“In one of them, in the midst of vast crowds of spectators, who made great acclamations and showed abundance of satisfaction, there were carried in pageants upon men’s shoulders through the chief streets of the city, the effigies of the Pope, with the representation of the devil behind him, whispering in his ear, and wonderfully soothing and caressing him (though he afterwards deserted him, and left him to shift for himself, before he was committed to the flames), together with the likeness of the dead body of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, carried before him by one that rode on horseback, designed to remind the people of his execrable murder. And a great number of dignitaries in their copes, with crosses; monks, friars, and Jesuits; Popish bishops in their mitres, with all their trinkets and appurtenances. Such things as these very discernibly heightened and inflamed the general aversion of the nation from Popery; but it is to be feared, on the other hand, they put some people, by way of revulsion, upon such desperate expedients as brought us even within an ace of ruin.”[119] A few days after these events the parliament met. “All Oates’s evidence was now so well believed, that it was not safe for any man to seem to doubt of any part of it. He thought he had the nation in his hands, and was swelled up to the highest pitch of vanity and insolence. And now he made a new edition of his discovery before the bar of the House of Commons.”[120] He now said that the Pope, having declared himself entitled to the possession of England, in virtue of the heresy of prince and people, had delegated the supreme power to the order of Jesuits, and that in consequence commissions had been issued by the general of that order, to various noblemen and gentlemen, investing them with all the great offices of the state. He swore that Coleman, and Sir George Wakeman, the Queen’s physician, were in the plot, and that for 15,000_l._ the latter had engaged to poison the King. Success emboldened him to soar still higher; and after declaring to the House of Lords, that he had named all the persons of rank involved in the plot, he had the effrontery to accuse the Queen of being concerned in it, under circumstances the most improbable: besides that the charge was discountenanced by the whole tenour of her life.