would doubtless have sought in vain for further victims had not the new parliament, which met on 21 Oct. 1680, been from the first ‘filled and heated with fears and apprehensions of Popery Plots and Conspiracies.’ A proclamation was promptly issued to encourage the ‘fuller discovery of the horrid and execrable Popish Plot.’ Informers multiplied anew, and Oates's popularity was increased by the currency given to several pretended plots against his life. A Portuguese Jew, Francisco de Feria, swore that a proposal to murder Oates, Bedloe, and Shaftesbury had been made to him by the Portuguese ambassador, Gaspar de Abreu de Frittas. About the same time Simpson, son of Israel Tonge, was committed to Newgate for endeavouring to defame Oates, a crime to which he said he had been incited by Sir Roger L'Estrange (Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. App. ii. pp. 246–9). On 30 Nov. Oates bore false witness against Lord Stafford at his trial; and the death in the following month of Israel Tonge, who had for some time past been increasingly jealous and suspicious of his old pupil, removed a possible danger from his path. At a dinner given by Alderman Wilcox in the city in the summer of 1680 much scandal had been caused by Oates and Tonge openly disputing their respective claims to the proprietorship of the plot, and their whig friends had some difficulty in explaining away the revelations that resulted.
Oates had now arrived at the highest point of his fortunes. He made constant and seldom unsuccessful demands upon the privy purse (see Ackerman, Secret Service Money, Camden Soc., passim). ‘He walked about with his guards,’ says Roger North (Examen), ‘assigned for fear of the Papists murdering him. … He put on an episcopal garb (except the lawn sleeves), silk gown and cassock, great hat, satin hatband and rose, long scarf, and was called or blasphemously called himself the saviour of the nation. Whoever he pointed at was taken up and committed; so many people got out of his way as from a blast, and glad they could prove their last two years' conversation.’ Parliament made the Duke of Monmouth responsible for the safety of his person, the lord chamberlain for his lodging, the lord treasurer for his diet and necessaries. ‘Three servants were at his beck and call, and every morning two or three gentlemen waited upon him to dress him, and contended for the honour of holding the basin for him to wash’ (Sitwell, The First Whig, p. 44). The Archbishop of Canterbury, from whom he received ‘several kindnesses’ at Lambeth, recommended him for promotion in the church, and Shaftesbury encouraged him to expect, if not to demand, a bishopric. Sir John Reresby relates how, dining with himself and the Bishop of Ely in December 1680, Oates reflected upon the Duke of York and upon the queen-dowager in such an outrageous manner as to disgust the most extreme partisan present. Yet no one dared to contradict him for fear of being made party to the plot, and when Reresby himself at length ventured to intervene, Oates left the room in some heat, to the dismay of several present (Memoirs, p. 196).
From the commencement of 1681, however, the perjurer's luck changed. In February 1681 a priest named Atwood whom he had denounced was reprieved after conviction by the king. The condemnation and death of Fitzharris and of Archbishop Plunket in the summer of this year proved a last effort on the part of those whose interest it was to sustain the vitality of the plot. The credulity of the better part of the nation was exhausted, but not before Oates had directly or indirectly contrived the judicial murder of some thirty-five men.
In August 1681 he charged with libel a former scholar and usher of Merchant Taylors', Isaac Backhouse, master of Wolverhampton grammar school, on the ground that Backhouse had called after him in St. James's Park, ‘There goes Oates, that perjured rogue,’ but the action was allowed to fall to the ground (Clode, Titus Oates and Merchant Taylors'). In January 1682 some ridiculous charges which he brought against Adam Elliott [q. v.] were not only disproved, but Oates was cast in 20l. damages in an action for defamation of character with which Elliott retaliated. In April of the same year his pension was reduced to 2l. a week, and in August his enemies were strong enough to forbid him to come to court and to withdraw his pension altogether (Hatton Correspondence, ii. 7). He took refuge in the city, amid the taunts of the court pamphleteers, in the van of whom was Sir Roger L'Estrange. In his ‘Hue and Cry after Dr. O.’ L'Estrange described Titus as drinking the tears of widows and orphans, and in the same year Oates was ridiculed on the stage as ‘Dr. Panchy, an ignorant railing fellow,’ in Crowne's ‘City Politiques.’ It was significant of the disrepute into which he felt himself to be falling that in June 1682 he did not venture to give evidence against Kearney (one of the ‘four Irish ruffians’ who were to have beaten the king to death). On 28 Feb. 1684 he had the assurance to petition the king and Sir Leoline Jenkins against ‘the scandalous pamphlets
