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Royal Marriages and Succession to the Crown (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill

To imply that a Government Whip is in any way a Government stooge is outrageous. The scale of remuneration is entirely different. We should not forget that Titus Oates received an annual allowance of £1,200. Perhaps Government Whips get that much—I do not know. That stipend was removed when James II—the great King James—came to the throne. When King James sadly left these lands, it was reinstated. We should not forget that King James, under the noble, generous and warm-hearted Judge Jeffreys, ordered Titus Oates to be pilloried and whipped, not once but annually, immediately outside this building in New Palace Yard, where he was also to be pelted with eggs and to carry a sign saying that he was a shame to mankind. My point is that someone who was so demonstrably and risibly a perjurer, with such an extraordinary background in Hastings and the Royal Navy, managed—in the company of a man called Israel Tonge, who was an equally inflammatory pamphleteer—to persuade the nation to execute Catholics on the grounds that they might possibly represent a threat to the nation. If Titus Oates managed to kill some 15 Catholics, Lord George Gordon, at the time of the Gordon riots in the late 18th century—well known to everybody who has read "Barnaby Rudge"—was responsible for the death of about 450 people. That brings us fairly up to date. Although Lord George Gordon sat in the upper House—