there seems to be an indomitable bull-headed, bull-backed power of endurance about this man Oates—this sham doctor of divinity, this Judas spy of Douai and St. Omer, this broken chaplain of a man-of-war, this living, breathing, incarnate Lie—that enables him to undergo his punishment, and to get over its effects somehow. He has not lain long in Newgate, getting his seared back healed as best he may, when haply, in "pudding-time," comes Dutch William the Deliverer. Oates's scourging was evidently alluded to when provision was made in the Bill of Rights against "cruel and unusual punishments." The heavy doors of Newgate open wide for Titus, who once more dons his wig and canonicals. Reflective persons do not believe in the perjured scoundrel any more, and he is seldom sworn, I should opine, of the common jury or the crowner's quest. He has "taken the book in his right hand," and kissed it once too often. By a section of the serious world, who yet place implicit faith in all Sir Edmondbury Godfrey's wounds, and take the inscription on the Monument of Fish Street Hill as law and gospel, Titus Oates is regarded as a species of Protestant martyr—of a sorry, slippery kind, may be, but, at all events, as one who has suffered sorely for the good cause. The government repension him; he grows fat and bloated, and if Tom Brown is to be believed (Miscellanies, 1697), Doctor Oates, about the time of Hogarth's birth, marries a rich city widow of Jewin Street.
Different, and not so prosperous, is the end of the assistant villain, Dangerfield. He, too, is whipped nearly out of his skin, and within a tattered inch of his miserable life; but his sentence ends before Newgate is reached, and he is being taken to that prison in a hackney-coach, when the hangman's assistants stop the vehicle at the Gray's Inn Coffee-house, to give the poor, tired, mangled wretch a drink. Steps out of the coffee-house one Mr. Francis, a counsel learned in the law of Gray's Inn aforesaid, and who has probably been taking a flask too much at the coffee-house. He is an ardent anti-plot man, and in a railing tone and Newmarket phrase asks Dangerfield whether he has "run his heat and how he likes it." The bleeding object in the coach, revived to pristine ruffianism by the liquor his gaolers have given him, answers with a flood of ribald execrations—bad language could surely be tolerated in one so evilly intreated as he had been that morning—whereupon the barrister in a rage makes a lunge at Dangerfield's face, with a bamboo cane, and strikes one of his eyes out. In the fevered state of the man's blood, erysipelas sets in, and Dangerfield shortly afterwards gives the world a good riddance (though it were better the hangman had done it outright with a halter) and dies. The most curious thing is, that Francis was tried and executed at Tyburn for the murder of this wretched, scourged, blinded perjurer. He was most likely tried by a strong Protestant jury, who (very justly) found him guilty on the facts, but would very probably have found him guilty against the facts, to show their Protestant feeling and belief in the Popish plot; but I say the thing is curious, seeing that the Crown did not exercise its prerogative of mercy and pardon to Francis, who was a
