Half Truths

Extract

On the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles II there appeared in The Times a most interesting article on that monarch and his time by Keith Feiling. The typically English attitude of mind towards the history of that reign expressed in its lines must, however, have roused the attention of Catholic readers, especially his allusion to ‘the half truths of which Oates got hold.’

It is matter for conjecture how many of his non-Catholic readers were aware of the whole truth where it touches Titus Oates and the malignant story of his career. To be sure, no historian defends the man who, according to Macaulay, was ‘the founder of the school of false witnesses.’ Every Englishman has learned at school that Titus Oates was a miscreant of the most evil and mischievous genius; that the men who were condemned to death on the strength of his false accusation were innocent victims of a politically engineered plot which had as its background the end of frustrating the Catholic succession to the throne. The end, in the mind of the average protestant Englishman, was laudable, although it did not justify the means adopted by the Government in this case.