QI The Book of the Dead

discovered performing homosexual acts, or ‘Italian love’, as it was then more delicately known. Sodomy was a hanging offence; it was only the fact that he was a clergyman that saved his skin.
    Undaunted by his narrow escape, Oates bluffed his way into becoming chaplain to the Earl of Norwich. Within a few months, he was sacked for being generally unsuitable and constantly inebriated. His career options rapidly narrowing, he decided to try his luck as a Catholic. Pulling the wool over the eyes of aneccentric (and possibly insane) priest called Father Berry he was received into the Church of Rome in March 1677. Shortly afterwards he met Father Richard Strange, head of the English Jesuits. There is strong evidence that Strange became Oates’s lover at this stage – it would be hard to explain why else he would bother with such an unattractive addition to the order.
    Strange arranged for Oates to study with the Jesuits at Valladolid under the pseudonym Titus Ambrosius. Once again, it didn’t last long. The Spanish booted him out when they realised he had no grasp whatever of Latin. Oates returned to England, boasting of a divinity degree from the University of Salamanca (which, of course, he had never even visited). Encouraged by Strange to try elsewhere, he enrolled in another Jesuit seminary in France under another false name: Samson Lucy. Here, his engaging personal habits – drinking, smoking, swearing and lying – made him so unpopular that a fellow seminarian attacked him with a frying pan. In a pattern that was by now tediously familiar, he was expelled and returned to London empty-handed. What fleeting attraction Catholicism had exerted over him had gone. Now all he wanted was revenge on the Roman Church – and the Jesuits in particular – that had so snubbed him.
    He didn’t have to wait long. An elderly friend of his father’s, Dr Israel Tongue, a virulent anti-Catholic, proposed producing some pamphlets using Oates’s first-hand ‘knowledge’ to expose the so-called ‘Jesuit menace’. Together they hatched what purported to be an undercover report on the Church of Rome’s plans to assassinate Charles II and replace him with his Catholic brother, James. It was a lie from top to tail: a half-digested string of rumours, myths and suppositions that the two men attemptedto craft into a coherent story. It used every emotive device it could muster: a Europe-wide conspiracy at the highest level, private armies being amassed, secret cabals convened in London taverns, large injections of finance from treacherous Catholic families, even a special weapon that fired silver bullets, which would be used to do the deed while the king was out walking.
    Charles II did this every day, regular as clockwork. He had even bought a piece of land so he could take his daily ‘constitutional walk’ from Hyde Park to St James’s without leaving royal soil. Constitution Hill, in what was then called Upper St James’s Park (now Green Park), got its name from these walks. On 13 August 1678, the king was intercepted on his customary stroll and handed a copy of Tongue and Oates’s ramblings. The document listed the names of nearly one hundred ‘plotters’, most of them Jesuit priests. Every slight that the twenty-nine-year-old Oates had ever suffered had been poured into one lurid, win-or-bust piece of deception. Charles was unimpressed and inclined to ignore it, putting the matter into the hands of his first minister, the Earl of Danby. His brother James felt differently. He was outraged by the implications and publicly demanded an investigation.
    With the ‘plot’ now out in the open, Oates took the initiative. Before a magistrate called Sir Edmund Godfrey, he swore on oath that his allegations were true. He was an energetic but far from convincing liar. His evidence was confused and contradictory. He made forty-three separate charges, naming the names of prominent English Catholics in a more or less random list. Godfrey was sceptical, but Oates was summoned to appear before the Privy Council. Shrewdly cross-examined by the king himself, Oates warmed to his theme. He increased the number of charges to eighty-one – throwing in Samuel Pepys and the archbishop ofDublin for good measure – and then produced his trump card. It was a letter from Edward Coleman, a genuinely fanatical Catholic and secretary to James’s wife, Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, written to Father La Chaise, personal confessor to King