page_title: Titus Oates
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Titus Oates / Aftermath
context_page_description: Titus Oates was an English priest who fabricated the "Popish Plot", a supposed Catholic conspiracy to kill King Charles II.
context_section_description: On 31 August 1681, Oates was told to leave his apartments in Whitehall, but he remained undeterred and even denounced the King and his Catholic brother, the Duke of York. He was arrested for sedition, sentenced to a fine of £100,000 and imprisoned.
  When the Duke of York acceded to the throne in 1685 as James II, he had Oates retried, convicted  and sentenced for perjury, stripped of clerical dress, imprisoned for life, and to be "whipped through the streets of London five days a year for the remainder of his life." Oates was taken from his cell wearing a hat with the text "Titus Oates, convicted upon full evidence of two horrid perjuries" and put into the pillory at the gate of Westminster Hall (now New Palace Yard), where passers-by pelted him with eggs. The next day he was pilloried in London and the third day was stripped, tied to a cart, and whipped from Aldgate to Newgate. The next day, the whipping resumed. The presiding judge at his trial was Judge Jeffreys, who stated that Oates was a "shame to mankind", ignoring the fact that he himself had  helped to condemn innocent people on Oates' perjured evidence. So severe were the penalties that it has been suggested that the aim was to kill Oates by ill-treatment, as Jeffreys and his fellow judges  openly regretted that they could not impose the death penalty in a case of perjury.
  Oates spent the next three years in prison. In 1689, upon the accession of the Protestant William of Orange and Mary, he was pardoned and granted a pension of £260 a year, but his reputation did not recover. The pension was later suspended, but in 1698 was restored and increased to £300 a year. Oates died on 12 or 13 July 1705, by then an obscure and largely forgotten figure.
caption: Engraving of a pilloried Titus Oates
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