The Gunpowder Plot and Lord Mounteagle's Letter, Being a Proof, with Moral Certitude, of the Authorship of the Document / Together with Some Account of the Whole Thirteen Gunpowder Conspirators, Including Guy Fawkes

by Henry Spink

Appendix B.

Discrepancy as to Date when not Material to Issue,
no Disproof of Truth of the rest of the Assertion.

The above doctrine of the law of Evidence applies, of course, to whatever may be the nature or purpose of the Inquiry, whether conducted in a Court of Law, in the library of the historical scholar, or elsewhere.

The principle was soundly stated at the trial of “the Venerable” Martyrs, Fathers Whitbread, Harcourt, Fenwick, Gavan, and Turner, at the Old Bailey, by Sir William Scroggs, Knt., the Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, on the occasion of the Popish Plot Trials, in the year 1679.

“If it should be a mistake only in point of time, it destroys not the evidence, unless you think it necessary to the substance of the thing.

“If you charge one in the month of August to have done such a fact, if he deny that he was in that place at that time, and proves it by witnesses, it may go to invalidate the credibility of the man’s testimony, but it does not invalidate the truth of the thing itself, which may be true in substance, though the circumstance of time differ; and the question is, whether the thing be true?” Quoted in Morris’s “Troubles: The Southcote Family,” first series, p. 378 (Burns & Oates). (The italics are mine.)