"Some truth there was, but dashed and brewed with lies." It is now universally admitted that Titus Oates and his chief witnesses were little more than reckless liars, playing upon the inflamed Protestant feeling of the time, but it would be generally admitted that _a_ plot, such as I have described, was really afoot. Since, however, Mr. Pollock also concludes that the Jesuits probably instigated and procured the murder of the London magistrate, it is necessary to reopen the question. Titus Oates, a little full-bodied man with large purple face and a complete lack of moral feeling, had joined the Catholic Church and been admitted by the Jesuits to their college at Valladolid. He was expelled, but it seems likely that he had gleaned some information about their hopes and designs in England, and, when he returned to London, he entered into communication with a fanatical anti-Papist named Dr. Tonge, though he continued to move amongst the Catholics. It says little for the discrimination of the Jesuits that they then admitted the man to the college at St. Omer's, from which he was once more expelled. Tonge and he then brewed the Popish Plot, and had the King informed that the Jesuits sought his life. Charles smiled, and, in September, the conspirators went before a well-known magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey--a Protestant, but a personal friend of Coleman and well disposed toward the Catholics--and laid information of a ghastly project of the Catholics to destroy the Protestants of London. The situation--a Catholic heir to the throne awaiting the death of a Protestant king, with a Dutch pretender gaining ground in London--seemed so ripe for a plot that London was seized with a dramatic terror, and the Privy Council was compelled to listen seriously to a story which was palpably false in many details and ridiculous in others. Father Whitbread, the Jesuit Provincial, and two of his colleagues were arrested; and, when the letters of Coleman were seized and found to have references to "the mighty work on our hands," the story seemed to be confirmed. Then Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found dead in a ditch at the foot of Primrose Hill, and the city was shaken with frenzy. For months the trained bands were kept under arms at nights, and citizens slept nervously with arms beside them, ready to spring up at a cry that the firing of houses and massacre of Protestants had begun.