Accordingly, one of the first steps taken by the king’s advisers after the trial of the conspirators was to issue a proclamation for the arrest of Fathers Gerard, Greenway, and Garnett, three of the four Jesuit missionaries then known to be in England. In this official document it was alleged “to be plain and evident from the examinations that all three had been peculiarly practisers in the plot.” Now, let us examine for a moment upon what those grave accusations were based. Simply on confessions of the prisoners, for it has never been alleged that the slightest proof, documentary or oral, other than those and the admission of Father Garnett, the provincial, were ever produced to connect the priests with the conspiracy. The examinations were conducted with the most exquisite tortures, taken down by the creatures of the government, and afterwards mutilated and altered by the attorney‐general to suit his own views. Fawkes, by special command of his majesty, was so frequently racked that he could not use a pen to sign his name, much less could he read what had been written for him, and Nicholas Owen, a lay‐brother, was so stretched that his bowels protruded and he expired in the hands of his tormentors. Of Father Gerard, mention was made by two of the original plotters, Fawkes and Winter, in allusion to the oath of secrecy. The latter said that “the five administered the oath to each other in a chamber _in which no other body was_,” which the latter confirms more in detail. “The five,” he says, “did meet at a house in the field, beyond S. Clement’s Inn, where they did confer and agree upon the plot, and there they took a solemn oath and vows by all their force and power to execute the same, and of secrecy not to reveal it to any of their fellows, but to such as should be thought fit persons to enter into that action; and in the same house they did receive the sacrament of Gerard the Jesuit, to perform their vow and oath of secrecy aforesaid. _But that Gerard was not acquainted with their purpose._”(108) This last sentence was by order of Coke underlined with red, notated _hucusque_, and was carefully suppressed in the reading of the examination on the trial! The original document is still preserved in the Public Record Office, and how such an indefatigable student as Mr. Dixon could have overlooked this part of it is, to say the least, very suspicious. His version of the affair is as follows: