The threatened Catholics were destined to pay for that check to national and Protestant anxieties. Several small plots, fictitious or real, were discovered; but the ordinary tribunals seemed weary of condemnations. It was the House of Lords itself which pronounced the sentence against Lord Stafford, youngest son of the old Earl of Arundel, and consequently uncle of the Duke of Norfolk. "He was a weak, but a fair-conditioned man," says Burnet. {381} Titus Oates and one of his compeers, named Turbervil, accused Lord Stafford of having plotted the assassination of the king. The charge had not a shadow of foundation; the viscount was nevertheless condemned by 55 voices against 31. The royal favor exempted him from the odious punishment of traitors. Charles II. was convinced of the innocence of the victims; he had too much sense to believe in the existence of those plots incessantly arising which so alarmed England, but his cold selfishness troubled itself little with the warrants which he signed, or the lives which he sacrificed to his repose. "The king appeared very calm, and his mind very cheerful," wrote Algernon Sidney, "although one might then have thought that he would be overwhelmed with cares, having no other resource but to dissolve Parliament, and trust himself to the good pleasure of his subjects; but the embarrassment in which he was did not seem to trouble him." A renewed attempt in the House of Commons in favor of the Exclusion Bill led to the dissolution foreseen by Algernon Sidney; and it was a token of the royal intentions that the new Parliament was convened for the 21St of March, 1681, not at Westminster, but at Oxford. Charles had concluded with Louis XIV. a new treaty, kept profoundly secret, by which the king of France engaged himself to give for the current year a subsidy of two million livres, which was to be reduced to fifteen hundred thousand during the three following years. At this price Charles broke the alliance which he had contracted with Spain for the maintenance of the treaty of Nimeguen. He returned to his dependence upon Louis XIV. {382}