The labyrinthine nature of the intrigues connected with the Popish Plot is amply illustrated by these two trials. The third case presents less intricacy, but no less dishonesty. In January 1680 John Tasborough and Anne Price were tried for subornation of perjury in having offered a bribe to the informer Dugdale to retract the evidence which he had given at the trial of Whitebread, Harcourt, and Fenwick. Mrs. Price had been a fellow-servant with Dugdale in the household of the Roman Catholic peer, Lord Aston. On the night before the trial of the five Jesuits[667] she came to him and begged him not to give evidence against Father Harcourt, who was her confessor. When the trial was over she renewed her solicitations, offering him the reward of £1000 and the Duke of York’s protection if he would recant what he had then sworn. Dugdale was introduced to Tasborough, a gentleman belonging to the duke’s household.[668] Meetings were held at the Green Lettice Tavern in Brownlow Street and at the Pheasant Inn in Fullers-rents. Tasborough confirmed the promises made by Mrs. Price. The informer was to sign a declaration that all his evidence had been false, to receive £1000 in cash, and to be maintained abroad by the Duke of York. The name of the Spanish ambassador was also mentioned. But Dugdale, as Bedloe before him, had secreted witnesses at these interviews. The intriguers were arrested, and the whole story was proved beyond the possibility of doubt at their trial.[669] Tasborough was sentenced to the fine of £100, Price to the fine of twice that sum. All parties at the trial were at considerable pains to exonerate the Duke of York. There was in fact no direct evidence against him; but it is improbable that the culprits had been using his name entirely without authority. They must have known that Dugdale would not put his name to the recantation without substantial guarantee for the reward, and certainly neither was in a position to pay any sufficient part of the sum mentioned from his own resources.
The evidence which Dugdale should have retracted was considerable. His reputation was still undamaged. He had been steward of Lord Aston’s estate at Tixhall, in Staffordshire, was thought to have enjoyed a fair reputation in the county, and to have been imprisoned in the first instance for refusing to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy.[670] Although he had laid information before the privy council as early as December 1678, it was not until the trial of the Five Jesuits[671] on June 13 of the year following that he appeared in court. The case for the prosecution was opened, as usual, with the evidence of Oates, He reaffirmed the story which he had told at the trial of Whitebread, Fenwick, and Ireland, and gave similar evidence against Harcourt, Gavan, and Turner. Dugdale was then called. He swore to treasonable consults held at Tixhall in September 1678, where Gavan and Turner were present, to treasonable letters between Whitebread, Harcourt, and others, and to a letter dispatched from London by Harcourt on October 20, 1678, addressed to Evers, another Jesuit, and containing the words “This night Sir Edmond Bury Godfrey is dispatched.”[672] The death of the king was to be laid at the door of the Presbyterian party. A general massacre of Protestants was to follow, “and if any did escape that they could not be sure of were papists, they were to have an army to cut them off.”[673] Bedloe followed with the evidence which he had before suppressed against Whitebread and Fenwick, and swore similarly to the treason of Harcourt. Some trifling evidence from Prance closed the first part of the case for the crown.[674] But almost more important than the oral testimony were two letters which were read in court. The one was a note from Edward Petre, containing a summons to the congregation fixed for April 24, 1678; the other a letter from Christopher Anderton, dated from Rome, February 5, 1679, in which occurred the following sentences: “We are all here very glad of the promotion of Mr. Thomas Harcourt; when I writ that the patents were sent, although I guess for whom they were, yet I know not for certain, because our patrons do not use to discover things or resolutions till they know they have effect. And therefore in these kind of matters I dare not be too hasty, lest some might say, a fool’s bolt is soon shot.” Both had been found among Harcourt’s papers several days after Oates was examined by the privy council.[675] They seemed to confirm his evidence in a remarkable manner. He had constantly spoken of the Jesuit design; the former of the letters contained the same word and enjoined secrecy on the subject. The latter seemed to refer to the patents which Oates had declared were sent to the commanders of the popish army. The prisoners explained that the “design” of the congregation was but to settle the business of their order and to choose a procurator to undertake its management at Rome. As for the patents, Anderton had meant to say Literae Patentes, and referred only to Harcourt’s patent as new provincial. Literae Patentes, contended the court, when used in reference to one person, meant a patent; but when the phrase was translated patents, it necessarily pointed at more than one. Oates, said the Chief Justice, interpreted the matter more plainly than the accused.[676]
The Jesuits proceeded to make their defence. Sixteen witnesses were called to prove that Oates had been at St. Omers from December 1677 to June 1678, and had not left the college at the time when he swore that he was present at the consult in London. This was the perjury upon which he was convicted at his first trial in 1685. Five witnesses were called to testify that Gavan had not been in town in April 1678; ten, that Ireland had been in the country in August and September of the same year. Very similar evidence to that now given was accepted six years later by the court to substantiate the charge against Oates, but at the trial of Whitebread, Harcourt, and Fenwick it was disbelieved. The witnesses were examined in detail and gave an elaborate account of the life at the seminary. But the story which they told was not altogether satisfactory. Under examination they shuffled and prevaricated. Sometimes they contradicted one another on points of time. They came prepared to speak to the date of the consult and the time immediately before and after it. When questions were put about dates less closely concerned, they seemed unwilling to answer. One, who declared that he had left Oates at St. Omers on taking leave for England to go to the congregation, was confounded when Oates reminded him that he had lost his money at Calais and had been compelled to borrow from a friend. Another confused the old and new styles. A third stated that whenever a scholar left the college the fact could not but be known to all his fellows. He was immediately contradicted by Gavan, who said that care was taken that the comings and goings of the seminarists should be unnoticed.[677] A rumour was spread abroad that witnesses had been tutored, and was repeated by Algernon Sidney in a letter to Paris.[678] For once rumour was not at variance with truth. Sidney’s information was perfectly correct. Three of the lads from St. Omers were arrested on their arrival in London by Sir William Waller, and their examinations were forwarded by him to the secret committee of the House of Commons. One of these was Christopher Townley, alias Madgworth, alias Sands, who had been a student in the seminary for six years. He admitted that “his instructions from the superior was to come over and swear that Mr. Oates was but once from the college at St. Omers, from December 1677 to June following.” Of his own knowledge he could say no more than that he had been in the seminary all the time during which Oates was there; “the said Mr. Oates might be absent from St. Omers in that time for several days and at several times, but not absent above one week at a time, this examinant being lodged in the college where Mr. Oates was, but did not see him daily.”[679] At the trial he did not scruple to say that he had seen and talked with Oates on every day throughout April and May and that, if Oates had ever been absent, he must certainly have known it.[680] Nor was this all. At his examination he deposed that Parry, Palmer, and Gifford were all absent from St. Omers while Oates was an inmate of the college. At the trial Gifford, Palmer, and Parry were produced to give evidence of their personal knowledge that Oates had been there the whole of the time.[681] No credence whatever can be given to such witnesses. It is worthy of remark that they were housed and entertained by no other than Mrs. Cellier, who was afterwards deeply concerned both in the Meal Tub Plot and in the case of Knox and Lane, and was pilloried for an atrocious libel in connection with the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.[682] No doubt can exist on the subject of Oates’ repeated and astounding perjuries. It is as little open to doubt that the witnesses who were opposed to him at this trial were almost equally untrustworthy. They were in fact very cleverly parroted. If his infamy remains undisturbed, the unctuous indignation with which it was denounced by the Jesuits, at the very moment when they were employing means as unhallowed as his own to controvert his statements, at least entitles them to a place by his side in the pillory of history.
Even at this point the false evidence given at this terrible trial was not ended. The crown produced seven witnesses to prove that Oates had been in London at the end of April and the beginning of May 1678. Of these the only two who gave evidence of any weight were Smith, who had been Oates’ master at Merchant Tailors’ School, and Clay, a disreputable Dominican friar, whom Oates had taken out of prison. Both were afterwards proved to have been suborned by Oates and to have perjured themselves.[683]
The Jesuits concluded their defence with speeches of real eloquence. Scroggs summed up the evidence in an elaborate speech and strongly in favour of the crown; and after a quarter of an hour’s absence the jury returned to court with a verdict of guilty against all the prisoners.[684]
On the next day Richard Langhorn was indicted at the Old Bailey for practically the same treason as that for which the Five Jesuits were convicted. Langhorn was a Roman Catholic barrister of considerable eminence.[685] He was the legal adviser of the Jesuits, and conducted for them much business which would now more naturally pass through the hands of a solicitor. Oates consequently named him as an active agent in the Plot and prospective advocate-general under the new government.[686] His trial was a continuation of the trial of Whitebread, Harcourt, and Fenwick, and exhibited all the same characteristics, of perjury on the one side, on the other of prevarication and falsehood. The same evidence was developed at length, and with the same result. Two fresh points of importance alone occurred. To Oates’ great alarm the hostess of the White Horse Tavern in the Strand was called by the defence. Oates had sworn that as many as eighteen or twenty Jesuits had met together there in one room at the congregation of April 24. The woman now declared that no room in her house would hold more than a dozen persons at the same time, and that when a parish jury had once met there the jurors had been compelled for want of space to separate into three rooms. This would undoubtedly have produced an effect, had not three of the spectators in court immediately risen to swear that there were two rooms in the inn which were large enough to hold from twenty to thirty people without crowding them unduly. An unfavourable impression concerning the evidence for the defence was created, and the king’s counsel was able to score an effective point.[687]
Of greater weight than this was a portion of Bedloe’s evidence. He swore that he went one day with Coleman to Langhorn’s chambers in the Temple, and from the outer room saw the lawyer transcribing various treasonable letters brought by Coleman into a register at a desk in his study within.[688] The nature of cross-examination was so imperfectly understood at the time that Langhorn did not attempt to question the witness on the shape of his rooms or to shake his credit by calling evidence to the point. In his memoirs, which were published in the course of the same year, he wrote the following comment on Bedloe’s statement: “Every person who knows my said chamber and the situation of my study cannot but know that it is impossible to look out of my chamber into my study so as to see any one writing there, and that I never had at any time any desk in my study.”[689] This was supported by other evidence. When Oates and Bedloe exhibited in 1680 “articles of high misdemeanours” against Scroggs before the privy council, they charged him in one that at the previous Monmouth assizes he “did say to Mr. William Bedloe that he did believe in his conscience that Richard Langhorn, whom he condemned, died wrongfully.” To which the Chief Justice answered “that at Monmouth assizes he did tell Mr. Bedloe that he was more unsatisfied about Mr. Langhorn’s trial than all the rest; and the rather, that he was credibly informed, since the trial, that Mr. Langhorn’s study was so situated that he that walked in his chamber could not see Mr. Langhorn write in his study; which was Mr. Bedloe’s evidence.”[690]
This was not the first incident which shook the credit of the witnesses in the Chief Justice’s mind. He had in the meantime received a still more striking proof of their worthlessness. On July 18, four days after the execution of Langhorn and nearly a month after that of the Five Jesuits, Sir George Wakeman, in company with three Benedictines, was brought to trial at the Old Bailey. Wakeman was accused of having bargained with the Jesuits for £15,000 to poison the king. The other three were charged with being concerned in the Plot in various degrees. Feeling had run so high after the last two trials that the case was postponed from the end of June for nearly three weeks, that it might have time to cool.[691] Interests were at stake which had not been present in the previous trials. In November of the year before, Oates and Bedloe had accused the queen of high treason, and Oates had sworn that Sir George Wakeman, who was her physician, had received from her a letter consenting to the king’s death.[692] The queen was now implicated with Wakeman, and the trial was regarded as the prelude to an attack on herself.[693]
Before the crown lawyers opened the direct attack, witnesses were, as usual, produced to testify to the reality of the plot. Prance and Dugdale reaffirmed their previous evidence, and Jennison, himself the brother of a Jesuit, swore that he had met Ireland in London on August 19, 1678, thus proving to the satisfaction of the court that Ireland had died with a lie in his mouth.[694] The prosecution then came to the prisoners. Oates told again the story how he had heard the queen at a meeting at Somerset House consent formally to the plot for murdering the king, and swore that he had seen a letter from Wakeman to the Jesuit Ashby, which was occupied chiefly with a prescription for the latter during his stay at Bath, but mentioned incidentally that the queen had given her approval to the scheme. He had also seen an entry in Langhorn’s register of the payment of £5000 made by Coleman as a third part of Wakeman’s fee and a receipt for it signed by Wakeman himself.[695] Bedloe gave evidence which would prove equally the guilt of the queen and her physician, and both swore to the treasonable practices of the other prisoners.[696] To rebut this, Wakeman produced evidence to prove that he had not written the letter for Ashby himself, but had dictated it to his servant Hunt. The letter was addressed to Chapman, an apothecary at Bath, who read it and then tore off and kept the part containing the prescription. Hunt proved that the letter was in his handwriting and was corroborated by another servant in Wakeman’s household. Chapman proved that the body of the letter was in the same handwriting as the prescription, that it contained nothing about the queen or any plan for the king’s murder, and that Oates had given an entirely inaccurate account of the prescription, which was so far from ordering a milk diet, as Oates had sworn that milk would have been not far removed from poison for a patient who was drinking the waters at Bath. Scroggs was afterwards accused of having grossly favoured the prisoner in order to curry favour at court; but the manner in which this evidence was received is an absolute proof to the contrary. The bench held, in a way that now excites surprise, but at the time did not, that Oates had meant that the milk diet was prescribed for Ashby before he went to Bath, and was therefore not at all inconsistent with drinking the waters while he was there; and that Wakeman might easily have written two letters on the same subject. No doubt, said the judges, the witnesses for the defence spoke the truth. What had happened was that Sir George had dictated one letter, which consisted of nothing but medical directions, and of which the apothecary and the other witnesses spoke; but he must certainly have written another, containing the treasonable words to which Oates swore. The court treated the matter as if this were beyond a doubt. To the prisoner’s objection that he was unlikely to have written two letters to convey the same instructions, Mr. Justice Pemberton replied, “This might be writ to serve a turn very well”; and Scroggs closed the discussion by remarking, “This your witnesses say, and you urge, is true, but not pertinent.”[697] Shortly before Wakeman turned to his fellow-prisoners and said, “There is my business done.” He knew that in all human probability he would be condemned. Suddenly, without any warning, there occurred the most unexpected event, which, in a dramatic moment unsurpassed by the most famous in history, shattered the credit of Oates and produced the first acquittal in the trials for the Popish Plot.[698] Sir Philip Lloyd, clerk to the privy council, was asked to state with what Oates had charged the prisoner at his examination before the council. The evidence deserves to be given in Sir Philip’s own words: “It was upon the 31st of September,” he stated; “Mr. Oates did then say he had seen a letter, to the best of his remembrance, from Mr. White to Mr. Fenwick at St. Omers, in which letter he writ word that Sir George Wakeman had undertaken the poisoning of the king, and was to have £15,000 for it; of which £5000 had been paid him by the hands of Coleman. Sir George Wakeman, upon this, was called in and told of this accusation; he utterly denied all, and did indeed carry himself as if he were not concerned at the accusation, but did tell the king and council he hoped he should have reparation and satisfaction for the injury done to his honour. His carriage was not well liked of by the king and council, and being a matter of such consequence as this was, they were willing to know further of it; and because they thought this evidence was not proof enough to give them occasion to commit him, being only out of a letter of a third person, thereupon they called in Mr. Oates again, and my Lord Chancellor desired Mr. Oates to tell him if he knew nothing personally of Sir George Wakeman, because they were in a matter of moment, and desired sufficient proof whereupon to ground an indictment; Mr. Oates, when he did come in again and was asked the question, did lift up his hands (for I must tell the truth, let it be what it will) and said, ‘No, God forbid that I should say anything against Sir George Wakeman, for I know nothing more against him.’ And I refer myself to the whole council whether it is not so.”
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane Hill, marching against Macbeth, or the duke uncloaking to Angelo could not create a greater sensation. “My lord,” cried Sir George Wakeman, “this is a Protestant witness too.” Oates began to bluster. He remembered nothing of all this. He did not believe that any such question was asked him at the council board. If there had been, he was in such a state of exhaustion after being deprived of his rest for two nights in succession that he was not in a condition to answer anything. “What,” returned Scroggs, “must we be amused with I know not what for being up but two nights?... What, was Mr. Oates just so spent that he could not say, I have seen a letter under Sir George Wakeman’s own hand?” The informer swore that to his best belief he had spoken of the letter; or if he had not, he believed Sir Philip Lloyd was mistaken; or if not that, he was so weak that he was unable to say or do anything. Then he completely lost control of himself and broke out recklessly: “To speak the truth, they were such a council as would commit nobody.” “That was not well said,” put in Jeffreys quickly. “He reflects on the king and all the council,” cried Wakeman. At this the wrath of the Chief Justice burst out on the perjured miscreant. “You have taken a great confidence,” he thundered, “I know not by what authority, to say anything of anybody”; and becoming more grave, pointed out the decisive importance of what had been proved against him, Oates did not open his mouth again during the rest of the trial.[699]