The nation was now so much alarmed that all people were furnishing themselves with arms, and a bill passed both Houses for raising the militia, and for keeping it together for six weeks, but the King rejected it, though he gave his consent to the disbanding the army; wherein the Commons were so diffident of him that they ordered the money to be brought, not into the Exchequer, but into the Chamber of London, and appointed a committee of their own members for paying it off and disbanding it.
The courts of justice in the meanwhile were not idle, for in December, Ireland the Jesuit, and Grove and Pickering, two servants in the Queen's Chapel, were brought to their trial. Oates and Bedloe swore home against Ireland that in August last he had given particular orders for killing the King; but he, in his defence, by many witnesses endeavoured to prove that on the 2nd of August he went into Staffordshire, and did not return till the 12th of September. Yet, in opposition to that a woman swore that she saw him in London about the middle of August; and so, because he might have come up post in one day and gone down in another, this did not satisfy. Against Grove and Pickering they swore that they undertook to kill the King at Windsor; that Grove was to have £1,500 for doing it, and Pickering thirty thousand masses, which at twelvepence a mass, amounts to the same money; that they attempted it three several times, but that once the flint was loose, at another time there was no powder in the pan, and at a third the pistol was only charged with bullets. This was strange stuff, but all was imputed to a Divine Providence. So the evidences were credited, and the prisoners condemned and executed, but they denied to the last every particular that was sworn against them.
This began to shake the credit of the evidence, when a more composed and credible person came in to support it. One Dugdale, who had been bailiff to Lord Aston, and lived in a fair reputation in the country, when he was put in prison for refusing to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, denied absolutely that he knew anything of the plot, but made afterwards great discoveries. He said that the Jesuits in London had acquainted Evers, Lord Aston's Jesuit, with the design of killing the King, and desired him to find out proper men to execute it; that Evers and Gavan, another Jesuit, had pressed him to undertake it; that they had promised to canonise him for it, and Lord Aston offered him £500 if he would set about it. And one instance to confirm the truth of what he asserted was his speaking in a public company (as several testified) of Godfrey's death, the Tuesday after he was missing, which he swore he saw in a letter written by Harcourt to Evers, which letter must have been sent on the very night that Godfrey was killed.
At the same time, a particular discovery was made of Godfrey's murder. Prance, a goldsmith that wrought for the Queen's Chapel, was seized upon suspicion; and as Bedloe was accidentally going by, knowing nothing of the matter, was challenged by him to be one of those whom he saw about Godfrey's body. Prance denied everything at first, but made afterwards this confession; that Gerald and Kelly, two priests, engaged him and three others in this wicked deed—Green, who belonged to the Queen's Chapel; Hill, who had served Godden, one of their famous writers; and Berry, the Porter of Somerset House; that they had several meetings wherein the priests persuaded them that it was a meritorious action to dispatch Godfrey, in order to deter others from being so busy against them; that the morning before they killed him Hill went to his house to see if he was yet gone out, and spoke to his maid; that they waited his coming out, and dogged him all day, till he came to a place near St. Clement's, where he stayed till night; that as Godfrey passed by Somerset House water-gate two of them pretending to quarrel, another ran out to call a justice, and with much importunity prevailed with him to come and pacify them; that as he was coming along Green got behind him and threw a twisted cravat about his neck, and so pulled him down and strangled him; and that Gerald would have run his sword through him, but was hindered by the rest lest the blood might discover them; that when the murder was done, they carried the body into Godden's room (for he was in France) and Hill had the key of it; that two days after they removed it into a room across the upper court, but that being thought not so convenient, they carried it back to Godden's lodging; that on Wednesday night they carried it out in a sedan, and when they had got clear of the town Green carried it on horseback to the place where it was found.
This was a consistent story, which was supported in some circumstances by collateral proofs; and yet when he came before the King and Council he denied all he had sworn, and said it was a mere fiction; but when he was carried back to prison, he said all was true again, and that the horror and confusion he was in made him deny it. Thus he continued saying and unsaying for several times; but at last he persisted in his first attestation, and by this and what Bedloe brought in evidence against them, Green, Hill, and Berry were found guilty and condemned. Green and Hill died, as they had lived, Papists, and with solemn protestations denied the whole thing; but Berry declared himself a Protestant, though he had personated a Papist for bread, for which dissimulation he thought this judgment had befallen him. But he denied what was charged against him, and to the last minute declared himself altogether innocent; and his dying a Protestant and yet denying all that was sworn against him, was a triumph to the Papists, and gave them an opportunity to say that it was not the doctrine of equivocation, nor the power of absolution, but merely the force of conviction that made those of their religion do the same.
The Lord Chief Justice at this time was Sir William Scroggs, a man more valued for a good readiness in speaking well than either learning in his profession or any moral virtue. His life had been indecently scandalous, and his fortune very low; and it was a melancholy thing to see so bad, so ignorant and so poor a man raised up to that high post. Yet now, seeing how the stream ran, he went into it with so much zeal and heartiness that he became the people's favourite and strove in all trials even with an indecent earnestness to get the prisoners convicted.
But their resolute manner of dying and protestations of innocence to the last began to make impression on people's minds, and impair the credit both of the judge and witnesses, till one Jennison, the younger brother of a Jesuit, and a gentleman of family and estate, but now turned Protestant, came in, as it were, to their relief; for in contradiction to what Ireland died affirming, i.e. that he was in Staffordshire at the time that Oates swore he was in London, he wrote a letter to a friend attesting that he was in company with Ireland on the 19th of August, and had much familiar talk with him, so that his dying affirmations were false. The letter was printed, and this use was made of it to vacate the truth of those denials wherewith so many ended their lives. But what afterwards destroyed the credit of the letter was the solemn protestation that the author made, as he desired forgiveness of his sins and hoped for the salvation of his soul, that he knew nothing of the plot; and yet the summer after he published a long narrative, wherein he said that himself was invited to assist in the murder of the King, and named the four ruffians who went to Windsor to do it.
While the witnesses were thus weakening their own credit, some practices were discovered that did very much support it. Reading, a lawyer of some subtlety, but no virtue, who was employed by the lords in the Tower to solicit their affairs, had offered Bedloe some money of his own accord (as it afterwards appeared) to mollify his evidence against the lords, and had drawn up a paper to show him by how small a variation in his depositions he might bring them off. But Bedloe was too cunning for him. He had acquainted Prince Rupert and the Earl of Essex with the whole negotiation, and placed two witnesses in his room, when he drew Reading into a renewal of the proposal so commodiously that the attempt of corruption was plainly proved upon him, and he was set in the pillory for it. Some that belonged to the Earl of Danby conversed much with Oates's servants, who told him that their master was daily speaking odious things against the King; and one of them affirmed that he had once made an abominable attempt upon him. But when Oates smelt this out, he soon turned the tables upon them; for he prevailed with his servants to deny all, and had the others set in the pillory as defamers of the King's evidence. And to bring things of the same sort all together, one Tashborough, who belonged to the Duke's Court, proposed to Dugdale, in the Duke's name, but without his authority, that he should sign a retraction of what he had sworn, and go beyond seas, and have a considerable reward for so doing. But the other outwitted him likewise, and proving such practices upon him, had him both fined and set in the pillory.
[11] I.e., his case against Lauderdale.