Oates was in prison for three and a half years. Finally he re ceived a royal pardon, with a pension of £300 a year. The re mainder of his life was spent in retirement, varied by sordid in trigue. In 1691 he became acquainted with William Fuller, whom he induced to forge another plot, though not with the success he had himself attained. In 1696 he dedicated to William III. a book called Eikon Basilike, a tissue of invective against "the late king James." In 1698 he obtained admission as a member of the Baptist Church, and used to preach at Wapping; but in 1701, as the result of a financial scandal, he was formally expelled from the sect. He died on July 12, 1705.
Dangerfield's and Bedloe's Narratives; State Trials; Journals of Houses of Parliament; North's Examen; the vari ous memoirs and diaries of the period ; Fuller's Narrative; Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; Burnet's History; Narcissus Luttrell's Rela tion. Lingard's History gives an e:thaustive and trustworthy account of the Popish terror and its victims ; and the chief incidents in Oates's career are graphically described by Macaulay. On the question of the place of his education see Notes and Queries (Dec. 22, 1883) . See also T. Seccombe's essay in Twelve Bad Men (1894, bibliography).
In Siberia, in lawsuits between Russians and the wild Ostiaks, it was usual to bring into court the head of a bear, the Ostiak mak ing the gesture of eating, and calling on the bear to devour him in like manner if he does not tell the truth. Similar oaths are sworn on the head or skin of a tiger by the Santals and other indigenous tribes of India. Death by a tiger precludes reincarnation and there fore involves social and physical extinction. Both in the old and
modern world oaths by rivers are most sacred. In earlier ages men swore inviolably by Styx or Tiber, and an oath on water of the Ganges is to the Hindu the most binding of pledges, for the goddess will take awful vengeance on the children of the perjurer. The Tungus brandishes a knife before the sun, saying, "If I lie may the sun plunge sickness into my entrails like this knife." The transition to invoking gods conceived in human form is shown in the treaty-oath between the Macedonians and the Carthaginians recorded by Polybius (vii. 9) ; here the sun and moon and earth, the rivers and meadows and waters, are invoked side by side with Zeus and Hera and Apollo, and the gods of the Carthaginians. The heaven-god, able to smite the perjurer with his lightning, was invoked by the Romans, when a hog was slain with the sacred flint representing the thunderbolt, with the invocation to Jove so to smite the Roman people if they broke the oath (Liv. i. 24; Polyb. iii. 25). But bears and tigers are as apt to kill truth tellers as perjurers, and the lightning-flash falls without moral discrimination. In the Clouds of Aristophanes, the Socrates of the play points out that notorious perjurers go unharmed, while Zeus hurls his bolts at his own temple and the tall oaks, as if an oak-tree could perjure itself.
The doctrine of miraculous earthly retribution on the perjurer lasted on in legend, as where Eusebius relates how three villains conspired to bring a false accusation against Narcissus, bishop of Jerusalem, which accusation they confirmed by solemn oath before the church, one wishing that if he swore falsely he might perish by fire, one that he might die of the pestilence, one that he might lose his eyes; a spark no man knew from whence burned to ashes the first perjurer's house and all within, the second was consumed by the plague from head to foot, whereupon the third confessed the crime with tears so copious that he lost his sight (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. vi. 9). In general the supernatural retribution on perjury has been transferred to beyond the grave.