looked like. It was obvious Oates had never seen him, and Oates ended up in prison. He denounced the King publicly, but in those days you Did Not Do That, and when James II took the throne, he had Oates imprisoned for life and driven through the streets of London being whipped — for five days every year. They also tied him onto a cart and drove him around the countryside, being whipped the whole time.
The whole affair became known as the “Papist Plot,” and Oates was largely forgotten. When the next rulers came along a few years later, they let him out of prison, but by then he was apparently out of scams to try, and died in obscurity in 1705. But the world of the 1600s, and the world of the early 1900s, doesn’t sound so different from the world of the 2020s, does it?
