ecame the mortal enemy of the leading Baptists, and persecuted them
with the same treachery, the same mendacity, the same effrontery, the
same black malice which had many years before wrought the destruction
of more celebrated victims. Those who had lately been edified by his
account of his blessed experiences stood aghast to hear him crying out
that he would be revenged, that revenge was God's own sweet morsel,
that the wretches who had excommunicated him should be ruined, that they
should be forced to fly their country, that they should be stripped to
the last shilling. His designs were at length frustrated by a righteous
decree of the Court of Chancery, a decree which would have left a
deep stain on the character of an ordinary man, but which makes no
perceptible addition to the infamy of Titus Oates. [195] Through all
changes, however, he was surrounded by a small knot of hotheaded and
foulmouthed agitators, who, abhorred and despised by every respectable
Whig, yet called themselves Whigs, and thought themselves injured
because they were not rewarded for scurrility and slander with the best
places under the Crown.

In 1691, Titus, in order to be near the focal point of political
intrigue and faction, had taken a house within the precinct of
Whitehall. To this house Fuller, who lived hard by, found admission. The
evil work which had been begun in him, when he was still a child, by the
memoirs of Dangerfield, was now completed by the conversation of Oates.
The Salamanca Doctor was, as a witness, no longer formidable; but he was
impelled, partly by the savage malignity which he felt towards all whom
he considered as his enemies, and partly by mere monkeylike restlessness
and love of mischief, to do, through the instrumentality of others,
what he could no longer do in person. In Fuller he had found the corrupt
heart, the ready tongue and the unabashed front which are the first
qualifications for the office of a false accuser. A friendship, if that
word may be so used, sprang up between the pair. Oates opened his house
and even his purse to Fuller. The veteran sinner, both directly and
through the agency of his dependents, intimated to the novice that
nothing made a man so important as the discovering of a plot, and that
these were times when a young fellow who would stick at nothing and
fear nobody might do wonders. The Revolution,--such was the language
constantly held by Titus and his parasites,--had produced little go