Hoax: The Popish Plot that Never Was
by Victor Stater
Yale, £20, 336 pages
Titus Oates was a flat-faced con man with no credit or standing in the world. By his late twenties he had been kicked out of school, university, the Church of England and – after his conversion to Catholicism in 1677 – the Jesuit colleges of Valladolid and St Omer. Drunkenness and homosexuality topped the charge sheet; the diarist John Evelyn thought him a “slight” person, whose testimony “should not be taken against the life of a dog”. Yet between 1678 and 1681, Oates’s words condemned at least 17 Catholics to the scaffold, and many others to prison.
