The evidence on the bishop’s side went very briefly to show that there was iniquity in Government offices in the concocting of testimonies; that not only handwriting could be, and in fact was, imitated, but that seals and impressions could be forged, and that the prelate himself (according to the evidence of his servants) neither received traitors in his house nor visited them at their own. The most remarkable witness was ‘Mr. Pope,’ but there was nothing remarkable in the poet’s testimony. He was nervous, embarrassed, and he blundered in his phrases. Atterbury had warned Pope, in a letter from the Tower, April 10th, to this effect: ‘I know not but I may call upon you at my hearing, to say somewhat about the way of spending my time at the Dean’ry, which did not seem calculated towards managing plots and conspiracies. But of that I shall consider.’ Pope replied the same day: his letter is warm, tender, and full of assurances of a love for his friend which he can only show in a way which ‘needs no open warrant to authorise it, or secret conveyance to secure it; which no bills can preclude, and no king prevent.… You prove yourself, my lord, to know me for the friend I am; in judging that the manner of your defence and your reputation by it is a point of the highest concern to me.’ Pope thus described to Spence how he played his part in this Jacobite episode: ‘Though I had but ten words to say and that on a plain point, how the Bishop spent his time while I was with him at Bromley, I made two or three blunders in it, and that notwithstanding the first row of lords, which was all I could see, were mostly of my acquaintance.’