Charles II did this every day, regular as clockwork. He had even bought a piece of land so he could take his daily “constitutional walk” from Hyde Park to St. James’s without leaving royal soil. Constitution Hill, in what was then called Upper St. James’s Park (now Green Park), got its name from these walks. On August 13, 1678, the king was intercepted on his customary stroll and handed a copy of Tongue and Oates’s ramblings. The document listed the names of nearly one hundred “plotters,” most of them Jesuit priests. Every slight that the twenty-nine-year-old Oates had ever suffered had been poured into one lurid, win-or-bust piece of deception. Charles was unimpressed and inclined to ignore it, putting the matter into the hands of his first minister, the Earl of Danby. His brother James felt differently. He was outraged by the implications and publicly demanded an investigation.
With the “plot” now out in the open, Oates took the initiative. Before a magistrate called Sir Edmund Godfrey, he swore on oath that his allegations were true. He was an energetic but far from convincing liar. His evidence was confused and contradictory. He made forty-three separate charges, naming the names of prominent English Catholics in a more or less random list. Godfrey was skeptical, but Oates was summoned to appear before the Privy Council. Shrewdly cross-examined by the king himself, Oates warmed to his theme. He increased the number of charges to eighty-one—throwing in Samuel Pepys and the archbishop of Dublin for good measure—and then produced his trump card. It was a letter from Edward Coleman, a genuinely fanatic Catholic and secretary to James’s wife, Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, written to Father La Chaise, personal confessor to King Louis XIV of France. Barely had this shocking revelation become the subject of heated debate in every tavern and coffeehouse 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 rumors 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’s allegations, 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” materialized. Serious contradictions in Oates’s evidence began to emerge and the judges started to find in favor of those he had accused. In 1681 he was thrown out of his grace-and-favor lodgings. In 1684 he was arrested at a city coffeehouse, tried for defamation, fined the enormous sum of ?100,000 (equivalent to almost $20 million today), 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 savior of the English monarchy was now vilified in pamphlets as a “Buggering, Brazen-faced, Lanthorn-jawed, Tallow-chapt Leviathan.” He was retried, this time for perjury, sentenced to life imprisonment, stripped of his clerical status, and forced to endure a public flogging. He received more than 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 and being pelted with eggs and kitchen slops.
Notwithstanding his horrific injuries from the flogging and regular beatings from his jailers, 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 successful than 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 criticizing 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 the death warrant of thirty- five entirely innocent men, changed the law of the land, and disrupted the lives of thousands of English Catholics. He spent his last years in obscurity writing religious tracts that nobody read and haunting the Westminster law courts as a spectator. He never tired of complicated, self-justifying stories.
If Titus Oates had any redeeming features, history does not record them. The same cannot be said of Alessandro, Count Cagliostro (1743–95). He too was a liar and a charlatan, but he became a genuine celebrity all over late eighteenth-century Europe. Magician, Freemason, alchemist, forger, spiritualist, and healer, he inspired both Goethe’s
Born Giuseppe Balsamo in one of the poorest parts of Sicily, he lost his father while still a child. His mother couldn’t afford to educate him, so at the age of fifteen, with the help of relatives, he was sent to a nearby monastery. The Fatebenefratelli, or “Do-Good Brothers,” were Augustinian monks famed for their network of hospitals. Medicine and chemistry were well taught and Giuseppe was a gifted pupil, spending his free time in the library, poring over books of occult lore. But he was still a Sicilian street brat at heart and—rather like Oates— foulmouthed, belligerent, and lazy. During mealtime readings of the lives of the saints, he swapped their names for those of notorious Palermo prostitutes. The monks rapidly tired of these games and let him go. Bright and unscrupulous, he settled into a life of petty crime and soon became a gang leader. Using what he’d learned in the monastery, he was also able to pose as a convincing alchemist. In this guise he convinced a goldsmith called Marano that he had sold his soul to the devil and could locate a cave in the mountains stuffed full of gold, but that first he would need sixty ounces of the precious metal to perform some expensive preliminary magic. The venal and credulous Marano fetched the money and, at midnight, set out for the hills, where he was promptly ambushed by six of Giuseppe’s accomplices dressed as devils armed with pitchforks and, according to the terrified merchant, blowing blue and red flames. They beat and robbed him and left him for dead. Giuseppe pocketed his share of the cash and left Palermo, never to return.
The attention to detail is impressive. The costumes weren’t strictly necessary for the robbery, but they gave life to a tale that was told and retold and that always left Marano looking a fool. This imaginative approach to crime—with the victims appearing to deserve their comeuppance—was to become Giuseppe’s trademark.
Arriving at Messina on the other side of the island, he lodged with his well-to-do uncle, Joseph Cagliostro, before swiftly making off with some of his money and his surname. As Giuseppe Cagliostro, he set out on a series of escapades in Egypt and Turkey in the company of a mysterious adept called Althotas, an alchemist who spoke several Eastern languages. To fund their travels, they hawked a chemical formula devised by the old magician that supposedly transformed rough fibers of hemp so they appeared to be silk. These could be sold to merchants at a profit, a rather more practical alchemy than turning base metal into gold.
By 1765 he was in Malta, in the service of the secretive Knights Hospitaller, Europe’s richest and most powerful charitable institution. The Grand Master was himself an alchemist, and Giuseppe’s training as an apothecary came in handy: He ground medicine during the day and concocted his own potions in the evenings. After three years, he decided it was safe to return to Italy and, in 1768, surfaced in Rome, carrying letters of recommendation from the Grand Master himself. These secured him the patronage of Cardinal Orsini, whose secretary he became. Rome had a thriving Sicilian community: sharp-witted, resourceful immigrants keen to make
