The Popish Plot: A study in the history of the reign of Charles II

by John Pollock

CHAPTER IV

PRANCE AND BEDLOE

At this point the atmosphere begins somewhat to clear. Two trials have been discussed, and the result is seen that the two chief witnesses at them were guilty of wilful perjury. Bedloe contradicted himself beyond belief. Although it was by no means clear at the time, the men convicted upon the evidence of Prance were certainly innocent. This has since been universally recognised. Yet the verdict against them was not perverse, and small blame attaches to the judges and jury who acted on the evidence of Prance. For all they knew he was speaking the truth. The witnesses for the defence were uncertain in points of time to which they spoke, and Prance was to a certain extent corroborated by independent evidence. On the case which came into court the conviction was certainly justifiable. It is now possible to see that the verdict was wrong. The motive which Prance alleged for the crime was weak in the extreme, and his subsequent conduct supports the fact of his perjury. Although an absolute alibi was not proved for any of the accused at the time of the murder, a considerable body of evidence came near the point, and an alibi was proved both for Green and for Hill at the time when Prance stated that each was engaged in dogging Sir Edmund Godfrey to his death. The sentries proved that the body had not been removed in the manner which Prance described. The evidence of the inmates of Hill’s house proved that it had not been placed where Prance affirmed. Green, Berry, and Hill were wrongfully put to death.

From this point it is necessary to start upon the pursuit of the truth, and before starting it is well to take a view of the situation. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey disappeared on Saturday, October 12. Five days later his body was found in a field near Primrose Hill. He had been murdered, and the crime was committed for some motive which was not that of robbery. He was murdered moreover not where his corpse was found, but in some other place from which it had afterwards been conveyed thither. Whoever was the criminal had placed the body in such a way that those who found it might attribute the magistrate’s death to suicide. Two witnesses appeared to give evidence to the fact of the murder. These two were the only men who ever professed to have direct knowledge on the subject. They both accused innocent men, told elaborate falsehoods, and contradicted one another. Their stories were so unlike, and yet had so much in common, that the fact must be explained by supposing either that there was some truth in what they said, or that one swore falsely to support the perjury of the other. The relation between the two is the point to which attention must be devoted in order to trace the interaction of their motives and to determine whether both or neither or one and not the other knew anything about the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey.

Nearly eight years after these events, in the second year of the reign of King James the Second, Miles Prance pleaded guilty to an indictment of wilful perjury for having sworn falsely at the trial of Green, Berry, and Hill.[244] Later, when L’Estrange was writing his work on The Mystery of Sir E. B. Godfrey Unfolded, Prance sent to him an account of the manner in which his evidence had been procured. He was, he said, wholly innocent and wholly ignorant of the murder. Before his arrest he knew no more of Godfrey, Bedloe, or any one else concerned than was known to the world at large. His arrest took place upon Saturday, December 21. During the nights of Saturday and Sunday he lay in irons in the dungeon in Newgate. Early on the Sunday morning he was disturbed by the entrance of a man, who, as Prance declared, laid a sheet of paper beside him and went out. Soon after another entered, set down a candle, and went out. By the light of the candle Prance read the paper; “wherein,” says L’Estrange, “he found the substance of these following minutes. So many Popish lords to be mentioned by name; fifty thousand men to be raised; commissions given out; officers appointed. Ireland was acquainted with the design; and Bedloe’s evidence against Godfrey was summed up and abstracted in it too. There were suggestions in it that Prance must undoubtedly be privy to the plot, with words to this purpose, you had better confess than be hanged.” In the evening of the same day he was taken to Shaftesbury’s house and examined by the earl. The Whig leader threatened him with hanging if he would not confess and acquiesce in what had been suggested to him in the paper. He could resist no longer, he said, “and so framed a pretended discovery in part, with a promise to speak out more at large if he might have his pardon.” A paper containing this was given him to sign, and he was sent back to Newgate, where he made a formal confession the next day. Clearly, thought Prance, the men who came into his cell, and left instructions for the evidence which he was to give and a light by which to read them, had acted under orders from Shaftesbury.[245] This is what Prance and L’Estrange had to say about this first confession. Before examining it further it will be proper to consider Prance’s condition between that time and the date when after numerous manœuvres he finally returned to it. On December 30 he appeared before the council and recanted his confession. For nine days there seems to have been no development. Prance lay in the dungeon and adhered to his last statement. But on January 8 Captain Richardson, the keeper of Newgate, and his servant, Charles Cooper, appeared before a committee of the privy council with information that Prance was feigning madness. When he was fettered he behaved the more sensibly. It was ordered accordingly that he should be kept in irons and that Dr. Lloyd, the Dean of Bangor, should be asked to visit and converse with him.[246] On January 10 a similar order was given for the admittance of William Boyce, an old friend of Prance, to be with him in prison. Cooper passed two nights with the prisoner. His sleep was irregular, and he spent long periods raving and crying out that “it was not he murdered him, but they killed him.” In spite of his wild talk Prance seemed to behave rather as if he wished to be thought mad than as if he actually were so; he ate heartily, used a bed and blankets which had been given him, and adjusted his dress with care.[247] Boyce also visited him, and found him sometimes reasonable, at others apparently out of his senses. Once he found him lying at full length on the boards of his cell and crying, “Guilty, guilty; not guilty, not guilty; no murder”; but when he first went to the prison Prance met him quietly and said, “Here am I in prison, and I am like to be hanged. I am falsely accused.” Shaftesbury’s threats had terrified him for the safety of his life, but he was anxious to learn that Green, Berry, and Hill had not been set at liberty, and in a conversation of January 11 told Boyce “that he would confess all if he were sure of his pardon.”[248] On Friday, January 10, Dr. Lloyd visited Newgate and found Prance in a very wretched condition. The weather was intensely cold, and the prisoner suffered severely from it, despite the covering with which he had been provided. He was very weak and denied his guilt sullenly, but after a time begged Lloyd to come again the next day, when he would tell everything that he knew.[249] Accordingly on the evening of January 11 the dean returned, and Prance was brought to him by the hall fire. For some time he remained stupefied by the cold; he was without a pulse and seemed almost dead; but after warming himself at the fire threw off the lethargy and conversed with Lloyd briskly and with freedom. The dean reported to the council: “He appeared very well composed and in good humour, saying that he had confessed honestly before, and had not wronged any of those he had accused.” He proceeded further to tell of a plot to murder the Earl of Shaftesbury, and said that a servant of Lord Arundel, one Messenger, had undertaken to kill the king. Lloyd warned him to be careful of speaking the truth; Prance protested that he would do nothing else. When he had finished his confession he asked to be lodged in a warmer room and to have the irons knocked off.[250] From that time onward he remained steadfast to his first confession. Writing many years later, when everybody connected with the Plot had fallen into discredit and Prance had pleaded guilty to the charge of perjury, Lloyd assured L’Estrange that he had never believed the informer’s evidence. In this he was deceived by his after opinions, for at the time he told Burnet that it was impossible for him to doubt Prance’s sincerity.[251] Lloyd did not escape the calumny which pursued every one who refused to be an uncompromising supporter of all the evidence offered in the investigation of the Plot. He expressed himself doubtful as to the guilt of Berry and thought that Prance might have made a mistake of identity. It was immediately said that Berry had made horrible confessions to him, and that he had been pressed at court not to divulge them.[252]

Prison life in the seventeenth century was hard. Prisoners were treated in a way that would now be considered shameful, and Prance did not escape his share of ill-treatment. He was kept in the cell reserved for felons and murderers. According to the general practice he was heavily ironed. Until his life was thought in danger he had nothing but the boards on which to lie. The greatest hardship arose from the cold, against which there was no real provision. But there is no evidence that Prance more hardly used than his fellow gaol-birds. A detestable attempt was afterwards made to prove that he had been tortured in prison to extract confessions from him. In the course of the year 1680 Mrs. Cellier, the Roman Catholic midwife of otherwise dubious reputation, published a pamphlet entitled “Malice Defeated; or a Brief Relation of the Accusation and Deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier.” The work was an attack upon the prosecutors of the Popish Plot, conducted with all the coarse weapons of seventeenth-century controversy. Incidentally she called the crown witnesses “hangman’s hounds for weekly pensions.” On September 11 she was indicted for a malicious libel and tried before Baron Weston and the Lord Mayor. The libel lay in her open declaration that Prance was put on the rack in Newgate and that Francis Corral, who had been imprisoned on suspicion of complicity in Godfrey’s murder, was subjected to intolerably ill treatment and active torture in Newgate in order to make him confess his guilt.[253] The charges which Mrs. Cellier made were not only outrageous but ridiculous, and were so improbable as not to deserve detailed discussion. Witnesses were called for the prosecution who proved their complete falsity, and Mrs. Cellier’s counsel virtually threw up his brief. Not only did the keeper of Newgate deny everything in the publication relating to himself, but the parties who had been mentioned in it were summoned as witnesses and gave decisive evidence. Prance denied the whole story and, what was of greater value than his word, made the pertinent remark that, had he been used in such a way as Mrs. Cellier suggested, Dr. Lloyd must certainly have known about it. The man Corral had been kept out of court by the defence, but he had already denied all Mrs. Cellier’s allegations in a deposition made before the Lord Mayor. His wife had made a similar deposition and, being now called as a witness, wholly refused to support the statements of the accused. Her husband had been treated hardly, as were all prisoners, but Mrs. Cellier’s charges of torture and brutality were false. She had been allowed to see her husband occasionally and to send him food constantly, and he had been given a charcoal fire in his cell to protect him from the cold weather. Mrs. Cellier had offered to support them both, apparently on the understanding that they should acquiesce in what she had said.[254] Another important witness proved the falsehood of many statements made in the publication, and after a lengthy summing up of the evidence by Baron Weston the jury without difficulty returned a verdict of guilty against the prisoner. Mrs. Cellier was sentenced to stand three times on the pillory, to a fine of a thousand pounds, and to imprisonment until the fine was paid.[255] Eight years later the same charges were repeated by Sir Roger L’Estrange and were supported by Prance, to whose objects this line of conduct was now better suited. The evidence which L’Estrange collected was exactly similar to that which Mrs. Cellier had obtained, and equally worthless. Not only the result of the trial, but the essential improbability of the facts alleged makes it certain that these allegations were absolutely devoid of truth.[256] Dr. Lloyd, who was well acquainted with the hard treatment accorded to Prance, saw no evidence that it exceeded the common practice of the prison, and disbelieved the gruesome stories which were industriously spread abroad.[257]

Whether or no Prance was subjected to illegitimate and illegal pressure after his recantation in order to secure his adherence to the earlier confession is a question of less importance than how that confession was obtained. Prance’s subsequent account has already been given. It remains to be considered whether that was true or false. Apart from the rest of the evidence produced at the trials of the Popish Plot, that of Prance exhibited one remarkable peculiarity. All the other witnesses altered and rearranged their stories with constant facility to suit the conditions in which they found themselves at any moment. Among this rout of shifting informations the evidence of Prance offers an exception to the rule of self-contradiction. In all but a few particulars it remained constant. Other witnesses invariably put out feelers to try in what direction they had best develop their tales. The methods of Oates, Atkins, and Bedloe are notorious instances of this. Prance produced the flower of his full-blown. Its bouquet was as strong when it first met the air as at any later time. The evidence which he gave to Godfrey’s murder in his first confession was as decisive and consistent in form as after constant repetition, recantation, and renewed asseverance. Almost all the other witnesses at their first appearance told stories which were loose, haphazard, inconsequent. Prance’s story was from the beginning minute and elaborate. He spoke of places in great detail and afterwards pointed them out. He gave a coherent account of what had happened at each spot. On these points he did not contradict himself. The evidence which he proceeded to give about the Plot in general throws his account of Godfrey’s death into high relief. His later information was exactly similar in character to that offered by all the other witnesses. It was vague and incoherent and full of absurdities. The contrast to the elaboration and detail of his previous evidence is striking.

Compared with Bedloe’s account of the murder the testimony of Prance shows another noteworthy feature. The evidence of the two men hardly covers the same ground at all. In almost every particular it offers remarkable points of difference. Up to the date of October 12 the two stories run in different lines altogether. According to Prance two priests, named Gerald and Kelly, had, by means of menace and abstract arguments, induced him to join with them and four others, Green, Hill, Berry, and Vernatt, in the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, on the score that “he was a busy man and going about to ruin all the Catholics in England.”[258] One Leweson, a priest, was also to have a hand in the business. Bedloe’s tale on the contrary was that Le Fevre, Pritchard, Keynes, and Walsh, four Jesuits, had employed him to effect an introduction to Godfrey for them. Le Fevre afterwards offered him £4000, to be paid by Lord Bellasis through Coleman, if he would undertake to kill “a very material man” in order to obtain some incriminating papers in his possession, without which “the business would be so obstructed and go near to be discovered” that the great Plot would come to grief.[259] At this point the stories begin to converge, and at the same time retain strikingly different features. Prance’s account ran that on October 12 Gerald, Green, and Hill decoyed Godfrey as he came down the Strand from St. Clement’s into Somerset House at about 9 o’clock in the evening under pretence of a quarrel. Green, Gerald, Hill, and Kelly then attacked him. Green strangled him with a twisted handkerchief, knelt with all his force upon his chest and “wrung his neck round,” while Berry and Prance kept watch.[260] On the nights of Saturday and Sunday the body was left in Hill’s lodgings in Somerset House, and on Monday was removed to another room across the court. There Hill shewed it to Prance by the light of a dark lantern at past 10 o’clock at night: “Gerald and Hill and Kelly and all were there.”[261] Prance had no knowledge of seeing Bedloe in the room. At midnight on Wednesday, October 16, the corpse was placed in a sedan chair and carried, as Prance said, by Gerald, Green, Kelly, and himself as far as Soho Church. Hill met them there with a horse, on which he put the body and rode with it to Primrose Hill.[262] Bedloe’s finished account gave a picture very unlike this. He stated that on Monday, October 14, between 9 and 10 o’clock P.M. Le Fevre took him to a room in Somerset House and showed him the body of the murdered man lying under a cloak. He recognised the body to be that of Sir Edmund Godfrey. Besides Le Fevre he only saw in the room Walsh, a servant of Lord Bellasis, the supposed Atkins, and another man whom he had often seen in the chapel and afterwards recognised as Prance.[263] The next day Le Fevre described the murder to him in detail. Before 5 o’clock in the afternoon of October 12 Le Fevre, Walsh, and Lord Bellasis’ gentleman had brought Godfrey from the King’s Head Inn in the Strand to Somerset House under the pretext of taking him to capture some conspirators near St. Clement’s Church. They took him into a room and, holding a pistol to his head, demanded the informations which he had taken. On his refusal they stifled him with a pillow and then strangled him with his cravat.[264] On Monday night the murderers agreed with Bedloe “to carry the body in a chair to the corner of Clarendon House, and there to put him in a coach to carry him to the place where he was found.”[265] Two accounts of the same facts could hardly be imagined to differ more from one another than the stories of Prance and Bedloe. To state the matter briefly, Bedloe swore that Godfrey was murdered in one place, at one time, in one manner, for one motive, by one set of men; Prance swore that he was murdered in another place, at another time, in another manner, for another motive, by another set of men. Both Prance and Bedloe swore that they had seen the body of Sir Edmund Godfrey at nearly the same time in a room in Somerset House on the night of Monday, October 14, but Prance swore only to the presence of the men whom he had named as the murderers, while Bedloe swore only to the presence of the men whom he had named, with the addition of “the other person he saw often in the chapel,” whom he afterwards recognised to be Prance.

What then becomes of Prance’s statement that the only source of his information was the paper introduced into his cell on the morning of December 22, and containing the substance of Bedloe’s evidence? He professed that it was solely from this that his elaborate confession of December 23 and 24 was drawn, and that it was arranged not only by the connivance, but absolutely at the direction of the Earl of Shaftesbury. Nor was this all. He told L’Estrange further that after he had been forced to retract his recantation his friend Boyce had acted as agent of Bedloe and Shaftesbury in bringing his evidence into line with that of Bedloe. On one point he refused to yield; he would not own that he had worn the periwig of which Bedloe had spoken; but for the rest, according to his own account, he made no difficulty.[266] The story is glaringly inconsistent with the facts. So far from agreeing first or last with Bedloe, Prance contradicted him in almost every possible point. If it was true that, as he said, he was wholly ignorant of the murder and concocted his confession from minutes of Bedloe’s evidence which were given to him, the confession would have worn a very different colour. His only object was to save his neck and get out of Newgate. He would certainly have taken the material with which he was provided, and have simply repeated Bedloe’s tale with so much alteration as was necessary to make himself a partner in the murder. He had no motive to do anything else. Even alone he could hardly have missed the point, and by his own statement did not. Under the astute guidance of Shaftesbury there could be no possible danger of bungling. Instead of this being the case he acted in a fashion which, if he spoke the truth, would have been inconceivable. Not only did he not tell the same story as that which he professed was his only guide, but he told a tale so entirely different that neither Bedloe’s name nor the name of a single man given by Bedloe was mentioned in it at all. The idea of collusion between the informers in this way must be discarded. It is impossible that it should be true.

The story was adorned with another flourish which Prance did not himself venture to adopt. On his arrest he was met by Bedloe in the lobby of the House of Commons and there charged by him with complicity in the murder. L’Estrange declared that Bedloe had first made inquiries about him and had seized the opportunity to take a good view of him under the guidance of Sir William Waller.[267] But it would be little good to Bedloe to act in this way in accusing a man who might for all he knew refuse to give evidence, or give evidence which would not corroborate his own. The more definitely he accused Prance, the more difficult would be his own position if Prance should not support him. He must certainly have assured himself beforehand that Prance would make a good witness. Assurance might have been gained either by arranging that Prance should be informed of what was expected before his arrest, or by the knowledge that Shaftesbury would see to the matter afterwards. Both conjectures are in the same case. The latter has been shewn to be wide of the mark. For the same reasons the former must be thought equally inaccurate. Further than this the comparison between the evidence of Prance and Bedloe shows conclusively that the two did not arrange beforehand to give false evidence about the murder. Perjurers may be as stupid as other men, and an awkward muddle might have ensued; but two men arranging a profitable piece of perjury would hardly be at the pains to contradict each other’s evidence in every particular. Also, between the date of Bedloe’s first information and Prance’s confession there intervened a period of seven long weeks. If there had been previous collusion between the two. Prance would have come forward far sooner than four days before Christmas.

Out of the total number of possible hypotheses which may be advanced to account for the relation between Prance and Bedloe two are thus disposed of. The witnesses did not arrange together to give evidence of Godfrey’s murder. Nor was Prance furnished with the information which he was wanted to give and then subjected to such pressure that he was compelled to acquiesce in it. What then are the remaining explanations which may be put forward? The notion that Bedloe, on seeing Prance in custody on December 21, proceeded to denounce him at a venture in the bare hope of getting some support from him may be dismissed briefly. It would in any one have been a mad action to expose himself to the risk that Prance could prove an alibi, but for Bedloe to take such a course would have been more than improbable. When at a former date he accused Atkins of complicity in the murder, he used the greatest caution to obviate this risk. Until he knew whether or no Atkins could prove an alibi he would make no positive charge at all. The fact that his caution was justified would only make him more careful to avoid being caught in a trap similar to that which he had only just avoided. A more probable supposition is that Bedloe had made sufficient inquiries to be sure that Prance could not prove an alibi, and then denounced him, as if on the spur of the moment. This is a theory which has likelihood in its favour and deserves to be well weighed. Bedloe, it is supposed, had given entirely false information about the murder. After his failure to secure the conviction of Atkins he was compelled to turn in another direction. Looking round, his eye fell upon Prance as a suitable tool. He made careful inquiries as to his opportunity and ability to bear false witness, found that Prance would be unable to make out an alibi, and denounced him dramatically at Westminster. Prance was clapped into prison and, without having any notes of Bedloe’s evidence given him, was so terrified by the two nights which he spent in the dungeon in Newgate that he concocted a false story and then made confession of it. There is certainly something to be said in favour of this view. It was common talk that Godfrey had been murdered in Somerset House, and Bedloe was well known to have said as much. Prance was well acquainted with the place and the people belonging to it. He had at least as fair a chance as another of making a plausible account of the murder. He was in considerable danger and in great discomfort. He had already lost his liberty and bade fair to lose his life for speaking the truth. It was natural enough that he should renounce his honesty and spin a tale to save his skin. He could make use of knowledge which would render it unlikely that he should be caught tripping. He had heard Bedloe say that he saw him on the Monday night standing by the body with a dark lantern, so that he could place this incident in his story without hesitation. The publicity of the manner of Godfrey’s death would enable him to speak with equal certainty as to the actual murder.

Here is a plausible enough theory of the relation between the witnesses and the manner in which Prance’s evidence was procured. Unfortunately there are considerable difficulties in the way of its acceptance. If Prance was enabled by the words which he heard Bedloe speak to place the incident of October 14 in his narrative, he was also enabled to make a connection with Bedloe himself at that point. As according to the hypothesis this was his only knowledge of the details of Bedloe’s information, he would have been eager to make the most of it. It would have been the first point for him to clutch. On the contrary, Prance did nothing of the kind. He did not mention Bedloe’s name at all. The question why he did not is, if this theory be true, unanswerable. Bedloe too went to the trouble of spending four valuable weeks in his search for a suitable instrument to bear out his story. If that was the case it is surely strange that he should not have attempted to make certain that the man whom he obtained at last should be more or less acquainted with the tale which he was to corroborate. To do this after the arrest would probably be very difficult, but as a previous step it would be by no means so hard. Oates and Bedloe had many disreputable friends, by profession Roman Catholics, who could have easily effected an introduction to Prance and have held conversation the meaning of which would after his arrest be plain. Instead of this Bedloe on the hypothesis preferred to run the risk of having his whole story contradicted. These are objections of weight; but a still greater lies in the nature of the evidence which Prance gave on his confession. He had been in a very cold dungeon for thirty-six hours at most, from the evening of December 21 to the morning of December 23. If he was unprepared for Bedloe’s charge, his mind must have been in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. Yet within this time he evolved a story so detailed, elaborate, connected, and consistent that he never afterwards found the need to alter it materially. For such a task phenomenal powers of memory, imagination, and coolness would be demanded. A man of Prance’s station, suddenly thrown into a horrible prison on a false charge, cannot be supposed to have been endowed with such a wealth of mental equipment. If he had possessed a tithe of the powers which in this case would have been necessary, he would have made sure of cementing a firm connection in his narrative between himself and Bedloe.

This consideration then has reached the result that the relation between the two men is not only inexplicable on the theory just discussed, but that it is inexplicable except upon the ground that there was more in Prance’s evidence than a work of mere fancy. Within the space of thirty-six hours, and with every condition adverse to clear and connected thought, he could not have produced the evidence which he gave on December 23 and 24 unless it had been based upon some reality in fact. On December 24 he was taken to all the places of which he had spoken, and went to each, describing the transaction on the spot in a manner perfectly consonant with what he had said under examination elsewhere. The consistence of his story, its readiness, the minuteness of its detail point to the certainty that he was speaking, not of incidents manufactured to order, but of facts within his knowledge. Prance was in fact a party to the murder.[268] From this it is a sure deduction that when Bedloe denounced him in the lobby of the House of Commons he was not, as L’Estrange asserted, making a move in a game which had been arranged beforehand, but had on the contrary really recognised the man and on the instant made an accusation not wholly devoid of truth. Bedloe too must therefore have known something about the murder. It would be an unbelievable coincidence that, if Bedloe were wholly ignorant, he should chance to choose, out of all London, one of the few who were not.

It now becomes evident what part of Prance’s evidence was true and what false. The three men whose conviction for the murder he procured were certainly innocent. Almost with equal certainty it can be said that he was not speaking at random. The truth of what he affirmed lay therefore in the facts and the manner of the transaction which he described. The murder had taken place at Somerset House in the way which he related, but he fastened the crime upon men who were guiltless of Godfrey’s death. The extent of Bedloe’s information also can be calculated. On every point of time and place he had prevaricated and contradicted himself beyond measure. On none of these is his testimony of the slightest value. Nevertheless he was possessed of enough knowledge to accuse definitely a man who was actively concerned in the crime and could relate the facts as they happened. Clearly he had become acquainted with the persons who were guilty of the murder. The probability then is that those whose names he first gave directly were the culprits. Prance he did not know by name, but by sight alone. From the beginning he had always spoken of “the waiter in the queen’s chapel,” or of the man whom “he saw often in the chapel.” If this had been a chance shot, he would afterwards have identified this man with Green, who actually answered to the description. Instead of this he recognised him in the person of Prance. As he only mentioned the fact incidentally and did not insist upon it as a circumstance in his favour, his word on the point is the more deserving of credit. If Prance himself was a party to the murder he must have known the real authors of it. He must have accused the innocent not from necessity but from choice, and in order to conceal the guilty. As he was expected and supposed to corroborate Bedloe’s evidence, his most natural course was to introduce into his story all those whom Bedloe had named. He carefully avoided mentioning any of them. No other reason is conceivable except that he knew Bedloe to have exposed the real murderers, and that he wished to shield them. What then was the motive of the crime, and how did this extraordinary complication arise?