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Oates, Atkinson, and Bowers went to Wynberg and temporarily forgot the sea. Oates's one idea was a horse, and he spent his holiday as much on horse-back as he possibly could. In a letter he expressed great admiration for the plucky manner in which Atkinson rode to hounds one day at Wynberg.
Sir George Wakeman had been acquitted in spite of Oates's direct testimony; and public attention was strongly excited concerning the event of the next trial; which chanced to be that of the Peverils, father and son, with whom, I know not from what concatenation, little Hudson the dwarf was placed at the bar of the Court of King's Bench.
A large and respectable minority of the House of Lords pronounced the prisoner not guilty. The multitude, which a few months before had received the dying declarations of Oates's victims with mockery and execrations, now loudly expressed a belief that Stafford was a murdered man. When he with his last breath protested his innocence, the cry was, "God bless you, my Lord! We believe you, my Lord."
The only witnesses against the prisoners were still Gates and Bedloe. Ireland affirmed, that he was in Staffordshire all the month of August last, a time when Oates's evidence made him in London.
There were twenty thousand Catholics in London, for instance, who, according to Oates's account of the plan, were to rise on a preconcerted night, and each one was to kill five Protestants, which it was thought they could easily do, as the Protestants would be taken wholly by surprise, and would be unarmed.
Among the other events which occurred during the reign of King Charles the Second, and which tended to connect unfavorable associations with the recollection of it in the minds of men, was a very extraordinary affair, which is known in history by the name of Titus Oates's Popish Plot.
And both houses, after hearing Oates's evidence, voted, "That the lords and commons are of opinion, that there hath been, and still is, a damnable and hellish plot, contrived and carried on by the Popish recusants, for assassinating the king, for subverting the government, and for rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion."
Atkinson writes also, and it should be inserted most certainly here, referring to their return after hunting for poor Oates's body: "On the second day we came again to the resting place of the three and bade them there a final farewell. There alone in their greatness they will lie without change or bodily decay, with the most fitting tomb in the world above them."
Had Shaftesbury laid the plan of a Popish conspiracy, he had probably rendered it moderate consistent, credible; and on that very account had never met with the prodigious success with which Oates's tremendous fictions were attended.
"The Doctor," said one of the gang, "is an excellent person, and has done great things in his time; but many people are prejudiced against him; and, if you are really going to discover a plot, the less you are seen with him the better." Fuller accordingly ceased to frequent Oates's house, but still continued to receive his great master's instructions in private.
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