Believed by Parliament, not only by the Country party, but by the Court party as well, believed also by the Ministers of State, and by the dignitaries of the Church, the plot came to be regarded by almost everybody as an unquestionable fact. The higher circles would not tolerate any doubt of Oates’ veracity; even Burnet, with all his Protestantism, inasmuch as he hesitated to accept Oates’ evidence, raised against himself “a great clamour:” and the Earl of Shaftesbury, who threw himself with all his energy and eloquence into the prosecution, declared “that all those who undermined the credit of the witnesses were to be looked on as public enemies.”[3] In the lower circles a conviction of the truthfulness of the accuser, and of the guilt of the accused, prevailed to the last degree; and the narrative related to the Council and the House of Commons, circulated amongst eager and credulous groups, in thousands of chimney corners during those autumn evenings. The King and the Duke of York seemed not to believe what other people admitted. Yet the former felt obliged to act as if he did. The reader who remembers the agitation attending the Popish aggression more than twenty years ago, must not take even that as a measure of the feeling awakened in 1678: perhaps nothing we have ever seen could be a parallel to what our fathers experienced at that time. Even the heavens were imagined to sympathize in the abounding alarm: a fog, after Godfrey’s death, gave to the day on which it occurred the name of _Black Sunday_; and a respectable Nonconformist speaks of it growing so dark, all on a sudden, about eleven in the forenoon, that ministers could not read their notes in their pulpits without the help of candles,--no uncommon occurrence, one would think, in the month of November. Not a house, he informs us, could be found unfurnished with arms, nor did anybody go to bed without apprehensions of something tragical which might happen before the next morning.[4] People gave the martyred magistrate--for so they considered Godfrey--a public funeral, after having for two days publicly exhibited his wounded remains in his own house. An immense crowd followed him to the grave, the corpse being preceded by seventy-two clergymen in their robes; and, on its arrival at the church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, the Incumbent, Dr. Lloyd, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph, delivered a sermon in honour of the slain confessor. A Protestant festival had long been kept on the 17th of November, Queen Elizabeth’s birthday; and this year an effigy of the Pope with the Devil whispering in his ear--and models of Godfrey’s dead body, and of Romish Bishops and priests in mitres and copes--were carried through the streets, to inflame to the highest pitch the prevalent indignation against the Church of Rome. Daniel Defoe was then a mere boy, and looked with wonder upon what passed before him; and, in after years, told how old