The fourth Parliament of Charles II. met in October, 1679, and, after repeated prorogation, assembled for the despatch of business in October, 1680. Another informer just at that time rose to notoriety, whose name deserves to be coupled with that of Oates. Dangerfield is represented as a handsome young man, whom profligacy and debt brought within the walls of Newgate, where he was visited by a Roman Catholic woman named Cellier, one “who had a great share of wit, and was abandoned to lewdness.”[27] The man professed to become a convert to her religion, and, through the influence of his new friend with persons at Court, obtained an introduction to the Duke of York, into whose ears he poured tales of treason. This time a plot was attributed to the Presbyterians, who, according to Dangerfield, were raising forces to overthrow the Government. James gave the man twenty guineas; Charles ordered an additional reward of forty. The adventurer, finding his trade so gainful, determined to push his object further. He lodged an information at the Custom House against Colonel Mansel, a Presbyterian, whom he charged with being the quarter-master of the army of revolt; but the revenue officers, on searching his house, found not what they expected, but only a bundle of papers behind the bed. The papers were plainly treasonable; not less plainly did they bear signs of forgery. The accused traced home the infamous trick to the unprincipled informer. Dangerfield, once more committed to Newgate, not for debt, but for something worse, now changed his story, and declared that, at the instigation of Cellier and Lady Powis, who had become mixed up in the affair, he had engaged in a sham plot, as a cover for a real one. Though no Presbyterian conspiracy existed, there was, he affirmed, a Popish one, and a proof of the former being a fiction might be obtained from a bundle of papers secreted in a meal tub. The meal was searched, the papers were found; they demonstrated the artifice, and the trumpery contrivance has gained a place in history under the title of the “Meal Tub Plot.” Powis and Cellier were now, in their turn, imprisoned. The grand jury ignored the bill against the former, and the latter obtained an acquittal at the Old Bailey. Dangerfield received a pardon; yet, though all three at the time escaped the penalties of the law, Dangerfield subsequently received a cruel whipping for the crime of perjury.[28] This miserable creature has been represented either as a tool employed by the Catholics to retaliate upon the friends of Titus Oates, or as a tool employed by the friends of Titus Oates to decoy Catholics into an attempt at injuring the Presbyterians. The former is the Protestant, the latter the Catholic hypothesis. Neither of them seems satisfactory; the latter is almost incredible. At all events, every reader must see that tissues of lies were woven in those days as unaccountably and as plentifully as spiders’ webs in autumn nights. [Sidenote: 1680.]