QI The Book of the Dead

Louis XIV of France. Barely had this shocking revelation become the subject of heated debate in every tavern and coffee-house in London when, a few days later, the body of Sir Edmund Geoffrey was found on Primrose Hill, strangled and impaled on his own sword. The Privy Council jumped to the conclusion that papists were to blame and gave Oates carte blanche to crush the plot. He couldn’t believe his luck. As one contemporary observed: ‘His greatest pleasure was to speed hither and thither accompanied by soldiers, enjoying complete power to imprison those he chose.’ He even took the chance to settle a score by arresting his old headmaster, whom he hadn’t forgiven for expelling him as a boy.
    Samuel Pepys was seized and sent to the Tower of London. After the jury took just fifteen minutes to reach their verdict, Edward Coleman was hanged, drawn and quartered and thirty-four other people – including several Catholic priests and the Archbishop of Armagh – were executed for treason. Public panic set in: anyone even remotely suspected of being Catholic was driven out of London and not allowed back within a ten-mile radius. The House of Commons was searched for gunpowder and there were rumours of a French invasion on the isle of Purbeck in Dorset. By the end of 1678 Parliament had passed the second Test Act ruling that only Protestants could sit in the Houses of Parliament. Anyone in public office had to swear allegiance to the Crown and take an oath of ‘supremacy’ confirming that the monarch was supreme head of the Church of England. Many people – including the king – doubted the truth of Oates’sallegations, but he was rewarded with an apartment in Whitehall, an annual allowance of £1,200 and his own coat of arms.
    Gradually, though, public opinion began to turn. No ‘great plot’ materialised. Serious contradictions in Oates’s evidence began to emerge and the judges started to find in favour of those he had accused. In 1681 he was thrown out of his grace-and-favour lodgings. In 1684 he was arrested at a city coffee house, tried for defamation, fined £100,000, and thrown into prison for calling the king’s brother James a traitor. Worse was to come when James came to the throne, intent on revenging his fellow Catholics whom Oates’s lies had condemned to death. The one-time saviour of the English monarchy was now vilified in pamphlets as a ‘Buggering, Brazen-faced, Lanthorn-jawed, Tallow-chapt Leviathan’. He was re-tried, this time for perjury, sentenced to life imprisonment, stripped of his clerical status and forced to endure a public flogging. He received over a thousand lashes while being dragged behind a cart from Aldgate to Tyburn, a distance of more than three miles. To rub salt in the wound, he had to appear five times a year in different parts of London, spending a whole day in the stocks being pelted with eggs and kitchen slops.
    Notwithstanding his horrific injuries from the flogging and regular beatings from his gaolers, Oates survived and, with the accession of William of Orange in 1688, he was free once more. Undeterred by his experiences, and his powers of persuasion still intact, he got a job as a royal spy, the new king paying him an allowance to keep an eye on possible French Jacobite plotters. In 1693, hideous though he was, Oates married a wealthy young widow and, despite the sniggering about his homosexuality, the couple went on to have a daughter. Somehow, he got yet another job as a minister, this time as a Baptist. It was no more successfulthan any of his other clerical posts. One of his parishioners, Heather Parker, disliked him so much that, on her deathbed, she expressly asked that he be barred from attending her funeral. When the day came, Oates’s response was to occupy the pulpit and preach an interminable and irrelevant sermon to delay the ceremony, causing a riot in the church, and being thrown out, yet again, by his own congregation.
    It was to be his last expulsion, but not his last appearance in court. In 1702 he was fined at Westminster for hitting a woman over the head with his walking stick. She had confronted him about his sermons criticising the Church of England and accusing Charles II of being a closet papist. A man in his mid-fifties hitting a woman is particularly pathetic. Prison had not improved his manners or diminished his insolent self-regard. He was what he always had been, an insecure coward and a bully. His delusional fantasies had signed