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.