We do not intend to give all the details of this wicked plot; but it played such an important part of Queen Catharine's life that we will, in as few words as possible, explain the nature of it. We must go back to a year or two after her marriage, for it was then that Catharine made a serious mistake, which caused her name to be connected with this plot nearly fifteen years later. Catharine's anxiety to have the independence of Portugal acknowledged by the pope was so great that soon after she got to England she induced her husband to send Richard Bellings, one of the gentlemen of her household, on a mission to Rome. The object was to promise his holiness that if he {225}would extend his protection to her native land she would use her utmost endeavors to advance the Catholic cause in England; adding that her desire to accomplish this had been the sole cause of her marriage. Letters of the same purport were sent to several of the cardinals also. Her appeal had the desired effect; but Bellings let out the secret, and the vigilant enemies of Queen Catharine made a note of it, to be used against her when opportunity offered. [[A.D. 1678.]] Titus Oates and Bedloe were the infamous characters selected to swear away the lives of a large number of innocent persons. Oates was the son of a weaver and preacher, and a villain of the deepest dye. If he had not been so brainless as to swear to a tissue of falsehoods too palpable to gain credence, rivers of blood would have been shed, and the disgraceful scenes that attended the St. Bartholomew massacre in France would have been repeated in England. But when the king questioned him and Bedloe, their statements as to the place and manner that the queen had used for declaring her intention of poisoning his majesty were so absurd that they stood self-convicted. King Charles never for a moment suspected his wife of any attempt on his life; and he knew, besides, that although the Duke of York, his brother, had become a member of the Catholic church, it had not been through her instrumentality. But the public mind was aroused to such a pitch by the daily inventions of Oates and his adherents that the business of life was interrupted, and the wildest statements were eagerly accepted as indisputable facts. Catharine was even accused of having caused the murder of Godfrey, a city magistrate, whose body was found on the highway, pierced with his own sword. {226}It was Shaftesbury who prompted Oates in all he said and did, though he was wily enough to keep himself in the background. It was he who secured from parliament, for the shameless perjurer, a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year for the information he had given, in consequence of which all the Roman Catholic peers were deprived of their seats in that body.