If
he refuse these conditions, he himself was immediately to be poisoned or
assassinated. "To pot James must go," according to the expression
ascribed by Oates to the Jesuits.
Oates, the informer of this dreadful plot, was himself the most infamous
of mankind. He was the son of an Anabaptist preacher, chaplain to
Colonel Pride; but having taken orders in the church, he had been
settled in a small living by the duke of Norfolk. He had been indicted
for perjury, and by some means had escaped. He was afterwards a chaplain
on board the fleet; whence he had been dismissed on complaint of some
unnatural practices not fit to be named. He then became a convert to
the Catholics; but he afterwards boasted, that his conversion was a mere
pretence, in order to get into their secrets and to betray them.[*] He
was sent over to the Jesuits' college at St. Omers, and though above
thirty years of age, he there lived some time among the students. He
was despatched on an errand to Spain; and thence returned to St. Omers;
where the Jesuits, heartily tired of their convert, at last dismissed
him from their seminary. It is likely that, from resentment of
this usage, as well as from want and indigence, he was induced, in
combination with Tongue, to contrive that plot of which he accused the
Catholics.
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