No more extravagant nonsense could have been conceived by the inhabitants of a madhouse. Nevertheless, "all England," says Macaulay, "was worked up into a frenzy by it. London was placed in a state of siege. Train bands were under arms all night. Preparations were made to barricade the main thoroughfares. Patrols marched up and down the streets, cannon were planted in Whitehall. Every citizen carried a flail, loaded with lead, to brain the popish assassins, and all the jails were filled with papists. Meantime Oates was received in the palaces of the great and hailed everywhere as the saviour of the nation." The result of it all was that sixteen innocent men were sent to the gallows, among them seven Jesuits: William Ireland, John Gavan, William Harcourt, Anthony Turner, Thomas Whitebread, John Fenwick and David Lewis, besides their illustrious pupil, Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh. As the saintly prelate has been beatified by the Church as a martyr for thus shedding his blood, inferentially one might claim a similar distinction for all his companions. On the list are one Benedictine, one Franciscan and six secular priests. The Earl of Stafford who was sentenced like the rest to be hanged, drawn and quartered was graciously permitted by his majesty to be merely beheaded. For these murders Oates was pensioned for life, but in 1682 Judge Jeffries fined him one hundred thousand pounds for _scandalum magnatum_ and condemned him to be whipped, pilloried, degraded and imprisoned for life. "He has deserved more punishment," said the judge, "than the law can inflict." But when William of Orange came to the throne he pardoned the miscreant and gave him a pension of three hundred pounds. In his "Popish Plot," Pollock continually insists, by insinuation rather than by direct assertion, that Oates was a novice of the Society. Thus, we are told that he was sent to the "Collegio de los Ingleses at Valladolid to nurse into a Jesuit;" and subsequently "the expelled novice was sent to complete his education at St. Omers." But, in the first place, a "Collegio" at Valladolid or anywhere else can never be a novitiate, for novices are forbidden all collegiate study; secondly, St. Omers in France was a boys' school and nothing else; thirdly, the description of Oates by the Jesuit Father Warner absolutely precludes any possibility of his ever having been admitted as a novice or even as a remotely prospective candidate.