of Sir Roger L'Estrange,’ and demanded pecuniary reparation. Ten weeks later, on 10 May, Oates was suddenly arrested at the Amsterdam coffee-house, in an action of scandalum magnatum, for calling the Duke of York a traitor. About the same time two of his men, Dalby and Nicholson, were convicted at nisi prius for seditious words against Charles II, and both stood in the pillory. Oates himself, after a brief trial before Jeffreys, was cast in damages to the amount of 100,000l., and in default was thrown into the King's Bench prison, where he was loaded with heavy irons.
James II succeeded to his brother in February, and on 8 May 1685 Oates was put upon his trial for perjury. There were two indictments: first, that Oates had falsely sworn to a consult of jesuits held at the White Horse tavern on 24 April 1678, at which the king's death was decided upon; secondly, that he had falsely sworn that William Ireland was in London between 8 and 12 Aug. in the same year. Oates defended himself with considerable ability, but things naturally went against him now that the evidence of Roman catholics was regarded with attention. Jeffreys, now lord chief justice, summed up with great weight of eloquence against his favourite witness of former days. ‘He has deserved much more punishment,’ he concluded, ‘than the laws of this land can inflict.’ The prisoner was found guilty upon both indictments, and nine days later Jeffreys deputed Sir Francis Wythens [q. v.] to pronounce sentence. Oates was to pay a heavy fine, to be stripped of his canonical habits, to stand in the pillory annually at certain specified places and times, to be whipped upon Wednesday, 20 May, from Aldgate to Newgate, and upon Friday, 22 May, from Newgate to Tyburn, and to be committed close prisoner for the rest of his life (Cobbett, State Trials, x. 290; cf. Bramston, Autobiography, p. 194). The flogging was duly inflicted with ‘a whip of six thongs’ by Ketch and his assistants. That Oates should have been enabled to outlive it seemed a miracle to his still numerous sympathisers (cf. Abraham de la Pryme, Diary, Surtees Soc. p. 9). Edmund Calamy witnessed the second flogging, which the king, in spite of much entreaty, had refused to remit, when the victim's back, miserably swelled with the first whipping, looked as if he had been flayed (Life, i. 120; Ellis, Correspondence, i. 340). After his scourgings his troubles were by no means at an end. ‘Because,’ he wrote with ironical bitterness in his ‘Account of the late King James’ (1696), ‘through the great mercy of Almighty God supporting me, and the extraordinary Care and Skill of a judicious chyrurgeon, I outlived your cruelty … you sent some of your Cut-throat Crew whilst I was weak in my Bed to pull off those Plasters applied to cure my Back, and in your most gracious name they threatened with all Courtesie and Humanity to destroy me.’ The name, address, and charges of the ‘judicious chyrurgeon’ are given at the end of the book, and iterated reference is made to him in Oates's later writings. He was doubtless paid for the advertisement.
In 1688 it was plausibly rumoured that Oates was dead. Notices, however, appear from time to time in the newspapers, to the effect that he stood in the pillory at the Royal Exchange and elsewhere in accordance with the terms of his sentence. In August 1688 he begot a bastard son of a bedmaker in the King's Bench prison (Wood, Life and Times), and issued another coarse pamphlet on ‘popish pranks,’ entitled ‘Sound Advice to Roman Catholics, especially the Residue of poor seduced and deluded Papists in England who obstinately shut both eyes and ears against the clearest Light of the Gospel of Christ.’
Oates's hopes revived as the protestant current gathered strength under the auspices of the Prince of Orange. Sarotti, the Venetian ambassador, wrote to the signory that when Oates stood on the pillory the people would not permit any to inflict the least hurt upon him. Soon after the landing of William of Orange he emerged from prison, and was received by the new king early in 1689. On 31 March he petitioned the House of Lords for redress and a reversal of his sentence, and, after some deliberation, the judges pronounced his sentence to have been erroneous, cruel, and illegal (Hist. MSS. Comm. 12th Rep. App. vi. 75–84). But while this decision was pending Oates had unadvisedly sent in a petition for a reversal of sentence to the commons, an act which provoked the upper house into committing him to the Marshalsea for breach of privilege. The commons regarded this in the light of an outrage, and the two houses were on the verge of a serious quarrel when the prorogation of 20 Aug. 1689 set Oates at liberty. Shortly afterwards the king, at the request of the lower house, granted the perjurer a pension of 5l. a week.
His testimony remaining invalid in a court of law, Oates had to reconcile himself henceforth to a private career; but from the eager patronage that he extended in 1691 to William Fuller [q. v.] the impostor, who boarded for a time with Oates and his friend, John Tutchin, in Axe Yard, Westminster, it is evident that he was still interested in the fabrication of plots. Oates lent Fuller money
