Titus Oates | Petition to the King for clemency, 1685

Titus Oates

Petition to King James II

Asking that writs of Error to be granted him 'for the bringing his Cause into Parliament and Staying Execution of ye late Judgement against him', "Titus Otes" written at the foot in a second hand (but not believed to be autograph), 1 page, folio, 18 May 1685

Titus Oates, according to his contemporary Roger North, was "a man of an ill cut, very short neck, and his visage and features were most particular. His mouth was the centre of his face, and a compass there would sweep his nose, forehead, and chin within the perimeter . . . In a word, he was a most consummate cheat, blasphemer, vicious, perjured, impudent, and saucy, foul-mouth'd wretch, and, were it not for the Truth of History and the great Emotions in the Public he was the cause of, not fit to be remembered".

On 10 May 1684 Oates was arrested at the Amsterdam coffee-house, in an action of scandalum magnatum, for calling the Duke of York a traitor. His fabrications over the "Popish Plot" had by this time been exposed and his trial before Judge Jeffreys resulted in damages of £10,000 and in default Oates was thrown into the King's Bench prison, where he was loaded with heavy irons. Once the Duke of York had acceded to the throne as James II Oates was tried for perjury on two counts: that he had falsely claimed to have attended a "consult" of Jesuits held at the White House tavern on 24 April 1678, at which King's death was decided upon; and that he had falsely sworn that the Jesuit William Ireland had been in London between 8 and 12 August in the same year. The latter lie was particular significant as Ireland had been executed in 1679, in large part as a result of Oates's perjury. Jeffreys summed up against his favourite witness of former days: "He has deserved much more punishment than the laws of this land can inflict". Oates was found guilty and sentenced to pay a heavy fine, to be stripped of his canonical habits, to stand in the pillory annually, to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and Newgate to Tyburn with only two days between the punishments and to be committed close prisoner for the rest of his life. He was pardoned shortly after the accession of William III. 

One of the endorsements (both written in the same hand but probably on different occasions) on the present document reads "Memdm, That he was this day ye first time sett in ye Pillory". The endorsing hand may be one of Pepys's secretaries but it is not believed to be that of Pepys himself (contrary to the modern note in pencil on the verso of the second leaf). A link between this petition by Titus Oates and Samuel Pepys is one of those piquant connections which infuses life into history and contains a fine touch of irony and some poetic justice; for it had been partly through the implication of one of Pepys's servants, Samuel Atkins, in the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey and the Popish Plot that Pepys had found himself committed to the Tower in 1679.  

PROVENANCE:

Sotheby's, London, 24 July 1978, lot 98