The witnesses having been better drilled, a True Bill for High Treason was eventually found, and on May 3 the Archbishop was arraigned at the bar of the King's Bench. He was told that the abortive proceedings in Ireland had not led to a trial, and that he might therefore be legally tried in England for treason committed beyond channel. There were precedents for this, and it is only necessary to mention the case of Lord Maguire in 1645. Plunket then asked time to get his evidence from Ireland, and the trial was fixed for June 8, five weeks off. This seems a liberal interval, but in reality it was wholly insufficient, for the Archbishop had hardly any money and expeditious travelling was expensive. Moreover, the officials in Ireland would not give copies of necessary records without an actual order of the Court. 'The servants,' he said, 'that I sent hence and took shipping for Ireland were two days at sea and came back again, and from thence were forced to go to Holyhead and from Holyhead, in going to Dublin, they were thirteen or fourteen days, the winds were so contrary, and then my servants went about to go into the counties of Armagh and Derry.' Even willing witnesses, being Roman Catholics, were afraid to start without passports. The prisoner only asked for an adjournment till the 21st, when he was satisfied to be tried whether they had arrived or not. Some of them had got as far as Coventry on the day of the trial, but he was told that he had already had an extraordinary allowance of time and that the fears and hesitations of Irish witnesses were beyond the control of the Court. The keynote was struck by Sawyer the Attorney-General: 'May it please your Lordship and you gentlemen of the Jury, the character this gentleman bears as Primate under a foreign and usurped jurisdiction will be a great inducement to you to give credit to that evidence we shall produce before you.' Wyer was the first witness, and he showed that Plunket received money and exercised jurisdiction among the clergy, but failed to connect him, except through the loosest hearsay, with any plot. There had been intrigues with France in 1667 following upon the disappointment of the Irish after the Act of Settlement, and there was an attempt to make out that the conspiracy had gone on ever since and that the Archbishop was at the head of it, the object being to further a French descent at Carlingford. In Wyer's evidence, and in that of other witnesses, papers were frequently referred to, and MacMoyer produced two, of which one purported to be a translation from a copy made at Capranica, near Rome, five years before, but which the Archbishop said was an absolute forgery. The other was a copy in Plunket's own hand of statutes, as they were called, concerning clerical contributions from Ireland to Rome. Both documents were confessedly stolen out of a packet addressed to the Secretary of Propaganda, and the original had been altered by interpolating a figure.