ABSTRACT
TITUS OATES, whose father had been a Baptist and Chap-lain to one of Oliver's regiments, at an early age became a clergyman in the restored Anglican Church, and in 1677 was reconciled to Rome. He belonged really to the mendicant order of scoundrels who flourished as bullies and spies under the patronage of the more respectable Churches. The informers of the Restoration epoch, used first by the Anglicans against the Dissenters, then by the Whigs against the Catholics, and again by the Tories and Catholics against the Whigs, cannot claim Oates as their Founder; but it was he who made their sordid trade imaginative and magnificent, attacked the highest persons in the State, and let loose over England the revolutionary passions of the decisive decade in her history.
