Juries of the time were pliable, or, if they showed signs of independence, there was a court of Castle Chamber, corresponding with the Star Chamber of English history, that could use means to bring them into line. That the two Earls were innocent of the plot alleged against them is a moral certainty. The fact that when they fled, it was not to Spain they went, seems strong evidence of this. Any evidence of a plot depends on the word of St. Lawrence, Lord Howth, whose character may be judged from what we read about him in the State Papers.[4] There was an armed fight in 1609 between him and Sir Roger Jones, the son of the Lord Chancellor. Speaking of it Sir A. Chichester refers to the “wrongs done by the Earl of Howth to the Lord Chancellor”; while the latter writes to the king of “the murderous attack made by Howth and his cut-throat (sicariorum) retainers upon his son.” Plowden gives the following quotations to show the unreality of the whole alleged conspiracy, and the base character of St. Lawrence. “Dr. Anderson in his _Royal Genealogies_ (p. 786), dedicated to the Prince of Wales in 1736, says: ‘Artful Cecil employed one St. Lawrence to entrap the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, the Lord Delvin, and other Irish chiefs into a sham plot, which had no evidence but his. But those chiefs being basely informed that witnesses were to be hired against them, foolishly fled from Dublin, and so taking guilt upon them, they were declared rebels, and six entire counties in Ulster were at once forfeited to the Crown, which was what their enemies wanted.’ That this St. Lawrence was a fit instrument for such a design is clear, from what Camden relates of him (Eliz. 741), viz., that he offered to murder Lord Grey de Wilton and Sir Thomas Gerald, to prevent their conveying reports of Essex to the Queen; which bloody service Essex rejected with indignation. No history whatever mentions any symptoms of rising in the North at this time.”[5]