JAMES II. 8r

by the late king; and they added some impositionson tobacco and sugar. This grant amounted onthe whole to about six hundred thousand poundsa year.

The house of lords were in a humor no lesscompliant. They even went some lengths towardsbreaking in pieces all the remains of the popishplot; that once formidable engine of bigotry andfaction.

A little before the meeting of parliament,Oates had been tried for perjury on two indict-ments. One for deposing, that he was present ata consult of jesuits in London the twenty-fourthof April, 1679: Another for deposing, thatfather Ireland was in London between the eighthand twelfth of August , and in the beginning ofSeptember in the fame year. Never criminal wasconvicted on fuller and more undoubted evidence.Two-and-twenty persons, who had been studentsat St. Omers, most of them men of credit and family,gave evidence, that Oates had entered into thatseminary about Christmas in the year 1678, andhad never been absent but one night , till themonth of July following. Forty-seven witnesses,persons also of untainted character, deposed thatfather Ireland, on the third of August, 1679 ,had gone to Staffordshire, where he resided tillthe middle of September; and, what some yearsbefore would have been regarded as a very mate-rial circumstance , nine of these witnesses wereprotestants, of the church of England. Oatcs’ssentence was , to be fined a thousand marks

Vol. XII. G

CHAP,

LXX.

I6SS.

Oates edn*victetl ofperjury.