Titus Oates, the contriver of the "popish plot," born in England about 1G20, died in London, July 23, 1705. He was the son of a clergyman, was educated at Cambridge, took orders, and held several curacies, but lost them by committing perjury in two malicious prosecutions. Subsequently he was dismissed in disgrace from a chaplaincy in the navy. With a Dr. Tonge, Teonge, or Tongue, he concocted a plan for informing against Roman Catholics, in regard to whom; there was a strong popular feeling of distrust. In 1677 he professed to be a Catholic, but was successively expelled from the Jesuit colleges at Val-ladolid and St. Omer. He returned to England in June, 1678, and drew up a narrative of a Jesuit conspiracy to murder the king and subvert the Protestant religion. Tonge laid it before the king, who paid no attention to it. Nevertheless Oates enlarged the story until it comprehended a vast scheme for the seizing of the kingdom by the Jesuits, and implicated all the principal Catholic gentlemen in England, and even the queen; and he swore to the truth of it before Sir Edmondbury Godfrey. A warrant was issued for seizing persons and papers, but the only evidence found was the expression in the papers of the duchess of York's secretary of a hope for the speedy reëstablishment of the Catholic religion.

Within a month Sir Edmondbury Godfrey died, whether by murder or suicide was unknown, and a great demonstration was made at his funeral. Thence arose an excitement such as had never been known in London, in which both government and people seemed to lose their senses. Catholics were arrested and their houses searched, Whitehall was fortified, the streets were patrolled, and popish assassins were supposed to be lurking in every shadow. Oates was lodged in Whitehall, had guards assigned him, and received a pension of £1,200 per annum. The party opposed to the court used the plot for po-litical purposes, and the court has been strongly suspected of getting it up for its own. In November, 1678, the trials of the accused Catholics began; and numbers of them were convicted, amid the applause of the populace. At the end of two years the bad character of Oates and the improbability of his story began to be considered; and when Lord Stafford was executed for complicity in the plot, in December, 1680, public feeling began to turn. In a civil suit for defamation brought against Oates by the duke of York, the jury gave £100,000 damages, and Oates was imprisoned as a debtor.

Soon after the accession of James II., in 1685, he was convicted of perjury on two indictments, and was sentenced to pay a fine of 2,000 marks, and to be pilloried, whipped, imprisoned for life, and pilloried five times a year in different parts of the kingdom. He was nearly killed in the first pillory, and his partisans raised a riot for his rescue. At the whipping he received 1,700 blows, and had to be drawn away on a sledge. Yet he survived it all, and on the accession of William of Orange his sentence was annulled, and he afterward received a pension of £5 a week.