The mischance marked the beginning of his rise. Again adrift in London, the tide threw him upon William Smith, his former master at Merchant Taylors’ School. It was Bartholomew-tide in the year 1676. With Smith was Matthew Medburne, a player from the Duke of York’s theatre, and by creed a Roman Catholic. The two made friends with Oates, and on Medburne’s introduction he became a member of a club which met twice a week at the Pheasant Inn in Fuller’s Rents. The club contained both Catholics and Protestants, discussion of religion and politics being prohibited under penalty of a fine.[4] Here Oates made his first acquaintance with those of the religion which he was afterwards to turn to a source of so great profit. The rule which forbade controversy applied only to the meetings of the club, and beyond its limits discussion between members seems to have been free. It was perhaps by the agency of some of these that in the winter of the same year Oates was admitted as chaplain into the service of the Duke of Norfolk.[5] Testimony to character on the engagement of a servant in the seventeenth century was probably not severely examined. In the house of the great Catholic noble Oates found himself in the company of priests of the forbidden church. Conversation turned on the subject of religion, and Oates lent ear to the addresses of the other side. Though he wore the gown of an English minister, his faith sat light upon him, and he did not scruple to change it for advantage. On Ash Wednesday 1677 he was formally reconciled to the Church of Rome.[6] The instrument for the salvation of the strayed lamb was one Berry, alias Hutchinson, a Jesuit whom Oates had afterwards the grace to describe as “a saintlike man, one that was religious for religion’s sake.” By others the instrument was thought to be somewhat weak-minded; at a later date he seceded to the Protestant faith and became curate in the city, later still to be welcomed back into the bosom of his previous church; withal a very pious person, removed from politics, and much given to making converts. Neither conversion nor piety alone was an end to Oates. He soon made his way to Father Richard Strange, provincial of the Society of Jesus, and notified him of a desire for admission into the order. Consulting with his fellows, Strange gave consent to the proposal, and before the end of April, Oates was shipped on a Bilboa merchantman with letters to the English Jesuit seminary at Valladolid.[7]