Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/38

 of his writings upon the subject (see below). These works, so Oates informed him, ‘so gaul'd the jesuits at St. Omer’ that they despatched Titus to murder the author, but the intended murderer took the opportunity to escape from their clutches and to save his king and his country. This probably represented Tonge's genuine belief in the matter.

In September 1680 Simpson Tonge, the divine's eldest son, was committed to Newgate for aspersions against his father and Oates to the effect that they had concocted the plot between them. A few days later the young man withdrew this charge, and accused Sir Roger L'Estrange [q. v.] of suborning him to the perjury. No weight whatever can be attached to his evidence, as he seems to have acted as the tool of Titus Oates with a view to ‘trepanning’ L'Estrange, the mortal enemy of the plot. Oates's idea was evidently to involve L'Estrange in a colourable charge of tampering with young Tonge to invalidate the ‘protestant’ evidence. The device was exposed by L'Estrange in ‘The Shammer Shamm'd’ (1681, 4to; cf., Narration, 1680, fol.); but it had the effect of driving L'Estrange temporarily from London.

The affair led Israel Tonge to commence an elaborate vindication of his conduct in connection with the plot. Having narrowly escaped censure by the House of Commons for imputing to a member (Sir Edward Dering) a feeling of kindness towards the pope's nuncio (, Debates, viii. 1 sq.), Tonge seems to have proceeded to Oxford in November 1680. He had a design on foot for turning Obadiah Walker [q. v.] out of his fellowship and succeeding to the place. At Oxford, too, he took part in the burning of a huge effigy of the pope, in the body of which, to represent devils, a number of cats and rats were imprisoned. He returned to London before the close of the month, and he died in the house of Stephen College [q. v.] on 18 Dec. 1680. His funeral procession from Blackfriars to St. Michael's, Wood Street, was followed on 23 Dec. by ‘many of the godly party.’ The sermon preached by Thomas Jones of Oswestry was printed with a dedication to the Duke of Monmouth. A committee of the privy council was appointed to examine his papers, but nothing seems to have resulted from their investigations.

An inventory of Tonge's books is in the Record Office (State Papers, Dom. Car. II, p. 409). The same volume contains a very copious and elaborate diary of the events of 1678–9, subscribed ‘Simson Tonge's Journall of the Plot written all with his own hands as he had excerped it out of his father Dr. Tonge's papers a little before he fell into the suborners' hands.’

According to Wood, Tonge excelled in Latin, Greek, poetry, and chronology, but above all in alchymy, on which he spent much time and money. ‘He was a person cynical and hirsute, shiftless in the world, yet absolutely free from covetousness and I dare say from pride.’ He showed great ingenuity in his grammar teaching and also in his botanical studies, and contributed three papers on the ‘Action of Sap’ to the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ (Nos. 57, 58, 68). A vivid description of the learned ‘gown-man’ with his head stuffed full of plots and Marian persecutions, patching up the depositions, with Oates and Bedloe on one side and Shaftesbury on the other, is given in the ‘Ballad upon the Popish Plot’ (see Bagford Ballads, ed. Ebsworth, p. 690). His diatribes against the jesuits, for many years unsaleable, derived a tremendous impetus from the ‘discovery of the plot.’ The chief of them were: 1. ‘Jesuitical Aphorismes; or, a Summary Account of the Doctrines of the Jesuites, and some other Popish Doctors. By Ezerel Tonge, D.D., who first discovered the horrid Popish Plot to his Majesty,’ London, 1679, 4to. 2. ‘The New Design of the Papists detected; or, an Answer to the last Speeches of the Five Jesuites lately executed: viz. Tho. White alias Whitebread, William Harcourt alias Harison, John Gavan alias Gawen, Anthony Turner, and John Fenwick. By Ezrael Tongue, D.D.,’ London, 1679, fol.; an apparently sincere protest against the ‘damnable impiety’ of the victims of the popish plot, on account of their dying declarations of innocence. 3. ‘An Account of the Romish Doctrine in case of Conspiracy and Rebellion,’ London, 1679, 4to. 4. ‘Popish Mercy and Justice: being an account, not of those massacred in France by the Papists formerly, but of some later persecutions of the French Protestants,’ London, 1679, 4to. 5. ‘The Northern Star: The British Monarchy: or the Northern the Fourth Universal Monarchy .... Being a Collection of many choice Ancient and Modern Prophecies,’ London, 1680, fol.; dedicated to Charles II ‘by his majesty's sometime commissionated chaplain, E. T.’ 6. ‘Jesuits Assassins; or, the Popish Plot further declared and demonstrated in their murderous Practices and Principles,’ containing a catalogue of the ‘English Popish Assassins swarming in all places, especially in the city of London,’ proposals for the ‘extirpation of this Bloody